Ish’s Greatest Spell

Ish’s fame as a mountain witch grew every day. But the slaying of Emmit Webster was Ish's best spell. Emmit was an engineer from Charlottesville, Virginia, hired by Jewell Mountain Coal Company. Olivia Collier worked at a grocery store across the street from Bailey's Boarding House, where Emmit stayed. Emmit bought cigarettes from Olivia every day, but he really stopped by to flirt.

Olivia was a dainty size three. She used soft pink nail polish and wore a pink ribbon in her silky, auburn hair. The first things men noticed when they looked at Olivia were her hazel eyes and her olive skin. She had a rich alto voice and sang often in church.

Emmit went to church with Olivia a few times. She was nineteen, and Emmit was twenty-nine. He bought her roses and expensive perfume. Olivia was flattered by so much attention from a man like Emmit. He was tall and had black hair and a small black mustache.

First, Emmit talked Olivia into giving up her position as a church soloist. Then he began keeping her out later and later at night. Olivia's father complained, “You have my girl home by eleven o’clock, do you hear? And you’d better show a little more respect when you come to pick her up. Don’t drive into my yard and blow your horn expecting my daughter to come running outside.”

Emmit ignored Vince. “I’m marrying you, baby,” he told Olivia, “not the whole family.”

Vince was a disabled coal miner, dying with rock dust in his lungs, and he smothered at the smallest exertion. Every time Emmit pulled his red Buick into the yard and blew his horn, Vince’s blood pressure went up and his oxygen level went down.

Olivia’s father and mother thought that Emmit and Olivia were going to revival meetings in Bluefield. But when Emmit brought Olivia home at one o'clock in the morning from a dance, Vince had one conniption fit after the other. He was waiting for Emmit and his daughter on the front porch. "Don't you ever come here again, boy," he told Emmit. "I'm friends with the law, and I'll call them if I see your face around here anymore."

With that threat, Vince went into a coughing spasm and started choking. Olivia and her mother helped Vince back to the couch where he could hook up his oxygen again. Emmit called to Olivia from the front yard, "I'll see you later, sweet thing." Vince stayed on the couch until the choking stopped and his chest pains passed.

The next day, Vince found out that Olivia and Emmit had been playing husband and wife. This disgrace proved what Vince had always believed—“that more souls were made than saved at revival meetings.”

Emmit told his buddies he was just "sampling the goods," but Olivia was in love. Vince called Bailey's Boarding House and found out that Emmit was planning to leave Richlands that afternoon. He had quit his job at the mines and was going back to Charlottesville. Vince called his youngest brother, J.C. Collier, a deputy sheriff.

Emmit wasn't happy to be sitting in the Colliers' living room, being questioned by a man with vengeance in his eyes and a deputy sheriff as a brother. "Well, Emmit, when are you going to marry my daughter?" Vince asked as he watched Emmit's face. “I know that you were getting ready to go back to Charlottesville.”

“Never. If you think I'm going to marry her and raise somebody else's bastard, you're crazy."

J.C. Collier pulled out his night stick, and Vince reached for his .22 pistol under the couch.

Emmit rose to leave. "See you around, sweet thing," he said.

Trying to reach his gun, Vince fell to the floor, then grabbed at Emmit. "You'll pay for this! One way or the other, you'll pay," Vince cried.

Emmit lit a cigarette and laughed as he walked out of the Colliers’ house and out of Olivia's life. J.C. Collier could bring Emmit to see Vince, but he couldn’t make him marry Olivia.

Vince never left his living room again. He died on the couch sometime in the night, struggling to pull air into his chest that was clogged with coal dust and heartbreak.

Emmit stayed in Richlands and went back to work at Jewell Mountain. The same day that Vince Collier died, Olivia lost her job. "Since you're pregnant and not married, I can't have you waiting on customers. You'll be showing any day now," the store manager told her.

On the day of Vince’s funeral, Olivia stayed at the grave until after sundown. She watched men lower the casket into the ground and cover the grave. As each shovel full of dirt hit her father's casket, Olivia hardened herself.

"Thud!"

And she made a vow.

"Thud!"

She swore.

"Thud! Thud!"

And then the sounds stopped.

The men who had covered the grave gathered their tools and walked away, leaving Olivia sitting on the ground. Olivia reached over and squeezed a handful of dirt from her father's grave.

There was more than enough money to have Emmit killed. As friends and relatives went out the door of the church after Vince's funeral, they put money in Olivia's hand. She didn't raise her eyes to see who gave what. There were a lot of one dollar bills. But Olivia's lap was full of five and ten and twenty dollar bills, too. Ish wouldn't care where the money came from.

There was no moon, but there was one light that rarely went out at night at the head of Cloverlick Creek. Ish's shack gave off a red glow that was an invitation to some and a warning to others. In her hatred, Olivia welcomed the red light. She wanted to touch it, to feel its heat. She had to see Ish. Olivia hated to look at Ish’s humpback and hairlip, but she hated Emmit Webster even more.

As Olivia walked, her feet felt heavy, and each step became the thud of the dirt hitting her father's casket. Her heart pounded, and Olivia smelled Emmit's after-shave lotion in the wind. Every time he had held her down, kissing and pawing her, forcing her, pushed into Olivia's memory.

Voices rose from trees on the side of the road, calling for Olivia to turn and run home. But the "Thud, Thud" of the dirt on her daddy's casket refused to stop in her head, and Olivia started running to the red light, to Ish. The voices suddenly hushed. And the “Thud, Thud” in Olivia’s mind stopped. The night wind had died down. There were no birds singing. It was strange at this time of year to hear no frogs or crickets. It was the first silence Olivia had felt since her father died. She finally stood at the end of Ish's swinging bridge.

Because there were no clothes that Ish had ever found to fit the large hump on his back, he usually wore loose flannel shirts. But tonight, he stood on the other side of the swinging bridge wearing a shiny, white shirt that had long sleeves but no collar and no buttons in the front. The shirt’s V-neck gapped open, showing the top of Ish’s chest, and the shirt reached to the ground.

Ish grinned and twiddled with a leather necklace that held a gold chicken bone. He wore two large, loop earrings in each ear, one silver and one gold. His white hair had grown to his waist. Ish had lost weight since Olivia had seen him last, and the hump on his back seemed larger than before. At four feet high, Ish looked taller than Olivia felt at that moment. Ish stood at the end of the bridge, his white hair blowing in the night wind.

"I’ve been waiting for you. Come on over," he said through the gap in his hair-lip. Olivia had heard Ish whistle with his mouth closed, but now he talked without moving his lips.

Inside the shack, Ish only wanted to know how much Olivia was willing to pay. "Everything I’ve got," she told him. "And I want it done soon."

The red light hurt Olivia's eyes, but her hatred for Emmit doubled in Ish's presence. “One minute, I want to kill Emmit before morning, and the next minute, I want him to suffer for a hundred years.”

"But my dear," Ish said through the gap in his lips, "you can have both. And I will make it happen."

"I want you to tear his heart out, just like he tore daddy’s heart out," Olivia said.

“You came at the right time, my girl. It’s the best hour for the job. A half hour before midnight is the last few minutes of good time. Thirty minutes after midnight is evil’s most powerful time. It’s the time when death stalks his victims and marks them for destruction. It’s the time when all those who hate are in one mind and one accord, opening the door to hell for our enemies. Yes, child, you have come at the right time,” Ish said.

“Before we can do anything, you must put his name in my book. It’s getting quite full, you know. Make his whole name one word. Use this quill.” Ish gave Olivia a goose quill sharpened on the end.

He handed her a bottle of red ink. Olivia spilled several drops on her hand as she dipped the quill into the bottle. “This is blood,” she said.

“When you make deals with the devil, you use what hell demands. Now write. It’s three minutes after midnight,” and Ish’s voice began to growl.

When she put the pen to the page of the book, the quill started writing without Olivia having to move her hand: emmitwebster emmitwebster emmitwebster emmitwebster.

"Stand here," Ish told her, pointing Olivia toward the wall facing the creek. Olivia stood before a man's shape cut out of newspaper. The form was cut unevenly, as if by a child learning to use scissors. "Take this knife," Ish said. "Now cut into the paper where his heart is."

When Olivia raised the knife into the air, Emmit’s face appeared on the paper, and Olivia took a step backward.

"Hurry," Ish said. "Use the knife before the time is gone. It’s five minutes after twelve."

Olivia stabbed at Emmit's heart, making a gash from the chest to the groin in the paper man’s body. She stabbed so hard that she dropped the knife. Ish said, "Put your hand in the hole."

When she reached through the wound in the newspaper, Olivia pulled out a wet ball of red paper that was stuck to the paper man. As she pressed the wrinkles out of the soggy paper, Olivia stood holding a heart that looked like a first grader's homemade valentine.

Olivia threw a wad of money at Ish as she ran out the door, holding the wet paper heart. As she went across the swinging bridge, Olivia could hear Ish laughing and growling, “Emmit Webster, Emmit Webster, Emmit Webster.”

At Jewell Mountain the next day, Emmit bragged about how he had fixed old Vince Collier and his whore of a daughter. “I plan to stay in Richlands and even marry someday,” he told his buddies in the mine. “But I never even thought about marrying a trashy girl like Olivia.”

At 12:05 the next day, twelve hours after Olivia had visited Ish, a power cable carrying two thousand volts of electricity tore loose from the shuttle car Emmit was driving. The cable hit Emmit in the chest and knocked him off of the machine. Sparks flew, and the smell of Emmit's flesh filled the air. The power cable sank into Emmit’s chest, lifting him into the air.

Twirling him like a snake on the end of a spear, the end of the electrical cable ripped into Emmit's chest, wrapped around his heart, and jerked it out of his body. There was a loud click, and the mine went dark. The power cable stopped dancing in the air, and Emmit’s body fell to the ground.
The power came back on, and the other miners had to wait for their eyes to adjust to the light. While Emmit’s body still cooked, his buddies unhooked him from the end of the tangled cable. The foreman arrived. Emmit’s heart sizzled and fried on the end of the power cord. It was burned black, like an overdone steak. It beat one last time and exploded, spraying steaming blood all over the foreman's face and clothes.

Whitley Talbert, the foreman, put on his insulated gloves and tore the ragged, black heart from the end of the power cable and laid it on top of Emmit's belt. Emmit's whole body smoldered and smoked as the miners carried him out of the mine on a stretcher. The stench of the burning flesh made them stop twice while men took turns throwing up. They moved away from Emmit’s body and waited for the ambulance to arrive.