Naked, on the Edge

Miss Dowdy

There are things you want to forget. Like when my cat got run over by the snowplow and the night my Dad drove off in our new 1962 Chrysler and never came home.

Then there are things and people you don’t want to forget. But how can you care that you forgot them, if you forgot them?

Our neighborhood was like most in my small town — tree-lined streets, warping sidewalks cross-hashed with chalk for games of hopscotch, fenced yards, and tidy frame houses. My sister Jena and I, seventeen months apart, spent the summer between my third and fourth grade year collecting rocks from the road that looked like gemstones and building a tree house out of lumber scraps we dragged across the alley from where Mr. Richards was putting in a new sunroom.

There weren’t many kids in our neighborhood, and I played with them though they liked to get me into trouble. David lived across the street and Marla lived two doors up. They helped us with our tree house and we helped them do other stuff, like train David’s fat beagle to pull a wagon and teach Marla the alphabet in sign language.

This particular summer was especially buggy and sticky. Mom was pregnant, which didn’t alarm us but which made David snicker because he said, “Your Dad’s been gone more than a year.” The baby was due in September, so she was pretty big and didn’t chase us around us much as she usually did. This gave us a delicious freedom we’d not had in summers past.

Miss Dowdy lived near the end of the block where the road curved down and to the right. Her home was a grayed, wood-shingled bungalow with a front porch with a low-riding roof. She was a really old woman, at least 200 Jena thought, but I knew people couldn’t live that long so I put her at 150. Neither of us had seen her, though. Until that summer we had never played as far away as Miss Dowdy’s house, not that we’d wanted to. We’d heard the rumors. She was a witch. If you got too close, you’d be cursed. Nobody knew what kind of curses she wielded, but they couldn’t be good.

On July 2nd David’s dog got away from us. Usually the dog, as round and short-legged as a footstool, never went far when he tired of our attentions. He’d just trot a few paces then role over on the gravel. This time, though, he must have smelled or heard something enticing, because he dashed down the sidewalk, cutting catty-corner across to the other side, never looking back, his tail sticking straight out like the flag the crossing guard holds when we walk to school.

“Buddy!” called David.

Buddy kept on running.

“You better catch him before he gets hit by a car,” Marla said.

“Damn stupid dog,” I said.

“Ah, Annie, you cussed!” said Jena.

“It’s not cussing if you’re not saying it to somebody.”

“Oh, yeah, it is,” said Jena.

"Buddy!” shouted Marla.

“Buddy!” David called again.

After a good full minute of calling, David kicked at a discarded Mountain Dew bottle and said, “Ya’ll coming with me?”

“Not my dog,” I said.

“Yeah, but…”

“Yeah, but what?”

“But if he went, you know.”

“What?”

“Near that woman’s house.”

“What woman?”

“You know. Miss Dowdy.” He whispered it so softly I really only read his lips.

“You mean the witch?” asked Marla.

“Shh!”

“She’s not a witch,” I said, though the word chased a chill down the back of my t-shirt. “That’s baby talk.”

“Then you get Buddy since you aren’t scared,” said Marla.

“I said already, it’s not my dog.”

“Then you are scared,” said David. “And if you don’t come with me, I’ll tell your mama you cussed and you’ll get a spanking like last time.”

And I knew he would do it. He and my sister had gotten me several spankings in the last few weeks.

I cursed again, this time under my breath. Then I took a deep breath and puffed out my cheeks until they stung. I was scared, but as the oldest, I couldn’t show it.

Clenching my fists, I marched off after Buddy. Jena, David, and Marla tagged behind, a nervous, chittering parade. My heart felt like a water balloon being squeezed in and out, in and out, so hard it might pop. Down the sidewalk we went, scuffing the hopscotch chalk and avoiding cracks so as not to break our moms’ backs. Trees heavy with mid-summer foliage shaded our footsteps. Little kids behind chain link fences wanted to know where we were going.

The road turned and dipped; we turned and dipped with it. Then we stopped. There was Miss Dowdy’s house, tucked up in her yard, grass grown tall and tangled, the pine trees next to it pressed so tightly they seemed to be holding it so it wouldn’t collapse. The porch roof hung down like a droopy eyelid.

I heard David’s sharp intake of breath. Buddy was in the old woman’s yard, sniffing at a dead cardinal.

“Buddy!” he whispered. “C’mere, boy!”

The dog looked over but then continued to sniff.

“Buddy!”

Marla grabbed David’s arm. In any other circumstance, he would have shaken her off or shoved her away. But this time I think he was glad for the touch. “Let’s go. Buddy’ll come back when he’s ready.”

I’d never really looked closely at Miss Dowdy’s house before; I’d never really wanted to. When our family went shopping, we always drove the other way. On the rare occasion we did travel in this direction, like when we went out of town to visit Mom’s sister, we went by fast enough that it didn’t really register. As I stood on the sidewalk with my sister and friends, my teeth set hard against each other, I wondered if the old woman was on her porch. It was hard to tell; the shadows were deep, near black. Yet I detected what looked like the outline of a glider or porch swing moving slowly back and forth.

“Let’s go,” urged Jena.

I took a small step forward, right to the edge of her yard, tilting my head, looking at the porch but not really wanting to see.

And then she coughed.

David, Jena, and Marla squealed and ran. I wanted to, but for some reason, my legs had other ideas. I held my ground.

Buddy had heard the cough, too. He looked up, shook his head, and then waded through the weeds to the porch. I wanted to call him back but was afraid that if I spoke, the witch would suck up my soul.

Miss Dowdy coughed again, then said something I couldn’t hear but that Buddy clearly could. He stopped at the foot of the porch steps and stared. And then he climbed up the steps and vanished into the shadows.

Buddy…you’re done for now!

I went home. There was no way I was going to ask for the dog back.

But it didn’t seem to matter. Because when I found David, Marla, and Jena in our tree house, trying to see who could throw pieces of bark the farthest, and I told David what Buddy had done, he stopped flicking bark and said, “Who’s Buddy?”

I let out an exasperated grunt. “Don’t play stupid with me.”

“Don’t call me stupid, stupid!”

"You don’t care what happened to your dog, then fine. I don’t care, either.”

“I don’t have a dog, you moron!”

“Yes, you do, you dumb shit!”

“I’m telling you mama!” squawked David.

I wanted to punch him, but knew it would only make things worse for myself so I gritted my teeth. One of these days, I thought, just you wait!

Jena dropped her pieces of bark and looked at me with genuine, seven-year-old seriousness. “He doesn’t have a dog, Annie, why are you saying that?”

“So,” I insisted, “what’s that doghouse doing in your backyard?”

“I don’t have a doghouse in my backyard!”

“We’ll see about that!” I stomped across the street to David’s house, around to the back where Buddy’s homemade hovel was nestled against the tool shed.

But it was not there.

David’s Mom was watering her rose-of-Sharon, sunglasses slipping on her nose. “Mrs. Hirst, where is Buddy’s doghouse?”

Mrs. Hirst gave me an odd look. “Who is Buddy?”

That night, I stared at the ceiling long after Jena had drifted to sleep. At dinner I had asked Mom if I could have a dog like Buddy. She said she didn’t know what I was talking about.

Buddy was gone, sucked into the witch’s house and forgotten.

I had to know if it was real or if I was just going crazy from the summer sun, like my grandmother warned would happen to kids who didn’t wear sunhats.

Marla had a hamster, Hitty-Pitty. We liked to take it outside to run in the grass and then we would catch it. The morning after Buddy became a non-dog, I borrowed Hitty-Pitty. None of us locked our doors, and we knew each other’s homes almost as well as we knew our own. Marla was playing with Jena in the tree house and Marla’s Mom was sunbathing in the hammock outside. I sneaked in, collected the hamster in a paper bag, and went down the alley so as not to be spotted. In the pocket of my shorts was a roll of masking tape. Under my arm were six cardboard tubes that had held wrapping paper an hour earlier. The paper was now crammed in my closet. I’d put cotton balls in my ears so I wouldn’t hear Miss Dowdy if she coughed or spoke.

When I was several houses from my own, I skirted back up to the street and continued down to Miss Dowdy’s. The hamster rattled about in the bag.

I sat behind a big oak and taped the cardboard tubes together, creating a tunnel about eighteen feet long, long enough to reach from the sidewalk to the first porch step. Then I got up and stood before the little house. Carefully, I slid the tubes across the yard and onto the bottom step. Then I sent in Hitty-Pitty.

At first she went in a few inches then sat there, like she suspected my motives. Then I blew on her and she vanished into the depths. A moment later, she emerged from the other end of the tube on Miss Dowdy’s porch step.

I swallowed, the sound loud in my skull. I began to hum in case the cotton wasn’t good at keeping out witch sounds. The humming worked, or the witch had decided to be silent. Hitty-Pitty sniffed the step, then hauled her little furry body up to the next step, then to the next, and she was on the porch. She scurried into the darkness, and that was that.

Withdrawing the tube I immediately crumpled it, avoiding the end that had touched the porch step, then threw it into a trash barrel in the alley. I caught up with Marla and Jena, who had tired of the tree house and had flooded a hole in our front yard with the garden hose. “We’re making soup,” Jena said.

“Can we play with Hitty-Pitty?” I asked Marla.

“Hitty-Pitty?” Marla blinked.

“Your hamster.”

“Shut up, Annie.”

“Shut up why?”

“You know my mom won’t let me have a pet. You’re rubbing it in.”

My blood went cold. “Jena, do you know what I’m talking about?”

“No, and be quiet.” She was sprinkling bits of dandelion into the mud hole. “I have to get the soup right or the queen will be mad.”

Hitty-Pitty. Gone to the witch and forgotten.

“You want to play?” Marla asked.

I shook my head then went to the tree house and climbed up alone. I broke off a thin, dry branch and snapped it into tiny pieces. Tossing the handful of broken branch bits into the air, I watched as they spun in a breeze then fell to the ground. Why was I the only one who remembered Buddy and Hitty-Pitty? Miss Dowdy’s house was creepy, but this was the creepiest thing of all.

I avoided Jena and the others for the next few days. Mom wondered why I was moping around, looking at television but not really watching it, spinning my fork in my food but not really eating it, cradling my Breyer horse models but not really playing with them. She said if I didn’t quit it she’d make me go to the doctor’s and get a shot.

I began to really wonder what Miss Dowdy looked liked. I wondered what it was like inside her house. I wondered if she had baked Buddy and Hitty-Pitty in a pie. I wondered what would happen if a person wandered into her yard and onto her porch. Would they be forgotten just like the pets? Had it already happened but those people were forgotten?

I wondered if I could kill her.

There were no guns in the house; Dad had taken those. Jena had a wooden bow and arrow set but it didn’t shoot very well. I’d have to drive the arrow right into the witch’s heart if that was my weapon of choice. I wondered if witches even had hearts.

There was powdered poison in the basement that Mom used to kill mice. All I needed to do was poison something Miss Dowdy liked to eat and somehow get her to eat it. What did witches like to eat?

I figured everybody likes cookies. We had a pack of Oreos in the kitchen, partly eaten, held shut with a clothespin. I took the Oreo pack to the basement, dumped in some poison and shook it up. Back in the kitchen, I put five cookies on a plastic plate, covered it in plastic wrap and taped the wrap securely. Next, I secured cotton balls in my ears. Then, making sure Jena, Marla, and David weren’t spying on me so they could then tell on me, I took the plate down the street, over the chalk marks, past the kids in their wading pool behind the chain link fence, and around to Miss Dowdy’s house.

Nothing had changed. The shadows that held the porch hostage were as deep as before, as if the sun didn’t dare challenge the will of the witch. But the distance from the sidewalk was too far to toss the plate.

The only option was to run to the porch without touching it or the steps, and run back. It wasn’t until Buddy or Hitty-Pitty touched the porch that the trouble began.

Inhaling deeply and then holding it so I wouldn’t breathe Miss Dowdy’s foul air, I dashed across the yard. Four feet from the porch, I hurled the plastic plate at the top step. Then my foot struck an overturned birdbath base hidden in the tall weeds, and I went down. My head hit the edge of the porch, driving stars clear through my brain.

“Are you all right?” The voice sounded far away.

Head pounding, I pushed myself into a sitting position. The world wobbled.

“I said, are you all right?”

I touched my forehead. It wasn’t bleeding, but it stung like blazes and there was going to be a huge bruise.

“Take out that cotton so you can hear me better.”

I glanced at the porch and saw something move in the shadows. “No!” I managed.

The movement shifted, developing a shape, coming closer to the top step. I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see. But the voice said, “Look at me, it’s all right.”

I looked back at the street and the sidewalk, which continued to waver.

“It’s all right.”

I looked. She was on the top step now, a small woman in a pale blue dress and white sneakers. Her gray hair was in two braids that were coiled and pinned to her head. Her skin was nearly as white as her shoes, but she bore no horns, no warts that I could see, no claws or fangs.

“They’re all scared of me, I know, but not you.”

Oh, yes I am! I thought.

“You’re my first real visitor in a long time. Won’t you come in?”

No! I know what happened to Hansel and Gretel!

“I know you remember the dog. The hamster. If you come in, I will tell you the truth.”

“I don’t want to come in.”

“Then sit on the porch. I don’t mean any harm. Truly I don’t.”

I stood up and looked over my shoulder, hoping to find someone to talk me out of this. There was no one on the street.

“Never mind, then,” said Miss Dowdy with a sigh. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

I heard myself say, “I’m not scared,” and in saying it, I found I wasn’t so much. I pulled the cotton out of my ears.

“Come.” She smiled. It was a lovely smile, really. “I’ll explain it to you. Sit with me on the porch.”

Once up the steps I could see the porch clearly. It had a little glider and a rattan chair with a sunny yellow cushion. She motioned for me to sit. I chose the chair.

“In a way,” Miss Dowdy said as she lowered herself on the glider and began to rock back and forth, pushing at the porch floor with the tips of her shoes, “you children are right. No, I’m not a witch but yes, I do have power. You know that there was a dog. There was a hamster.”

I nodded, noting with surprise my head didn’t hurt any more.

“I’ve got a responsibility to help people, to try and keep their lives from being any sadder than they are.”

“What do you mean?”

“Buddy was riddled with cancer, but David didn’t know it. He would have been very upset if he’d had to watch his dog to wither away and die. I called for Buddy and he came to me. Now, David doesn’t know there was a Buddy, so he won’t be sad.”

I thought about this. What a strange idea, yet it made sense. “But…what about Hitty-Pitty? You didn’t call for her. I brought her to you.”

“Honey, that hamster was going to get away from you kids the very evening you brought it here. A feral cat was going to eat it almost to death, and Marla was going to find it and have to put it out of its misery. Do you know how much that would hurt your friend?”

“But I didn’t know that. I only did it as a test, to see what would happen.”

“You might not have realized what you were doing, but something in you knew the hamster was in trouble and it made you bring it to me. Now, it won’t suffer and neither will Marla.”

Something in me? What the hell? “But…but what about…?”

“Yes, there have been others. There was one little girl a couple years back, who was soon to be kidnapped, raped, and murdered. I called her here, like I called Buddy. Her parents forgot they had a child, and so didn’t miss her.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, my fingers going to my suddenly dry lips and beginning to pick. “The little girl. She was cute, red hair. I knew she’d gone missing but nobody said anything so I just…I don’t know…forgot, too.”

Miss Dowdy nodded. “It’s good the children think I’m a witch so they’ll leave me alone. This work is best done without interruption.”

“Have there been a bunch of others?”

“Oh, yes, from the whole town. Many you wouldn’t know, and a lot of them before you were born.”

I looked at the old woman, at her little white shoes and her little gray braids. I looked out at the street, and the sunshine that reflected off the bits of quartz in the gravel. I should be with Jena, collecting quartz. We were going to make a million selling our rocks once we had enough.

“You said,” I began, then began again. “You said something in me knew about the hamster. I don’t get it.”

“It means you’re like me. You’ll take over for me someday.”

“No!” I jumped up. “I’m not going to do stuff like you do!”

“Not now, honey. When you’re grown and old enough to understand the importance and can handle the responsibility. It’s nothing to worry about now. Later. Later.” She reached over and patted my knee. It didn’t burst into flames. Her touch was kind, soft. Then she said, “How about the cookies, now?”

“Oh.” I looked at the cookies on the step. “No, you can’t. They’re…stale.”

“All right, then.”

I said good-bye to Miss Dowdy, collected the cookies, and hurried home. The plastic plate of Oreos went into the kitchen trashcan under a bunch of sloppy leftovers from supper the night before. That way, Mom wouldn’t see it and dig it out to save the plate.

All night long I tossed about in bed, thinking about the terrible things that could happen to people and their pets, and how Miss Dowdy did all she could to make things better. It was kind of like Jesus or Superman, helping others like that. I tried to imagine myself as a grownup, sitting on a porch in the shadows, calling for people and animals to come to me, making those who loved them forget they ever existed.

Jena and I continued to collect sparkly rocks from the road until our jars were filled to the top. Marla finally learned the sign language alphabet and we signed dirty words to each other up in the tree house. David’s mom gave into his nagging and bought him a black lab that he named Rusty. I walked around with an uncomfortable sense of superiority bubbling just under the surface, knowing that one day I would be a savior.

On a Friday afternoon in August, when Mom and Jena were watching one of Mom’s stories on television, I sneaked out the back door to slip down to Miss Dowdy’s house. It had been weeks since I’d sat on her porch. I just wanted to have a look to remind myself that what I’d learned was real, that she was real.

David was in the alley, sticking out his tongue and swinging an old jock strap he’d found in somebody’s trash. “Where you going?”

“None of your business.”

“Here, smell this.” He wiggled the jock strap at my face.

“Get that away from me.”

“No, smell it!” He jabbed it at my nose and I slapped it away.

“Stop it, you asshole!”

“I’m telling!”

Hatred and heat raced up my spine. “No, you aren’t!” I drew up my fist and cracked him so hard in the jaw he fell back onto the gravel and bit his lip.

“You’ll get a spanking for this, just you wait!” he wailed around a trickle of blood. “You can’t do that to me!”

“I just did, now get out of my way!”

I left him in the gray dust, knowing Mom would be furious, knowing there would be punishment waiting. “One of these days!” I whispered around the knot in my throat. But still, I had to see Miss Dowdy again. Nothing was going to stop me.

The house hadn’t changed. Still small and dark, the grass still tall and tangled. I

thought for a moment of going right up to her door and knocking, but I didn’t want neighbors to see that. We had a secret, Miss Dowdy and I. So I sneaked around the side of her house and crept low beneath a scrubby forsythia bush. Maybe she would sense I was there and let me in the back door.

I heard it then. Weeping, moaning. Very soft, but unmistakable. I squatted close to a tiny, filthy window at ground level and squinting, I peered inside.

The cellar was dirt-floored, stone-walled, and low-ceilinged. It was dark except for a roaring fire inside a huge oven set into the far wall. Miss Dowdy, in her blue dress and white sneakers, stoked the fire with a poker. The flames licked at her cheeks, coloring them orange and yellow.

In the deep shadows along the other walls I detected the outlines of cages. Cages with faces pressed to the bars. Small animal faces in the little cages. Human faces in the larger cages, and hands that reached through the bars, clutching, pleading. Miss Dowdy only laughed, and then tossed more wood into the oven, making the fire erupt anew in a bright and sparkling dance.

And then she looked up at me, smiled, and winked. Her lips were blood red; her eyes the same.

I fell away and ran from her house. I hadn’t wondered what had happened to all those who had gone into Miss Dowdy’s keeping. I suppose I’d thought they had, once forgotten, become nothing. As if they had never actually existed.

Up in the tree house, alone again, I held my chest as my heart pounded and railed within. They were still there. They were still alive. Miss Dowdy had lured them in and kept them for her own needs.

Terrible!

Terrible.

But what power that old lady had. What incredible power.

I heard Mom call me from the house. “Annie! Where are you! Get in here, I have a bone to pick with you!”

My heart clenched, picked up an angry, painful beat, but then it slowed, and didn’t hurt as much.

“I mean it, Annie! I’ve had about enough of your bad behavior!”

A beetle crawled along a limb near me and I squished it with my thumb.

I wondered what it would be like to have that much power.

I guessed I would find out.

One of these days.