Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

  Harker and Serena

  THE LONG THIN POLES by the water were round, not square. De-limbed and peeled trees, not railroad ties. Gifts from the river, which flooded each spring. Basketballs, pieces of cordwood, plastic planters, actual railroad ties. Serena always figured railroad ties were okay for flower beds, but not for vegetable gardens. Who wanted to eat creosote?

  She dragged them home and pushed her found logs into shapes, making raised beds at the foot of the back stairs. A squarish shape. A triangle. She filled them with wheelbarrow loads of topsoil she dug out of the woods. Pushing and pulling one of the logs in hopes of perfecting the corner of her shape, Serena noticed carvings. She tried to decipher the pattern but it made no sense. It wasn’t English or Egyptian. It appeared runic, but it wasn’t Ogham. Maybe someone upriver had invented it.

  After a year went by her teenaged sons Jake and Blake caught two more of the strangely carved poles. Then April was rainy as always and suddenly there were six. Maybe upriver a stack of carved poles someone had left by the bank was shrinking, just as her pile grew. Serena pulled the poles away from the edge of the flood. She began taking Jake and Blake to the river after a big rain or a sunny day had melted more of the remaining snow. She had a hunch the poles might turn out to be worth something.

  And after a long winter cooped up inside, spring was mesmerizing. If she were able to walk on water, she would do it in the spring, when water and earth were flush. But of course, they had to be. The water couldn’t rise higher than the land, not here, not yet. It could only fill and flatten it, inches of plate glass. One spring the suckers had come up from the lake to spawn, and swum across her lawn, arcing up out of the water, jumping and jumping. There had been so many of them, their arced backs and jumps a series of semi-circles, until she’d had to blink, wondering whether she was looking at a sea serpent. But the strangers who lived beyond the big bend upstream only sent peeled and carved tree trunks, and never animals.

  If they sent things at all. Maybe they laughed at the folks downriver so foolish they caught pneumonia standing knee high in the current, trying to reach out and grab the poles that swam past. You couldn’t stand in the middle of the river to catch them. The current was too strong; it would pull your legs out from under you. Even Harker couldn’t do it easily.

  Harker had come from away and told people he was the new head man. People of weak minds believed him for a day or two, until they noticed no one paid much attention. Serena’s doctor husband had been the real mayor.

  Sometimes Serena had sex with Harker. She missed her husband, who had gone away at first light the morning after she’d noticed the inscriptions on the first pole. He’d taken all their daughters, not yet grown. She never found out where they had gone. He’d never sent word. No one had ever brought her news of him. No wonder, she thought, she’d started sleeping with Harker.

  Harker had hair on the backs of his hands and on his big toes, but he also sprouted vegetation. He was bald as a billiard ball, so what grew on his head never came into the equation. No one knew. But when they were in bed together, Serena was able to run her hands though the lichen on his chest. It was a beautiful off-white colour, which was fine with her. Harker grew a few actual leaves too. Just little ones, sprinkled amongst his eyebrow hairs.

  “They change colour in the autumn,” he told her, when she plucked one out. They were a dark green leaning towards brown, so mostly they stayed hidden beneath the bushy brown hairs. “When they turn red I pluck them so no one will notice.”

  “If I pluck one in the spring when it’s warm and the light is long, it might grow roots. And then, over time, I could grow a new you,” Serena said.

  “Just hope it never comes to that,” Harker said. They lay companionably on her embroidered pillows together.

  “What a strange thing to say!”

  “Why do you really think the doctor left?” Harker asked, stroking her arm. “You’re good looking and you were crazy fertile. Three girls, two boys. Some people wondered if the doctor might have wanted more children and left you for someone younger because of that?”

  “That really would be crazy,” she said. “But now that he’s gone I can’t remember my anatomy. What does a kidney do? A liver?”

  “They both clean things, I think, but what?” Harker asked. “The blood, the urine…”

  “Why does urine need cleaning, if it’s leaving the body anyhow?” Serena asked.

  “I can’t remember either. But I know why the doctor left you.”

  “Why then, Harker?”

  “Because of the poles. Once you had that much magic, you didn’t need him anymore.”

  With the doctor, all Serena’s knowledge of medicine had fled. She used to help him clean wounds and set sprains and fractures and sew people up after surgery or knife fights. But, her mind newly blank, she couldn’t charge for her nursing, because she couldn’t nurse. She grew lots of food for herself and her sons, and worked part-time as a landscaper, but nothing paid like a paycheque. There weren’t many to be had since the call centre had closed. Even the feeder high school was only open half days now.

  Serena hadn’t yet figured out that she could sell the magic poles if only she and her sons were willing to stand in the icy river from late April to early June, grabbing them as they flew past, in water both too cold and strong and deep to stand for long. It was giving her arthritis, she was sure of it. And Jake and Blake regularly came down with bronchitis and pneumonia.

  sss

  In the morning she brought him fresh coffee. “Maybe head man doesn’t mean reeve or mayor but the man who sleeps with Serena. First the doctor, and now you.” Serena smiled to show it was a joke and pulled Harker out the door and to the river. She wanted him working.

  He stood on the shore looking out as if he wasn’t sure why he was there. Serena pushed him, gently, from behind. He moved into the torrent and grabbed the first passing log. It fought him, like a big fish wanting to escape.

  “I like it,” he said after he’d wrestled it to shore.

  There were hardly any carvings, just what appeared to be a few leaves at one end. The carvings, Serena was starting to understand, didn’t create the magic, they only described it. In the upland village, where more things were magic, folks could probably differentiate in ways she couldn’t, or couldn’t yet. In addition to being carved, the poles were often warm to the touch, and attracted lint and crumbled leaves and other fine debris. They smelled of hot metal, even when they were made of wood, as this heavy, waterlogged log indeed was. She followed Harker out onto the little gravelly beach and slapped his hands away from the pole.

  He paused, gazing at her owlishly. “I want to keep it in my room.”

  She slapped his hands again, harder than before. “It isn’t yours.” She didn’t regret it at all this time.

  “But I got it,” he said.

  “You got it because I told you to. This is my corner of the river. Everything that comes out of the river here is mine.”

  Which was a load of rot. Finders keepers, or I was here first, she knew, were specious school yard arguments. She began to drag the log home.

  “I wanted to keep it,” Harker mewled, following. “The leaves are like my leaves.”

  She was glad he didn’t know how much the poles were worth, or she’d have to fight him, and she didn’t know how to fight, at least not someone so much bigger than she was. Fighting was more dangerous than just being mean, she guessed.

  She’d started selling the poles to out-of-towners over the winter. The buyers had appeared out of nowhere, usually late at night. Sombre men in cowls and cloaks, they had offered her staggering sums.

  Setting the pole down, Serena massaged her abdomen where a dull chronic pain had turned into a searing one. “What does a kidney do exactly, do you know?” she asked Harker again. The doctor had taken away not just his encyclopedic knowledge, but his ency
clopedias. She was fucked, standing in the freezing river day after day. How had her life come to this?

  Harker looked at her pleadingly, his leafy eyebrows and big hands still dripping.

  “You can keep the next one,” she said. “But we have to go back in the river to get it. I hope we didn’t miss one, standing here arguing.”

  She’d seen Harker ring the necks of geese. A full-grown goose can break a man’s arm just by flapping her wings, they always said, but Serena wondered whether it was true. Maybe a smaller man than Harker. He gave the geese to poor families. Serena declined them. She wouldn’t have, before she began selling the poles.

  “You should have the meat tested. The geese might be full of lead from the shot,” she said. “Or creosote.”

  “From eating railroad ties.” Harker nodded helpfully.

  She thought of how he looked vacant when he snapped the geese’s necks. There was no cruelty in it. It was just something he did.

  She studied the pole. Fresh out of the water, it was already covered with a thin crusting of filth. Dead beetles and living. Dirt. Ground glass. Where had it all come from, so quickly?

  Maybe the pole attracted crud because it was garbage magic, junk magic, failed magic. Maybe the folks upriver made a heap of their failures beside the icy bank and laughed, slapping their sides, when the spring torrent took the flotsam.

  What if she found her way to the village and talked to people? She could ask them how they made the poles. The poles were much more magic than she’d guessed at first. She could sense it more and more as time went by.

  Maybe the magic in the poles was what conditioned her to feel it.

  She wondered, again, what their purpose was.

  And what she might use them for.

  Two very different questions.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said, taking Harker’s hand. “We can come back out tomorrow. The water’s so cold today we’ll catch our deaths.”

  sss

  Serena told Harker and the Akes to keep the poles a secret. The garbage magic was seemingly worth a very great deal on the black market. She figured it for a black market as the buyers came at night, wearing dark clothes. At first she’d wondered whether they were her neighbours from down the street, wearing disguises. But how could her neighbours know what the magic was worth and for when she didn’t?

  She hid the money. She would use it for her sons’ tuition. Or she’d go downriver to search for her daughters, Mildred, Concepción and Agatha, if not their doctor father. Or upland to learn about magic.

  They had gone to bed after pole catching, as was their ritual. It had been warming and companionable but she still hadn’t come.

  “If I could figure out how to make them work I could cure cancer,” she told Harker, running her fingers through his chest moss. “Or I could use them to clean toxic waste dumps.”

  “You wouldn’t bring your girls back?” he asked. “Mildred? Agatha, and…”

  “Concepción.” It was nice of him, she thought, to have remembered some of her daughters’ names. “My daughters will come back if I cure cancer,” she said. “I mean, who wouldn’t? And you’re not supposed to use magic to make people do things they don’t want to do.”

  “How do you know?” Harker asked. “And maybe, secretly, they want to do them.”

  He touched her hair in that way he had. She loved it but nevertheless moved his fingers back to where they’d do more good.

  sss

  It was time to try a few things. She took one of the poles she hadn’t sold from behind the couch and dragged it to the middle of the floor. She stared at it, thinking hard. The pole levitated a couple of inches. Not for long. Less than a minute.

  “Impressive,” her elder son said. Serena started; she hadn’t heard him come in. It frightened her; what if one of the neighbours had snuck in? “But what is the point?” Blake asked. “It’s like bending spoons. What are you supposed to do with a bent spoon? All the same, try placing a spoon beside the pole, or on it, and send that thought.”

  “The magic amplifies the power of the thought?” she asked. “Is that how you think the technology works?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, blowing his blonde bangs off his forehead. He went to the dark little kitchen at the end of the house and came back with a handful of spoons. They sat together on the fraying broadloom, examining their sorry excuse for cutlery. “In our house,” Blake said, “the challenge is finding a spoon that isn’t bent before the experiment even starts.”

  “Indeed,” Serena said, accepting the spoon he offered. It was a nice straight one, sterling even and not plate. “Don’t tell Harker,” she added, watching the spoon she’d laid on top of the carved log float, eerily, a couple of inches into the air.

  “I thought it was supposed to bend,” Blake said.

  “Is that the thought you sent?” she asked.

  “Isn’t it what you sent?” Blake asked.

  She looked at him.

  “Are we going to start arguing about whose thoughts are more powerful?” he asked, laughing. She wanted to hug Blake, and would have, except he was fifteen, an awkward stage. He thought his friends would snicker if they saw, and probably some of them would.

  “Jake is ill,” Blake said, changing the subject. “We’re not sure what it is.”

  “Bronchitis? Strep?”

  “Pneumonia? Maybe all of them.” Blake gave his mother a look. It was imploring, like Harker’s look the time she hadn’t let him keep a pole. It was this pole, in fact, that she hadn’t let him keep. It was barely engraved at all, except for the little circles and sprinkles of leaves at one end.

  Why hadn’t she let Harker keep the pole? It wasn’t too late. She could give it back to him. Or she’d sell it for him, if that was what he wanted.

  “They’re like my leaves,” he’d said.

  “Can I go see him?” she asked. Jake had always been tiny. She and the doctor hadn’t noticed during the years when the children had seemed uncountable on top of unmanageable, and they’d more or less expected Jake to be small because he was the youngest. She shouldn’t have ever asked him to go into the cold river, not Jake. And she wouldn’t have except he’d been pissing his life away, playing video games. As if theirs being the only working computer in the whole village wasn’t evidence enough of the pointlessness of the endeavour. But no, little Jake loved shooting things. She wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d shot the occasional real thing, a beaver or wild turkey they could eat as a change from Harker’s geese, which she’d stopped declining. Sadly, Jake only shot onscreen things, mostly bad guys, and, when he could, level bosses. He was smart and she’d have sent him to school so he could follow in his errant father’s footsteps but there weren’t many loans now, and she couldn’t afford medical school, even if she remortgaged the house. The sustainable building school was close by and not so pricey. Maybe she’d tucked enough money away selling poles for him to go to that.

  “He’s staying at Sue’s,” Blake said. “He’s so sick I can’t move him.”

  Serena sighed. “Take the pole,” she said. “Lay it beside him when he sleeps. Wish.”

  “Is that enough?” Blake asked.

  “Whose thoughts are more powerful, didn’t you ask? Make yours strong. Tell Jake to wish too. He can sleep holding it. It’s extremely powerful, the most powerful stick I have ever found.”

  “There are no carvings,” Blake said. “I didn’t notice before. Why did you even bring it home? I thought the more carvings there were the more magic there was.”

  “There are,” she said, showing Blake the leaves. “Just different. Harker picked it. It doesn’t matter that it’s not very carved. Look at the crud on it. The most magic ones are all covered with crud.” She brushed the wood lightly. “See, it’s hard to get off. And it’s not that the sand and leaves are damp, or
the pole. It’s the magic. It’s a magnetic force of some sort, but it can also do things. Like levitate the poles.”

  She was sure of it now; just spending time with the poles had been a way of learning about them, as if by osmosis. Just having them in her house had changed her. Serena wondered whether she had made a mistake in selling them.

  “How much gold would you have gotten for this stick?” Blake asked.

  She looked at him. “If I told you, would you sell it now or save your brother?”

  Blake said, “It’s got to be worth a lot, or you wouldn’t have said that. My brother might die anyway. The stick might not save him.”

  “Sell it after he dies, if you think that.” And she gave him the pole.

  Would they come tonight or tomorrow night? What would she tell the cowled and hooded men? I have no more magic for you. What if no more poles came, ever? She had to keep the few she had left. Practise and learn.

  She wondered what the buyers used them for. Magic imprinted so easily. Down the street, Sue and her parents and Blake would coax Jake to get up for a few moments. They would drink apple cider, one of the big bottles, not one of the small ones, and eat goose they’d bought from Harker.

  When Blake had gone to Sue’s dragging the leafy pole behind him, Harker came back and led her to the bedroom. The house was empty, her sons out, the way both he and the buyers liked it best.

  “I want things,” Harker said, removing the butcher’s apron stained with goose blood.

  “Which things?” Serena asked.

  “Many things,” he said, and she began them, running her hands through his lichen.

  sss