Beloved Mother

by Laura Hunter

  Kee Granny laughed her scars into wrinkles. “Little People. They live in caves and come at night to help you. You need sleep. They bring sleep.” Kee Granny shot out a glob of snuff spittle off to the side. “Kind-hearted and great wonder workers, they are. Very gentle.”

  “No. I hear one voice,” Lily insisted. “Only one voice.”

  “Then it’s them Dogwood People.” Kee Granny stroked Lily’s hair. “They expect that if you do something for someone, do it out of goodness of your heart. You’re doing that for your mama. It’s come to soothe you.”

  Lily looked across to the smokehouse where Briar stayed. “If they can help, why haven’t they healed my mama?” She shifted her head to face the granny. “Why haven’t you healed my mama?”

  Kee Granny rested her hand on Lily’s shoulder, holding her down. After a long thinking time, she spoke. “She can’t be healed, child.” She spoke, her voice low.

  “What do you mean? You can heal.” Lily narrowed her eyes and tried to shrug Kee Granny’s hand off her shoulder. “You’re Beloved Mother.”

  Kee Granny stared at the horizon. A reddish sun lay low against the treetops, changing their green to deep ebony. Lily heard Kee Granny swallow before she spoke. “She can’t be healed. Her mind and body, they’s no harmony with her spirit.” The granny waited a minute and added, “She’s soul-sick. ‘Heart sick,’ some call it. They ain’t no cure for that.”

  Lily raised her voice. “What are you talking about? Is this some Cherokee trick?”

  Kee Granny flinched. “Your mama’s got a burden, a burden of a size that haunts her.” She struck Lily with another fact. “She walks with a rock of knowing in her shoe. Ever time she moves she’s reminded, so she’ll one day soon stop trying to walk from the pain of it. The debt won’t be paid, but she won’t feel the pain no more.”

  Lily jerked from under the granny’s hand, stood and glared at her. “I don’t believe you,” she spit out. “You can heal her.”

  “You must believe. Else you’ll never be Beloved Mother,” Kee Granny’s voice sounded drained.

  “I don’t want to be a Beloved Mother.” Lily’s shrill voice carried down the trail toward Rattler’s den. “If I can’t heal Mama, why should I be Beloved Mother?”

  Kee Granny placed her arms around Lily. “You got to be Beloved Mother so you can make life better for women who need you.” She let her head fall on Lily’s shoulder. “They ain’t got nobody else.”

  Lily dragged her feet as she returned to Boone Station. Her shoulders drooped under the burden of this new knowledge. But she knew herbs. She knew cures. Perhaps the time had come for her to heal her mother.

  The next day promised to be a hot July day. Lily left early to buy more herbs. She would make a stronger potion herself, if it called for it. She passed Rattler on the trail, sunbathing in his trunk hollow. He lay so still, he did not look real. She considered touching him but decided he might vanish if she came too close. Leave him be. He may have a power Lily didn’t recognize.

  At Flatland, she eased around the back of the church, calling for Kee Granny. No one answered. She glanced around, trying to rid herself of the feeling that someone watched her. Lily looked at the sun. Almost noon. Lily recalled Kee Granny would be at her cedar mid-day, praying and chanting to the Great Spirit.

  Behind the church, at an earlier time, someone had built a little room, smaller by half than the old sanctuary. Boards zigzagged across two windows, one on each side of the room. Its slant tin roof directed rain so close to the plank wall that a narrow ditch isolated the little room from the grassy area, much like a shallow moat.

  Lily stepped inside the old church. She had been here before, but she had never gone into the back room. Lily glanced about for an entrance to the lean-to. The sanctuary ceiling sloped right and left, from a single rafter that extended from the front door to above a small platform where a pulpit once stood.

  Against one wall, the board bed where Kee Granny slept held a frayed Cherokee blanket. Lily walked over to Kee Granny’s heavy wooden worktable. Morning sunlight reflected streaks of reds and greens and browns through bottles of liquids across the tabletop. As she ran her fingers over the jars and bottles, her foot bumped a jug under the table. She nudged the jug back in place. Its label read Alcohol, and under that One Gallon. Kee had never had her use alcohol in preparing a cure.

  Lily rubbed one hand over the glass globe of a kerosene lantern that sat in the middle of the table. The globe was full, ready to be lit. Next to the lantern lay the worn leather book Kee used for her recipes. Lily flipped through the pages. The Cherokee words scribbled across the pages looked like worms, words Lily could not read.

  Kee loved the book. When she picked it up, she caressed it and hugged it to her bosom as if it were a living thing. She had long ago given up her glasses. Lily could barely remember them. Kee would open the cover, bend over and place her nose so close to the page it seemed she sniffed out a cure. Lily closed the book with a pat. It could not help her.

  Across the room were two low shelves with different sized crockery bowls aligned by size, their rims bordered in cobalt blue and pink. Inside each bowl rested a different plant, leaves or blooms, waiting to be processed. Lily lifted the pestle and pretended to grind a mixture in the mortar. The pestle’s wooden surface had been worn as smooth as a new leaf. She wrapped her index finger into a loop for holding the mortar steady. Her finger froze. The marble bowl felt as cold as the stream behind Boone Station when high mountain melted snow made its way south.

  Putting the pestle aside, she walked to a side window. On the windowsill, in small tin cans, grew a variety of green-leafed plants, plants Lily could not remember using before. She pinched a bit off one plant and tasted. Its bitterness pouted her lips. Bitter, it was. Bitter as green persimmon. She scraped her tongue with her fingernails so she would not gag. She examined the plant closer. It was the plant Kee Granny had warned her against touching when she had come earlier for her mama’s herbs.

  The room was hot. Lily’s eyes circled the room looking for a drink of water. Checking the room for a bucket and dipper, she realized something was not right. Something was missing. An iron stove for heat and cooking. The bed. The table. A chair. Shelves. Kee Granny’s long brown dresses hanging on wall pegs, dresses she called her “woods roaming dresses.” A quilt hung next to the pegs, at the opposite end of the room from the door.

  The quilt. A crazy quilt, a quilt made up of irregular cloth pieces, none the same, neither color nor shape. Someone had sewn pieces together with a chicken scratch stitch that danced around each piece in an orange frenzy. A crazy quilt, made especially warm with woolen scraps, would not hang on the wall. It would be on the bed, a necessity not meant for display. It was so like the one she and Anna slept under that it could have been made by the same hand. But here it was. A quilt hanging where a window or door should be.

  Every house Lily had ever been in had cross ventilation, with a window or door directly across from another so that breezes could catch an opening and move through the room. There was no window opposite the entrance door, nor was there a door. Thick nails attached the quilt to the wall below the gabled ceiling. Lily stepped up on the dais and patted the quilt.

  “Come here quick,” Sister Sun calls. “Come here, Great Spirit.”

  The quilt moved as if it breathed. Lily lifted a corner. There it was. The opening. A door frame, rather than a window.

  Great Spirit floats in from the USSR where he has watched the Russians launch two dogs into space. “I’ll have them back in eight days. They won’t kill two of my best creations. I’ll see to that. Sending living beings into space. Humph. These won’t be the last,” he grumbles. “Man will try and try until he manages to kill an entire spaceship of travelers. Never learn.” He kicks a southern wind out of his path. “They never learn.”

  Lily peeped behind the quilt and stepped onto a dropped landing. Behind the quilt, she felt her way down a railing that guarded seven stairs. Heavy p
lanking nailed against windows on each sidewall darkened the room.

  Sister Sun cannot stay still. “Come here, Great Spirit,” she repeats. “This is not going to be good.”

  Lily steadied her eyes and caught her breath. At one window, she slid a board aside so light could enter. The nail holding the board in place screeched a complaint at being disturbed. A sliver of sunlight sliced across the floor, capturing dust motes in its path.

  “Can’t you stop her?” Sister Sun asks.

  “Not necessary. Knowledge never hurt a body.” Great Spirit floats off toward the East. “Catch me at the All-Star Baseball Game in Kansas City. I need a break from all this.”

  In the middle of the room on a small wooden platform, sat what had once been a black Edwardian rocker. The rockers were gone and the legs nailed to the platform so the chair could not move. Brown wooden arms, laid bare by gripping hands and clawing fingernails, contrasted with the chair’s black paint.

  Lily edged closer. In the center of the seat was a hole, a hollow that opened to a blue and white speckled enamel wash pan resting on the platform. Lily touched the pan. It moved, free of the platform, as if waiting to be filled. Aha, Lily thought, a fancy slop jar Kee Granny or Briar made.

  The back wall held a wide shelf. On it, stacked thick, glass to glass, were capped jars, all full. Some with whitish, some with grayish, some with glob-like things floating in clear liquid. She came closer. A snippet of paper lay at the base of each jar, each with a name scribbled in pencil. Betty June Lawler. Inez Whitson. Pernnecie Arnold. Lily passed over the names, looking for someone she knew. Juanita White. And another Juanita White further down the shelf. Her mama’s friend from Breakline Camp. Jason’s mother. It had been so long since she had last seen Jason. Not since she stopped school in the sixth grade.

  More fascinating than the names was what each jar held. Lily picked up a small jar and shook it. Air bubbles jiggled up and down. Inside, what seemed to be a large dry lima bean sloshed back and forth. In another was a larger bean, misshapen in a way that looked like it had eye bulges and almost a nose. Somebody had wrapped it in something, cheesecloth maybe, for it was whiter than the first bean. She touched a jar near the back. Its lid moved. She turned the jar ring and slid her fingernail under the lid to break the seal. The stench took Lily’s breath. Liquid rotted fish. Lily gagged and screwed the ring back in place.

  Behind this jar set a larger jar. Lily had to pull up a stool and climb to get to the back row. The larger jars on the back crammed against each other, all too heavy for Lily to lift. She slid the first row out and scanned the back row, jar after jar. More detailed, whatever floated inside these jars looked like what Lily imagined a ghost should be. This one, almost as long as her forearm. That one had what looked like two legs. This one, the biggest yet, held its skinny elbows together, covering what seemed to be a face. Beneath the edge of this jar lay a paper with the name scratched in pencil. Anna Parsons Goodman. Her mama’s name.

  It was science class all over again with frogs and snakes on the back shelf. But these were not frogs and snakes, but something very, very different. Something that should not be. Not at Kee Granny’s. Beloved Mother’s purpose was to save lives, not take lives.

  The reality of what she had before her struck so hard Lily could not breathe. She jumped off the stool and fell to the floor. The faces and bodies in these jars could not belong to her Kee. Briar must live in this room. Her Kee Granny would not stay in such a room. Her mama would not be in this room with rows of misshapen globs of flesh. It must be a hoax, set up to deceive her.

  She rolled over and stood up. Backing away, she struck the black chair that now overpowered the room. When she hit the chair, she took hold of herself and ran. Out of the church. Down the footpath. Past Rattler’s hollow trunk. It stood empty.

  When she got near Boone Station, she skidded down to the stream. She splashed her face and lowered her feet into icy water. She sat on the bank, waiting for her body to stop shaking, her heart to stop pounding. Within a moment, Lily heaved and vomited into the stream.

  It had not been real. It was a waking nightmare. She would forget what she thought she had seen.

  “You think she’ll be back?” Sister Sun asks Brother Moon.

  “Leave her alone,” Brother Moon says. “Why can’t you do what Great Spirit tells you? He’s likely to sling you off into some other universe.”

  “He’d never do that to me. I’m his sun.”

  “Humph. You’re not the only star in the sky,” says Brother Moon. “You should go over to Orion and see Betelgeuse. Now there’s a real sun.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, and you can’t make me,” says Sister Sun.

  “Then leave her alone.”

  Chapter 30

  Lily could not recall the day of the week when it happened. She did remember that the year was 1961 when it happened in June, Granny’s Month of the Green Corn Moon. She did remember the sound of heavy crockery breaking behind her. She turned to find Anna on the floor, a crockery bowl shattered. Raw eggs seeped across boards and dripped through cracks. Anna shuttered. And shuttered again. Lily grabbed her mama and sat her up. A milky substance thrust itself out of Anna’s mouth, and Anna closed her eyes.

  Lily shook Anna until she opened her eyes. She dragged her to the bed, all the time talking, talking, trying to call her mama back. When Anna didn’t speak, Lily ran, without thinking, for Kee Granny.

  Kee Granny brought her supplies. She carried the satchel she had brought from the Carolina Mountains. She pulled back Anna’s eyelids and put her ear to Anna’s chest, but she did not concoct a brew. “Leave her lie. Let her know you’re here.” She closed her black valise, now so worn it was grey in spots. “She seen the other side and she wants to go.”

  Lily choked. “I don’t understand. Why?”

  “Your mama knows, but she ain’t saying. Our job’s to make her path easy. That’s all.”

  Lily rushed for the porch and stared toward the chimney. “Did you see her spirit mist?” she called through the open door. “Did you? If her spirit mist is not there, you can fix her.” Lily shut the door. “You’re Beloved Mother. You know things.” She grabbed Kee Granny by the shoulders and shook her until Kee Granny’s head bobbed back and forth. Lily stopped when she saw the granny’s face. Weariness? Shame? Lily could not decide. Tears ran down the scars and disappeared into Kee Granny’s open mouth.

  “Kee Granny? Tell me.” The granny’s face seemed cut into two parts. Lily was not sure now an answer was worth this. She brought the granny to her shoulder and held her.

  “I ain’t no Beloved Mother. And I shore ain’t the Beloved Mother,” Kee Granny spoke tentatively into Lily’s ear.

  “But you’re Cherokee,” Lily rationalized.

  “Maybe a part of me’s been Cherokee once. But nobody never made me no Beloved Mother.”

  “But you’ve said so all these years. . . and you made Mama brews and potions and rattled the gourd and danced the rabbit dance.” Lily’s voice fell as she spoke. “Great Spirit talks to you.”

  “I never said Great…” Her voice broke.

  Lily interrupted her. “You taught me…” She could not have said if the tears she felt were hers or Kee Granny’s, so close to each other they stood. Lily pushed Kee Granny back so she could see her face.

  Kee Granny kept her eyes to the floor. “They’s those who knows more than most. They’s the ones who decide.”

  “Did they make the scars?”

  “Scars? These?” She ran her hand down her cheek. “Oh, no. No, Lily. No more than your own arm scar. A white man done this. No. My Cherokee man was a good man.” Granny Slocomb plopped heavy onto the floor.

  Lily glared at nothing. Numbness draped itself over her like a thunder-filled cloud and her knees weakened. She dropped to the floor beside Kee Granny. Outside a woodpecker looking for grubs thumped his hard head against a hollow tree. “And the cedar? The one for Great Spirit?”

  Granny answered with
a slight shake of her head. “You can’t not believe, Lily. Not Great Spirit. He exists in every living thing.”

  “Lies?” she whispered. “It’s all been lies?”

  “What’s true depends on who’s saying it, I reckon.” Granny’s voice drained quieter with each word. “Believe anything strong enough and long enough, it becomes true.”

  Lily’s spirit shattered into little bits of nothing. “Why?” Lily wanted a truth to be a firm truth, not something defined by the believer.

  “Sometimes it takes a life to give a life.” Granny held up a hand as if asking Lily to help her rise.

  Lily rose instead. “Who told you that?” She leaned over the mound on the floor. “You taught me all things are one. It’s Beloved Mother’s job to preserve.”

  Kee Granny lifted herself up on her knees in an attempt to face Lily. “A body believes what it will. What it wants to.”

  “What were you giving her?” Lily backed away. “My mama?”

  The granny rose, her eyes now coal black. “Belladonna.” She shuffled toward the door.

  Lily knew there was more. “And foxglove,” Lily demanded. “Did you give her foxglove?”

  “A mite.” Kee Granny gripped the doorknob.

  “Foxglove. My God. You’ve been killing my mama with foxglove.” Lily dropped into a chair. “You slowed her heart so she can’t live. Why?”

  Kee Granny stepped out on the porch, leaving the door ajar.

  “Get off my porch!” Lily screamed. The veins in her neck throbbed. “Go back to your Great Spirit and his rattling ways.”

  Throughout the night, the recollection of Kee Granny’s moaning as she stepped off the porch and crept away from Boone Station would awaken Lily again and again.