There wasn’t a child old enough to give ear to a tale who hadn’t heard of Pol Gentry’s powers. How she had bewitched Dan Eskew’s little girl Flossie. It wouldn’t have happened, some said, if Flossie had spit in her bonnet when the black cat crossed her path as she trooped through the woods one day gathering wild flowers. That very evening when she got back home Flossie sank on the doorstep, the bonnet filled with wild flowers dropped from her arm. She moaned pitifully, holding her head between her hands and swaying to and fro. Right away her head began to swell and by the time they got word to Seth Eeling, the wizard doctor who lived in Mossy Bottom, Flossie’s head was twice its size. Indeed, Flossie Eskew’s head was as big as a full-grown pumpkin. The minute the wizard clapped eyes on the child he spoke out.
“Beat up eggshells as fine as you can and give them to this child in a cup of water. If she is bewitched this mixture will pass through her clear.”
Orders were promptly obeyed. Flossie drained the cup but no sooner had Flossie passed the powdered egg shells than the witch left her. Her head went back to its natural size. Nevertheless Flossie Eskew died that night.
“Didn’t send for the wizard soon enough,” Seth Eeling said.
Some believed in the powers of both, though neither witch nor wizard would give the other a friendly look, much less a word.
Pol Gentry was never downright friendly with any, though she would hoe for a neighbor in return for something to eat. “My place is too rocky to raise anything,” she excused herself. And whatever was given her, Pol would carry home then and there. “Them’s fine turnips you’ve got, Mistress Darby,” she said one day, and Sallie Darby up and handed her a double handful of turnips. Pol opened the front of her dirty calico mother-hubbard, put the turnips inside against her dirty hide and tripped off with them. Nor was Pol Gentry one to sit home at tasks such as knitting or piecing a quilt. But everyone admitted there never was a better hand the country over at raising pigs. So Pol swapped pigs for knitting. She had to have long yarn stockings, mittens, a warm hood, for her pigs had to be fed and tended winter and summer. Others needed meat as much as Pol needed things to keep her warm. Tillie Bocock was glad to knit stockings for the old witch in return for a plump shoat. Tillie had several mouths to feed. Her man was a no-account, who spent his time fishing in summer and hunting in winter, so that all the work fell to Tillie. Day by day she tended and fed the shoat. It was black-and-white-spotted and fat as a butterball, she and the little Bococks bragged.
“Another month and you can butcher that shoat.” Old Pol would stop in at Tillie’s every time she went down the mountain, eyeing the fat pig. Sometimes she would put the palms of her dirty hands against her mouth and rub the black hair back to this side and to that, then she’d stroke her chin as though her black beard hung far down. Pol would make a clucking sound with her tongue. “Wisht I was chawin’ on a juicy sparerib or gnawin’ me a greasy pig’s knuckle right now,” she’d say. Then Pol would begin on a long tale of witchery: how she had seen young husbands under the spell of her craft grow faithless to young, pretty wives; how children gained power over their parents through her and had their own will in all things, even to getting title to house and land from them before it should have been theirs. She told how Luther Trumbo’s John took with barking fits like a dog and became a hunchback over night. “Why? Becaze he made mauck of Pol Gentry, that’s why!” She rubbed a dirty hand around her hairy mouth and cackled gleefully.
At that Tillie Bocock turned to her frightened children huddled behind her chair. “Get you gone, the last one of you out to the barn. Such witchy talk is not for young ears.”
Then old Pol Gentry scowled at Tillie and her sharp eyes flashed and she puffed her lips in and out. Pol didn’t say anything but Tillie could see she was miffed and there was in her sharp eyes a look that said, “Never mind, Tillie Bocock, you’ll pay for this.”
Next morning Pol Gentry was up bright and early, rattling the pot on the stove and grumbling to herself. “I’ll show Tillie Bocock a thing or two. So I will. Sending her young ones out of my hearing.”