William Kennedy - Very Old Bones

In Ireland, Crip boasted, he’d been called the Wizard, the Cunningman who could outwit the Good Neighbors. And when Malachi heard this he confided to Crip that he had lost his privities.

“Did you ever lose them before?” Crip asked Malachi.

“Never.”

“Was there pain when they went?”

“None. I didn’t know they were gone till I looked.”

“It’s a shocking thing.”

“I’m more shocked than others,” Malachi said.

“I’ve heard of this,” said Crip. “Somebody has put the glamour on you.”

“Glamour, is it?”

“A spell of a kind. The Neighbors could do it. I read of a man who lost his privities and thought he knew who did it, and it was a witch and he went to her. He told her his trouble and also told her she had the most beautiful bosoms in the village, for he knew how witches love flattery. And she took him out to a tree and told him to climb up it and he’d find what he needed. When he did that he found a great nest full of hay and oats in the treetop, and two dozen privities of one size and the other lying in it. And the man says I’ll take this big one, and the witch says no, that belongs to the bishop. So the man took the next-smaller size and put it in his pocket, and when he got to the bottom of the tree and touched the ground with his foot, the witch disappeared and his privity was on him. And he never lost it again.”

“You’re thinkin’, is it, that a witch did this to me?” Malachi asked.

“It well could be. Do you know any witches yourself?”

“None.”

“Have you had any in the family?”

“None that I know of.”

“And your wife’s family?”

“I’ve never heard it spoken of.”

“They don’t speak of it, don’t you know.”

“I’ll ask her,” said Malachi.

“I saw her up on the Neighbors’ hill two days ago.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s so, and she was dancing.”

“Dancing, you say.”

“I do. Dancing with her skirts in the air.”

“No.”

“Didn’t I see it myself, and the shape of a man in the woods watching her?”

“The shape of a man?”

“Not a man atall, I’d say.”

“Then what?”

“One of the Neighbors. A creature, I’d call it.”

“Lizzie dancing with a creature? You saw that. And were you at the potsheen?”

“I was not.”

“Did you go to her?”

“I did not. You don’t go near them when they’re in that mood.”

“What mood?”

“The mood to capture. That’s how they carry on, capturing people like us to fatten their population. They like to cozy up to them that come near them, and before you know it somebody’s gone and you don’t even know they’re gone, for the creatures leave changelings in place of the ones they take. But there’s no worth atall to them things. They melt, they die, they fly away, and if they don’t, you have to know how to be rid of them.”

“You know how to do that, do you?”

“I’ve heard how it’s done. I have the recipes.”

Two books lie on the table in Peter’s Conspiracy painting.

The first is the Malleus Maleficarum. Its subtitle, not visible in the painting, is The Hammer of Witches Which Destroyeth Witches and Their Heresy as with a Two-edged Sword. The book is a fifteenth-century theological analysis of the anarchical political forces that for centuries sought the overthrow of civilization through witchcraft, plus abundant remedies for this evil; and it is a work that had motivated Crip Devlin since the days of his priestly intent, for its divinely inspired misogyny conformed to Crip’s own outlook, especially after his infection with the pox by his wife. And did she give it to him, the witch? Well, she did. Didn’t she die of it herself, and die before Crip? Was that proof or was it not?

Malachi, when he listened to Crip’s wisdom, handed down from the sages of history, felt like a chosen man, one who would yet again do battle with the dark spirits, the lot of the true warrior in every age. Malachi accepted the role without complaint, for its rules and its goals were as familiar to him as the streets and the fields of Albany. He agreed with them, he understood them, and he knew from his wound that he had been singled out for this challenge. As the Malleus pointed out so clearly, devils existed only with God’s permission, and Malachi perceived that God had allowed these devilish things to happen to him, allowed his life to be taken away piece by piece, in the same way He had allowed Job and Jesus and the martyred saints to be warrior sufferers for His sake.

Without ever having heard the phrase, and with small capacity for understanding it if he had, Malachi had become an ascetic idealist, as obsessed by his enemy as Peter would be by his art; and when you look at the eyes Peter gave the man, you know that both Malachi and Peter understood that the world was inimical to them and to their plans of order and harmony, that their lives existed at the edge of disaster, madness, and betrayal, and that a man of strength and honor would struggle with the dark armies until he triumphed or died on the battlefield.

Malachi truly believed he would win this struggle with the black villain. He had done as the Malleus counseled, had said his Aves and his Our Fathers, had made the Stations of the Cross on his knees, had talked to the priest and confessed his sins (not his loss for that was an affliction, not a sin), and had gone to mass so often that the women of the parish thought he must be either very guilty, or dying. But, in truth, he was coming to understand that some sort of action that went beyond heavenly recourse was called for, action beyond what was known on earth — except by a chosen few whose courage was boundless and whose weapons were mighty.

The second book on the table in the painting is a slim volume that is open to a sketch of a plant with leaves and berries that any herbalist would recognize as foxglove. Also in the painting Crip is holding a chicken by the neck with his left hand and from its anus is receiving droppings in his right palm, some of these already floating in a bowl of new milk on the table.

Crip, before the moment shown in the painting, has enlightened Malachi on the things witches fear most, things that cure enchantment and banish the witch back to her own devilish world: foxglove and mugwort, white mullen and spearwort, verbena and elf grass, the four-leaf clover and the scarlet berries of the rowan oak, green and yellow flowers, cow parsnip and docken, a drawn sword, the gall of a crow, the tooth of a dead man, rusty nails and pins, the music of a Jew’s harp, a red string around the neck, the smoke of burned elder and ash wood, the smoke of a burned fish liver, spirting into your own shirt, pissing through a wedding ring, and fire.

Crip mixed half a dozen potions for Malachi and he drank them; the two men burned ash wood and fish liver; they found foxglove and cow parsnip and made a paste of it and Malachi went off by himself and rubbed that on his groin. He thought of pissing through his mother’s wedding ring, but then he remembered he had nothing to piss with. More things were done, all of them failing to restore Malachi’s privities.

Crip then moved to the next logical step: an inquiry into the behavior and the physical properties of the women around Malachi (his sister Kathryn, the Whore of Limerick, Lizzie), for it was well known that witches sometimes assumed the shape of living people, especially women. Even so, they could be found out, for they always had marks and traits that were not human. Crip knew of one witch who had an extra nipple on her stomach, and another with nipples on each buttock. A third witch always lived with two creatures sucking her, a red one at her left breast, a white one at the inward walls of her secrets.