The madwoman rattles around town in her filthy black car and nobody stands in her way. The car has fins and teeth, long and fanged as a crocodile – it’s a Cadillac, of course – except one bumper is torn off and dangling just above the street as if a dog had seized and fought it, snarling.  We see her sometimes striding around to the trunk and popping it open. But somehow none of us are ever close enough to see what’s inside. Puffs of red road dust fly off when she slams it with the sort of heavy thud that means the trunk’s not empty. The underside of the lid is hitting something in there. A bundle of twigs for a broom. A roadkilled deer she’ll gut and drain for her dinner. The body – trussed and bound, eyes pleading up – of the last man who got too close. What we imagine is always worse than what is there.

Because men do approach her, and not always strangers, in the juke joint on the red-dirt country road just past the hanging tree and the graveyard with slave names scratched into the concrete slabs (HENRY died 1833) and the clapboard houses with their lush gardens of collard and okra and watermelon. There are warnings stenciled in black paint on the side of that cinderblock building with its door as narrow as a bad man’s mouth: NO GUN, HERE TO HAVE FUN. She parks the filthy black Cadillac at the end of the long line of cars tilted half-over in the ditch, one wheel down in the tangle of grass where the snakes curl, and she strides into the parking lot under the single sodium spotlight and slips through that door like a bad thought into someone’s mind. The men throwing knives under the light outside turn their heads to watch her go in. Nobody moves till she’s gone in and the door shuts behind her.  Crazy girl back again, one of the young men volunteers, lifting his beer can from where it leaves a wet red ring in the dirt. One of the old men looks at him and shakes his head.  That ain’t no girl. 

What happens when she gets up in there is hard to say.  Seeing her on the street of town – although it’s really just a wide place in the road now that the lumber mill’s gone and the Koreans seem to want to make their cars everywhere else in Alabama but here – you’d never think she’d draw a man. Skinny, scrawny even, with her skin so road-dust-ashy its in-between color is harder than it ought to be to name.  Her hair’s patchy in places where the long hanks hang and her scalp shows through. Her eyes never meet yours or anyone’s and you’re afraid to look at her anyway so all of her is kind of a blur.  Yet in that dark juke joint she sheds some kind of skin, eases and curls up next to some man on the bar stool till he doesn’t know what he’s feeling, only that it’s good.  Her eyes are wide and inviting, her hair suddenly sprung out from its patchy dustiness in giant dark curls, long as moss from a tree, and softer.  Whatever man touches her then feels one of those curls reach out to twine around his wrist and not let go.  At first it’s only playing, like the pet garter snake he had when he was a boy.  Lands, she laughs, I never heard such things before.  But then she isn’t playing anymore, although when the game stopped the man would never, thereafter, know for sure.

The madwoman has been known to slip her shirt off and dance on the bar.  The barmaid – who disapproves, as all the women do – reports a purple lace bra and skin that looks much younger than her face.  The madwoman likes the old stuff best, the blues, all stomp and gutbucket and oh, baby, yeah, I’ll die.  Sometimes the barmaid (who never tells the rest of us this part) thinks she sees the witch’s mark her oldest grandma talked about, the warts or veiny marks spread through the skin like rot, the nipples that turn, whenever you look at them, to eyes that blink and narrow in a sneer.  You’re just afraid, they say.  You stupid bitch.  Behind your glasses and your keyring and your invoice pad.  You’re just afraid to be like me. 

The madwoman dances on the bar and all the men are watching, even the ones who know they shouldn’t.  Those men will be the first ones through the doors of the church on Sunday and work themselves up to fling themselves out of the pew and down the aisle and holler help me Jesus, save me, help me right here, now.  They’ll be first in line at the next baptizing down in the river, even if they’ve been baptized before, even if they’ve let the Lord take over for real, and they’ll look into the preacher’s eyes before he clamps his hand over their noses and bends them backwards, and they’ll plead silently help me. Save me. Please.  Their wives and mamas looking on from the river bank, slapping mosquitoes and sliding a little in the mud, will smile.  They won’t know what’s going on.  But the little girl, the smallest one, holding to the pink-streaked rock she picked up at the water’s edge, will know.  She’ll understand.  Help my daddy, she’ll ask silently, inside her head.  Help my daddy. He’s going down.  She’s out there moving in the world.  She’s out there in her car.  There’s nowhere she can’t go.

It’s no use calling the police because they don’t know how to name the thing they’re looking at any more than the rest of us do.  That hank of hair and piece of bone that fell out in the street one time – tied with a red ribbon – when the madwoman opened her car door looks like just a piece of trash to them.  The scuffed place in the woods, with branches broken and the ground all clawed – just some bucks in rut, says the sheriff, scratching his big stomach, fightin like they do.  The times she brushes against you on the sidewalk and looks into your eyes and snarls like a cat, and you wake up screaming every night for a week until your wife or husband soothes you down and leans against you and strokes you till you fall back asleep, repeating it isn’t real, it isn’t real.  You keep repeating this although you know what you saw.  What you see.  That long black Cadillac cruising the back roads past your house and raising dust.  The red lights getting smaller and smaller till the witch’s car is out of sight.

Based on the real-life, unknown woman in the medical history above.

Opening excerpt:

Along the dark street Ann hurries toward a place to hide. Another cold night is coming on here in the hinge between winter and spring, the first week of March although she’s lost track of the day. Beyond the wall of Parliament to her right, with cold bronze Cromwell on his horse, the Thames rushes past in its stinking bed.  Frost rims the air like fur on a rich woman’s coat.  A glitter of late snowflakes catches and swirls in the wind.

Between her legs the bale of sodden rag is cold. She carries it always: her curse, her shame, slung about her hips like a stillborn child bound to her as penace. To leak and leak, to run and run, to make her howl with pain when it’s touched. And, now, again, to lose her her place. “My God,” said Mrs. Macready last week in her velvet parlor, lifting her nose when Ann entered with the ash-bucket and broom.  “What’s that horrid smell?”  And Ann stood still, dumb as a mule, waiting for the eyes to land on her. They always did. And then Mrs. Pullen, the housekeeper, sat her down at the kitchen table, firm and dismally kind, the braids of onion and the chicken on its hook to be dinner that night for everyone in the house but her.  “Oh, Ann, girl, the mistress says ye’ve got to go. Here’s a reference for ye, a good character. Ye’ve earned it.”  There are so many things she can never say in this situation.  Good thing Mrs. Macready can’t hear her guests calling her a jumped-up Scots merchant’s wife, getting above her station. Good thing character’s not of the body but of the soul.  Because it’s my body, again.  Isn’t it. The thing you can’t stand to see.

Ever since she left the village there’s been house after lady’s house, inn after inn after tavern with its pallet of straw in the back. And now, whatever hiding hole she can find. But there is always the body and the thing between its legs to haul from pillar to post, from doorway to bridge-arch to square of yellow light falling from window through which she can see the normal people drinking, eating, warming themselves, sitting still for as long as they like. Like a dumb child that’s the cause of shame yet unknowing of wrong, her body begs her: What’d I do to be so hungry, so wet and raw? So cold? Oh, why am I not fit to look upon?

The weight of rags around her hips is familiar now.  Even the chafe of the reddened skin is known.  She’d bathed the thing between her legs when she was in work at Mrs. Macready’s and could haul a kettle up to the garret she shared with the other maids.  “Oh, Ann,” jested Irish Bridget, “don’t ye find it a trial to bath so often?” But then Bridget saw her legs, and the thing between them, and went white, even crossed herself.  “Oh, Ann.  I’ll pray for ye.”

“Yes, well,” Ann said.  That was the third house in a year or maybe fourth and she was tired of prayers. “It ain’t exactly suited God to take this from me, has it?”

All those Christians. Comfort the afflicted.  That’s what they are taught.

Here it is now, the great arch of Westminster. On nights like this all the hiding holes are full.  The crevices up under Blackfriars and London Bridge and Westminster Bridge as well, the broken-open cellar near the Swan and Hoop where the fire started and has never been repaired, the lean-tos behind the breweries, where you can find old wicked Sal and all the rest, sucking on the barrel-dregs. The word’s got out among them that Lord Mayor’s decreed the Abbey door be opened on such nights.  “Tell us another,” says Ann.  “Every time I’ve tried it’s locked.  And anyway, who’d let us in?” With all that gold, and all the famous tombs. All that splendor and illustriousness.  Against old wicked Sal, and Will, and Mary Jane, and her. But even if the door isn’t open there will be the arch, the nooks in all the walls.  Some place to get out of the wind at least. A hole for her against the river and the stars and all this city.