She had a well for running water—although sometimes it ran kind of rusty looking. The propane gas tank out back worked the water heater and fueled the kitchen stove and a teensy refrigerator, but there was no electricity, no phone, no flush toilet. I knew what a privy was, but I’d never seen one till that morning I used hers, and the first time I had to evict a snake from the place before I could go about my business, I gave serious thought to getting back on the highway with my thumb out.
Naturally she didn’t have a car. Never even drove one, she said. After I’d been there with her almost two weeks, she woke me up early one morning and we set off to Florales, dragging this old wooden wagon, to shop for supplies. That was what she called anything she couldn’t grow, find, make, or get in trade for medicines.
I wasn’t very excited about going to town. I was still leery of making myself too conspicuous, but she insisted that she needed my help, since she had to buy twice as much food as usual. Or maybe she was afraid if she left me there alone I’d take her money and run away.
Old Highway 323 stretched out in front of us like a black ribbon winding through an ocean of blue-green greasewood bush with islands of brown-gray grama grass, silvery chamisa, dark filigree globes of tumbleweed. Hawks floated on the thin air, hunting prairie dogs and mice. The soft breeze carried a faint smell of woodsmoke from cooking fires, the screech of a piñon jay.
Cassie wasn’t one for a lot of pointless talking, and for that I was grateful. She walked silently except for the flopping legs of her baggy overalls, her eyes focused on the pavement, watching for potholes and the occasional rattlesnake, snoozing on the warm asphalt. A pickup truck honked as it sped past us and got lost in the orange ball of sun.
When we rattled into Florales, the noise of the wagon’s rickety wheels seemed to echo from one end of town to the other, and the few people out on the street turned to wave when they recognized Cassie.
She gave me the grocery list and sent me into Begay’s while she headed for the hardware store. Stepping over the yellow-brown dog sprawled in the doorway, I looked around the shadowy interior. Delbert, or whatever the guy’s name was, was nowhere to be seen. A Navajo girl about my own age sat on a stool at the cash register head bent over a comic book, straight black hair falling around her face like a curtain.
She didn’t look up when I pulled the dirty handle of an even dirtier shopping cart and started down the first aisle. I grabbed a bag of masa, one of sugar, a tin of coffee and four cans of evaporated milk, a box of rice, a jumbo plastic sack of pinto beans, and then headed toward the refrigerator case for a pound of bacon. There was a stack of newspapers on the floor by the dairy case, and I picked one up. I’d lost all track of time. I didn’t even know what day it was.
The paper was from Española, dated Tuesday, May 27, but the pages looked yellow and tired, like they’d been here a few days. There was a big story about the ongoing drought, another about a bank robbery in Farmington. I flipped the paper over and threw it back on the stack. When I bent over to reach for a package of cheese, my eyes landed on a small headline in the lower right corner of the page, and I froze.
HUNT INTENSIFIES FOR MISSING COLORADO GIRL
I felt this tightness in my chest like I used to always feel if I got called to Ridley’s office. If Cassie saw that, she’d know it was me. She’d find a way to sneak off and call the sheriff, and they’d come take me back to Carson.
Then I read the first paragraph, and my knees just about buckled from guilty relief.
Volunteers joined local authorities here today as efforts continued to locate little Connie Morales, the toddler who wandered away from her family’s camper at Bandelier National Monument yesterday morning. With temperatures expected to dip into the thirties tonight, Sheriff Gus Gilmore voiced fears that the child may already be suffering from exposure and dehydration….
“Don’t dawdle, child.” Cassie’s voice blared, making me drop the paper on the floor. “Put that cheddar back and grab some Long Horn. It’s cheaper.” She reached down for the newspaper and tossed it in the cart. “You got everything else?”
“Yes.” I said weakly. “I mean no. I didn’t get bacon.”
She marched off toward the meat case, leaving me staring after her.
Suddenly it came to me like a singing telegram. Nobody was looking for me. They never had been.
Cassie’s living was mostly in her garden, so that was where she needed my help. Easy to see why she wanted me to stay, never mind enjoying my company. As weeks passed and the sun moved higher in the sky, it needed watering more often. Two barrels were supposed to collect rainwater from the thunderstorms that weren’t happening often enough.
We used it to bathe in and wash our hair, and then we poured it, bucket by bucket into this contraption she had rigged up with a fifty-five-gallon drum full of stones and sand and charcoal. When it came out the other side, it was clean enough to use on the garden. This had to be done in the evening or early in the morning while it was still cool, so the water wouldn’t evaporate before it could soak into the ground.
Cassie showed me how to clean the kerosene lamp chimneys and keep the wicks trimmed so they didn’t smoke. How to split logs for the woodstove and stack them on the portal for winter. Not that I was planning to be around that long, but I didn’t mind helping her out. It was hard work, and it felt good—the heft of the maul, the cracking sound when the logs came apart, the dark, sharp resin smell that shot up like a fountain.
We took turns with meals—although we were both happier when I took her turns—and with washing clothes in the deep sink on the porch. I always hung them on the wire line she had strung between the house and a scraggly juniper tree, because she couldn’t reach over her head without her shoulders hurting.
There were medicinal plants in the garden, but lots more grew wild in the low scrub hills around the house. Gathering those got to be one of my favorite chores. We collected juniper needles and berries for digestives and teas for pregnant women, male saltbush flowers to treat ant bites and make soap, the delicate white petals of Apache plume for upset stomach, broom snakeweed for rheumatism, big sagebrush for purification.
She taught me which plants were poisonous—like the beautiful white-flowered jimson weed and narrow-leafed milkweed. She said how it was important to take only the tops of the amaranth and bee plant greens, so the plants could keep growing. When we dug yucca roots to make shampoo, Cassie buried the seedpods, to make sure there’d always be more yucca plants.
I delivered medicine to her customers, figuring out on my own the mostly unmarked roads and rutted dirt tracks that ran around and between the low, scrub-covered hills. Sometimes they paid in cash, but more often it was eggs or fruit or a chicken or a rabbit that I hauled back home.
It bothered me, killing the animals. In fact, the first time Rick Chee gave me a rabbit I turned it loose. Its ears were soft, and when I held it against me, I could feel its heart beating about a million miles an hour, like it knew it was going to end up in Cassie’s big iron pot. When I put it on the ground, it sat there and looked at me for a second, too stupid to run, or maybe too surprised. So I stamped my foot, and it took off like a shot.
When I got back to the house, Cassie was folding clean clothes. She looked up.
“What’d he give you?”
I swallowed the dust in my throat and told her the truth. I expected her to get pissed off and say I couldn’t have any supper, or some such. First thing she did was laugh. Then she shook her head and said I was a “caution.” Whatever the hell that meant. She didn’t say anything else about it.
Later while we were eating our beans and rice—for the third night running—I started to feel pretty stupid.
I said, “I guess I shouldn’t have let the rabbit go.”
She set down her spoon. “There’s no sin in killing for food, Avery. Truth to tell, that rabbit probably made some coyote a meal this very night, while we’re eatin’ beans. But that’s okay. Coyote needs to eat, too
.”
The next time we got a rabbit, I made myself watch Cassie kill it. She was all business—just picked it up by the hind legs and clubbed it right behind the ears with the flat side of our kindling ax. It made a thunk noise and the little body went limp. Okay, so there was no pain, but when she flipped it down on the log splitter stump and chopped the head off, I had to turn around and go in the house. I couldn’t look at it again till it was flour-coated and sizzling in the big iron skillet.
Eventually, my muscles stopped aching, and I could actually feel my body getting stronger. Our food wasn’t fancy, but there was plenty of it, and I could tell I’d gained weight. One morning when I was yanking weeds out of the garden, I looked up to see Cassie watching me.
“Skin’s gettin’ dark,” she said. “You got any Mexican blood in you? Or Indian?” After that first night, she’d never asked me about anything about where I came from or who my people were. She never acted like my eyes were different from anyone else’s.
I sat back on my heels, making lines in the baked earth with the old trowel. “I don’t know.”
“Your folks never talked about their kin?”
“I never knew my folks.”
She just nodded. “So you don’t know who had them eyes like yours.”
“No,” I said. And then I got back to weeding.
It wasn’t just herbs Cassie was selling. Sometimes strangers showed up at odd hours, looking for a different kind of medicine. The first time it happened, I answered the door one night after supper because Cassie was out in the garden. I was just getting used to her doing stuff like burying pieces of hair and fingernail clippings out there after dark to keep away gophers and make sure no raven got any of your hair. She said if a raven made its nest with a person’s hair, that person would die young. Then, too, she’d sprinkle osha root around the house at night to repel rattlesnakes.
A woman was standing on the creaky wooden porch—not as old as Cassie, but not all that young either. She had shoulder-length brown hair and she was wearing a faded plaid shirt and black stretch pants. She seemed pretty surprised to see me.
“Is Cassie around? I need to see her right away.”
I stepped back from the door, and she walked right in and sat down at the table, like she did this all the time. “I’ll get her,” I said.
When Cassie saw the woman sitting there, she shook her head. “Evelyn, Evelyn. Not again?”
Evelyn bit her lip and looked embarrassed. “Just this one time, Cassie. If it doesn’t take, I’ll leave him go.” She laid a five-dollar bill on the table.
Cassie opened a cupboard and took out a cardboard box. She sat down across from Evelyn, while I hovered in the background, hoping she wouldn’t notice I was eavesdropping. Cassie picked up the money and stuck it in her shirt pocket.
“Let’s see, what’s today? Thursday? Not good. You need to do this tomorrow. Friday night and it’s a waxing moon, so that’s good. If this don’t work, Evelyn, it wasn’t meant to be.”
Evelyn kept biting her lip. It was getting red and swollen looking. “Should I come back tomorrow night?”
“No, I’ll give you what you need and you can do it yourself at home. Just don’t forget. Do it right after moonrise tomorrow night. If you forget, you should wait till next Friday.”
Cassie took out a small white candle and gave it to her. Then she took a box and fished out two straight pins, one with a plain silver head, one with a blue head. She put them in a little brown envelope like the kind the nurse at Carson used to put pills in.
“Now, tomorrow night just after moonrise, you go out on your porch. Stick the blue pin in the candle like this, left to right. Then stick the silver one in right to left and make sure they cross. Then get you a saucer and set the candle in it and light it, and let it burn down till it goes out of its own, all the while thinking of Tommy and sending the message to come home. Then bury the pins in your garden.”
“Okay, I’ll do it just that way. Thank you, Cassie.” She gave Cassie a little hug. “Pray for me.”
“I will,” Cassie said. “Now run along home. And if he comes back before tomorrow night, do the candle anyway. Can’t hurt. Might help.”
After she left, I glared at Cassie. “I can’t believe you take somebody’s money for hokey stuff like that.”
She acted like she didn’t hear me. She put the box back in the cupboard, pulled out an old beat-up cookie tin, and rummaged in it for a dried wand of big sagebrush that she lit off the stove. She held it under her nose and inhaled, pulling the smoke up into her nostrils while I watched, fascinated. It was something she did nearly every night after supper. “To ward off melancholy,” she said. I didn’t know about that part, but I’d come to love the smell of burning sage.
After one good snort, she turned her mild gaze on me. “What do you mean, hokey?”
“Lighting candles, burying pins in the garden by the light of the moon,” I said scornfully. “How’s that going to make some guy come home?”
“You know for certain that it won’t?”
“How could it?”
She shrugged. “People been using this energy for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, Avery. Seems like if it didn’t work, they’d a stopped doing it a long time ago.”
She took another hit of sage smoke and closed her eyes with a small smile of contentment.
One day in August I came running into the house, my face on fire and streaked with sweat.
“Cassie, look! Old Lady Many Goats gave us peaches! We can—” The rest of the sentence evaporated in the dry air.
A stranger sat with Cassie, coffee cups on the table in front of them. Ribbons of sage smoke seemed to connect the two old faces. We stared at each other till I remembered to lower my eyes.
“Avery, this is Señora Sanchez.” Señora was fat, and even though she looked as old as Cassie, her hair was black and so shiny it seemed to give off blue sparks.
“Buenos días, Avery.” She had some missing teeth that made her lisp.
From they way she was looking me over, I knew I was the topic of the conversation that I just interrupted. Señora wiped her hand across the faded green skirt stretched tight over her thigh, and she reached out to touch my chin, tilting my face up.
“She’s my comadre.” Cassie drank the last of the coffee from her cup. “My friend.”
When Señora Sanchez started to make the sign of the cross on me, I jerked back.
Cassie got up, reached for the chipped blue enamel coffeepot on the stove. “Avery, there’s clothes in the sink need hangin’.” She took the sack of peaches from me and stuck her nose in it. “Mmm. Those smell just fine.”
I went out to the porch. The clothes still felt soapy to me, so I filled the sink for another rinse, wrung them out, and dropped each one into the galvanized bucket. All the time, I was straining to hear the women in the kitchen. The hum of their voices came through, but I couldn’t make out any words. I slipped the strap of the canvas clothespin bag over my head and took the clothes outside.
It was a warm, still morning at the end of summer that I woke up feeling something sticky between my legs. Surely to God I hadn’t peed in my sleep on Cassie’s couch. I yanked the covers off and my heart stopped when I saw a patch of half-dried blood on the sheet. Jesus. I touched my finger to it and sniffed it just to be sure. It was blood all right. That sick, sweet smell. I was still sitting there trying to figure out how much longer I had to live when Cassie came out, dressed for garden work in her baggy denim overalls and a high-necked white shirt.
“What’s the matter, child?”
I was holding my finger out stiff, so as not to touch anything else. “I think I’ve got cancer.”
“What?” She looked down at the sheet, then smiled broadly. “That’s not cancer, Avery. Didn’t anyone ever tell you about men-struating?”
Immediately I felt stupid. This was what the older girls at Carson giggled and whispered and complained about in the bathroom. That was why I knew the sme
ll. I smelled it plenty of times when I went in a stall that one of them had just used.
She beamed at me. “Your first moon cycle.” When she reached out and touched my forehead, I shrank back, but she didn’t seem to care. She just closed her eyes and said, “Avery James, respect your body like the blessing it is. Honor your blood that comes with the moon. Let it flow gently, without pain. Remember the circle of life you hold in you.”
Then she went into the kitchen, turned on the oven, and started cutting big squares of leftover cornbread for our breakfast, humming softly to herself.
I hugged my knees to me, placing my feet carefully to avoid the reddish-brown spot. “Cassie?”
She raised her eyebrows at me over her shoulder.
“What kind of—you know—thing was that?”
“Thing?”
“You know. Prayer or whatever. I never heard anything like that in church. I mean it didn’t sound very…Christian.”
“That’s because it’s not.”
She put the cornbread in a pan, slid it into the oven. I waited, but she didn’t say anything else. That was the damnedest thing about old people. When you didn’t want them to tell you stuff, they just couldn’t wait to jam it down your throat. When you did want to know something, they weren’t talking.
She opened the refrigerator and got out butter and milk. “I thought you weren’t interested in God.”
“I’m not,” I said quickly. “I was just curious, that’s all.”
“There’s other ways of thinking about God than the Church of God in Jesus way, you know. Or the Lutheran way. Or the Catholic way.” She pulled two mugs out of the cupboard. “Just think, Avery—how many different kinds of Christians there are. Then you got your Hindus and your Moslems—” She waved a spoon around like she was conducting a band. “And all kinds of other religions in places you and me never heard of. And every darn one of them thinks that they’re the only ones doin’ it right. What’s that tell you?”
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