Beloved Mother

by Laura Hunter

Granny picked up the child and carried her to the porch. “This’ll burn,” she said as she sat her on the boards. “Turn loose your arm.”

  Lily shook her head.

  Granny pried the child’s fingers off the cut. “Not bad,” she said, “but you’ll have a good scar.”

  Lily glanced at Granny’s scars then at the slice in her arm.

  “Not like mine,” she said as she stretched out Lily’s arm. She tilted the kerosene can to pour the coal oil over the wound. Lily pulled against Granny’s clutch and whimpered.

  “Hold still.” She drizzled a thin stream into the cut. “Great Spirit will not be pleased if you disobey.”

  Sister Sun flares. “How dare she scare that baby like that? I’m going to tell.”

  “Stay out of it,” says Brother Moon. “Great Spirit knows what to do.”

  “Just one more time,” Sister Sun threatens. “That baby’s my responsibility. Great Spirit said so.”

  Silent tears streaked the dirt on Lily’s face.

  “Enough of that,” Granny said. She slipped the bloody dress over Lily’s head, took Lily by the hand and led her inside. Anna had not moved. Granny sat Lily on the table in her underpants. She dabbed flue soot into the cut. She stripped a dishrag and bound the cut. Knotting the muslin, she said, “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  Granny trimmed the blood from the hunk of cheese and put a slab on a tin plate she took from the shelf. While Lily ate, Granny prepared a dose of belladonna berry juice for Anna. With Lily fed and Anna now asleep, Granny wrapped the unclad child in her summer shawl and rocked Lily into an exhausted sleep.

  The next morning, Granny climbed the rise to add more kerosene to growth surrounding her cedar. Exhilarated that she had marked the center of her worship site, she strolled down the road to Boone Station and knocked on Anna Goodman’s door. Lily was three years old.

  “Winds say you need me,” she said, her chin high. “And I need to see to the child.”

  Chapter 17

  Anna yearned for something or someone to believe in, something other than God’s wrath. She met the granny at the door. “I need an angel,” she said, her face downcast.

  “I ain’t no angel. Not much more than a fool,” the granny said. “I’ll try to heal your miseries, and I’ll keep the girl so you can mend.” She stepped inside the room. “I brought herbs and such for a start.” She set her black valise on Anna’s table. “You got to trust.” Without waiting for an answer, Granny Slocomb took out her mortar and pestle, dropped St. John’s wort into the bowl and ground it to a powder. She sprinkled the powder into a cup of hot water and commanded Anna to drink. “You want to be better, you got to believe.”

  “How did you know?” Anna asked. “I mean, what to bring?”

  “They’s ways,” Granny Slocomb said.

  The coming of the granny did not relieve Anna’s misery. Granny later came with a pottery bowl so small Lily could hold it in one hand. Light cedar incense, Granny insisted, would ease Anna’s grief. The smoldering crushed chips only made the room smell of stove ash and trees. The odor choked Anna.

  Daily doses of St. John’s wort left Anna tired and dizzy. She staggered back and forth across the room. In a few days, she could not drink enough water to wet her mouth. She became restless and paced the floor while Lily was with the granny. Anna walked on the edge of panic, fearing that something grotesque would emerge from the forest and break through the door. Hopelessness moved in and complicated Anna’s depression.

  Gabe came once each week with supplies from the commissary. He tried to revive Anna by relaying what he heard from Rafe. But Anna needed more than Gabe’s words. More than the heft of a gold bracelet on her arm. What little wisdom she gave herself credit for having told her that nothing she could do would be enough for Winston. Winston was Winston.

  But Anna couldn’t let go. This time of despair. Moving Lily to Boone Station dogged her. “Gabe,” she said, “I failed Lily. I brought her up here away from people. No children to play with. At least in the camp, she had Jason.”

  “No,” Gabe said. “She’ll be fine here among all Turtleback can give.” He reached out and patted Anna’s knee. “Don’t you worry none. Sometimes what you find outside is better than them you meet inside.”

  “I don’t miss Breakline. It laid a heavy burden on me.” She took Gabe’s hand. “But it’s my burden to bear, not my child’s.”

  “Now you need to stop thinking ’bout them catty miners’ wives. They lord it over anybody they can.”

  Anna laughed. “I expected them to spit in my face.” She dropped her chin. “Or maybe it was just me hiding from all I done.”

  “You ain’t done nothing worse than nobody else has done,” Gabe said. “Everybody’s got ghosts in their closet.”

  “You are a good man, Gabe Shipley,” Anna said. “I hope my Lily can find a man as good as you one day.”

  Gabe took back his hand and grinned. “Well, I couldn’t beat having a wife like her.”

  “Gabe Shipley is waiting for Lily to grow,” says Brother Moon.

  “What? You snooping now instead of me?” Brilliant white mare’s tail clouds provided little separation between Sister Sun and the azure sky.

  “You’re as blind as a stump, Sister Sun. He’s had his eye on Lily since she was a lap-baby.”

  “Don’t be nasty, you old rock you. Who told you that you can make judgments about Great Spirit’s people?” says Sister Sun. “Besides that’s usually my argument.”

  “Nobody had to tell me. This is not right.”

  “Why can’t a man love a child? Like a father, maybe. She’s not got a father.”

  “Is that what he’s doing?”

  “Sure.” Sister Sun raises the temperature on the Gobi Desert.

  “I still think we should talk to Great Spirit about it,” Brother Moon insists.

  “Why do you think he doesn’t know already?” She stirs up a twister to twirl eddies on the sand dunes.

  “Who knows what Great Spirit knows? Why are you arguing? You’re the one who always wants to jump in the fire.”

  “Ha. Ha. You’re funny.”

  “I’m going to talk to Great Spirit. At least ask him to watch Gabe. He’s too old to be so smitten with this child.”

  “Better you than me,” says Sister Sun. “I always get a scolding when I interfere.”

  Anna needed peace, especially at night. In the darkness she relived Clint’s death. She questioned whether Clint had suspected something and actually stepped into the truck’s path. Other times she asked how deep the truck driver had slipped his hand into Winston’s pocket when Winston gave him the word. Winston had deep pockets whenever he needed them. The Winston Anna thought she knew early on told her Winston would not pay to have Clint killed. But the other Winston? Had she initiated Clint’s death? Had she put Winston into such a vice that he had no other choice? She had fought this battle with herself early on. She continued to lose.

  Anna grew worse. Granny Slocomb brought more tea, stronger tea, and Anna drank it without question. She knew it was God’s will that she suffer. With Lily roaming the forest with the granny every day, Anna could listen to the absence of voices only so long before she shuffled to bed. Nights she lay awake asking herself the same questions and fought against a vision of Winston that materialized in the moonlight. She searched her memory for a vision of Clint that never appeared.

  Chapter 18

  It was 1949. Summer days, Lily spent hours learning about Turtleback and its gifts with the granny. Summer nights, Lily kept a jar of fireflies stolen from bushes at dusk to keep evil away. The jar, refilled each evening, rested on the slat table by the front window. Each morning, Lily found the bottom of the jar covered with dead insects. The fact that the dead bugs didn’t shine bothered her in a way she did not understand. Still, lack of understanding did not prevent her capturing more lightning bugs. In the darkness, comfort came from what bit of glimmer they provid
ed.

  Granny initiated a ritual with Lily. Each Wednesday she took Lily up the high ridge. “Going to save a sacred tree,” Granny said on the first trip. Though not yet five years old, Lily realized they were on a path she had not traveled before.

  “How?”

  “It’s a magic oil in this here can.” Granny sloshed the can so Lily could hear that it was not empty. “You are going to help me and the tree.”

  “The wind says there’s magic. Does Gabe and Mama know?”

  “No. This is our tree. You don’t tell nobody where it is or what it’s for.”

  Lily puffed from the climb. “What’s it for, this tree?”

  “It’s a sacred tree meant to honor Great Spirit. He controls what happens in our lives.”

  “I thought Mama did that.”

  “She does for some things, but Great Spirit decides the big things like who lives and who dies, so we have to show him honor by growing him a perfect cedar. And I found the right one.” At the top of the ridge stood a thin cedar. It towered over Lily at twice her height. But it was skinny, so skinny it looked sickly. Lily walked around the tree. “It don’t look so special to me,” she said.

  “It will. It’s them other trees that are squeezing it out,” Granny said. “We got to give it room. Room for Sister Sun.” Granny screwed the potato off the can’s spout and poured greasy oil around the base of a tree beside the cedar. “Come over her and help me,” she said. “You got to say this prayer when you pour: ‘Great Spirit, give your sacred tree her ground. Destroy what stands in her way. We honor you, Great Spirit, with this magnificent tree’.”

  Walking bent over in what she perceived as reverence, Lily poured the stinky liquid around the surrounding trees. Ignoring the burn to her nose, Lily chanted Granny’s prayer at each trunk. “Great Spirit,” she said. “You are a tree.” She inhaled a breath. Not sure of what came next, Lily stopped pouring. She tried again, saying without taking a breath “Stand by my tree.” Before she finished, she had learned to pinch her nose together to keep out the smell. Holding her nose made her prayer chant into a whine, but Lily didn’t mind. After dousing the last tree, she stood upright and puffed out her chest. She had honored Great Spirit.

  “When will they die, the trees?”

  “In time,” said the granny. “Give it time.”

  “Brother Moon, do you think Great Spirit will be mad if I send out a bolt of radiation to strike down this crone?” asks Sister Sun.

  “Better tend to your own business is what I say,” answers Brother Moon.

  “Were you tending to your business when you let Rafe appear nights at the woman’s back door in Breakline?” Sister Sun demands. “Were you tending to your business when you told Great Spirit that I was late coming over the mountain that night her husband was killed?” Sister Sun glows orange with anger. “Now he blames me, and I never wanted that kind of killing power.”

  “I was not sending Rafe to that house. It had to be that mountain granny doing that. She sells spells, you know. Besides, you’re the sun. You’ve always had power of life over death and death over life. What’s wrong with you? Is your core low on helium?”

  Sister Sun shoots a solar flare in his direction and says, “My helium is fine. Leave me alone.”

  Within two months, Lily could trek the route to the cedar alone, her shoulders straight with pride. She carried the heavy kerosene can, switching from hand to hand, happy to be entrusted with the sanctity of the cedar.

  On an autumn day that same year, the echo of metal hammering on metal resounded throughout the forest. Lily sought out the source. She found the granny squatted in damp leaves beneath an oak, its trunk more than twice as thick as Lily’s waist. Beside the granny lay an iron spike and a hammer. Before Lily could speak, the granny pounded the spike deep into the trunk. Lily plopped down beside her. Near the protruding spike was a hole, beneath it a deep dent in the bark. Lily counted four holes before they ringed around the trunk and out of sight.

  “What’re you doing?” Lily asked, as she stuck her thumb into the nearest hole.

  The granny reversed the hammer and braced its head against the trunk. The spike screeched against the oak’s core as the hammer dug into the bark. She did not speak until the trunk released the spike. Loss of the spike’s resistance took her momentum and dropped her back on the ground.

  “Killing this tree,” she answered. She moved the spike over a few inches, screwed up her lips and hammered again.

  “Why? It’s a nice old tree.” Lily flicked a bit of loose bark from the hole. “It don’t seem too close to our cedar.”

  “Great Spirit’s cedar. Not ours. And he says it has to die,” the granny said.

  “He did not.” Sister Sun spits her words out with a fiery tongue. “I’m telling Great Spirit.” She vanishes behind popcorn clouds.

  “Why not cut it down, instead of making it suffer all winter before it dies?” Lily frowned.

  “The cedar is the chosen one. It must live.” The granny pulled out her spike. “This oak rots within. It will die on its own, in its own time. By then, the cedar will be stunted and misshapen. Great Spirit would be disappointed in us.”

  “If you have to kill it, why not let Great Spirit hit it with lightning or use Gabe’s axe? Then it won’t take so long for it to die.” The concept of destroying what seemed valuable refused to register with Lily. This white oak provided constant shade, never dropping its leaves even in winter, to make soft ground so earthworms could eat soil and open the earth to fresh air. It produced acorns for deer. Lily had examined its leaf with its five fingers and thought of the white oak as her sister. It stood tall, a mammoth tribute to the power of Great Spirit.

  “It’s bigger and prettier than the cedar,” Lily said. “Great Spirit might like it better.”

  “Ever’ place has its own life-force. Here is the place of the cedar.” Granny continued, “This way is better.” The granny pointed with her forefinger, “See that nest up there?”

  Lily recognized the cluster of leaves secure within the fork of two branches. “Baby squirrels,” she said.

  “Cut down the tree and the nest will go.” She inched the spike to a new location. “If I kill the tree, no squirrels will nest here.” The granny kept her face on the deep punctures running horizontally around the tree’s base. “No baby squirrels.”

  “What about the mother squirrel?” Lily asked. “Don’t she matter?”

  The granny paused, her hammer midair. “With no young, the mother will move to another tree.” She dropped her hammer. “Make a better life for herself.”

  Lily tilted her head.

  “We must accept the way of Great Spirit. He knows everything. He judges us by what we do.”

  “Can I try?” Lily asked.

  The granny placed the hammer and spike in Lily’s hands and smiled. “Don’t tell your mama,” Granny said. “She might not want you hammering such a spike the size of this here.”

  Lily noticed that the granny no longer smiled when she talked about her mama knowing what they were doing.

  Anna and the granny were alike, but not the same. Both loved Lily, but for different reasons. For Anna, Lily was her child, her one piece of Winston Rafe. For the granny, Lily was her hope for a true Beloved Mother to come.

  Anna never thought about the granny training her child. Numbed by her loss of faith in Winston, she lived a life of rationalization. A belief in the Cherokee way, even if perverted, could be no more damaging than loss of faith in the word of another. The Cherokee belief might be better for her child.

  The sun rose, the sun set. Oak and hemlock, green and cool, larger than the house itself, cast shades that fertilized mosses growing heavy on wooden roof shingles. The moon moved through its phases without fail. Rain washed poison green water out of the old abandoned mine shaft near Boone Station and filled the ditch that bordered the road between the house and a tall bluff. A new season moved up the mountain. Nights were colder and the morning sun came later over
the mountain. Gabe came every Monday with supplies and news for Anna. He brought laughter for Lily.

  One day with no warning, Lily’s childish laughter, partnered with Gabe’s throaty chuckles, spoke to Anna. She stepped out, raked leaves from the cisterns and, using her shovel, scraped away moss. Turtleback’s stream poured in fresh, cold water again. It pooled, transparent, reflecting the colors of surrounding hardwoods, as it had for her ancestors.

  Anna still argued with herself about Winston. Never did she question the power of the drinks Granny gave her. She accepted the nights spent awake and the days grasping chairs against a fall. She laid cool rags on her head to relieve constant headaches. This was her yoke, and she must accept its weight. Each day she drank the granny’s brew.

  If her God had wanted her to know the truth, why did he leave it to her to search out the answer? God had spoken to Moses through a burning bush. He had sent an angel to fight with Jacob so he could know the truth. If God had wanted her to see the real Winton Rafe, she would have seen him.

  The season gradually changed from the lushness of summer to royal colors of fall. Fall brought with it a specter of Winston Rafe. Each time he appeared, he was outside the house. She understood that he was a ghost conjured to tease her. He stood afar to her left and did not move. He watched her, but Anna was not sure why. She accepted that he was there in spirit only, for she realized she was no longer a priority in his life. He never emerged at the foot of the bed or within the house.

  Later, when winter had Anna housebound, she glanced up and there he was, close, watching her through the windowpane. A faint spirit. He was as she remembered him. His smile, in some undefined way, strangely like Gabe’s. His dark eyes and rumpled hair. Remote, yet close enough for her to smell his cigarette smoke. Each time he appeared, she walked to the door to see if his Buick waited outside Boone Station. It never did. Nor did he.