A Natural History of Hell: Stories Read Online Free Page B

center of the room. She worked her way to the other chair at the table and half-sat/ half-fell backward into it. Once she was settled, she took a pack of Marlboros out of her pocket and a black lighter. She leaned forward on the table with one arm. “Word dolls,” she said.
    I nodded.
    “You’re the first person to ask about the museum in about twenty years.” She laughed, and I saw she was missing a tooth on the upper right side.
    “You can hardly see your sign from the road,” I said.
    “The sign’ s a last resort, ” she said. “I have a permanent spot in the What’s Happening section of three of the local papers. In January, I send them enough to run the ads for a year. Still, no one pays attention.”
    “I’m guessing most people don’t know what a word doll is.”
    “I know,” she said and lit the cigarette she held. She took a drag and then pointed with it at the left wall, where there were three beige file cabinets. The middle one had a golden laughing Buddha statue on it. “What’s in those nine drawers over there is all that remains of the history of word dolls. This is the largest repository of material evidence of the existence of the tradition. When I’m gone, knowledge of it will have been pretty much erased from history. You live long enough, Mr. Ford, you might be the last person on earth to ever think of word dolls.”
    “I might be,” I said, “but I don’t know what they are.”
    Beverly put her cig out in a half cup of coffee that looked like it had been on the table for a week. “I want you to know something before I start,” she said. “This is serious to me. I have a doctorate in anthropology from OSU, class of ’63.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I seriously want to know.”
    She sat quiet for a moment, eyes half shut, before taking a deep breath. “A ‘word doll’ is the same thing as a ‘field friend,’ they’re interchangeable. Their existence is very brief measured in anthropological time and also very localized. Only in the area that’s now roughly defined by our county border was this ritual observed. It sprang up in the mid-19th century and for the time in which it ran its course affected no more than fifty or sixty families at the most. No one’s certain of its origin. Some women I interviewed back when I was in graduate school, they were all in their 80s and 90s then, swore the phenomenon was something brought over from Europe. So I asked, where in Europe? But none could say. Others told me it originated with a woman named Mary Elder, back in the 1830s. She was also known as The Widow, and I have a picture of her in the cabinet, but her candidacy for the creation of the tradition is called into question by a number of factors.
    “Anyway, back in the day, I’m talking the mid-1800s on, in rural areas like this, kids, when they reached a certain age were sent out to participate in the fall harvest. By about age six or seven, they were initiated into the hard work of the fields during that season of long hours well into the night. It was a difficult adjustment for them. There are a lot of writings from the time where farmers or their wives complain about the wayward nature of their children, their inability to focus through the hours of toil. Training a kid to endure a harvest season with no real prior experience appears to have been a common problem. So, to offset that, someone came up with the idea of the word dolls. The idea in a nutshell is to allow the child to escape into her imagination while her physical body stays on the task at hand.
    “Whoever came up with it really could have been a psychologist. They attached a ritual to it, which was a smart way to embed the thing into the local culture. So, in September, usually around the equinox, if you were one of those kids who was to be sent out in the fields for the first time come harvest, you could expect a visit from the doll maker. The doll maker came at night, right after everyone was in bed,