Alice Munros Best

the rows of tall plants. The tobacco juice was black and sticky, like molasses, and it ran down their arms and was smeared over their breasts. At dusk they went down to the river and scrubbed themselves clean. They splashed in the cold water, girls andbig, broad women together. They tried to push each other off balance, and Lottar heard her name cried then, in warning and triumph, without contempt, like any other name: “Lottar, watch out! Lottar!”
    They told her things. They told her that children died here because of the
Striga.
Even grown-up people shrivel and die sometimes, when the
Striga
has put her spell on them. The
Striga
looks like a normal woman, so you do not know who she is. She sucks blood. To catch her, you must lay a cross on the threshold of the church on Easter Sunday when everybody is inside. Then the woman who is the
Striga
cannot come out. Or you can follow the woman you suspect, and you may see her vomit up the blood. If you can manage to scrape up some of this blood on a silver coin, and carry that coin with you, no
Striga
can touch you, ever.
    Hair cut at the time of the full moon will turn white.
    If you have pains in your limbs, cut some hair from your head and your armpits and burn it – then the pains will go away.
    The
oras
are the devils that come out at night and flash false lights to bewilder travellers. You must crouch down and cover your head, else they will lead you over a cliff. Also they will catch the horses and ride them to death.
    THE TOBACCO HAD been harvested, the sheep brought down from the slopes, animals and humans shut up in the
kula
through the weeks of snow and cold rain, and one day, in the early warmth of the spring sun, the women brought Lottar to a chair on the veranda. There, with great ceremony and delight, they shaved off the hair above her forehead. Then they combed some black, bubbling dye through the hair that remained. The dye was greasy – the hair became so stiff that they could shape it into wings and buns as firm as blood puddings. Everybody thronged about, criticizing and admiring. They put flour on her face and dressed her up in clothes they had pulled out of one of the great carved chests. What for, she asked, as she found herself disappearing into a white blouse with gold embroidery, a red bodice with fringed epaulets, a sash of striped silk a yard wide and a dozen yards long, a black-and-red wool skirt, with chain after chain of false gold being thrown over her hair and around herneck. For beauty, they said. And they said when they had finished, “See! She is beautiful!” Those who said it seemed triumphant, challenging others who must have doubted that the transformation could be made. They squeezed the muscles in her arms, which she had got from hoeing and wood-carrying, and patted her broad, floured forehead. Then they shrieked, because they had forgotten a very important thing – the black paint that joins the eyebrows in a single line over the nose.
    “The priest is coming!” shouted one of the girls, who must have been placed as a lookout, and the woman who was painting the black line said, “Ha, he will not stop it!” But the others drew aside.
    The Franciscan shot off a couple of blanks, as he always did to announce his arrival, and the men of the house fired off blanks also, to welcome him. But he did not stay with the men this time. He climbed at once to the veranda, calling, “Shame! Shame! Shame on you all! Shame!
    “I know what you have dyed her hair for,” he said to the women. “I know why you have put bride’s clothes on her. All for a pig of a Muslim!
    “You! You sitting there in your paint,” he said to Lottar. “Don’t you know what it is for? Don’t you know they have sold you to a Muslim? He is coming from Vuthaj. He will be here by dark!”
    “So what of it?” said one of the women boldly. “All they could get for her was three napoleons. She has to marry somebody.”
    The Franciscan told her to hold her tongue. “Is this what you want?” he said to Lottar. “To marry an infidel and go to live with him in Vuthaj?”
    Lottar said no. She felt as if she could hardly move or open her mouth, under the weight of her greased hair and her finery. Under this weight she struggled as you do to rouse yourself to a danger, out of sleep. The idea of marrying the Muslim was still too distant to be the danger – what she understood was that she would be separated from the priest, and would never be able to claim an