Mark Medric George
Loveless
The hired man left the world he knew when he was twenty-five. His parents were dead. He’d fallen in love with a girl too good for him, and now she was gone. When the bank sent the eviction letter for his father’s house, the hired man doused the walls with gasoline and set it on fire so he could walk away free, first on roads he knew, then on roads he didn’t, sleeping in ditches, haunted by hunger as the days passed into weeks and familiar land gave way to a strange and wild country. Only then, when he was out of all reckoning, did the hired man realize that he was no longer wandering. He was following a path appointed to him, step by step, until it ended on the verge of a dark forest where an archway of crumbling stone with tall iron gates stood open. Come, said a voice in his head, the witch’s voice, and when he obeyed her and stepped through the gate and into the forest, his old life was gone forever.
The witch’s great house loomed beneath a stand of dying locust trees at the end of the gravel drive, splendid with bay windows and sprawling porches and a turret stabbing upward into the sky, yet the walls were black with mold, the eaves sagging, the windows blind behind dark curtains. Loveless, the witch’s son, was on the front porch waiting for the hired man. He wore a white linen suit and straw hat and sat in the shade on an old swing going creak, creak, creak as he smiled at a point just above the hired man’s head. Loveless was older than he, but only just, blonde and pale with a washed out, sickly look, but solid under his baby fat. His reedy voice showed no fear. He spoke only in statements, never questions. The tall locust trees above him were heavy with thorns.
There’s a shed down by the creek, said Loveless. That’s where you’ll stay. She’ll call for you when it’s time.
The hired man nodded and licked his lips. He had dust in the cuffs of his pants, dust in the back of his throat. He didn’t know why he was there or why he nodded at the man on the swing. Whatever had pulled him down to the witch’s house now gripped him so tightly that he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. As Loveless sat and watched, the hired man walked down to the tiny clawboard shed under the willow trees by the creek. The air inside was stale and full of dust, but there was a hard little bed and a table and an empty steamer trunk where he might have put his things if he’d left his home with anything but himself.
The last thing Loveless told him before driving off in his red Packard convertible was this: A young man with an empty life is the most useful and dangerous thing in the world.
***
The witch did not leave her house, not on the first day, not on any day, but from the moment the hired man stepped foot on her piece of the world, her mind was heavy on him. The night he arrived, he lay in the dark shed on the dusty mattress, itchy and awake in the cloying heat as if he were being watched, then he fell into a dreamless sleep. In the morning, he got up and fetched water, found a maul leaning against the wood pile and split firewood for the stove until his arms ached, her eyes on him even though the curtains at the house were always closed.
Loveless drove up to the house in the hottest hour of the afternoon and sat on the porch swing to hold court. He gestured out at the land that surrounded them. Her piece goes all the way back to the bluffs along the river. She’s got the oak woods on the high ground and the swamps down along the creek where all the waters gather. He explained to the hired man that the witch made patent medicines for Loveless to sell to people desperate for her miracles. She can make you healthy if you’re sick, make you fall in love, make you fertile if you’re barren, or kill someone stone dead. When she needs something for her medicines, she’ll call you. That’s why you’re here. Everything she needs is out there if you know where to look.
Loveless paused and studied the hired man as if measuring him up. The old lime works up in the hills are hers too. Bad things happened up there. You’re curious, or you will be, but don’t ever go up there if you know what’s good for you. At least not until she tells you to go.
Loveless left and the days passed, and the hired man spent his empty time walking the witch’s piece as far as he dared, up into the woods, down along the sluggish creek where the mosquitoes clustered thick in the shade. In the daylight, the witch seemed to be asleep, perhaps dreaming in the stuffy darkness of the closed-up house beneath the thorn trees. At night she worked. The hired man could sense her moving from room to room, window to window, but her attention was elsewhere, and she left him alone to sleep and wait.
In the darkest hour of the seventh night, she finally called on the hired man while he was sleeping and when he opened his eyes, everything around him was new.
***
He was lying under the countless stars on a broad granite glade. The hired man wanted to stand but he could only lie on the rock and stare at the night sky reeling in slow circles above him, wondering if he had died and his soul had been pinned like a moth to a board. When he finally stood, it was not by his own will. He simply blinked, got to his feet, and walked down the rocky path in the dark as if someone else had decided for him, as if he was just a passenger in his own body, and he understood that it was the witch who had chosen for him.
They walked across the glade as one, down the narrow path through the pines. The land, her land, now felt familiar to the hired man even in the black of night, for they were one and he knew that she had made the trail herself long ago. She had walked it many times with many hired men on moonbright nights when she took them out under the stars to find what she needed, first through the pine woods, then the ash and swamp willows lower down. The stifling darkness closed in until they went down to the gently flowing water moving forever over smooth stones just under the surface. The mud pulled at the hired man’s feet and the mosquitoes hummed in his ears. The air was full of the endless grinding of the katydids.
The hired man did not know what the witch was seeking, but he found it nonetheless: a tiny night-blooming flower hidden in the sedges on the water’s edge. He crouched down and grubbed out the flower and the root whole, his fingers confident as if he’d done it before. The witch was pleased and her satisfaction coursed through him, but the hired man felt something else in that small part of himself that was still his own, a feeling of dread when he touched the root of the night flower.
Cupping the prize in his hands, the hired man worked back upstream to the narrow path through the trees. A sense of warmth and calm fell over him. He had proven useful. Passed the test. She would allow him to stay.
In the morning, the hired man woke with the sun bright and hot outside the clawboard shack. He was back where he had started, stretched out in the shack on his narrow bed but he could still feel where she had been in his mind, like the faint, whispery track of a hunting snake in the dust of a dry garden.
***
The witch remained unseen to the hired man, an abstraction, a ghost. Deep inside her house at night, she made her medicines for Loveless to sell. The hired man could sometimes see her shadow moving at night in the glow behind the curtained windows. He knew that she had been beautiful once, but she was beautiful no longer. He knew she was old, older than the house, older than the dusty road, older than the locust trees forever dying, so old she was as inevitable as the weather. The hired man knew that Loveless was not actually the witch’s son but something else altogether. He did not understand how he knew these things.
In the daytime, he took care of the witch’s property. At night, he slept on his hard little bed and waited for her to send him out into the dark woods, chasing poisonous night flowers whose names he didn’t know, or mushrooms pale as death growing in the rotten heart of fallen trees. She sent him to gather the tiny, cold bodies of songbirds lying in the dirt beneath a great black tree that set lovely poison berries high above the ground where only the birds could find them.
***
As summer passed into fall, the witch suddenly stopped sending the hired man out into the night. Instead, she came and watched his dreams, always choosing those full of melancholy and grief. She watched him in his childhood bed, delirious with fever, his mother in the other room, her voice crying out but too faint to understand. She watched him standing by the side of his father’s coffin, eighteen and barely a man, clenching his mother’s hand in his Sunday clothes with a storm brewing outside. The witch forced the dreams to linger, to focus, to bite again. He felt the rawness of his throat, sore from sickness and crying. He felt the itch of the tight collar as he looked at the casket. As he felt these things, so did she, and once the witch had taken what she could from him, she looked in the places he didn’t want to go, to the memory of the girl that was too good for him, the girl that was gone. Yes, the witch sighed at last. There she is.
Her given name was Margarethe but everyone called her Dearie and they were both sixteen when they sneaked into her father’s barn and took off their clothes surrounded by the warm, sweet smell of hay and the restless sounds of the horses. The heartbreak happened later, in a different place, in a different season. The dream lingered on the euphoria of that first time, poisoned now by the dread of a grown man who knew what was coming. In the dream, the hired man and Dearie fumbled in the dark and laughed as the night birds rustled up in the eaves. The hired man could hear the horses and feel the scratch of the straw through the old thin blanket, but he couldn’t see Dearie’s face as he looked down at her beneath him. He reached out to feel the delicate curve of her cheek as if it would help him remember, but the shape under his fingers was unfamiliar and for a dizzying moment, the hired man wondered if his memory of her had been a trick.
Before the hired man could pull away, Dearie’s hand took his and held it. Her fingers were hot, as if she had a fever, and her grip grew so tight he cried out at the pain of it. Don’t go, came the voice, the witch’s voice, and the hired man started awake. The sun was just coming up outside. The hired man reached out across the empty bed as if he might find Dearie there like a miracle, but he found nothing.
***
Loveless came to the house that day in a fresh rabbit fur coat and noticed that something had changed with the hired man. Loveless smiled, his eyes sharp. She likes you, he said. Not all of her boys have secrets. She gets bored when they don’t have secrets. The last one didn’t even last a year.
***
Once the weather turned cold and the harvest moon rose high above the trees, the hired man found himself called once again in the dead of night. He opened his eyes and saw before him a row of kilns, their stone chimneys lined up in ranks under the trees, each one a warning, a ghost story, a tragedy. The witch held him, as always, in the grip of her will, but now there was her fear along with his. Reach inside, search the ashes. The urgent thought came, its power nearly swallowed by his terror, and for the first time, the hired man was able to resist. He stood under the bright moon with the naked trees swaying and dry leaves scratching across the cold ground and thought of what Loveless had told him. That’s where all those bad things happened. Don’t ever go up there if you can help it.
He could see the opening in the nearest kiln, a black void against the gloom. Reach inside, she said again, but again he held back, his anger growing at the seemingly indomitable will pushing him forward. The stalemate lingered as the hired man held his breath and trembled, then it passed and he felt something unexpected. The witch was gone. The test was over. He closed his eyes again and slept and, in the morning, he awoke in his narrow bed with both hands clenched into fists. Part of the dream seemed to linger in the back of his mind just out of reach like an itch he longed to scratch, like a door cracked open with light on the other side bleeding out into the dark. As the day passed, he split firewood with an eye on the house, afraid the witch would come out at last and make him pay for his defiance, but the windows were dark, and the door stayed closed as the wind rattled the black husks of the seed pods in the locust trees.
That night, for the first and only time, the hired man dreamed, not of himself, but of her. She was looking out of the door of her house into a summer storm, the hot night throbbing, stabbed with lightning and the dry crack of thunder muted by the heavy air. She walked down the porch steps in a thin white gown already sweat damp, a small box held in front of her. It seemed more of a memory than a dream to the hired man, something that had happened long ago, for there was no electric light above the barn and a kerosene lamp burned in the kitchen window. The hired man could feel the witch’s desperate sadness as she reached the open sky and fell to her knees. She dropped the box and started to dig with her hands, clawing the rich dark soil away until her nails broke and blood wet her fingertips.
When the hole was deep and dark as a grave, the witch stopped digging as the first fat drops of rain started to strike the barn’s tin roof like gunshots. She reached into the box and pulled out, one at a time, a half-dozen lead soldiers painted with bloody wounds, then a toy train engine black as a patch of midnight, a velvet bag full of glass marbles, a silver baby spoon. She held each for a heartbeat, felt the familiar textures under her fingers, then dropped them one by one into the hole she’d dug. When the box was empty, she covered everything with wet, dark earth. The rain was falling harder now. The air was full of water, warm as a womb. Her grief was angry. It proved that she could be hurt like anyone, like everyone.
Then, at last, the witch paused, looked up, felt that the hired man was watching and realized that she had gone too far, too deep, to find out all his secrets and had opened a door that she couldn’t close. Her anger bloomed like a living thing and the hired man suddenly found himself awake in his frigid bunk with the north wind pushing against the walls and the trusses under the roof groaning as if the whole thing were about to rise up and blow away.
The hired man shivered in the darkness until the night lifted outside the window and the wind died down, afraid to sleep in case she was still there behind his eyes waiting for him.
***
In the morning, with the bleary sun warming what it could and the smell of the insatiable wood furnace inside the witch’s house spreading with the stirring wind, the hired man walked out across the stubborn frost until he stood where she had knelt in the dream. He got on his knees with a spade in his hands and studied the heavy curtains in the windows. He knew she was there. She was always there, but he had to know the truth, so he dug through the frost line to the rich soil underneath with worms as big as snakes twisting in the cold and fat white grubs moving as if to hide from the sunlight. The hired man dug until he found what he both wanted and dreaded to find: the toy train engine, its paint untouched by time as if it had been buried there just that morning, the lead soldiers, their agonies still bright red, a silver spoon, untarnished, a velvet bag of slag glass marbles, their swirls and flames dulled by countless games of some long lost child.
The hired man looked at the marbles sitting in his palm and suddenly felt that someone was staring at him, not the witch but Loveless, sitting on the porch swing in his rabbit fur coat as if he had appeared out of thin air, grinning at a point just above the hired man’s head. Such a shame, Loveless said. The hired man had not heard him come and yet there he was. He had a bottle of blackberry wine in his hand and his teeth were stained red. She buried them for a reason, Loveless said. She buried them to hide them from herself. She buried them so she would never remember, but here they are again because of you. Such a shame.
The swing went creak, creak, creak, and the hired man shivered.
I didn’t know, said the hired man. His voice was strange to his ears. He hadn’t said a word in months.
Of course you knew, Loveless said. She showed you.
***
The hired man was sitting on his bunk in the evening still wearing his boots, the kerosene lantern burning on its hook, when he was struck dumb between one heavy heartbeat and the next. His vision narrowed to a single point, pinned on a glowing coal sitting at the back of the stove’s belly. When he stood up, it was her will, not his, that moved him. He crossed the dusty floor with regal grace, put on his old barn coat, lifted the lamp off the hook, and stepped out into the night. The damp wind was shifting and smelled like snow. The cold took the hired man’s breath as he passed the dark house and walked down the path through the trees.
As the hired man made his way through the woods, he felt no fear, for everything he saw belonged to her: the naked trees, the still pools along the creek just starting to skim over with ice, the steady rise of the land rolling up from the creeping water to the hills where the trees gave way to the night sky. On and on stretched her valley, full of hidden places where the hired man had found so many strange and dangerous things for her. As he crested the hilltop, snow began to fall from the heavy clouds at last, flakes as big as silver dollars, slowly at first, then so thick he couldn’t see at all. He walked, confident of the way, for all that land was hers and always had been. There was a low growl of thunder up in the clouds, an electric tingle that seemed to prickle across his skin, spreading down his spine. Then came the flash, blinding against the bright white snow, with thunder following almost at once like a fist from the darkness.
The hired man stopped, looked out into the darkness, his eyes aching, the snow gathering on his shoulders, blurring all the edges of the world. At last, he found it, the flickering light of new fire out in the trees where lightning had struck some unfortunate tree and set it to burn. The hired man started walking again, guided now by the flame. So close. So close. Up he went, up into the wooded hills, back again to the lime works where all those bad things happened. Don’t ever go up there if you know what’s good for you.
Yet there he went and there he stood, the snow slowing to wind-blown flurries, the air colder as the night passed and the kilns loomed and a great oak tree, a hundred feet tall, had been split in half by the lightning strike. The tree had grown there for many years, long before the kilns were built, and now it was a ruin, great shards of it scattered across the snow. The fire was almost dead, diminished to a soft glow in the very heart of the tree where the trunk had opened from the crown to the soil. The hired man could taste the lingering smoke and feel the warmth from the slumped wreck of the tree. He felt the witch’s great sadness as he approached it for she could remember when the oak was only a sapling, young and greedy, and it had grown as she had grown. Yet the closer he came to the kilns, the more her fierce purpose for him overwhelmed her grief.
The hired man crept slowly forward, her will so tight around him that the fear and the defiance that had stopped him before felt muted and distant as a memory. Without a second thought, he plunged his hand into the cold ashes inside until he found what she wanted, a stone knife point pale as bone, older than any made thing the hired man had ever touched in his life. As soon as he had it in his hand, the hired man realized that the knife was the source of all the dread he felt. It reeked of death. It had done terrible things. That was why she had hidden it there, so that one day, when she needed that shadow again, a hired man could find it, standing in the dying glow of the burning tree with the knife white as the moon against his soot-blackened hand.
Satisfied at last, the witch led the hired man back through the night, down the trail and across the water, the clouds breaking and a new moon, all but invisible, riding high above. She was silent in his head now, but he knew what he was meant to do. Go to the house. She was waiting.
The hired man left the woods and crossed the fresh snow to stand at her door. For the first time, he studied the intricate texture of the brass knob barely visible in the dark. hen, he reached out and took it in his bare hand and winced as the cold bit into his skin. Her voice remained silent. He was free, it seemed, to choose, and so he chose to open the unlocked door and step inside. There was no light inside the witch’s house, but her long memory of it, like a bruise in his mind, made every step familiar to him, from the door past the sitting room with its heavy furniture shrouded in old dust covers, past the door to the pitch-black cellar where even she was scared to go. He knew that the bedrooms were upstairs, each a cold, dark mystery. He knew there was a player piano in the den with a yellowed reel of a tragic sonata in a flat minor key, but none of that mattered now.
The hired man walked straight to the kitchen, the heart of the house, where cast iron stock pots simmered over soft orange flame, where the witch stood in the gloom, the glow of the fire barely illuminating her looming shadow as she stirred and stirred. There were so many smells in the house that the hired man could barely tell them apart: laboratory smells, cooking smells and beneath it all the ever-present hint of slow decay, of moth-eaten drapery and termite tunnels in the walls.
The hired man waited for her voice to come, but she was silent. He was still free to choose. When he finally approached her, the sound of his boots on the stone floor sounded enormous. Even up close, he could barely see more of her than a dark shape, her housecoat red as a Packard convertible, her hair long and wild. He stopped and waited for her; his voice caught in his throat. Before he could speak, she held up her hand. Don’t, she seemed to say. The hired man swallowed and reached his chilled hand into his coat pocket for the knife point which he held out to her. She turned to him and took the knife, holding it up in front of his eyes. This is not for me. It is yours.
The hired man took back the knife and felt the shadow that had haunted him all that night suddenly lift. He sank to his knees on the flag stones at the witch’s feet. I’m sorry, he said, his voice a hoarse whisper barely audible over the bubbling stove. She looked down at him and touched his cheek. Her dry palm felt hot on his skin, as if she had a fever. When it’s time, you’ll know what to do. Then she turned back to the stove and went back to stirring and he knew at once that he was meant to go. And so he did.
***
When the hired man got back to the cabin and warmed up enough to fall asleep, he dreamed once again about Dearie. This time he could see her face. I’m going to miss you, she told him, and when the dream passed like any other dream and the hired man woke, the winter sun was shining through the dirty window. He raised himself from the bed, broke the skim of ice off the basin, and washed his face. He pulled on his boots still wet from the night before and shivered with the cold. Then he opened the door and stood in the biting air outside and listened to the lonely sound of the wind rattling through the locust trees. The knife was heavy in his coat pocket, the old stone warm from his own blood as he cupped it in his hand.
The hired man retraced his steps through the snow to the dark house and stood on the sagging porch. With a sigh, he sank down onto the porch swing without brushing off the snow and took the stone knife out of his pocket. It was his purpose. The edge was sharp and greedy. It had been long enough. When he heard the sound of Loveless approaching in his Packard, the hired man started to rock back and forth, creak, creak, creak, and waited for the car to arrive, painted red as murder. The hired man would have a name again. He would have a purpose. He would help turn the wheel again, then wait for the next hired man to come.
Mark Medric George received his MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His fiction has appeared previously or is forthcoming in Boulevard, New Madrid, The MacGuffin, and The Southeast Review among others. His awards include the Greensboro Review Literary Award for Fiction, honorable mention in the New Letters Robert Day Award for Fiction, and first place in the 2024 Boulevard Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers. He lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.