“An’ she finally said aye,” Anna whispered. This—was all too much to take in at once. She knew, of course, that her father didn’t have much use for her, except that she was his, and therefore no one else’s to take. But she had thought her mother cared for her. At least a little bit. But now to discover she hadn’t been wanted at all . . . it was a terrible blow.
“Why’s my Pa so mad at y’all, Aunt Jinny?” she asked, finally, as her aunt picked her mug back up and finished her now-cold tea.
Her aunt chuckled. “’Cause when ’e come rooster-struttin’ around Maybelle, I tol’ ’im to ’is face what I thunk of him. Pride goeth afore a fall, Lew Jones, I tol’ him. Y’all think yore better’n a farmer, cause y’all kin run a steam drill. Thet there steam drill’s a-gonna be the death of y’all. An’ y’all’re gonna leave a widder what owes ev’thin’ she’s got, which ain’t a-gonna be much, t’ the Company store. I tol’ ’im that straight. An’ thet’s what’s a-gonna happen.”
In that moment, Anna might have hated her aunt—except that Jinny didn’t sound triumphant. She sounded weary, resigned, even sad. Like one of the prophets in the Bible who tried to tell people that something terrible was going to happen, and they ignored him, and it happened, and people suffered because they wouldn’t listen to him. And he didn’t exult in their suffering, he grieved because he couldn’t convince them and save them.
“I might’a been a bit hard on ’im,” Jinny added after a very long silence. “The Good Lord knows he’s a-payin’ th’ price fer bein’ a damn-fool now. Them mines eat men an’ spit ’em out t’die afore their time.”
Anna bit her lip. She wanted to ask, “Is my Pa really going to die?” But she knew the answer. Her aunt was right. Everyone knew that when a miner started to get that kind of cough, he was going to die. The owners claimed that breathing coal dust was good for you, that it protected you against things like wasting fever and winter fever, but Anna didn’t believe them, and it was clear her aunt didn’t either.
“Won’t yore potions do him no good?” she asked timidly.
“They’ll do some,” Jinny admitted. “Dunno how much. Yore Ma thinks I kin work some kinda miracle. Ain’t nobody does miracles but God Almighty.” She reached out awkwardly and patted Anna’s hand. “I knowed that were hard t’hear. But I allus think it’s better t’know th’ truth. In the long run, lies’ll hurt y’all more than truth. Now y’all prolly oughta go up t’bed.”
Obediently, Anna undressed at the foot of the ladder to her loft, left her skirt, petticoat, and shirt folded over the side, and put the drawers and chemise in a basket by the sink to be washed tomorrow. As she climbed the ladder to the loft, in a moment of distraction from her woes, she realized that today, on the line beside her own clothing, there’d been a peculiar garment that was a sort of chemise and drawers in one. So that must be what Aunt Jinny wore under her flannel shirt and dungarees.
She said her prayers, especially for Pa, and was sure she never would get to sleep. But she was wrong. After all that work, she fell asleep almost immediately, scarcely noticing the tiny glowing eyes lined up along the rafters, shining in the darkness after Jinny put the candles out. And somehow, her rest was troubled not at all by the revelations of the evening.
* * *
I should be feelin’ bad, she thought, as she donned her clothing for the day. But . . . she wasn’t. It was more like she had always known these things about her Ma and Pa, but just hadn’t wanted to think about them. And now that her nose had been shoved into the truth—what she felt was more a hollow feeling of loneliness and emptiness than anything else. Sad, but not ready to burst into tears. At least, not yet.
Turning the chickens loose and feeding them helped. They were so sweet with their happy little clucks, and the rooster was so funny, strutting around like he was the owner of all he could see. Aunt Jinny told her to sweep the cabin rather than muck out the pigs. “Not sure y’all’s fit to muck out the sty, not till y’all is stronger. I’ll muck, y’all build th’ compost, an’ we’ll do’t arter breakfus’,” was what she said as Anna went out the door. So she came back to the cabin after setting the chickens loose and swept with a will until her aunt called her to eat.
Breakfast helped some more, with bounty she was rapidly becoming accustomed to. This morning there was fried mush, eggs, and sausage, and something brown and clear that Aunt Jinny poured generously over the mush. She noticed Anna was staring at the stuff askance. “’Tis maple syrup, chile,” her aunt told her. “I makes it m’self in spring. Try it. Figgered today y’all should hev some sweet t’ meller out the bitter words y’all got last night.”
One taste, and Anna was in heaven. It wasn’t like honey; it wasn’t like molasses. It was something all to itself and she couldn’t get enough of it. Aunt Jinny watched her eat with amusement.
Did Aunt Jinny even understand remotely how much food had come to mean for Anna? The lack of it was literally sickness and pain, and abundance like this felt like coming home to Heaven.
“If I’da knowed how bad thangs were for y’all,” Jinny said, in soft tones she had never heard out of her aunt before this, “I’da niver left y’all there thet long. I swear. An’ iffen I still couldn’ta got y’all away from that Lew Jones, I’da done more. Sent Maybelle parcels. Food, more thangs she coulda sold. Lookit this!” She waved her hand at the ceiling, and its festoons of smoked meats and fish. “Th’ Holcrofts ’n me already put up parcels fer poor widders in Ducktown. Some o’ thet could go t’ yore Ma. Weren’t hardly no more work t’raise one more pig a year and smoke it up. I’da done it. I would. It hurts m’cold old heart t’think how starved y’all was.”
Anna paused, and looked into her aunt’s eyes, and believed her. She nodded slowly. “Ma don’ like bein’ beholden,” was all she said. “Reckon she figgered makin’ them potions weren’t nothin’ but pickin’ a few weeds and packin’ ’em up and it weren’t no time or trouble t’y’all—and it weren’t like y’all sold them potions over to Soddy yore own self. So thet weren’t makin’ her beholden to y’all.” She scratched her head. “It don’t make no sense, when I say it out loud, but could be thet’s how she’s a-thinkin’. An’ Pa—well, y’all knowed Pa. He’d as likely send it back, or throw it out th’ door, as take it.”
Her aunt muttered something about “damn fools” under her breath.
Just then, a movement out of the corner of her eye caught Anna’s attention, and she turned to see what it was. But there was nothing there. She frowned, remembering the eyes in the rafters. “Aunt Jinny, y’all need a cat.”
Her aunt raised an eyebrow, and then guffawed. “What in tarnation do I need a cat fer?” she retorted.
“Y’all got mice, an’ a powerful lotta them,” she replied, glad to get the subject off her parents. “I seed ’em the fust night I was here, an’ last night too. All lined up on th’ rafters an’ a-lookin’ down at me with liddle shiny eyes.”
Her aunt’s eyebrow stayed where it was. “Didja now? What makes y’all so sure ’twas mice?”
“Dunno what else it could be,” she replied, then bit her lip, because she had come perilously close to contradicting her elder. She put her face down and assiduously finished her mush.
“Wall, there ain’t no mice in my house,” Aunt Jinny stated. “But there’s plenty’o small critters what come in an’ out an’ don’t do no harm.” And she left it at that.
Together they mucked out and fed the pigs. Jinny showed her how to collect the eggs from the nestboxes in the henhouse—and showed her the two hens currently sitting on eggs she was going to allow to hatch. They scrubbed their underwear and hung it to dry, emptied the soapy water into the garden (“Chases slugs,” said Jinny), and she set Anna to weeding. This time she weeded down the side of the garden that had the rows of corn, squash, and beans. She would have thought that the three plants would choke each other out—but they seemed to be thriving together.
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After another amazing dinner, Jinny called her over to the counter. “Y’all wanter be a Root Woman?” she asked abruptly.
Anna was so taken aback for a moment she could scarcely breathe. Did she? Of course she did! Why, as a Root Woman she would never lack for a way to keep herself fed! “Yes, please, ma’am!” she managed to get out, and Aunt Jinny looked pleased. She reached up to a shelf over the counter and took down a little, leather-bound book, one among a handful of books up there. “This here’s my receipts,” she said. “My Granny niver wrote nothin’ down, on account’o she wanted me t’larn things by mem’ry, but I copied ever’thang she taught me right here.” She tapped the cover of the book. “An’ y’all are a-gonna copy my book. Copy a receipt, then we make it t’gether. Then y’all make it on yore lonesome, while I watch.”
She sat Anna down at the table with four pieces of good, thick paper folded in half and stitched together at the crease, a little jar of ink, and a goose-quill pen—and her own all-important book. “Copy down th’ fust receipt,” she ordered. “Don’ use more paper than I used in my book.”
For a moment Anna felt paralyzed. There could be no making mistakes with this good paper and ink. Every letter would have to be perfect. I kin do this, she told herself over and over, but it was a long, long time before she got the courage to dip the quill in the ink, carefully drain off the excess, and write the first letter. With her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth and her brows furrowed with concentration, she dipped and wrote, dipped and wrote, until she had filled the entire page. She had no idea what the words were that she had just written, because she had been so concerned about copying them correctly, but she looked up from her task with triumph when she had finished.
“Done!” she exclaimed, and her aunt left her work at the sink to come look it over.
“Done, an’ done well,” Aunt Jinny agreed. “Now, what’s it say?”
“One part chamomile,” she read, stumbling over the name of the herb. “One part lavender. One part purple coneflower. One part lemon balm. Steep a tablespoon in bilin’ water fer as long as it takes t’ say Psalm 100, strain, an’ drink. Good for gen’ral ills, coughs, an’ bad sleep.”
“Thet’s the tea we been drinkin’,” her aunt told her. “Gen’rally good for whatever liddle troubles y’all got, an’ tastes good too. Now le’s go make it up.”
Her aunt made her look at the samples of fresh herb, gathered from the garden that morning, then the dry, then crumble the dry in her fingers and taste and smell it, until they were both sure she would know what they were in any form. Then she made up the batches of tea, first with her aunt, then alone.
She looked up from the last task to find Aunt Jinny smiling with approval. It was the first smile she had seen on her aunt’s face since she had arrived here, and she found herself blushing with pride.
“Y’all got th’ touch,” Aunt Jinny said. “Le’s put these up.”
Together they portioned out generous amounts to be enclosed in the packets Anna had seen the potions packaged in before—round, unstructured pouches made of woven grass. When the pouch was packed full, all the loose grass stems at the top were gathered into a bunch, and tied up, and Aunt Jinny finished by tying a tiny spig of chamomile and lavender to each packet to identify it. “I weaves these in winter,” she said, pulling one off the stack to her left and filling it with the tea. “When I runs out, I gotta use scrap cloth, an’ people don’ seem ter like that as much. With y’all here, I likely won’t run out anymore.”
Anna had never woven anything in her life, much less a grass basket, but she was willing to try. These things were pretty, and she had used them when very little (during the few moments of the day when she was allowed to play instead of work) as dresses for her corn dollies.
When they had packaged up all the loose tea, they checked to make sure the ink had thoroughly dried in Anna’s “receipt book” before putting it, the bottle of ink, and the cleaned quill up on the same shelf as Aunt Jinny’s book. “Y’all’s gonna do one a day,” Aunt Jinny said with warm approval. “Mostly. There’s a-gonna be days when we ain’t got time, ’specially in fall, and there’s gonna be days when y’all ain’t gonna do it right. And there’s gonna be days when I take y’all out in them woods t’gather. But soon or late, y’all’s gonna hev yore very own receipt book. An’ y’all will be a Root Woman.” She gave Anna a sideways look. “Whatcha think of thet?”
“Niver heerd of no Root Woman goin’ hungry,” Anna said, finally. “But . . . Aunt Jinny, y’all said yore potions cain’t cure ever’thang.”
Her aunt nodded. “No more can they. Y’all does yore best, an’ leave th’ rest t’ God Almighty. Jest like a doctor, on’y I reckon a good Root Woman gits more people cured than a doctor.” She laughed humorlessly. “Leastwise, we don’t kill as many.”
“Ma wanted me took to a doctor an’ got mad when he couldn’ find nothin’,” she ventured.
“Wall, a doctor ain’t a-gonna find what was wrong with y’all,” her aunt said enigmatically. Then she changed the subject. “I’m partial t’somethin’ sweet with supper ternight. Le’s check them strawbs.”
Well the mention of anything sweet was going to get Anna’s attention, and checking the strawberries yielded four big handfuls. “Who’s the neighbors, Aunt Jinny?” she asked, as they brought their harvest, cupped in their aprons, up to the cabin.
“Got two. Got th’ ones as y’all passed comin’ inter th’ holler and ones deeper inter th’ holler. The farm b’longs t’ th’ Holcrofts, an’ like I said, they bought it from my Pa. They’s got six chillun, oldest boy’s Joshua, oldest girl Sue’s ’bout y’all’s age. Deep inter the holler’s Old Raven and Young Raven, an’ I think Young Raven’s wife—I ain’t niver seen ’er, on account of they make thesselves pretty scarce most of the time, but he’s spoke of her a time or twain. An’ some more people I gen’rally don’ see. They’s Cherokee.”
At Anna’s start, her aunt nodded. “I know. They was supposed t’be Removed. But my Granpappy didn’ cotton to thet notion, so when Jackson’s sojers came ’round, he made like he was too stupid t’unnerstand what them sojers wanted. The sojers knocked ’round the woods fer awhile, got thesselves chased off by bears, an’ decided there weren’t no Cherokee in Lonesome Holler at all. Then my Granpappy, he went inter town an’ put the claim on all the holler land soon’s claimin’ was open. Nobody wanted ter mess wi’ him t’make a counter-claim, an’ ever since we all jest pretend there ain’t no Cherokee back thar.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I wunner iffen folks read th’ same Bible as I do; rippin’ famblies off th’ land an’ even farms they’ve had since Methusalem was a pup, an’ all so a buncha greedy layabouts what happens t’be white kin claim it.”
Anna looked at her aunt in shock at such an astonishing statement. Her aunt looked back at her sideways. “Who d’ye think taught my Granny most of what she knowed ’bout bein’ a Root Woman?” Aunt Jinny demanded. “She knowed the plants she brung with ’er t’ Lonesome Holler, but she didn’t know the ones that was already here. ’Twas Old Raven’s granpappy and granny taught ’er, when he saw—” And then, unaccountably, she stopped. “Wall, niver mind. The Ravens be wuth twenty of the no-good layabout white trash that would’a took what they’d made, iffen they’d had thesselves a farm.” She snorted. “Asides, my Granpappy didn’ want none of thet kind around. They don’t put no work in on th’ land, they’s allus borrowin’ an’ niver payin’ back, an’ when it all falls t’pieces they turns up on yore doorstep with six hungry chillun, a-whinin’ an’ a-cryin’ thet they got nothin’ t’eat an’ no wood t’burn an’ fer the love of God let ’em in.”
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