29 Shank Hill Road

This is a bedtime story my mother used to tell me about 29 Shank Hill Road:

People start bedtime stories with "a long, long time ago," but this one doesn't start like that. Maybe it seems like a long time to you, but to your mommy, it wasn't so long ago at all. Your mommy was I think eleven years old when all this happened, not so much older than you are now. And this happened down the block from Granma's house, over on Shank Hill, you know? So it's not so "far, far away," either, is it? No.

Now, back when this story took place, children – in general, "children" – tended to ostracize by fear some one certain older person. Just somehow by unspoken animal agreement. Children liked to make up stories; children liked to be afraid, just a little bit. I think this happened before this time, too, and I guess I would assume it still does. You know Mrs. Goldsmith, down the dead end? It's like that, I think. Kids daring each other to go touch her front door, bothering some poor old lady whose only crime is a bad taste in lawn ornamentation. Poor thing has far more to fear from the neighborhood committee than you do from her, I can tell you that. Well. We had someone like that, too. You know, now that I'm thinking back on it, she wasn't even that old. But we thought she was a witch, you know. Thought she killed and ate kids, anyone who disappeared or ran away or even just moved to another state with their parents – we blamed them all on her. It may have been true.

Even when people stop being children, they still tend often to fall into this trap, this habit of fearing the completely wrong object. Worrying and worrying and worrying but over, just…the thing that turns out harmless.

Well. Anyway.

As far back as I can remember, there was always a kid or two disappearing every once in a while. It sounds obvious, or brutal, just saying it like that, but I don't think it was, really. These things happen in towns like this. Kids fall into the river and never get found. Kids run away from abusive fathers. Or those fathers finally take it just a little too far, and the kids wind up buried under the cellar floorboards – I wouldn't know. But kids disappear. It's something kids do. So I suppose that's why it took us so long to connect these occasional disappearances. It's not like we were finding bodies, or anything. It was just that a mommy tucked her little boy or little girl into bed one night, and then in the morning, that little boy or little girl was clean gone. At least according to that mommy.

And there never were bodies, ever. I didn't mean to make it sound as though a cache of them was found in somebody's refrigerator or crawlspace or something later on. This was part of the reason we thought that Miss Riley was eating them. No evidence.

This story starts so vague because it's not told from the point of view of the mistreated step-children, or even the wicked witch. We'll never know what really happened to them. This story is told from the point of view of the townspeople who come in at the end and clean up and punish and reward and then go on their ways, if they can.

This story starts when Jasper Hitchens - you know Jasper - he cleans up over at the Wheeler School now - he was real, real young at the time, maybe three years old? - when he was found by a couple of deer hunters one Monday morning. I know one of them was your daddy's friend Mike's father. I don't know who the other one was. They said all they heard was this thin high little wail, like some kind of alarm, getting louder and louder and louder. They never said this part, but I wonder what kind of awful thing they might have thought it was, human or earthly or not. It was just little Jasper Hitchens, still so young he waddled more than ran, fell down every ten feet, stark naked and bloody and half-blue around his eyes from the cold. Ran right out into their clearing screaming, and when they ran down to pick him up and wrap him up in one of their soft old flannel hunting jackets he just kept running. At first he wasn't screaming anything, just screaming noise, but after a while, after they caught him and wrapped him up and started whispering to him like you do to terrified animals, he started screaming words. "Witch, witch."

I guess maybe a doctor would say he was in some kind of shock, or had that post-traumatic disorder that soldiers get. Maybe a boy that young can't get that sort of thing. But the kids in town, they knew. He was just under a spell, is all. She made it so that he couldn't talk anymore so that he wouldn't be able to tell anyone what had happened to him, or who had done it. But he was a strong little boy, a little fighter, and he fought his way through that spell and he could say one thing. "Witch. Witch."

This isn't some kind of backward small town I'm telling you about, you know that. But the more you hear something, the more natural it sounds. So the kids were all talking about it, of course. And it grew upward, like soft mold. The primary school teachers started telling each other in the faculty lounge, "You know, she always has stuck me as a little odd," and Miss Dankon from Sunday School told the pastor, "She gives me a funny look whenever I try to wave hello," and the parents ask each other, "Have you ever smelled anything a little funny when you're walking past her house?" And the people started asking the sheriff, "Do you have any leads? Any suspects? When will someone be arrested?" But there were no suspects, there were no arrests. No leads other than that poor little broken boy still shrieking in a big white bed over at Women and Infants, "Witch! Witch! Witch!"

Well. I don't know what happened in that little boy's house at night, when the doors were closed but the lights stayed on. I don't know the kind of conversations his parents had or the kind of awfulness his mother felt in her throat. But it was two weekends after Jasper was found when there was a knock on our front door. This was late, too. And my father went out and he talked to the man on the porch. And he turned back in and he said to my mother, "You stay here, now, and you watch your children." And he left the house. This was happening all over town, I suppose. And all over town the children managed to leave those houses where they were being watched so damn carefully, and they met in the woods behind that woman's house, and they hissed to each other, whispered in the cups of hot little pink ears, "Witch, witch." And they watched their fathers burn that woman's house down. Their fathers had circled her house first, nailing plywood sheets across the windows, two-by-fours across the doors. Banging their hammers unabashedly, trying to wake her up, trying to taunt her. Let her know what was coming. And the children, they expected to hear her screaming, of course, as she burned. But she didn't scream.

That's the real heart of this story, here. That she didn't scream. It leaves ever so many more possibilities. Maybe they didn't actually kill her. Maybe she got away and she's still out there, living crazy and ragged in the woods – those woods, see? Back behind the house? Or maybe they did kill her, but she was such a powerful witch that she somehow survived it anyway, dead though she was. And in that case, well, she wouldn't need to hide in the woods at all. She could go anywhere she wanted. Into houses, into the walls, into beds and under the covers with anyone she wanted to, huddling maybe in a dirty lump like old laundry at the end of the bed, staring at the soles of their bare feet. Maybe they killed her but they shouldn't have. Maybe she never did anything wrong at all. Imagine! If that's the case, oh I don't even want to think. That means that madman would still be out there just carrying right on along, but also too there's this woman's wrongly accused vengeful spirit! That's just too many for the price of one, isn't it?

So I suppose this story doesn't necessarily have an unhappy ending. I needn't have prefaced it with all that rigamarole about worrying at the wrong bone. Maybe they were worrying at the right bone, after all. Maybe they killed the killer. Maybe she stayed dead. Sure, children keep disappearing. But like I said: that's just something children do sometimes.

So that's that: we'll never know. That's the way all stories that are really real, and not fairy tales, ultimately end.

Now. You close your eyes. Give me a kiss. Go to sleep. I'm sure I'll see you in the morning.

They rebuilt the house for apartments, now, and happy college students live there. None of them have disappeared yet.