Bone and The Witch by Shanda McManus

Photo by Rey Seven via Unsplash

I had a hard time sleeping before Bone came. I was nine, and each night I wondered—Is that scratching on my window? As I got closer to sleep, I would feel a shadow creep toward me. Under my lavender bedspread, I would hug my knees to my chest, tuck my chin, and hold still. After exhaustion pulled me into sleep, I would wake up and be unable to move. I lay trapped inside my own body, struggling in terror to break free. My body felt glued to the mattress, and my eyelids resisted every attempt I made to raise them. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears and feel my heart hammering in my chest. When whatever it was, let me go, I crept down the hallway on the balls of my feet toward my parent’s bedroom, ready to run if I had to. Unseen things threatened me as I hurried past the stairway, which looked like a swirl of shadows. Ahead I could see a sliver of light outside my parents’ door. At nine everyone (even me) thought I was too big to get into their bed, so I laid on the floor outside their room. Huddled against their closed door in a tight ball, I sought shelter from the dark that made what I knew unrecognizable.

Although I knew the house on 15th Street in the daytime, I didn’t know it well because my parents had bought the crumbling twin home only few months before. Cold, musty air greeted me the first time I walked through the door. I saw brown—brown peeling paint, brown carpet, and brown wood panels. Where was the light, warmth, and music we had at Redfield Street? Dad said our Redfield house was not safe anymore. Someone had broken in. I remembered that day when we returned from the mall, I had stood frozen at the threshold, and my breath stopped. The Redfield house seemed as if it had been tipped over by a giant hand. Album jackets and naked records were scattered over the living room floor. The green reclining chair was upside down. The stereo was gone. But 15th Street didn’t feel safe either. The walls were marked with cracks in the plaster and divots around the light switches like a ghoulish hand had dug around each one. 

Before Bone came, I confided in my Grandmom about waking up and being unable to move during a weekend visit to her house. I sat in her lap and rested against her soft fleshy arms even though I was a big girl. She still called me baby. I inhaled her, and the familiar mix of snuff, beer, and Jean Nate soothed me. Grandmom and Mom were tall, but Grandmom was solid and thick compared to my mother’s willowy build. I leaned my head against her soft cotton housedress, her large breasts and stomach released from the rigid bra and girdle she wore. After we left Redfield Street, we lived with Grandmom. I thought—Why couldn’t we have just kept living here? 

“It’s dem witches ridin’ yo’ back,” she said.

The vision of a black hag sitting on my back like a broomstick with her hands pushing my head into the mattress stayed in my mind. At Grandmom’s house, the witch did not visit me. I slept in a room connected to hers and could hear her snores through the thin walls. I wondered if the witch came from rootwork. I wasn’t sure exactly what rootwork was, but I knew it was something like evil magic or voodoo that some person used against you. Grandmom blamed rootwork for my mother’s sickness, for Redfield Street being robbed, for my brother being hit by a car and breaking his leg, and for Dad’s accident with the shotgun that left him an amputee. I half believed in the roots. What else could explain all this bad luck? 

“I know somebody dun worked duh roots on me,” she would say, shaking her head.

I imagined a shadowy woman dressed in flowy fabric somewhere in Georgia, where Mom and Grandmom lived before migrating to Philadelphia, walking through the woods gathering herbs to work malevolence against us. I wondered if rootwork could cause things like the Three Mile Island nuclear accident I kept hearing about on TV. Grandmom told me to be careful and never leave my hair behind in a comb or brush for some rootworker we didn’t know to find and do more damage to our family. 

“Be careful, ‘cause it might be somebody you know,” she said.

I knew about doing things to keep away bad luck: don’t split the pole when walking with someone, don’t step on cracks on the sidewalk, and throw salt over your shoulder. So, I snuck my Mom’s matches, burned any hair I found in my comb, and fanned the acrid fumes around my bed, hoping for protection.

***

Bone and her mother, Dagmar, moved in after my father moved out of our house on 15th Street. He left after only three months. Had our family of four— me, my brother, Dad, and Mom split the pole unknowingly? Dagmar and Bone were hairy in a way my mother and I were not. Fine black hairs lay on yellow-tinted skin everywhere—arms, legs, and face. They both had thick black curly hair that reached their shoulders. Dagmar was compact and muscular but petite. She stood barely 5 feet tall. Bone seemed as big as Dagmar at eleven years old despite her thin, underdeveloped legs.  

Bone, whose real name was Sonia, slurred and moaned. Her laugh was uhhuh and a prolonged hiccup. Her thin arms jerked back and forth when she got excited, and her hands twisted into uneven fists. Sometimes spit would pool behind her lips and slip out the corners of her mouth. Bone could not walk or stand, so she spent her days in a wheelchair. Dagmar lifted her easily even though Bone was bigger than her. She carried her up and down the steps with her back straight. I could see Bone’s thin ankles dangling as they went up the steps. Soon, Bone’s moans and slurs sounded like talking to me, and I could understand her too. I stopped thinking of her as anything but another girl. I asked Dagmar why Bone was like she was.

“I was young, stupid, and wearing too tight clothes,” she said.

My mother did not tell me why Bone and Dagmar were staying with us. I eavesdropped and heard enough to know that it had something to do with extra money and Dagmar needing a place to go after a breakup with her boyfriend, Ronald Bing. Dad knew him from Gary’s house, the party house. Dad sometimes took me to Gary’s, even though Mom didn’t like him or his house. Before we even got on the porch, you heard music: Chic’s  “Good Times,” Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff,” or Chuck Brown’s “Bustin’ Loose.” The rowhouse was always full of people. Ladies sitting on couches smoking cigarettes or joints or both. I heard it whispered Ronald Bing beat Dagmar up. I thought he must like tiny things. Dagmar was tiny, and so was his little green sports car that he had to fold his long legs to get into.  

Even though Bone wouldn’t have been able to fight any witches off with her body, her presence gave me the courage to stay in my bed and sleep. Something changed, and the witch didn’t visit with Bone in the bed that Dagmar had set up across from mine. I even got brave enough to dress up like my own kind of witch that Halloween. I wrapped my head in a red scarf with golden stars and borrowed my mother’s long brown skirt—this is how I imagined the rootworker looked. Bone dressed as Wonder Woman, and Dagmar pushed her wheelchair over the creaked sidewalks as we went from house to house, not caring if she stepped on cracks. Walking beside her and Bone, I felt powerful over the shadows of the night.

I was amazed at how Dagmar understood the sounds and gestures Bone made. They understood each other. I wished that my mother understood me without words. But, I was a secret keeper and a traitor. I didn’t tell her about the woman at Gary’s house who draped her arms possessively around my father and kissed him. Dad had to move out because of his affairs and the child he was expecting with someone else. Mom threw all his clothes into green trash bags and hid them behind our washing machine. When my father returned to the house early one Monday morning before work, he asked where his clothes were, and I told him where they were hidden.

“You always take his side,” Mom spat at me when she found out I told him. 

My mother had secrets too. I heard whispers about her being sick, but no one said cancer. When I was five, she went to the hospital for a long time. I had a hazy memory of her dressed in a baby blue satin robe and Dad carrying her down the stairs of the house on Redfield Street. But now, four years later, Mom seemed back to herself, went to work as a bank teller, and didn’t talk about ever being sick.

While Dagmar and Bone lived with us, Dad picked me and my younger brother Monir up several times a week. Mom said he was a horrible husband but a good father. He took us to McDonald’s, the pet shop, and to visit cousins. While we drove around, Dad asked me all kinds of questions about Dagmar, like where she slept. Dad told me she liked women, and he was suspicious of her. But I liked that Dagmar and Bone stayed with us in the scary old house after Dad left to stay with his girlfriend and their new baby. 

***

After I turned twelve, Dagmar and Bone moved out. Dad lived with us again. But he still went out “to hang” on the weekends. My mother didn’t work at the bank anymore. She spent a few months in the hospital, then returned home. I overheard—cancer, terminal, and hospice. 

While Mom was gone, her body changed, and the IV pump and pole became an extension of her body. Like my Dad’s prosthesis, she was tethered to it. She could no longer eat solid food. Every night a bag of liquid nutrition would be hung on the IV pole. A tube from the bag was connected to the tube in her chest. At night, I heard the wheels of the pole as she rolled across the hardwood floor into the bathroom. Beeps from the pump would echo down the hall whenever the tubes got twisted, and the flow stopped. These sounds that signaled my mother’s decline scared me more than the imagined sounds of the old house or the riding of the witch which started again after Bone left. 

“Your momma is real sick,” Grandmom told me when she visited 15th Street. I no longer went to her house on weekends because my mother needed me at home. Grandmom brought us fried chicken with macaroni and cheese.  

“Don’t tell my business.” My mother would remind me before Grandmom got there.

The cancer was the secret everyone knew. No one was allowed to see how bad it was, not even my Grandmom. She would worry around my mother in the bedroom. Straightening the bedspread, rearranging the nightstand, and sweeping the hardwood floor—trying to rearrange the space to change what was. 

“Why are you walking bent over?” Grandmom said during one visit. Mom was pushing the pump into the bathroom. Her shoulders were rounded, and she leaned toward the pump.

“I’M SICK!” My mother yelled.  

When Mom came back home, I was her helper. She closed my father out from helping with the bag and pump. Or he had closed himself out by not being there when she needed him to be. The seesaw was unbalanced on the side of not there.

***

Books gave me a safe place to be. I went to the library alone after school two afternoons a week. I would cross Broad Street as the light faded in the afternoon. The short traffic light would turn yellow when I still had one traffic lane to cross. It was nerve-wracking to outrun the cars racing toward me. But at least I was alone and didn’t have to keep my daredevil brother, Monir, from getting hit again. Two years younger than me, my brother seemed to court danger. He had already been hit by a car twice. I had to practice caution for both of us. The story I read over and over again was A Wrinkle in Time. Meg, the heroine, has to rescue her father and brother from The Black Thing. I was Meg in our family, trying to save us from the evil or rootwork that seemed to be devouring us.  I imagined my own tesseract, a portal through space and time that could portal us back to when we lived on Redfield Street before the robbery. My parents had been whole in that house, no prosthesis, no other women, and no cancer. Even though Dad had sold weed from our house, I felt safe there.

Six books at a time was the limit on my children’s card. I would forget the time reading, and the light from the sky would be gone when I left. On the way home, the shadows seemed to be everywhere in the dark. I was what my Grandmom called—“half scared.” The streets around the library were empty, and if I saw a person, I walked faster. The trees seemed to reach toward me, and I saw tendrils following me on the sidewalk. I thought about the witch that had returned to visit me in the night. My ears felt stuffed with cotton or full of water. I looked behind me every few seconds afraid I wouldn’t hear someone come behind me. That was the year unexpected terror was everywhere. Adam Walsh’s murder, Atlanta child murders, and the coming nuclear war the newspapers seemed to promise. The whole world ticked with approaching death. When I got to the beginning of 15th street, I would run the rest of the way to my house. I outran the threats behind me and opened the door to my house where death hovered inside. 

I set up the IV pump at night while Mom was in the bathroom. IV Bags were delivered in an igloo cooler, and we kept them in the refrigerator’s vegetable drawer. Each night, I got a bag out and brought it upstairs. My hands felt the cool liquid inside the plastic. I switched on the power to the pump and primed the tubing. The screen blinked and flashed prior settings and let out an announcing bleep. I would let the liquid run through the clear tubing squirting the excess in a small trashcan by the nightstand. After Mom was hooked up to the pump, I got her a cup of i love lemon tea with honey. She couldn’t eat, but she still drank Pepsi during the day and tea at night.  My mother could have done the pump herself, but I learned to do it for her.

But changing the colostomy bag was something she could not do alone. It had to be changed every three days. I would set up all the supplies for the change while she emptied the bag in the bathroom. She undid a horizontal clip at the end of the bag to empty the stool into the toilet. I would cut a hole in the new adhesive square by first poking the center with scissors and then cutting a small circle to match the opening on her stomach. I peeled off the paper of the new bag and had it waiting. She would lie down on the bed and lift her gown, so the bag was uncovered. She would carefully pull the old bag and adhesive off and hand it to me to put in the trash. We had to work fast once she pulled the old bag off.

Liquid stool percolated through the red-rimmed hole on her stomach. She would dab it with gauze, then fan the area so it would be dry enough for the new bag to stick. A long scar ran down the middle of her stomach. Staple marks intersected the scar every ½ inch. The hole oozed fecal material it looked like brown sludge. I took no thought of the smell—I didn’t notice. Once there was a pause in the bubbling of stool, I would quickly press the new bag on—sealing away the decay. This ritual we orchestrated in concert, knowing rhythm and timing. We learned to stay in step. United in this task, we communicated as Dagmar and Bone had—words were not needed. Our mother-daughter distance melted, and we were one. She would sometimes say with tears around the edges of her voice, “Shan, I don’t know what I would do without you.” 

Bone was no longer slept across from me to save me from the witch attacks. But as my mother dwindled, I began to lie in bed, stretched out without my bed spread. I challenged the witch to come.  I lost the fear of what the witch could do because my mother lay down in the hall facing off with death, and the witch could nothing worse to me. 

***

One afternoon after school coming up the steps from the subway at Logan station, I felt like someone was following my brother and me. But I turned and didn’t see anyone. As I walked up Lindley Avenue to Carlisle Street, I snuck looks behind me. I sensed a presence behind me that I couldn’t see, no matter how fast I turned around to look. Monir skipped ahead, crossing back and forth on the small street, growing smaller and smaller. The street had houses on only one side, and the other had a black iron fence with trees behind it. Monir telescoped farther and farther away and disappeared around the corner. Afraid of not being able to see him, I hurried up the street, almost running. It was my job to keep him safe. As I passed the row houses, something strange happened, and even now  I don’t know if it was real. I passed a window that expanded and narrowed, so it became a doorway. I found myself stepping through it.

There was a room filled with candles and chairs with thick cushions. The room smelled of church incense and a spicy smell I recognized from my Grandmom’s house. A lady wearing layers of jackets and sweaters with several long skirts filled the room with her bulk. She was purples and soft silks and polished gold. I started telling how my mother was too young to be sick, and another lady appeared shrouded in browns and blacks; she blew black dust in my face. I covered my eyes and stumbled back through the doorway. My eyes were gritty with dust, and I blinked as they watered. When I could see again, I was hurrying up Carlisle street, and nobody was behind me. 

After that day, I took the next street over home. I tried not to think about that doorway. I tried not to ask myself if it was the rootworker or the witch. I tried not to be afraid.

***

The witch left me alone after my mother died. I navigated high school, college, medical school, marriage, and motherhood. I survived the unexpected deaths of my Grandmom and my brother. But the witch returned. After my mother had been dead for over two decades, I awoke one night to my four-year-old daughter standing beside my bed.

“Mommy, there’s a witch in my room,” she said, her voice thick with tears.

“Shush, Shush,” I embraced her, then took her warm moist hand as we walked back to her bedroom. We climbed into her bed; the sheet still had the warmth of her body. I soon heard my daughter’s even breathing as she fell asleep. I spooned around her small form. I lay with my eyes adjusted to the dark and saw a movement in the corner of the room. There stood a black shadow clothed in long skirts and scarves. It was the witch in the form I had always imagined. I stared her down, refusing the fear she brought, and watched her shadowy form float out of the room. I understood that the only way to survive the unseen and incomprehensible was to face it. I also knew the terrifying thought of leaving my child behind was more terrifying than the witch or shadow, and I understood all my mother had kept from me. 

Shanda McManus is a family medicine physician with over twenty years in practice. She writes about the intersection of life, race, and medicine. Find more of her writing in Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, Midnight & Indigo, Bellevue Literary Review, and swamp pink. Shanda was privileged to be a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow. When Shanda is not seeing patients or writing, she binge reads and rides a bike that goes nowhere. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and their five children.