Crockett’s Hollow
When Jasper Tipton married Talithie Burwell and settled on Tipton’s Fork in Crockett’s Hollow, folks said no one could ask for a better start. The Tiptons had given the couple their house seat, a bedstead, a table. Jasper had a team of mules he had swapped for a yoke of oxen, and he had a cookstove that he had bought with his own savings. A step stove it was, two caps below and two higher up. The Burwells had seen to it that their daughter did not go empty-handed to her man. She had a flock tick, quilts, coverlids, and a cow. But, old Granny Withers, a midwife from Caney Creek, sitting in the chimney corner sucking her pipe the night of the wedding, vowed that all would not be well with the pair. Hadn’t a bat flitted into the room right over Talithie’s head when the elder was speaking the words that joined the two in wedlock? Everyone knew the sign. Everyone knew too that Talithie Burwell, with her golden hair and blue eyes, had broken up the match between Jasper and Widow Ashby’s Sabrina. Yet Talithie and Jasper vowed that all was fair in love and war. If a man’s heart turned cold toward a maid, it was none of his fault. There was nothing to be done about it. You can’t change a man’s way with woman, they said. It’s writ in the Book.
And soon as Jasper had cast her off, Widow Ashby’s Sabrina took to her bed and there she meant to stay, so she said, the rest of her life. Or—until she got a sign that would give her heart ease. Sabrina Ashby didn’t mince her words either. “I don’t care what the sign may be,” she said it right out, before Granny Withers. That toothless creature cackled and replied, “I’m satisfied you’re knocking center.”
Indeed Sabrina was telling the truth. She meant every word of it. The jilted girl did not go to the wedding. She didn’t need to, as far as that was concerned, for old Granny Withers came hobbling over the mountain fast as her crooked old legs would carry her, and it in the dead of winter, mind you, to tell Widow Ashby’s Sabrina all that had happened. How lovely fair the bride looked beside her handsome bridegroom! “Eh law, they were a doughty couple, Jasper and Talithie,” Granny Withers mouthed the words. She lifted a bony finger, “Yet, mark my words, ill luck awaits the two. When the bat flew into the house and dipped low over the fair bride’s head, she trembled like she had the agger—and—”
“The bat flew over her head?” Sabrina interrupted, eyes glistening. “A bat—it’s blind—stone blind!” the jilted girl echoed gleefully. “There’s a sign for you, Mistress Jasper Tipton, to conjure with!” She let out a screech and then a weird laugh that echoed through Crockett’s Hollow. She cast off the coverlid and in one bound was in the middle of the floor, though she had lain long weeks pining away. She clapped her hands high overhead like she was shouting at meeting. Sabrina laughed again and again, holding her sides.
Granny Withers thought the girl bewitched. So did Widow Ashby and when the two tried to put a clabber poultice on her head and sop her wrists in it, the jilted Sabrina thrust them aside with pure main strength. That was the night of the wedding.
The days went by. Jasper and Talithie were happy and content everyone knew.
Old Granny Withers in her dilapidated hut up the cove watched and carried tales to Sabrina. The forsaken girl listened as the old midwife told how she had seen the two with arms about each other sitting in the doorway in the evening many a time when their work was done. Or how she had found them in loving embrace when by chance she happened to pass along the far end of their corn patch. “Under the big tree, mind you!” Granny Withers scandalized beyond further speech clapped hand to mouth, rolled her eyes in dismay. “Just so plum lustful over each other they can’t bide till night time. The marriage bed is the fitten place for such as that.”
When the forsaken Sabrina heard such things she burned with envy and jealousy. Secretly she tried to conjure the pair, to no avail. That had been by wishing them ill. She meant to try again. One day she went far into the woods and caught a toad. She put it in a bottle. “There you are, Mistress Talithie Tipton. I’ve named the toad for you!” she gloated as she made fast the stopper. “You’ll perish there. That’s what you’ll do. Didn’t old Granny Withers tell me how she worked such conjure on a false true love in her young day? He died within twelve month. Slipped off a high cliff!” Stealthily, in the dusk, Sabrina made her way through the brush to a lonely spot far up the hollow where the big rock hung. There she put the bottle far back under a slab of stone.
She waited eagerly to hear some word of the wedded couple.
One day, a few months later, old Granny Withers came hobbling again over the mountain. “Jasper’s woman is heavy with child,” the toothless midwife grinned, moistening her wrinkled lips with the tip of her tongue. “He’s done axed me to tend her.”
Not even to Granny Withers did Sabrina tell of the toad in the bottle. “If you ever tell to a living soul what you’ve done, that breaks the conjure,” the old midwife had warned long ago. So Sabrina kept a still tongue and bided her time. Nor did she have long to wait.
News traveled swiftly by word-of-mouth. And bad news was fleetest of all.
At first Jasper and his wife were unaware of their babe’s fate, though Talithie had noticed one day, when the midwife carried the little one to the door where the sun was shining brightly, that it did not bat an eye. Granny Withers noticed too, but she said never a word. The young mother kept her fear within her heart. She did not speak of it to Jasper.
Two weeks later, after Granny Withers had gone, Talithie was up doing her own work. Supper was over and the young parents sat by the log fire. There was chill in the air. The babe had whimpered in her bee-gum crib, a crib that the proud young father had fashioned from a hollowed log in which wild bees had once stored their honey. Cut the log in two, did Jasper, scraped it clean, and with the rounded side turned down it made as fine a cradle as anyone could wish. With eager hands Talithie placed in it, months before her babe was born, a clean feather tick, no bigger than a pillow of their own bed. Pieced a little quilt too, did the happy, expectant mother.
How contentedly the little one snuggled there even the very first time Talithie put her in the crib! Rarely did the child whimper, but this night small Margie was fretful. Talithie gathered her up and came back to the hearth crooning softly as she jolted to and fro in a straight chair. The Tipton household, like most in Crockett’s Hollow, owned no such luxury as a rocker. But for all the crooning and jolting small Margie fretted, rubbed her small fists into her eyes, and drew up her legs. “Might be colic,” thought Talithie. “Babes have to fret and cry some, makes them grow,” offered the young father who continued to whittle a butter bowl long promised. However, for all his notions about it, Talithie was troubled. Never before had she known the babe to be so fretful.
The log fire was burning low and in the dimness of the room she leaned down to the hearth, picked up a pine stick and lighted it. She held it close above the babe’s face. The small eyes were open wide and strangely staring. Talithie passed the bright light to and fro before the little one’s gaze. But never once did the babe bat a lash.
“Lord God Almighty!” Talithie cried, dropping the lighted pine to the floor. “Our babe is blind, Jasper! Blind, I tell you! Stone blind!”
Jasper leaped to his feet. The wooden bowl, the knife, clattered to the floor. The pine stick still burning lay where it had fallen.
“Our babe can’t be blind,” he moaned, falling to his knees. “Our helpless babe that’s done no harm to any living soul, our spotless pure babe can’t be so afflicted!” he sobbed bitterly, putting his arms about the two he loved best in all the world.
The pine stick where Talithie dropped it burned deep into the puncheon floor leaving a scar that never wore away.
Again old Granny Withers hobbled over the mountain as fast as she had the night she bore the news to Sabrina about the bat that flew over the fair bride’s head. “Talithie’s babe is blind—stone blind, Sabrina Ashby! Do you hear that?”
This time Widow Ashby’s Sabrina did not cry out in glee. She did not clap her hands above her head and laugh wildly. The forsaken girl sank into a chair. Her face turned deathly white, she stared ahead, unseeing.
It was a long time before she spoke. Then there was no one there to hear. Granny Withers had scurried off in the dark and Widow Ashby—she was long since dead and gone.
“A toad in a bottle,” the frightened Sabrina whispered and her voice echoed in the barren room, “a toad in a bottle works a conjure. Ma’s gone and now Talithie’s babe and Jasper’s is plum stone blind.” She swayed to and fro, crying hysterically. Then she buried her face in the vise of her hands, moaning, “Little Margie Tipton, your pretty blue eyes won’t never ’tice no false true love away from no fair maid. And you, Mistress Jasper Tipton, you’ll have many a long year for to ruminate such things through your own troubled mind.”
Some shake their heads sympathetically, finger to brow, when they speak of Widow Ashby’s Sabrina living alone in her ramshackle house far up at the head of Crockett’s Hollow. “A forsaken girl that holds grudge and works conjure comes to be a sorry, sorry woman,” they say.
Should you pass along that lonely creek and venture to call a cheery “Hallo!” only a weird, cackling laugh, a harsh “Begone” will echo in answer.