, eds. Debbie Seagle, Dan Smith, Kathie Dickenson. DOIT Publishing, Roanoke, Va. LLC, 2025.
by Bill Kovarik
A chill in the autumn air, a thrill at the back of your neck, a thumping in th’ heart, and that squeaking terror in your strangled scream …. Sure, most people think that’s what happens when you bump up against the supernatural. But it ain’t so.
I know this ’cause I was born on Old Christmas Day — January 6 — which is celebrated in mountain lore as the day of healing and protection.
Two ways, now, that you can get protection. One is by burying the guts of a black chicken under the hearth to guard against fire and lightning. Or, if you’re a tad less superstitious, you can chalk the door.* It’s easy. You just mark the year, with the three wise men in the middle.
So, the year was 1939, and a’course the wise men were Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, so I chalked the door like this: 19+C+M+B+39.
The protection doesn’t come from the rituals themselves. It comes when you realize the duty we all owe to the protective spirits, the guardian angels — you know, your ancestors who gather ’round the hearth.
Elwyna used to tell us that she didn’t believe in such-like, but they were there all the same. I used to wonder about that.
Elwyna was my mom’s great aunt who promised to take care of us. She was a toothless old widder-woman who lived all her life back up the next holler. She raised baccy for her corncob pipe and batched up corn squeezins now and then. “Drink a few shots and you are set, you dancin’ fool,” Elwyna would say. “Drink down a whole pint an’ your woman will go home with another man.”
Elwyna’s garden grew the biggest turnips and pumpkins you’ve ever seen, which was on account of plantin’ by the signs. But her true gift was healing, because she, too, was born on January 6.
On my sixteenth birthday in 1939, I chalked the door, and then took a notion to bag a deer, what with the corn meal running low and the lard bucket not looking like it would make it to next week, much less Fat Tuesday.
Cousin Ferdy lived in the holler, so I fetched her up, and told her to grab her rifle, for to be my second shot. If’n you don’t know about hunting deer, it’s handy to have a second rifle because the deer can sense the first shot coming and take a leap. The second shot goes high, up front.
We wandered off into the clouds grazing the mountain, and we crept through the rhododendron forest towards the spring above Elwyna’s garden, where the deer love to linger in the late afternoon. Elwyna doesn’t like us hunting there. It disturbs the peace of the place, she says.
But we were hungry and not thinking very clearly.
Ferdy an’ I came across a young buck in the fog, and I drew a bead but then I stopped. “Don’t …” I whispered, but the buck jumped and Ferdy fired, and in a second we had turned a thing of beauty into a hunk of raw meat.
So Elwyna comes running up to the sound of the shot madder’n all hell, saying we’d runed it, just runed it. But then the deer staggered to its feet and wandered down the holler to her front porch.
I was feeling sorrowful and stupid. “Damn, Ferdy, what in hell’s wrong with us?” I whispered.
Then Elwyna sat down with the deer on her porch, cradling its head, muttering some old Scottish prayers. I knew she was a powerful healer, and she could fix the mistake we made.
And at first, I thought she did fix it. The deer stood up gracefully and walked away in the silver moonlight. Watching that, I felt a powerful blend of color, and warmth, and freedom of spirit, like the Seann Triubhas dance at a summer Highland festival. It almost seemed as if the gates of heaven opened for that deer, and then slammed shut for us.
“How did you do that, Elwyna?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Heal that deer and make it walk away,” I explained.
“Don’t be crazy,” she said. “Here’s your deer.”
She was right. The carcass was right there. She was cradling it on the porch.
“Better clean it before you walk home, or it’ll go rancid,” she said, with a small, sniffling smile.
“How is that possible?” I asked. “We just saw the deer walk off down the trail.”
Ferdy nodded. “I saw it too,” she said.
Elwyna drew a deep breath and looked us over with a kind of love but also a sadness, and her voice took on a strange starry quality: deep, cold, and distant.
“You saw the best part of that deer, walking the same trail that you will walk someday,” the deep sad voice said.
“And don’t look so proud of yourselves, knowing what you know now. Cause the days are coming when you will be tested, and you are going to have to remember that this world doesn’t just bump up against the next one by accident. This world is the pale shadow, the wisp of fog, the breeze in the moonlight. That other world you saw — that’s the real one. And now you’re going to ache for it.”
She pulled a wisp of hair back behind her pointed ear and shook her head at us.
“Most people ain’t given to know … all that. They never learn that the end of this life is not the end of life itself. And that’s for a reason. Most people would take that knowledge and use it recklessly, without care or forethought.
“But you, nephew, born on Old Christmas day, and you, Ferdy, will have to carry that ache the rest of what is going to be two very long lives.”
She was right.
I carried the ache through Tunisia, and Sicily, and Normandy in the 1940s, along with the stretchers that I lifted in and out of surgery. I carried it through medical school in Virginia in the 1950s, and through the lives and deaths of two wives, five children and a few unlucky grandchildren in the decades that followed. Cousin Ferdy too, not long ago.
I watched as each one of them wandered down that path, in that moonlight, with that damned old deer. And every time, I prayed to God, trying to give the thanks I should have given ol’ Elwyna that January 6 back when my world was still young.
I can still feel that breeze, muffled in the cold fog of a late mountain evening.
In fact, it’s getting closer.
Bill Kovarik is a writer and college professor who teaches journalism, media law and history at Radford University in Virginia.
* Chalking the door is a Christian tradition used to bless one’s home around Epiphany (January 6). It is usually in the pattern of four crosses positioned in between the traditional initials of the three wise men, which are surrounded by the first two and last two digits of the current year (e.g. 20 ✝ C ✝ M ✝ B ✝ 26). The practice of chalking the door originated in medieval Europe.