neighbor in return for something to eat. "My place is too rocky to
raise anything," she excused herself. And whatever was given her, Pol
would carry home then and there. "Them's fine turnips you've got,
Mistress Darby," she said one day, and Sallie Darby up and handed her a
double handful of turnips. Pol opened the front of her dirty calico
mother-hubbard, put the turnips inside against her dirty hide and
tripped off with them. Nor was Pol Gentry one to sit home at tasks such
as knitting or piecing a quilt. But everyone admitted there never was a
better hand the country over at raising pigs. So Pol swapped pigs for
knitting. She had to have long yarn stockings, mittens, a warm hood, for
her pigs had to be fed and tended winter and summer. Others needed meat
as much as Pol needed things to keep her warm. Tillie Bocock was glad to
knit stockings for the old witch in return for a plump shoat. Tillie had
several mouths to feed. Her man was a no-account, who spent his time
fishing in summer and hunting in winter, so that all the work fell to
Tillie. Day by day she tended and fed the shoat. It was
black-and-white-spotted and fat as a butterball, she and the little
Bococks bragged.

"Another month and you can butcher that shoat." Old Pol would stop in at
Tillie's every time she went down the mountain, eyeing the fat pig.
Sometimes she would put the palms of her dirty hands against her mouth
and rub the black hair back to this side and to that, then she'd stroke
her chin as though her black beard hung far down. Pol would make a
clucking sound with her tongue. "Wisht I was chawin' on a juicy sparerib
or gnawin' me a greasy pig's knuckle right now," she'd say. Then Pol
would begin on a long tale of witchery: how she had seen young husbands
under the spell of her craft grow faithless to young, pretty wives; how
children gained power over their parents through her and had their own
will in all things, even to getting title to house and land from them
before it should have been theirs. She told how Luther Trumbo's John
took with barking fits like a dog and became a hunchback over night.
"Why? Becaze he made mauck of Pol Gentry, that's why!" She rubbed a
dirty hand around her hairy mouth and cackled gleefully.

At that Tillie Bocock turned to her frightened children huddled behind
her chair. "Get you gone, the last one of you out to the barn. Such
witchy talk is not for young ears."

Then old Pol Gentry scowled at Tillie and her sh