There once was a quaint and picturesque village called Rockingham nestled in a valley between two hills. The village was named Rockingham due to the rocks that once slid from the hillside into the entire area and the first settlers had to clear them all away in order to plant crops in the otherwise fertile soil of the valley. They used the rocks to make a huge wall around the village.
Life in the village was nice, but mundane. Nothing of note ever happened there. People tended to shun the outside world and stayed with the confines of the wall. The village children, however, were afraid of a particular person named Mahitable who had come to the village from beyond the wall. She lived on the outskirts of their town. None of them dared to go near her, for it was rumored that she wasn’t like the other people born and raised in the village. In fact, they swore that she was a witch. She was an herbalist and grew herbs for medicinal purposes, but people thought that she was using them to cast spells, so all the children were warned to stay away from her place. This was one time that the children were obedient. All except for one child, that is.
The boy was a brazen, cocky twelve year old named Walter Wimbley who was always looking to stir up a little trouble. He decided to monitor the goings on at Mahitable’s place, so he went every single day for a month to spy on her. Every day he lurked around hiding behind trees or crouching behind bushes and watched her every move. Then he would race back to the center of the village to spread lies and half truths about what he had seen. Of course, people ate up every word he said because, sadly, that’s how people are.
Next, the local constable began making visits to her place to question her about what was going on there. He’d received countless complaints and said that if he didn’t do something soon, the villagers were going to form a vigilante committee and burn her house down. Mahitable maintained that she was doing nothing out of the ordinary and since he had no evidence otherwise, he stopped bothering her.
One day, while on his spy mission, Walter saw the old woman burying a dead bird in her garden. He ran back to the village as fast as his legs would carry him and told everyone that he’d seen her bury a body in her garden. He didn’t reveal what sort of body, so naturally, they all assumed that it was a human body. Once again, the constable made another visit and made her dig up everything in her garden only to find that the only body there was a bird. He apologized and left feeling vexed with the boy.
Walter was pleased with all the excitement that he had caused and felt no guilt for making such a mess. Even though the boy had lied, people blamed the constable and claimed that he must have missed something somewhere and even implied that he was on the hag's side and should be fired. What it really boiled down to was that they just plain loathed the old lady and wanted her gone. They couldn’t stand the looks of her because she had scraggly long gray hair, a hook nose and a missing tooth or two. Besides that she wasn't one of them because she came from beyond the wall.
As for Mahitable, she was enraged and since she knew her accuser’s name, she planned to make him pay. He had been stealing an apple from her tree every time he came, so she went into her house and got down her book of spells and cast a rather interesting one on the apple tree. You see, she really was a witch, but never used her powers against anyone in her entire life. Instead, she had helped people from the village when they came to her secretly. She had cured many of their ailments and helped with such things as matchmaking. Then they would go their way and say rotten things about her around town.
The next day when Walter showed up, she stayed inside of her house and watched him steal the most beautiful apple on her tree. He went away eating the apple and nothing seemed to happen, at first. He went home and ate a hearty supper, went to bed and slept soundly. The next morning, when he went to jump up out of bed, he fell to the floor. He looked in horror and found that one of his feet was gone! He hopped one legged to look in the mirror and tried to scream to no avail because lo and behold his missing foot was crammed solidly in his mouth. Walter Wimbley lived ever after, unable to tell another half truth. Many times his parents employed the use of a surgeon to remove the foot from his mouth, but every time it was taken out another immediately replaced it, so he spent the rest of his miserable life hopping on one foot and unable to speak another word. Needless to say, no one ever dared to cross Mahitable again.
