by Willa Reece
This was his freshening. And the reason he’d been given the gift of movement. He nibbled here and there. He filled his belly until the burn was soothed. Then, sniffed his way—smell, listen, look—to a tiny sapling where the girl’s ashes had been spilt.
He sat there for a while, remembering her pockets and the dreams he’d calmed for her, before he turned to make his way back to the cabin. He couldn’t follow the newcomer. He could barely sense her now. She’d gone too far away for even a ferociously woven mouse. He would have to wait some more.
His movements were more coordinated after several hours of practice, but he was still slow to notice the blacksnake he’d avoided earlier had coiled in the same clump of grass where he’d hidden from the hawk. He was new to the world of scents and sensations. Only the shine on the snake’s scales saved him as the sun suddenly broke from behind the clouds to illuminate deadly intent.
The blacksnake struck and he leapt without ever having leapt before. But the wild place, the wildwood garden, had fueled his minuscule muscles well. His tiny gray body flew up into the air and he curled and rolled to where he could clamp down on the back of the blacksnake’s head with his teeth when he came down.
What followed was more in keeping with the ferocity of his maker than his current incarnation as a living, breathing mouse. He’d been made as a protective charm. He had to protect himself to fulfill his purpose. Blood flowed. The snake writhed in death throes that should have dislodged its killer. He was more than a charm now. And more than a mouse. Although he wasn’t yet what he had been crafted to be…
Between She who will come and She who came before,
Fair-Margaret-Ann-Elizabet-Berta-Katherine-Mary-Beatrice-Melody-Sarah.
Between the wildwood vine and beating heart,
connect, guide, protect.
He didn’t open his jaws until the snake stopped moving. Pain was new. Wildwood emissary or not, a wisewoman’s familiar or not, his little mouse body hurt from heroic effort. But his once lavender brain had quickened along with the rest of him. As he left the dead snake on the path behind him, he thought about being more than he had been before.
He would be here, freshened, when the newcomer needed him.
Melody Ross had ensured it.
Granny’s house had gingerbread trim like well-turned teeth all around its edges. The first person I’d asked had known exactly where to find it. The woman had been exiting a corner hair salon and she’d lowered her voice and whispered the directions with furtive glances up and down the sidewalk as if she didn’t want to be seen or heard giving me the information I’d asked for. Strange considering how everyone had greeted Granny in the diner.
Of course, she’d also looked me up and down as if my black skinny jeans and high-top sneakers were breaking some kind of dress code I didn’t understand.
I approached the Queen Anne Victorian cautiously through a spiky wrought iron gate, reminding myself I’d been invited. However, the toothy trim and curtain-covered windows didn’t seem to welcome me. The house was the largest and oldest on the block at the very end of a cul-de-sac turned mostly to black gravel from the crumbling asphalt. The other houses were sided with painted boards or cheap vinyl that probably covered deteriorated wood, but the yards were mowed and the weeds whacked back, and here and there was evidence that families with children resided in some of the homes—a swing set, a sandbox, a bike with training wheels leaned on a fence.
Granny’s house was faded brick, but still solidly handsome, fronted by a dominant cylindrical turret. On top of the turret, a large black crow in the form of a weather vane squeaked rather than cawed as it twisted to and fro. I thought maybe the woman from the hair salon considered Granny and her house eccentric. The woman’s hair had been smoothed, sprayed and teased into a very conventional soccer-mom style. I’d known Granny only a short while, but with all her layers, pockets and patches, not to mention her wild curly hair, she was definitely outside of the norm, even for Richmond. In this small town she was probably seen as more wild than wise.
One of the “No Pipeline” signs was displayed proudly by her front walk.
It took me a flustered few minutes to figure out the doorbell after I’d climbed the stoop to reach the entrance. There was no button, only a knob you pulled instead of pressing, and the result of the pull wasn’t a buzz. The knob tugged a cord in the wall that mechanically jangled a bell inside.
Footsteps responded to the bell, walking in a stride I remembered from the diner.
Granny opened the door.
Her cheeks were flushed pink and her curls were more frazzled, the silvery strands sticking out all over like exclamation points. She wore a voluminous apron over the clothes she’d worn that morning, another layer added to her already impressive regalia. More pockets, seen and unseen. So many I couldn’t count them. When she moved, the contents of her pockets rustled or clicked or rattled, adding a mysterious layer of noises to her persona.
“I’ve baked you some cookies,” she shouted above the cry of a giant fat tabby—he’d had more than his share of cookies—twining around her ankles.
The air released from the house carried the warm scent of sugar and vanilla, but it was combined with a mixture of other scents not as pleasant. Devil’s breath? Furniture polish? Burnt toast? Pixie dust? I could only imagine. When I stepped inside and she closed the door behind me, my reaction was a little too panicky, considering the door supposedly opened from both sides.
“There, now. That’s finished. The hard part is over. The rest will be a breeze,” Granny said. She enveloped me in a bear hug, an impressive undertaking since she was much shorter than an actual bear and I towered over her by more than a foot. Still, I suddenly felt supported and completely understood. It wasn’t merely a big hug from a small woman. It was a Sarah hug, and for a few seconds I had come back to see Granny for this, nothing else. No purpose or mission or goal beyond this embrace. The problem with building a wall as a defense against the world is when you’re finished you’re there with yourself with nowhere to hide.
I disengaged after those few seconds of weakness and I couldn’t tell if Granny had given me something or taken something away.
“The dreams have put you through the ringer. You need a rest. Some reprieve. And I’ve baked just the thing,” Granny said.
She prodded me forward down a long hall that led to the back of the house. It was a tight squeeze through clutter that must have accumulated over many years. I tried to take in all the individual details of bric-a-brac and furniture, but a nude bronze, a tufted ottoman, umbrellas and photographs, crystal decanters and a grinning plastic piggy bank I recognized as the diner’s logo rushed past.
We burst through the swinging door of the kitchen with a slap of Granny’s stained palm against its surface. And, there, a different sort of clutter began. Copper pots hung from the ceiling. Baskets and barrels lined the floor. Bins and tins filled every shelf, and bottles with meticulous labels of tiny script marched along the counters in orderly rows.
Granny left my side to rush to the largest oven I’d ever seen. A white enamel monstrosity with rounded edges and chrome accents, the appliance must have been as old as Granny herself. Or older. But when she opened its door and used the corner of her apron as a pot holder to retrieve a cookie sheet, I could see that the cookies were golden brown and cooked to perfection.
There was still a hint of something unusual—I couldn’t decide if it was burnt toast or devil’s breath—but vanilla and sugar predominated now. So much so my stomach gurgled and my mouth flooded with saliva. I’d nibbled jam and toast that morning, and I’d skipped lunch altogether. The distance of the drive between town and the Ross cabin had taken up much of the day. Suddenly, thoughts of devil’s breath led me to thoughts of Persephone and Hades’s pomegranate seeds. Was I really going to sit down and eat as if I hadn’t been warned away from this eccentric woman’s mixes and mischief?
Granny grabbed a spatula from a pottery crock on the counter
and moved cookies from the hot tray to a cooling rack she must have previously prepared.
“We have a lot to discuss while these cool. Pull up a chair and see there what I have for you… besides a good night’s sleep,” Granny said. She nodded toward a table beside a picture window that looked out into a backyard that was more riotous than the neighbors’ yards I’d seen. The other houses had seemed to have towny, trimmed landscaping. Unlike the ordered lushness of the wildwood garden, Granny’s yard was basically a kitchen garden gone crazy.
But she hadn’t nodded toward the riot of herbs growing outside.
The Ross Remedy Book sat on the kitchen table.
I’d never seen it whole before, though I’d seen it destroyed a thousand times in my dreams. Sweat beaded on my brow and above my upper lip. My mouth went dry. This was my nightmare come to life. This was also, somehow, Sarah. Her past. Her heritage. Her mother. Gone, but not forgotten. Never forgotten.
I once dragged Sarah from a foster home in the middle of the night because our new “dad” had hugged us both a little too long before bedtime on a night our new “mom” had been traveling out of town on business. I’d found us a safe place to crash with nothing but the few belongings we kept stowed in our backpacks for times like those.
I’d done it with dry eyes, even knowing our caseworker wouldn’t believe we were in danger and there was no assurance that the next placement would be any better.
But for the millionth time today my eyes weren’t dry. The hold I’d had on myself for years was loosening and I didn’t know how to reset my grip.
I walked to the table and sat down. I reached for the remedy book and touched the pages, in real life, for the first time. No. I wasn’t going to run away. Caution with Granny might be a good idea, but retreat wasn’t an option.
“I repaired it. I dried the pages and sewed a new leather binding to the old leather covers. I saved it for Sarah,” Granny said. She came over and sat across from me, leaving the cookies to cool.
The binding was obviously new leather. It stood out, a pale caramel, compared to the nearly black walnut front and back covers that had been polished by thousands of hands over time. I’d never noticed the faded imprint of a tree that had been stamped into the leather of the front cover. I lightly traced its branches wondering if Sarah had done the same, and many of her ancestors before her. I flipped through the book, certain some of the splotched pages were ones Sarah had saved from the dew the morning her mother had been killed. I could feel the sturdiness of the binding Granny had created, but repaired or not, I was also certain some of the stains on the covers and the pages weren’t from the stream. The pale bloodstains, if that’s what they were, didn’t seem gory; rather they seemed a testament, a recording of lives and events as carefully kept as the words on each page.
“Sarah would want you to have it,” Granny said.
Many of the recipes and concoctions were signed with the same bold cursive initials I’d seen on the scrolled paper Granny had shared with me in the diner. I traced the M and the R, knowing Sarah had given me her mother’s name back when I didn’t have one of my own. It had been a tribute and an honor. It had been her way of adopting me when we were both unwanted and alone.
“Mel” had suited my temperament better than “Melody.” The nickname had stuck. But I’d never tried to claim “Ross.” I’d gone from Jane Smith to Mel Smith without looking back. I’d had it legally changed as soon as I was old enough to make it happen.
“Jacob Walker told me to leave while I still can. He told me not to drink your tea or stay too long in the wildwood,” I said.
“Did he warn you away from my cookies too?” Granny asked. “Because the recipe is in that book. Great-Granny Ross put it down in her chicken-scratch scrawl.” She reached across the table and flipped the pages until the book opened on a recipe illustrated with thistles like the yellow ones I’d seen in the Ross garden. There were notes in the margins that had obviously been added more recently than the recipe itself. Chicken scratch was a good description for the original handwriting on the page.
“Hers are always the hardest to read. Her daughter and granddaughter clarified a lot of them in the margins. She was self-taught. No schooling at all. Save for what she learned by her mother’s knee,” Granny explained.
I scanned the ingredients. No devil’s breath or toadstool juice. “Ground sunwort” was the only thing I didn’t recognize.
“It’s a mild soporific. These will help you sleep. And that’s the only hoped-for result stirred into them,” Granny said. She wasn’t as jolly as she’d been that morning, but she was still elfin. Her eyes glinted with knowledge in the waning light from the setting sun. The sun’s reddish glow warmed the kitchen around us, reflecting off the copper pots and pans.
While I hesitated between the lure of a deep sleep and Walker’s warnings, the tabby pushed his way into the kitchen. I followed his surprisingly graceful movements until he leapt up on the counter directly across from the table. He sat with regal privilege where most cats wouldn’t, without nosing around the cooling rack of fresh cookies, and met my attention head-on without blinking. His eyes were as green as the biologist’s and as intent, but there was something unusual about his expression that seemed to come from neither man nor beast. The tabby’s irises seemed to swirl with non-catty thoughts I couldn’t ascertain.
“This is where you belong, but you have to make that decision. And stay or go isn’t something you have to decide right away. For now, rest or run. It’s your choice. Walker is wiser than he lets on, I’ll give him that. But there are some things he can’t understand… about Ross women and what they’ve been through. Sarah’s mother was murdered. Now, Sarah is dead. I can only go by the tea, the roots, the flowers and the trees, but the mountain whispers to me and I don’t like what it says,” Granny said.
“It was a hit and run,” I blurted. Maybe it was the scent of cookies. Or maybe it was the hug. Suddenly, there was no stopping the rest. “They never found the unmarked van that clipped us in the rain. Sarah was driving. She never trusted me behind the wheel. I was too aggressive in traffic. Too prone to road rage. She was always so careful. Slow and steady wins the race. But not that time. The rain was heavy. It was just before dusk and the storm made it dark as night. The van came out of nowhere. They were speeding,” I said. Hot tears finally overwhelmed my control. They streaked down my face. I’d held them back all day. For weeks, even. My heart had felt ice-burned in the garden. Now, my tears burned embarrassing acid trails on my cold cheeks. I’d had no one to talk to about the accident. I gulped back on the torrent that had burst from my aching chest. I knew better than to overshare. Even to an apparently sympathetic ear.
Granny stood and walked to the counter. The tabby didn’t move. Even his tail was still. She slowly placed cooled cookies onto a porcelain plate.
“It was just a horrible accident,” I said. There were no tears left. My cheeks had dried, tight and sticky. Granny came to the table and placed the plate of cookies between us. Then, she fetched glasses and a carafe of milk from the old-fashioned refrigerator that matched her oven. She poured us each a glass of milk and then poured some for the tabby in a bowl on the floor I hadn’t noticed before. Thankfully, the cat acted exactly as I thought a cat should. He broke eye contact with me to jump down and lap up the fresh milk. Granny picked up a cookie and bit into it as the cat drank. She chewed and swallowed thoughtfully before she replied.
“I sent Sarah away. I hid her as long as I could. I think I failed. I think she was found,” Granny said. “But all hope isn’t lost yet because Sarah found you.”
“I’m nobody. Only a student. Not even really that. We couldn’t afford classes for both of us. I wanted Sarah to get her nursing degree first. So, me? I’m only a barista,” I said, drawing my attention away from the now normal tabby. I pressed my fisted hands on the table on either side of the pretty cookie plate. My knuckles were still red from the wounds I’d caused when I’d tried to free Sarah
. If the window hadn’t been cracked and damaged by the accident, I might have broken my fingers trying to break shatterproof glass. They would probably carry scars to remind me of those frantic moments forever. The pain in them had been nothing compared to the pain of seeing Sarah dead and trapped in the car. But I would always wonder if the phantom pain Sarah had experienced before she met me had been a premonition of what I would do to my hands after the crash.
She’d told me the ghost pain had never bothered her again after I’d held her hand that first night we’d been together.
“So. You’re a barista. Brewing is more important than you know. Than anyone knows. Much more. It’s a lost craft. The Ross women knew it. They practiced it,” Granny said. “I’m getting old, but I’ll help you learn it. A student is exactly what I need. If you don’t run away, I’ll help you brew through this book. Sarah’s book. And the wildwood will show us what to do.”
“I don’t believe in your craft. It seems like the same kind of magic they always asked us to believe as kids—happy families, the good guys win, love conquers all,” I said. “That there would be a home for us one day.”
“You believed in Sarah. You believed in the sisterhood you shared. That’s all that matters,” Granny said.
I did believe in Sarah and our sisterhood. She was right. That belief hadn’t disappeared. I could feel it in my gut, a hint of warmth like smoldering coals. Maybe I could stir them back to life if I honored her memory this way. There was nothing for me in Richmond but a cold, empty apartment. At least here I could explore Sarah’s childhood world. What she had believed. The people she’d known. Just for a little while I wouldn’t have to completely let her go. I uncurled my fists and reached for a cookie. I dunked it in the milk in my glass.
Granny did the same and then she lifted her dripping cookie toward mine. Exactly as Sarah would have. Had she eaten Granny’s cookies as a child? We clicked them together as Sarah and I would have before we each took our bites. A sweet explosion with a hint of bitterness on the back end filled my mouth as I chewed.