The Cunning Man Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The Cunning Man

  D.J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey

  The demons of the Great Depression are real. The cunning man is here to fight them.

  Hiram Woolley is a cunning man.

  A witch is someone whose craft is malevolent, someone who curses you. A cunning man is the person who is master of the lore necessary to defend you against witches, and against other evil powers.

  Hiram is also a widower and a beet farmer, who learned his occult lore from his Grandma Hettie. Grandma Hettie raised Hiram on her farm; she said her prayers in German, sang the Psalms to secret melodies, and knew the special properties of stones. In the 1930s, with the western United States sunk in deep depression, Hiram and his adopted son try to help the poor—delivering food, helping the unemployed find jobs, digging out collapsed wells, and settling family disputes.

  Behind the played-out farms and failed businesses, Hiram finds demons, curses, sorcerers, and unatoned wrongs. Bags of groceries and carpentry won’t be enough—to truly help the poor, Hiram will have to turn to Grandma Hettie’s magic.

  BAEN BOOKS by D.J. BUTLER

  The Witchy Wars Series

  Witchy Eye

  Witchy Winter

  Witchy Kingdom

  The Cunning Man

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by D.J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-9821-2416-8

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-742-1

  Cover art by Dan Dos Santos

  First printing, November 2019

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Butler, D. J. (David John), 1973– author. | Ritchey, Aaron Michael,

  author.

  Title: The cunning man / D.J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey.

  Description: Riverdale : Baen Publishing Enterprises, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019029051 | ISBN 9781982124168 (trade paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Paranormal fiction. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.U8667 C86 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029051

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  This book is dedicated

  to our wives,

  Emily and Laura.

  We would like to thank Tan Smyth for her sensitive early read and comments, and Jason Huntzinger for helping us envision Helper in the 1930s.

  Many thanks also to this book’s two editors, Toni Weisskopf and Tony Daniel. Thanks also to J.R. Dunn, for busting us on a few anachronisms.

  And again, we are grateful to and for our wives.

  “Magus is a Persian word primitively, whereby is exprest such a one as is altogether conversant in things divine; and as Plato affirmeth, the art of Magick is the art of worshipping God.”

  —Henry Cornelius Agrippa,

  His Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy,

  “Preface to the Unprejudiced Reader,”

  Robert Turner, 1655

  “And it came to pass that there were sorceries, and witchcrafts, and magics; and the power of the evil one was wrought upon all the face of the land.”

  —The Book of Mormon, Mormon 2:19

  Chapter One

  “I’ve heard disturbing things about you.” Bishop Smith was the youngest of the three men who made up the Presiding Bishopric, and his Van Dyke beard certainly made him the jauntiest. It jutted forward like a knife.

  Hiram Woolley felt his heart lurch like a toad in his chest.

  Bishop Wells, sitting in a chair beside Bishop Smith, had a face round as a pie and a cream-colored complexion. Behind round spectacle lenses, his eyes smiled, though the line of his mouth was flat. Smith and Wells were the counselors, number two and number three respectively; the Presiding Bishop himself, Bishop Cannon, wasn’t with them.

  They had heard Hiram was a magician.

  Smith and Wells both wore slacks and waistcoats, their jackets slung over the backs of chairs; Hiram was in his overalls, with his faded olive-green wool coat and his hat on his knee. The Bishops wore polished black shoes, and Hiram had dirty Redwing Harvesters.

  “Oh?” he said.

  “About you and your grandmother.”

  “Hettie,” Hiram said. “God rest her soul.”

  “She was a witch.”

  “No,” Hiram said immediately.

  Bishop Smith leaned forward, nostrils flaring. “And you have magical powers.”

  Hiram ran the fingers of one hand through his thinning hair. He wanted to stand, put his fedora back on, and leave, but he owed respect to Bishop Smith. To the office at least, if not to the man. “No, I don’t.”

  “Jedediah Banks said you caught a thief. Found out who it was using balls of clay that dissolved in a dishpan.” Bishop Smith smirked.

  Hiram said nothing.

  “And Beulah Wiseman said you dowsed her a new well when her old one dried up.”

  “Hiram wouldn’t be the only dowser in Utah.” John Wells spoke in mild English tones. He and Hiram had met at a barn-raising in Butlerville, several years earlier. Hiram had taught John how to drive a straight nail, in the process of which he’d seen a protective lamen, an amulet written on paper, around Wells’s neck. He’d driven Wells home that night, and Wells had told him of his experience as a child in Nottinghamshire, being healed of an abscess in his foot by a cunning woman named Granny Jenkins.

  “There’s more than one adulterer, too.” Smith squinted at Hiram. “Well?”

  Hiram could repeat the simple truth that he didn’t have magical powers, but that would make the final admission worse. “I helped Beulah. And Jedediah, too. And the thief, for that matter. Got him to return Jedediah’s mule and ask forgiveness.”

  Smith steepled
his fingers before him. “And do you believe God gave you magical abilities?”

  Hiram carefully controlled his breath to avoid sighing. “Yes,” he said. “And no.”

  “You’re being evasive.” Smith frowned. “Do you know James Anderson? In American Fork?”

  “At the People’s State Bank,” Hiram murmured. Jim Anderson was his loan officer.

  “James Anderson is a faithful brother.” Smith’s frown twisted slowly into a smile.

  “He is.” Hiram’s heart was thumping.

  “I don’t think Brother Anderson would want to have anything to do with witches.”

  Like any farmer, Hiram was sometimes late in his payments, and his personal relationship with his bankers was the only thing that got him the days—and sometimes weeks or months—of grace he needed to stay afloat.

  “I’m not trying to be evasive,” Hiram said. “Look, you’re a healthy man with two legs, you walked into this room. Did God give you the power to walk?”

  Smith looked suspicious. “This is irrelevant.”

  Wells smiled slightly. “Let’s hear him out, David.”

  Hiram continued. “Without God, you wouldn’t walk. You wouldn’t have legs, the earth you stand on wouldn’t exist and wouldn’t be spinning around to generate gravity—anyway, that’s what Michael says makes gravity. You can walk because of God, but that doesn’t mean you have a special power of walking. You’re just an ordinary man, doing an ordinary thing—walking—in the world as God made it. In the same way, you could say that God gave you the power to read, or swim, or drive a car.”

  “I’m not a witch.” Smith’s voice was cold.

  “Neither was Grandma Hettie.” Hiram avoided making eye contact with John Wells, feeling he might implicate his friend. “And neither am I. A witch is someone who hurts others, but I help people. That’s what Brother Banks and Sister Wiseman both told you about me.”

  “So you would call yourself what, then?” Was that a hint of triumph in Smith’s eyes? “A wizard? A charmer?”

  It was a trap. Those words were both associated with condemnation in the Bible.

  Hiram shrugged. “If people ask, I tell them I farm sugar beets. Which is the truth.”

  “I would hate to have to drive home past the bank, Brother Woolley,” Smith said. “On the way here I stopped to talk with Brother Anderson, and he told me you’re late on your payments as we speak.”

  The egg-shaped, red-flecked green stone Hiram always carried in his pocket—his bloodstone, or heliotropius—lay inert. So Bishop Smith was telling the truth.

  “I’ll catch up on payments. Harvest should be good this year.”

  “I hope you catch up in time.”

  What could Hiram say that was safe? “Grandma Hettie said that the things she did made her a ‘cunning woman.’ I suppose that makes me a ‘cunning man,’ though that’s not a term you hear so much anymore.”

  “A wizard.”

  Hiram shook his head. “Just someone who knows how things work. And who uses his knowledge for good.”

  “And this knowledge…these things you do…you’re convinced they work?”

  Hiram nodded. “Ask Beulah and Jedediah. In the mouth of two witnesses.”

  “Do they always work?” Smith smirked. “Or do they only sometimes work?”

  “Well,” Hiram said, “sometimes a man who knows perfectly well how to walk trips over his own feet anyway, or steps into a puddle, or isn’t looking where he’s going, so he walks into a wall, or someone else kicks his feet out from under him. You wouldn’t say his walking only works some of the time. And some things depend on faith, or a pure heart—mine, or the person I’m helping—so yes, sometimes my lore fails.”

  “And does your lore include the use of…sacred things?”

  The hair on the back of Hiram’s neck stood up. This was a dangerous question. Certain sacred names or gestures were very effective against illnesses or wicked spirits, especially if repeated multiple times. He shrugged slowly. “If making the sign of the cross over a sick person, or singing a psalm to an excited mule, helps a person in need, then yes, I do it.”

  “Is this nineteen thirty-five…or eighteen thirty-five?” Bishop Smith leaned back in his chair and looked at Bishop Wells. “You really want to send this man to the Kimball Mine as our representative?”

  “To say ‘representative’ is a bit much.” Wells smiled softly. “We need someone to take food to the miners, and Hiram is ready to go. And he does this sort of thing for me often. I trust him.”

  “The food’s loaded on the back of my Double-A,” Hiram said. “Three different Lehi congregations pitched in. But I can unload it. I’m not the only man in town with a truck.”

  Bishop Smith looked at the two other men through slitted eyes. “Take the food to the men of Kimball Mine, Brother Woolley,” he said. “And then come back home. Don’t do anything else, and don’t imagine we won’t hear if you do. Even in godforsaken Helper, there are those who will tell us what happens.”

  Smith stood with a dancer’s grace—back erect, heels snapping sharply together—and left. The door fell shut behind him and Hiram heard the clicking of his heels on the wooden floor of the halls.

  Hiram Woolley and John Wells stood more slowly, then shook hands.

  “Maybe I should stop trying,” Hiram suggested. “Keep to myself. Farm beets.”

  “Can you?” Wells asked, the dark eyes in his cheeselike face glittering.

  Hiram grunted.

  “Listen,” Wells added as they walked together to the exit. “The Kimball family, they followed…older ways.”

  “Heber Kimball saw signs in the heavens, back about eighteen thirty-five.” Hiram nodded. “Or…do you mean polygamy?”

  “Both,” Wells said. “Teancum was a polygamist like his father.”

  “Are you saying…there’s something more than a closed mine happening here?”

  Hiram had been acting as unofficial assistant to John Wells since nearly the day they’d met. Sometimes, John called on Hiram because of Hiram’s farming skills, or because he owned a truck. Other times, he needed Hiram because Hiram was a cunning man.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Wells said. “Teancum Kimball was said to have had prophetic gifts, and at least one of his children is mad. Keep your eyes open, and stay out of trouble.”

  Hiram grunted again and nodded. Could he stay out of trouble? He had to…for himself and for Michael.

  They left the building, and Wells turned right, walking toward his dusty white Terraplane parked under a black walnut tree. Hiram turned left, and found his adopted son Michael waiting beside their Ford Model AA pickup truck, strumming on his Sears, Roebuck guitar.

  Michael’s birth parents had been Navajo, so the two looked nothing alike; Michael was stocky, with a solid chest and a dark complexion, where Hiram was thin, rangy, and naturally pale. Hiram tended to introduce him as my son, Michael, not including any surname in order to avoid the thorny question whether Michael’s last name was Woolley or Yazzie.

  Michael ended the blues song he’d been yodeling and put the guitar away.

  Hiram checked the apple crates and brown sacks of groceries in the back of the truck, piled so high the Double-A looked like one of the gypsy family vehicles he’d seen in France. He found them all secure, tightly roped to iron rings along with Hiram’s shovel, water cans, spare gas can, camping gear, and toolbox.

  Michael drifted over.

  “You could have come inside,” Hiram said.

  Michael snorted. “I’d feel like a hypocrite, Pap. What did they want to do, tell you who to give the food to?”

  “I already know that. There’s a mine foreman. Name of Sorenson.” Hiram climbed into the shotgun seat and Michael got behind the wheel. Michael drove because Hiram had fainting spells. Only occasionally, but often enough that he preferred Michael to drive.

  “Anything else they want to talk about?” Michael asked.

  Hiram tried to avoid lying directly to hi
s son. “They had the idea that I’ve been carrying on Grandma Hettie’s craft. Her special skills.”

  Michael started the truck. “You mean magic?”

  The sudden note of disdain in Michael’s voice stabbed Hiram in the belly.

  “Yeah,” he said, as the truck rolled from the church parking lot and turned south. “Crazy, I know.”

  Chapter Two

  Driving down from Lehi felt good. Hiram liked the road, the blue skies, and the mountain ledges dotted with sagebrush, gambol oak and pine, and tall yellow grass. Snow sat in nooks of orange stone, hiding from the sun and the nearly-warm breeze. He also liked the engine smell of the Double-A. The dirt road was graded, but scarred by plenty of washboard ruts. The government had been paving all the highways until the stock market had jumped off a cliff, dragging the rest of the economy with it.

  They were descending through Price Canyon toward Helper when Michael asked, “So, how long do you plan to keep running these errands for Bishop Wells?”

  Ye have the poor always with you, Hiram thought. “You hear back from any of those colleges?”

  “No,” Michael admitted. “I wrote to a few more. Mahonri helped.”

  Hiram had known Mahonri Young all of his life. They’d played on Sundays in the marshes around the mouth of the Jordan, slipping out of the white-slat chapel on any pretext whatsoever. They had whiled away many days racing off into the mountains to swim, fish, and memorize the stars. Mahonri was still his best friend and, other than Michael, the smartest man Hiram had ever met. Smart enough he’d gotten schooling. Then he’d gotten a job working at Brigham Young High School, in the library.