The Hex Witch of Seldom Read Free

really coming back, until her parents in Louisiana had placed her in a good private institution the other side of Pittsburgh. Chantilly was not dangerous, but her delusions did not let her cope with life in the real world, the doctors explained.
    And the first time Bobbi had seen something that she knew wasn’t really there, she had been scared half crazy that she would go all the way crazy, like her mother. The next day she had started to bleed between her legs, and even that hadn’t scared her as much. She had told Pap about the bleeding, and he had explained it to her as best he could. But she had never told anyone about the things she saw. She was a Yandro, and Yandros didn’t talk rot.
    She had not known her father wrote poetry. Nobody had ever told her. Now she held his poem in her hand, and it was as if he had written it just for her, as if he spoke to her across the distance of years and death, reaching out to her through this bit of paper that smelled of dust, withering and crumbling and dry as the bones, his bones, lying six feet under the ground down in Silver Valley Cemetery. She could have wept without knowing why.
    Carefully she laid the frail yellow clipping aside and turned to the other things in the box.
    There were notebooks. Opening the first one, Bobbi felt a shock, a prickling sense of deja vu . It took her a moment to understand why. Wright Yandro’s handwriting, the figure-eight g’s, the airily looping tails of the y’s, the fly-away capitals—like hers. Could have been hers. A strong, wild scrawl, even messier than Bobbi’s, but very much like. She might be the only one in the world who could read it.
    Until sometime long past midnight, sometime in the silent heart of night, when cats roam and distant dragons roar in the dreams of the uneasy, Bobbi pored over the notebooks. In them she read thoughts, struggling bits of poetry, the scribbled and much-scratched-out beginnings of stories. One such fragment she read again and again, until she could nearly have recited it, though it filled her with questions left unanswered.
    â€œThe staff bore a sword inside it,” (Wright Yandro had written, years before, maybe when he was no older than she) “and scrying in the shining surface of the sword blade I could see the long history and the hard destiny of the staff. Its name meant ‘the wise one.’ It had been made of a wand of hazel cut from the living tree at sunrise, for all puissant things draw their strength from the sun. I saw the druid cutting it from the tree with a knife baptized in blood. I saw the staffmaster shaping it. I saw the priest chanting over it during the course of the shaping, to make it a force of good as well as of magic. The staff had a soul and a fate. It remembered the staffs of Moses and Aaron; it could bring up springs of water out of arid land, striking hard at the stony earth with its tip of steel. It scorned the sceptres of rulers, the swagger sticks of sergeants, the policeman’s baton. It honored the caduceus, and would not strike an innocent person, no matter what hand wielded it. It knew the forces of evil, and knew that its own scruples would bring about its undoing, and hated and feared the death-wands made of cypress and yew. It had visionary power; it foresaw the manner of its death, and mine.
    â€œI had a choice. I could take up the staff and sword, and the staff would speak to me of things beyond knowing, and lead me into dangers fit to make me a hero or a spirit. Or I could sheathe the sword once again in the staff, and place the staff back in the ground where I had found it, and go away, and be happy with my woman.”
    There the story broke off. Bobbi wondered: was her father speaking of himself, really? Was it possible he had really found such a staff? Or was he speaking of an inner self he showed to no one? Or was he telling someone else’s story through his scrawling ball-point pen?
    Bobbi got up and