Ursula Vernon: Razorback

Author’s Note: The story of Rawhead and Bloody Bones originated in Europe but migrated to the American South and underwent a local transformation. The definitive folklore version is likely S. E. Schlosser’s and is very much worth reading on its own.

There was a witch who lived up in the mountains, and I never heard but that she was a good one.

Some people will tell you she was old, but I don’t think she was. She just had one of those faces full of lines. With a face like that, you look a lot older than everybody else, but as time goes on, they all look older and you don’t, and you end up looking younger than everybody else by the time you die.

And you do learn early on not to get by on your looks, so there’s that.

I never did learn who her people were or if she had any. A whole lot of people wound up in the mountains—Lumbee and Cherokee and escaped slaves and the grandkids of people who lit off into the hills for one thing or another. Little bitty scraps of this group and that, all of ’em living together and having kids. Leftover people.

She was one of those. Most of us were, one way or another.

The witch had a couple of names, depending who you ask, but everybody in town called her “Sal.” She wasn’t the only witch there, I’ll tell you right now, but she was the best of the lot.

If you went south and east from town, you got into the sandhills, where the rain runs down through the dirt without ever stopping, and there was a witch out there named Elizabeth Gray. Her heart was as dry as the sand and things ran through it without ever stopping. She couldn’t be moved by pity or anger, and she only dealt in cash.

If you went north, you’d run into the river, and there was a shack down on the riverbank and an old woman lived in it who was madder than a shoe. She’d have had to come a long way to just be senile. She believed she was a witch and she’d cast a curse for a slug of whiskey and a couple of cigarettes, but whether the curses did anything much, I couldn’t tell you.

(They do say that the sheriff riled her up and she cursed him and that’s why he took a nail in the foot and got sepsis and his daughter ran off with a horse-thief. If you ask me, though, the nail was bad luck, and his daughter was fixing to run off with the first person who looked at her twice. But I don’t know, maybe it was the woman from down on the mudflats.)

Sal, though … Sal was good. She never promised what she couldn’t deliver, and she wouldn’t ill-wish somebody just on a customer’s say-so. She wouldn’t brew up a love potion, but she’d cook up a charm to make a girl look a bit better or to give a bit of fire back to a man who was down to the last of the coals, if you understand what I’m saying.

And if somebody got a little too much fire in their belly, well, Sal knew how to make some unexpected surprises go away, too. That didn’t put her in good order with the preacher, but preachers aren’t traditionally fond of witches anyhow, so she didn’t lose much by it. You didn’t get so many girls in our town going to visit relatives for a year and turning back up with a baby and a tale of a dead husband, either.

Now, you’d think that somebody who provided this sort of community service would live in the middle of town in a house with glass windows, but you’d be wrong. Sal lived halfway up a mountain in a tumbledown house with a porch like a cow’s hipbones. It was a long trek out to see her, and that was the way she liked it. She didn’t have many friends to be inconvenienced by the walk. People want a witch when they need one, but they don’t much like them. It was a little too easy, when you saw Sal go by, to remember what all she knew about you.

She didn’t make it easy for anybody, either. She’d catch your eye and smile a little, and you’d remember that little matter she took care of for you and know that she was remembering it, too.

She was a good witch and a decent person, but decent people aren’t always easy to live with.

So at the end of the day, Sal’s best friend was a razorback hog.

He was a damn big animal, size of a pony. Some idiot over by Graham got the bright idea to bring in boars for rich people to hunt, thinking he’d keep them fenced up in a park, and of course there were boars on either side of the fence before you could say “Well, that’s a stupid goddamn idea, isn’t it?” So this razorback’s granddaddy was a boar from the old country. Sal used to say he could see the fairies and liked to dig up their nests and gulp ’em down whole.

She called him “Rawhead.” If you’ve ever seen the hogs down at the butcher shop, before they make headcheese, you know what she was talking about. They take the skin right off and what you’ve got left is a bloody skull with teeth like tent pegs.

Rawhead turned up one day in the garden and started rooting around in her compost heap. He had a taste for magic and there was plenty of it there, alongside the eggshells and the wishing melon rinds. (I never met a witch worth her salt who didn’t love her garden more than any mortal soul.)

Well, she busted out of the door shouting at this half-grown hog in her compost heap. He’d been trampling down the pumpkin vines, so she put a curse on him that turned his tail straight. He staggered off and Sal thought she’d seen the last of him, but the very next day he was rooting off in the compost again.

She put a curse on him that time that turned his ears inside out. He staggered off again, his hooves going opposite directions, and took down one of the bean teepees in the process. Sal wanted to scream, but you can’t stop pigs being pigs, so she grabbed her broom and shooed him out by the garden gate.

“Get gone!” she yelled. “You come back, I’ll haul you down to the butcher and you’ll be a raw head and bones by nightfall!”

Third day, she comes out on the porch and there Rawhead is, in the compost heap, with his tail straight, his ears inside out, and a rotten tomato sliding down his chin.

“You don’t learn, do you?” says Sal.

No, ma’am , says Rawhead, and takes another bite of tomato.

You would have had to be a witch to hear him, but it’s not all that surprising. Pigs aren’t that far off from talking, most of them, and it doesn’t take more than a few wishing melons to tip them right over the edge.

Well, things that talk are people, however they look, and you don’t throw people out of the garden without offering them some hospitality. She invited Rawhead up to the porch and gave him a bucket full of water and yesterday’s leftovers, and he sat next to her rocker and thumped his straight tail on the boards.

“How’s that taste, then?”

Tastes good, ma’am.

“I see your momma raised you to be respectful,” said Sal, rocking.

Have to be, ma’am. If you aren’t, she rolls over on you and squashes you flat.

“Huh!” Sal rocked harder. “Not a bad notion. Know a few people who could’ve used a good squashing back in the day.”

It does make you think before you speak, ma’am. He rolled a beady little boar eye up at her. You cook good cornbread, ma’am. Can I stay with you a little while?

“Huh!” said Sal again, and after that, you couldn’t have found a closer pair than Sal and Rawhead the hog.

People tend not to mess with a witch, but there’s always some damn fool who sees a woman living alone and gets thoughts in his head.

The next time someone tried, he got a tusk in his behind and went off yelling.

So word went out that Sal had a razorback hog as her familiar, and that did nothing but good for her reputation.