fear – Page 2

On witches and free books

April 30, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I was only a boy when I learned of the witches, and the picture I’d formed in my mind—something akin to the marrying of the Wicked Witch of the West and the one from those Bugs Bunny cartoons—wasn’t the picture I ended up seeing along that mountain ridge. I saw no brooms or bubbling cauldrons gathered about that shack, only a few drying possum skins and a column of gray smoke from the chimney, an overturned metal pail by the well. Could have been any old body’s shack, really. Except this one wasn’t. Witch lived there.

“Ain’t no witch,” I said. But I said it low and kept my head that way too, one eye and all my body behind a stout oak some fifty yards away. “That’s just some woman lives there.”

“Ain’t,” Jeffrey said. “Ever’body knows she’s a witch. My mama came up here onced for medicine. Daddy didn’t want her to but she did.”

“Witches don’t give medicine.”

“This one here does. Mama says she makes them in a room in there. Says she prays over all these plants and stuff.”

“Witches don’t pray.”

Jeffrey said, “This one here does.”

That was the first (and only, as it happened) time I visited Jeffrey’s house and the deep woods beyond it, the two of us fast friends that year of first grade, two country boys marooned at a Christian school in the city. Ours was a kinship born of place rather than blood. While the other boys would spend recess putting together Legos and learning the names of the disciples, Jeffrey and I would be out in the mud patch under the basketball goal, digging up worms with our hands. He’d invited me over that Saturday afternoon, saying he had a lot better worms in his yard and more mud too, plus maybe we could shoot his daddy’s .22. Turned out Jeffrey’s daddy was gone that day and the sun had scorched that soft mud to brown concrete. That’s when he asked me—Hey, you wanna see where a witch lives?

“Where’s she at?” I asked, leaning out a little from the tree.

“I don’t know. Daddy says sometimes she turned to a bird or a deer so you can’t tell. He says she’s watchin even when you don’t think she is.”

“Let’s go up there,” I said.

“No way. You wanna get cursed?”

“Ain’t no curse.”

Jeffrey said, “This one here, she’ll curse.”

I’d like to tell you I went on anyway, left that tree and marched right up to the door on that shack and knocked with neither fear nor trepidation. But I didn’t and neither did Jeffrey, because right after that a crow called from the trees and we ran. Ran all the way back and never stopped until we were locked inside Jeffrey’s little bedroom, and then we never spoke about no witch. I never went back. Not to Jeffrey’s, not to that stretch of ridge. To this day, that part of the mountain is one of the few places I’ve tread but once.

That memory is still fresh in my mind all these years later. I can’t remember the name of my fifth grade teacher or exactly whose house I egged when I was seventeen or where I left the keys to the truck this morning, but I can tell you how the sun beat on our backs that day and how the creek water felt like ice when we ran through it hollering and stumbling and that something—animal or witch—followed us through the trees the whole way back from that cabin. I know it.

There are stories here in the mountains, secret ones told by granddaddies on their porches at night when the crickets sing and the moon is high in a dark sky and a Mason jar is in their hands. Tales to make your skin goose up. The ones with demons and angels are good. Ghosts are better. The stories of the witches some say still hide in these hollers, they’re the best.

I guess that’s the biggest reason I decided to add to those best stories with a tale of my own. Not about two small boys that happen to strike the ire of a witch, but an entire town that does the same and what happens when that witch seeks her revenge. About the darkness in us all, and the light.

The Curse of Crow Hollow won’t be out until later this summer, but you have a chance at getting your own copy a bit earlier. I’ll even scrawl my name in it. All you have to do is follow this link and enter your name. Easy peasy.

In the meantime, you keep away from those witches.

Avoiding life’s sting

April 16, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I see him by the steps as I pull up. Standing there, staring at the door. He’s still there when I park, still there as I climb out of my truck with shopping list in hand. Still there when I sidle up beside him.

“Hey Charlie,” I say.

He turns and looks at me. “Hey.”

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Oh,” he says, “just waitin’.”

“Uh-huh,” I answer.

I decide not to say anything else. I know what might happen if I do, and I know what might happen after that. Because Charlie is one of those people who can start a conversation in the real world and finish it somewhere in the Twilight Zone.

But then I figure what the heck, I have some time to kill.

“You know,” I say, “they’re not gonna bring your groceries out to you. You gotta go in and get them yourself.”

Charlie nods. “Yep,” he says. “I’ll be going in directly. Just gotta wait for it to leave.”

“Gotta wait for what to leave?”

Charlie points to the flying speck of something in front of the door and says, “That.”

I squint my eyes and stare ahead, trying to figure out what I’m looking at. After careful consideration, I decide it’s a bumblebee.

“You’re not going in because there’s a bee in your way?” I ask.

“Yep.” Then he says, “Nope,” just in case he got his words mixed up.

The door swooshes open then as an older woman rolls her grocery cart out, oblivious to the certain death that hovered over her. Charlie winces as she walks past, exhaling only after she was clear of the danger zone.

“You allergic to bees, Charlie?”

“Nope.”

I nod, trying to find the right words to ask him what I need to ask him next. “You, um…you ain’t, you know…afraid of them, are you?”

“Nope.”

I nod again. “Okay, well want me to go get your beer?”

I don’t know for sure that Charlie is here for his beer. He might be low on something else, maybe hamburger or peanut butter or ice cream, because Charlie loves his ice cream. But he loves his beer even more, and I have a feeling that his shaky right hand isn’t completely due to the bee.

“Nah,” he says. “I’ll go. I got the time to wait. Just don’t wanna get stung.”

It’s then that I realized Charlie really is afraid. I’m not convinced that is a bad thing, though. No one likes getting stung by a bee. It hurts. Everyone knows that.

More than that, I realize people do this sort of thing all the time. Myself included. We all eventually realize not just where we were, but also where we want to be. And we realize there is usually some sort of Bad blocking the way. It could be a rejection slip or an unreturned phone call. Could be nerves or insecurity. Could even be the prospect of success after years of failure.

Regardless of what it is, that’s what’s floating between you and it. Between where you are and where you want to go.
The size of what’s blocking your way doesn’t matter either, because the fact of the matter is this—there is risk involved in proceeding further. You could fall. You could fail. You could be disappointed.

You could get stung.

And that hurts. Everyone knows that.

The alternative, of course, is to stay where you are. With practice and dedication you may convince yourself that you’ve gotten this far, which is further than some and maybe even most. That might be good enough. And you might even begin to believe that holding onto the prospect of what you could have done will be good enough.

I could have been a writer. Or a teacher. Or a nurse. I could have gone to school. I could have had that job or that career. But there was this Bad between me and it and, well, things just didn’t work out.

But you know what? That never works.

I know from experience that Could Have is just the same as Never Did.

“I’m gonna go in, Charlie,” I say. Then I look at him. “You know that bee’s gonna fly right out of my way, right? Because I’m bigger than the bee.”

“Yep.”

“Okay, then.”

I leave him there at the door and pick up the few things on my list. Charlie’s still standing there when I head back to my truck.

“Don’t want to get stung,” he says again.

“I know,” I answer.

“We’re all gonna DIE!”

September 12, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

“We’re all gonna die.”

So said my daughter tonight in the sort of operatic voice she normally reserved for when she mistakes the neighbor’s barbeque for a forest fire.

I listened as well as I could, though I’ll admit she nearly scared me to death at first—Die? Why die? What happened?—but then I managed to get the entire story. She’s 12 now, my daughter, an age I’m quickly beginning to see as Not So Young Anymore. The world is opening up to her, and not just the good stuff, either. She’s learning that not all of life is so wonderful and that the future doesn’t always seem rosy.

It was strange at first that what bothered her so much wasn’t something that would happen, but something that already had.

“Do you know how the dinosaurs died?” she asked me.

“No room in Noah’s ark?”

She looked at me like I was the kid and she was the parent. “It was a meteor!” she said.

“So why are we all gonna die?”

“Because there’s more,” she said. She waved her tiny arms around her head as if she were trying to beat them all away. “It like happens all the time.”

“What does?”

“They hit our planet and kill everything.” She slumped down on the sofa beside me and sighed. “One could be coming now.”

“I hope it waits until this ballgame’s over,” I said, “because I really want to know who wins.”

“I’m being serious, Daddy,” she said. “Aren’t you scared?”

I told her I wasn’t, and that seemed to satisfy her enough. Nothing else was said about things falling from the sky. Mission accomplished, I would usually say. But the fact is that I kinda/sorta lied to her when I said I wasn’t scared.

Because I kinda/sorta was when I was her age.

The truth is that the history of our fair world isn’t fair at all. There have been five mass extinctions in our planet’s history, the last of which occurred just over 70,000 years ago after a volcano almost wiped humanity from history before it had even started.

Just weeks ago, two meteorites passed within just a few thousand miles of Earth.

Global warming.

Terrorism.

Solar storms.

Ebola.

You get the picture.

I remember when I was about my daughter’s age hearing a preacher on the radio saying he’d received a vision from God (which, heard through his Southern accent, sounded more like GAWT) that the world would end in exactly seven days and thirteen hours. I can’t recall who the man was, but I remember the panic he caused among the few who actually believed him. Me included, of course.

I sat out on the hood of my father’s truck that night and waited for Armageddon. Didn’t come, of course. And even though predictions of The End will stick on me like a burr from time to time, I learned my lesson that day.

I learned that no matter how hard we all may try, none of us can keep the bad away. We can lessen its impact, we can fight it, we can even turn some of it into good, but the fact remains that it’s still there and it’s still coming. The world’s full of trouble, and whether that trouble comes from earthquakes or madmen doesn’t really matter.

If that sounds submissive, I didn’t mean it to be. My daughter fell into the very trap I’ve found myself in so many times—she was worried about something she couldn’t influence. In the age of twenty-four-hour news channels and the internet, that’s something we can all struggle with sometimes.

But I’m older now. I can let solar storms and the ebola go.

It’s the other, personal forms of destruction I want her to worry about, and that’s what I’ve learned to concern myself with more, too. Because it doesn’t take a meteor or a volcano to ruin our lives, especially when we can do that just fine on our own.

We can give in to pain rather than get through it.

We can surrender to temptation rather than fight it.

We can yield our dreams rather than cling to them.

Those are our choices to make, those small decisions that perhaps have no influence on the world outside but make all the difference in the world inside.

That’s what I want my daughter to know. Because planetary destruction is in God’s hands, but self-destruction is in ours.

Basements

October 31, 2013 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

A family down the road loves Halloween almost as much as I do. Mother, father, and son—Mikey is his name. Mikey’s seven.

Mikey already has his costume picked out—it’s Jack Sparrow this year—and already has his pumpkin carved. All that’s left are the decorations. Mikey’s folks get a kick out of decorating for Halloween.

But as with most things in life, all this excitement and elation is sprinkled with dread. Decorating for Halloween, you see, means having to get the decorations out. Not a problem usually, but in Mikey’s case it’s a big one. Because all the decorations are in his basement.

All of that old and mostly forgotten stuff down there gives Mikey the willies. It’s scary down there, he’s told me. Dark and stinky, too. It’s where the spiders and mice and ghosts live. Also the furnace, which he believes may well be the gateway to hell. When you’re a kid, nothing is scarier than the furnace.

At night before bed, Mikey doesn’t worry about the front or back doors being locked, he worries about the basement door. He’s seen the movies (though he won’t fess up to me which movies he’s talking about) and knows what can happen. He’s not afraid of someone coming in, he’s afraid of something coming up. But there’s a problem. The lock is on the inside of the door, not the outside. The builder’s mistake, on that his father never gotten around to fixing. Which means the spiders and mice and ghosts can keep everything in, but Mikey can’t keep them out.

So when the first week of October rolls around, he’s both elated and scared to death. His father expects Mikey to go down there with him. He has to help unpack it all, too. And lay it all out right there on the basement floor. “You never know what’s going to be in there,” he told me. “Spiders love to crawl in those boxes. Zombies, too. I seen em.”

This fear, this dread, is Mikey’s alone. He hasn’t told his parents about the basement, and how he worries about the lock on the basement door before he goes to bed, and how he prays that eventually his dad will change the lock around to the other side so he could get in but they couldn’t get out. It’d make him seem like a kid. And when you’re a kid, the last thing you want is to act like one.

Me, I understand all of this. The kid part, but especially the basement stuff. I might not have a basement in my house, but I do have one inside of me. Deep down, seldom seen. It’s the place where all the junk is kept, the fears and worries and failures. The sins I’ve committed and the regrets I have.

It’s a mess, my basement. Junky and moldy and dark. I suspect things crawl around down there, too. And there are ghosts. Plenty of ghosts.

I’m not alone here. Flip through your Bible and you’ll find plenty of people with junky basements. Moses had one, what with that murder charge and all. David too, with the whole Bathsheba in the bathtub incident. Peter when he denied Christ after saying he never would. And let’s not forget Paul, who had the blood of hundreds and maybe thousands of Christians on his hands. They found out, like we do, that living with junk in the basement is tough and scary.

They also found out that God can clean those basements up. He can get rid of the junk, scrub everything down, and chase away all the nasties. Problem is, He won’t do it alone. We have to open the door to let Him in. Because like the Mikey’s house down the road, there are locks on our basement doors, and they all lock from the inside.

Baring all

August 22, 2013 by Billy Coffey 6 Comments

Today marks the fourth day of my daughter’s junior high career. So far, it’s been a bumpy ride. She’s done everything she’s been taught, keeping that chest out and chin up and upper lip stiff. But I can see the cracks that have formed on that tough exterior. Even the strongest dam will break with enough pressure.

It’s been a long while since I was in the sixth grade. At a certain point, all those years beyond the last ten or so melt into one fuzzy memory of misshapen moments. Tough to tell the truths from the imaginings sometimes. My sixth grade year was like that until this week. Having my daughter endure it has allowed me to remember much, especially how scary it all was.

The news kids and new teachers. The new school. The extra homework. The hormones racing. Waking up in the middle of the night, trying to wipe your mind of the nightmare you just had about not being able to get your locker open or not finding a seat at the lunch table. Go ahead and chuckle. You know what I’m talking about. Chances are you’ve had those very dreams at some point and maybe even still do from time to time. To me, that proves just how important this time is in my daughter’s life, and just how much of it will cling to her in the coming years.

The biggest test of all came yesterday. She had been warned ahead of time—over the summer, in fact—but that didn’t make things easier. Seeing a thing coming from far off might lessen the surprise, but not necessarily the dread.

Not math or science or language arts. It was dressing out for P.E.

The thought horrified her. Standing in front of a chipped wooden bench in that smelly locker room, feeling your toes on the cold concrete. All that silence banging off cinderblocked walls. Taking your shirt off first because that’s bad but not nearly as bad as taking off your pants, only to discover after that your pants are all you have left. Trudging through the next forty minutes of laps and volleyball, knowing you’re going to have to do it all over again when that’s done.

Baring yourself right there, in front of everybody.

I remember that well, and how terrible it felt.

It’s not only a girl thing, either. The boys suffer, too. One teacher even told me the boys react worse. The girls cry. The boys throw up.

I never yarked my lunch, but things did reach the point when I started wearing my gym shorts under my jeans. It was uncomfortable and god-awful hot, but at least there was little chance of anyone seeing something they shouldn’t. Something only my doctor and mother should see, and only in extreme circumstances.

We don’t like baring ourselves. We’d rather be covered and clothed. We need that barrier between us and the world, even if it is just a thin layer of denim and cotton. If we don’t have that, there’s nowhere we can hide.

I tell her she’ll get used to it. I think that’s true, even if I never did. Of all the lessons my daughter will learn this year, I think the one she’s found in gym class is the most important. Not because I particularly want her just fine with prancing around wearing little more than what the good Lord gave her, but because there will come a time when she will have to bare other, even more private things.

Her heart, for one. Her fears. Her weaknesses and worries. Her faults and failings. We go to great lengths to cover those things, too, and with more than jeans and underwear. And sometimes, we hide behind those things better.

My daughter made it through yesterday well enough. It wasn’t bad, she said. No one looked at her because they were too busy staring at themselves. I think that’s true for a lot of things.

She still doesn’t see this as a learning experience, mostly because she’s stuck in the middle of it right now. That’s another lesson my daughter will learn soon. Unlike junior high, the tests we get in life often come first. The answers come later.

Prayer adjustments

June 26, 2013 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

It was a big deal for my daughter and me, a couple Saturday’s ago. We’d been skittish for most of that day. She battled nerves over participating in her first official piano recital. I battled my apprehensions because that recital was to take place at the local nursing home.

One small story first:

I was in kindergarten when my teacher decided it would be a grand idea for the class to make Valentine’s Day cards for the elderly. We plunged into the task with all the gusto five-year-olds can summon, after which we were herded onto a school bus and trucked down to what my teacher called “The Rest Home.” The name conjured all manner of fantastical images in my mind, all of which were proven false once I walked through those old wooden doors. The nurses had gathered everyone in a gathering room that was much less stately and much more moldering, where I was greeted immediately by an old man with hooks for hands (and no, I’m not kidding). The sight froze me such that the other people in class quickly distributed their cards to the nearest person and made a quick exit, leaving me all alone. I heard a murmur to my left and turned there, seeing a hand stretched out. I shoved my card into a set of bony fingers and looked up just long enough to see the woman to which I’d just wished a happy Valentine’s Day didn’t have a right eye, only a patch of red, seeping skin. For months, I prayed at night for God to never let me end up like that woman. The memory haunts me to this day. It’s proof that much of the weight we carry in our hearts has been there in some form for a very long while.

That’s what was in my mind during most of that Saturday. Sitting there on the sofa, listening to my daughter practice.

It’s also why I kept near the doors when we arrived that afternoon. Go ahead and judge me, I don’t care.

The gathering room stood empty but for the twenty or so chairs that had been laid out in neat rows. The concertgoers trickled in after—men and women dressed in khakis and dresses, combed and perfumed and bejeweled.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad, not really. They were smiling and talking and happy. They were, as far as I could tell, nothing more than a collection of friendly grandparents.

That all changed when a nurse pushed in the woman in the wheel chair.

Her hair was thin and the color of snow, arranged in a what reminded me of an abandoned bird’s nest. Beneath her white slacks and blue shirt laid the remains of what I imagined to be a vibrant and healthy body once upon a time, but was now little more than a thin layer of dried, leathery skin over frail bones. And right there by the doors, I prayed that I would never end up like that woman.

The nurse wheeled her into the first row as the recital began. One student after another, fingers dancing and sometimes tripping over the keys. The room became filled with applause. Only the woman in the wheelchair did not move. Her head lolled from side to side. I supposed that was the closest she could come now to clapping, and I prayed I would never end up like her again.

My daughter did well. Magnificent, in fact, though I am perhaps a bit biased. But I don’t want to talk about the songs she played or how straight she sat or how she really nailed the ending to the Flintstones theme song. To be honest, I barely noticed any of that. I was too busy watching the woman in the wheelchair.

It was in the middle of my daughter’s second song when I looked at the woman again, and only then because of the thin stream of drool leaking from her mouth. But before I could turn away, I noticed her fingers moving along her chest, playing the keys in her mind. She kept perfect time with my daughter’s song, even caught the parts my daughter missed.

And I realized then that she may have been confined to both a wheelchair and a fading life, but she was still hearing music. She was still playing her song, even in the wan of her life. And can any of us truly strive for more in this life? Could our prayers truly ask for nothing else?

Me, I don’t think so. I think that lovely old lady is better off than a lot of us. Which was why that night and every night since, I’ve asked God to let me end up like her.

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