Mrs. Cole lived down the street from us. People said she was a witch. They’d seen her flying around on a broom. And she had been spotted in Eastwood Park picking poisonous mushrooms by the back fence. She was also said to walk around the neighborhood with a shopping bag full of frogs. But most sinister of all the accusations: they said children were chained up in her basement and that she ate these children. I didn’t know what to make of these stories. Mrs. Cole did have a face like a witch, or a hag anyway. She never smiled. I had the feeling she was a mean but lonely lady. No one ever went to her house to visit. Okay, she was a little mean, but a witch?
I asked my mother about her. “She’s a widow,” she said. “She has problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“None of your business what kind of problems. Stay away from her.”
“They say she’s a witch, Ma.”
“You stay away from her,” my mother said, flashing her blue eyes at me and cursing under her breath in Sicilian. But she didn’t come right out and say she wasn’t a witch and this concerned me. Was it possible we had an actual witch living in our neighborhood?
Patty Sullivan told me Mrs. Cole had offed her husband. “She put a hex on him and he ran into oncoming traffic.”
“Do you really think she has kids in her basement?”
“I’m sure she does. Or else how does she eat? She’s old. She don’t work. She don’t have a husband or her own kids to help her. So it makes sense. She has to eat something.”
Patty spoke with such conviction my knees went weak. The idea of someone eating children horrified me. We had to do something.
“Like what?” Patty said, his freckled nose scrunched. “She might put a hex on us and turn us into frogs or whatever. Or she might eat us.”
I laughed when he said this, but I was far from amused. I wanted to investigate if there were indeed children chained up in her basement. If so, maybe we could save them. Patty thought I was crazy for even suggesting it.
“You’ll go on your own,” he said. “I want nothing to do with Mrs. Cole.”
I didn’t sleep well that night. I kept thinking about kids being chained up and crying, screaming for their mommas. And then I pictured a big pot or cauldron with boiling water and carrots and onions spinning around in it, and some poor kid’s parboiled skull bobbing in the foamy bubbles.
Next day I woke up exhausted and frazzled. My mother wanted to know what was wrong with me, but I just said I’d not slept well in the heat. It was July, so my mother didn’t press. I recalled my late Nonna wearing a cornicello charm for protection against the malocchio, or evil eye. I wondered if such a charm would work against Mrs. Cole. Even though my mother claimed to not believe in such fairy tales, she kept a red coral one from Sicily in a jewelry box on her nightstand—maybe just in case. I snatched it with its thin gold chain and hung it around my neck.
I went over to Patty’s house after lunch and asked him what he wanted to do that day. He suggested hitting the recreation center at Eastwood Park and shooting hoops or hiking down to the harbor. Emboldened by the talisman around my neck, I told him I had a better idea.
“Let’s go check out Mrs. Cole’s house. I want to see what’s going on there.”
“I’m telling you, if she puts a hex on us we’ll be toast.”
“So you really believe she’s a witch?”
“I saw her flying a broom one night.”
“You lie.”
“Swear to God,” he said, but then admitted the truth. “Okay, I didn’t see her flying a broom, but plenty of people did.”
“Well, I’m not worried about that.”
“How can you not be worried?”
I showed him the cornicello.
He squinted at it with his milky blue eyes. “What the heck is that, a hot pepper?”
“It’s not a hot pepper,” I said. “It’s Sicilian. It’s a little horn. For protection.”
Patty stood there baffled and slightly annoyed.
I had no time to explain. “Listen, I’m going,” I said. “Maybe you can just watch my back, you know. You don’t have to get close.”
After more pleading Patty agreed to come with me, provided he could just stay back and keep six. That sounded fine. I patted the cornicello as we walked over to Mrs. Cole’s ugly stuccoed house. The front yard looked like a freak weed garden, wild and spilling out to the sidewalk. It struck me as a house where bad things had happened and continued happening. No wonder nobody visited. I wasn’t sure how to approach. Going to the front door seemed foolish. Maybe I could catch a peek through a basement window.
A machete would have been handy reaching the nearest window. Burrs and yellow pollen clung to my T-shirt and shorts. Thin branches and prickly weeds lashed my bare calves. The window was so clouded with dust and mud I couldn’t see inside. Even after I rubbed a spot clean on the glass, I could make out nothing in the dark basement. I doubted there were children chained up down there. As I stood up, I thought I heard Patty cry out to me. When I turned to him, I was met with a wallop across my ear that sent me sprawling into the weeds. I could hear Patty screaming bloody murder as I scrambled to my feet and stood there reeling.
At first I thought Patty had thrown something at me. But then I saw Mrs. Cole hunched by the house with a broken broomstick in her hands, her yellowish face drawn and stern. She came at me again and clipped me across the shins. I wrestled my way out of the weeds, covered with burrs, my shins burning, and tried to run. Now she hit me in the back of the legs so viciously I fell forward on my hands, shredding my palms on the pavement.
“Stop it!” Patty cried. “Stop it! I’m calling the cops!”
Mrs. Cole stopped the assault and retreated to her house. I stumbled home with Patty’s assistance, weeping and clutching the backs of my legs, blood trickling from my left ear.
At home my mother yelled at me for disobeying her. “What’s the matter with you?” When she told me to lower my pants, I thought she intended to spank me. But she didn’t; she gasped. Then, cursing in Sicilian, she lifted my pants, grabbed my arm, and marched me out of the house.
We walked to Mrs. Cole in silence. My mother leaned forward as if shouldering into a wind, nostrils flared, jaw set. I shook with fear. I didn’t know what to expect. When I went to squeeze the cornicello for protection or good luck, it wasn’t there. I must have lost it during the assault. I feared what might result if my mother found out. My mother never let anything go by. She could be truly vengeful and cold. But this time I thought she was messing with the wrong person.
I wanted to tell her to forget it, not to bother Mrs. Cole. She was a witch, after all. And I didn’t have the talisman to protect us. We couldn’t win. How could we beat a witch? She could hex our whole family. But I said nothing.
My mother knocked on Mrs. Cole’s door. When she didn’t respond immediately, my mother knocked again, harder, her chest heaving. The old woman finally answered, her slack face expressionless. My mother said nothing. She merely turned me around, lowered my shorts, and showed Mrs. Cole the welts on the back of my legs.
The two women exchanged no words. My mother stared at Mrs. Cole with her hot blue eyes, fists clenched at her sides. I thought she was going to strike the old woman, but she didn’t. She intoned some strange and piercing words in Sicilian, spat in the palm of her right hand, and slapped her hands together. Mrs. Cole said nothing. Her face looked like a porous rubber mask. After another moment, my mother and I turned around and walked home.
I asked my mother why she hadn’t said anything to Mrs. Cole. Or why we didn’t just call the police. My mother shot me a Sicilian look that suggested I shut my mouth, and I did.
A week later, when Mrs. Cole’s house burned down with her inside it, I wanted to ask my mother more questions. But after a brief moment of reflection, I thought it better that I say nothing and never mention the incident again.
Poet and storyteller Salvatore Difalco is the author or five books, including Black Rabbit & Other Stories (Anvil Press). Recent work appears in Cafe Irreal, E-ratio, and Poetry Lighthouse. He lives in Toronto Canada.
Image: houseofgoodfortune.org
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