Tumshieheid, Tam o’Shanter, Mamma Lucy and hoodoo. Today, for a change, we have extracts from two very different forthcoming tales with folkloric roots, one by Scots/Canadian writer Willie Meikle and one by Yorkshireman John Linwood Grant. And two fun audio picks to go with them. Both come from the planned anthology Between Twilight and Dawn, put together by Golden Goblin Press and featured in their latest Kickstarter campaign for An Eldritch Legacy -The Cousins Come of Age (Sequel to The Children of Lovecraft Country) and Between Twilight and Dawn.
If you just want to check out the campaign, it’s at the link below:
If, on the other hand, you want a taste of what you might be getting in Between Twilight and Dawn , and a couple of audio links for amusement, follow us now…
Tumshieheid
by Willie Meikle
“You don’t want a pumpkin—no kid of mine is having a bloody pumpkin. Pumpkins are corporate Americana, sanitized bollocks for the easily pleased. Pumpkins are cute and cuddly and bland Hollywood Halloween at its very worst. Bloody pumpkins. You’ll have a tumshie. Now there’s real Halloween for you.”
“But Derek’s getting a pumpkin and…”
“Derek’s dad’s a bloody idiot then. A tumshie was good enough for me when I was your age, so a tumshie is what you’ll have.”
“What’s a tumshie, dad?”
John’s dad slapped his forehead in mock disgust.
“Don’t they teach you kids anything that’s not American? A tumshie is what people around here used for lanterns on Halloween Night—All Hallows—when they went out ‘acting the galoshes.’ We didn’t have bloody ‘trick or treat’ then, either—we had to work for our sweeties. Sweeties—not bloody candy.”
John hesitated before asking anything else—it was obvious that something had made his dad angry—he just wasn’t sure what it had been, so any further questions were going to be dangerous. John knew from bitter experience how painful a wrong question could be. Especially when his dad’s anger—never that far from the surface—was already risen.
So John kept his mouth shut, although he was desperately keen to know what a tumshie might be. He knew that he’d have to justify why it was so much better than the huge bulbous pumpkin Derek’s mother had brought from the shop earlier that morning.
A search online wasn’t particularly useful.
‘Tumshie is a word used in Scotland for a turnip, and a tumshie lantern was a Jack O’Lantern carved from a turnip. It is a traditional method employed to capture and hold a demon, the carved, hollowed vegetable symbolizing a fiery cage of hell, especially when lit.’
“Turnip? How will I explain that to Derek?”
His opinion didn’t change in the slightest when he saw what his dad intended to carve into his lantern. It was waiting on the kitchen table as the sun went down and Halloween properly started—much too late now to get a pumpkin. What he got instead was a deformed, purple-brown ball, rough-skinned, like it had a serious case of acne, and scarcely the size of two fists put together.
“There’s a story about this,” his dad said. “I got it out in your Granddad’s field, where he got his and I used to get mine when I was a lad—where the meteorite fell in ’44. Had to dig deep to get to the roots, too—it was dug in like a real bugger.”
“Everybody’s going to laugh at me,” John said, looking at the misshapen thing on the table..
“Let them laugh,” his dad said, and took out the big knife from the drawer by the side of the sink. “This is your tradition, this is. If they want to forget where they come from, more fool them. Come on—I’m going to need a hand with this—it’s heavy work—man’s work—not soft—not like them there pumpkins.”
And heavy work it was. His dad started it off, but it seemed that John was expected to do most of it himself. Although the knife was strong and heavy, the flesh of the turnip appeared to be as hard as rock, and John didn’t make much headway in making a hollow before his dad was forced to take over for a while.
“Give it here,” his dad said and grabbed the knife harshly before setting to an attack with some gusto. Rather too much gusto as it turned out, for although the turnip got mostly hollowed out in short order, the blade slid hard to one side as he was trying to carve a rough mouth, and it gouged a slice across his left palm.
“Bastard!”
Blood pooled in the hollow inside the turnip for several seconds as the man stood above it holding his wounded hand…
TRIVIA: Despite the ubiquitous nature of the pumpkin and its gaudy symbology towards the end of October, all serious folklorists and horror fans know that these orange monstrosities are latecomers to the game. Oh yes, pumpkins flutter their leaves and tendrils, and they puff out their big ribbed bodies, but it’s just show – for they know that the turnip, often recognised as the spirit-animal of Northern England, Scotland and Ireland, is the genuine symbol of All Hallows.
Swede, rutabaga, turnip, neep, tumshie – we don’t mind what you call the vegetable, but calling someone a tumshie means that they’re foolish, ill-advised or dim – contracted from the expression “tumshie-heid” meaning “turnip-head”. For centuries, bold Northerners have torn their fingernails, skinned their knuckles and stabbed themselves in the leg trying to carve through rock-hard turnip flesh in order to make something resembling a diseased skull.
And if you want to get deeper into the mood of classic Scots scares and the supernatural, why not listen to this great reading of the classic ‘Tam o’Shanter’ by Robert Burns, here recited by storyteller Ian Boyd?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiATxrzZamE
Find out more about veteran writer Willie Meikle’s extensive body of work here:
https://www.williammeikle.com/
And on to somewhere else in time and space…
Whiskey, Beans and Dust
by John Linwood Grant
South of Petersburg, Indiana
March 1925
Mamma Lucy knew there was trouble coming. It was a prickle at her neck; a new scent on the squalling wind that had turned up so sudden, late afternoon.
“Ain’t that always the way, when you don’t seek folk out,” she said to the ancient hen which had been her only companion for the last few nights.
The hen had nothing to say, and so two of them waited quiet, waited steady, in the barn they shared. It wasn’t much – an earth floor, rough plank walls and a gambrel roof; straw and chicken feathers. Dusk was near. If she had guests coming, she’d need the battered lantern she’d found in one corner…
Less than an hour after her neck warned her to be ready, Mamma Lucy heard a grumble outside the barn, the sound of an automobile choking and stalling. She got to her feet and smoothed down her old print dress. She could hardly make out the flowers on it any more. Roses, maybe. Once.
“In here, Fredric.” A woman’s voice, frantic. “You can make it, come on.”
Two strangers staggered between the half-open barn doors. The woman was fair hauling the man, his arm limp over her shoulders, one leg dragging in the dirt. His head hung low, and he was muttering to himself.
Mamma Lucy didn’t like the words. She knew Deutsch, Pennsylvanian and true, a smatter of Francais and a few others. These here were words which shouldn’t be said, in church nor barn.
“Reckon you seen trouble,” she said.
The woman – girl – looked up. Nineteen or twenty years old. The setting sun at her back showed her thin, but not too thin. Mamma Lucy tried out a smile. A mistake really. With her milk-and-honey left eye, and her horse teeth, all set in a wrinkled black face, it seemed to scare the girl.
“My husband – he’s been hurt. We can’t get any further, and the light’s going…”
“Happens round this time.”
Mamma Lucy looked the man up and down. City clothes, but torn and stained. Some of that was blood; some wasn’t. He had a spoke of metal embedded in his right shoulder. She helped settle him on a heap of last year’s straw.
“Best tell me a name or two.”
“Name?” The girl blinked, confused. “Oh, I’m Esme Ranton. This is Fredric, my husband. The storm… we raced the storm. Fredric got hurt when the top tore off, and the motor started to fail. I took the wheel. I was heading for Bloomington, and then… I knew we wouldn’t make it. I had to turn, come this way instead.”
Mamma Lucy shuffled her big bare feet in the dirt. “And why d’you think you did that?”
“I don’t know.” Almost a child’s wail.
“Well, set yourself down, and let me look at this Fredric o’ yours.”
The old woman glanced outside to where a Model T Sedan hissed to itself, steam spouting from more than one hole, the windscreen broken, soft-top ripped open and all askew. She went over to the man. He was waxy pale, runnels of sweat through the grime on his face.
“When’d this happen?” she asked the girl.
“A few hours ago. Princeton… most of Princeton’s gone. The storm…”
“Been bad. A twister, maybe a parcel o’ them.”
The girl stiffened. “It tore its way from Missouri, right across Illinois, crushed everything in its path. There must be hundreds dead.” She paused. “How did you know about it, out here in nowhere? We’ve been driving non-stop.”
Mamma Lucy wondered about that wound. A metal spar had gone deep through his shoulder and into his chest. If she pulled it out, the blood might come gushing.
“I hear things.” She checked the pulse at his neck. Weak, unreliable, the patter of rain on a tin roof. She straightened up. “Name’s Mamma Lucy. Reckon you turned you this way on account o’ me. Folk do that, when there’s trouble.”
The girl sat down on a bale, shaking.
“You don’t realise what’s coming,” she said, flat-voiced. “I’ve seen… felt something – I can’t even tell you…”
TRIVIA: Mamma Lucy is a hoodoo lady, a conjure woman. Historically, the guiding principle for most hoodoo was belief in God and the Bible. Where Caribbean and New Orleans spiritual movements blended Catholic saints with African belief systems, a lot of hoodoo folk were Protestant in one form or another. Voodoo and hoodoo get confused, but they ain’t really the same. You might call hoodoo a dominant blend of African beliefs, with threads of European herb and symbolic lore pulled in as well. Much conjure-work links back to Ewe and Fon lore from West Africa. The lines got blurred, as Black people from different tribes and cultures were enslaved and forced together. They sought systems which might sustain at least a fraction of their origins and identity, including shared reference points. With time, some of these developed into beliefs and oral traditions which echoed the lost past but also reflected life in the States.
If this was a predominantly Black road, it didn’t automatically exclude whites, because it slowly drew in folklore from European immigrants, especially Germanic ones. It came from the big slave plantations, but as the 19th century progressed, it spread into communities through freedmen and women, and had value for many poor and disenfranchised people. It absorbed elements of Native American herbalism, and became its own thing. Hoodoo. Root-work is another name, from the use of medicinal or magical roots and herbs.
Your audio pick this time – a fun one, Louis Jordan’s ‘Somebody Done Hoodooed the Hoodoo Man’…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iE5kl8wqXY&list=PL_aYw4bA2r-fS_79hTdCjG5TtS9Ro_B_6&index=19
Find out more about John LInwood Grant’s peculiar body of work by… oh , just hanging around here, we guess.
The Between Twilight And Dawn anthology also includes:
- FORGETTING by Richard Lee Byers
- MARY IN THE MIRROR by Christine Morgan
- SHARPE SHAVER by Glynn Owen Barrass
- FERTILE GROUND by Oscar Rios
- RACE ROCKS by Paula R. Stiles
- GRAVEYARD SHIFT by Brian M. Sammons
- UNCLE CRAIG’S WAKE by Konstantine Paradias
- KAMLOOPS LAKE by Neil Baker
- BLACK JACK by Lee Clark Zumpe
- THE DOUBLE-GOER BY Orrin Grey
- BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON by Pete Rawlik
And there are more details about the other volume, An Eldritch Legacy -The Cousins Come of Age, on the campaign pages: