by Vicki Lane
Go on, I told them, it ain’t safe for you here.
It was a sight on earth, how that thick cloud of bees begun to lengthen out and then move up towards the woods, like a great snake swimming through the air. I tried to watch to see where they went but they disappeared into the dark.
Once more I went out to let the yard dog loose, and this time, the instant I took the collar off, he made for the grass at the edge of his dirt patch and begun to roll. Well, anyway, I thought, he can have a taste of freedom, even if he don’t go off. He was still sniffing around the rim of the dirt circle when I went inside, and I figured that I’d tie him back in the morning like always.
But in the morning he was gone, never to return. When I told Granny Beck, she looked at me hard and said, “He finally got off the chain that was in his head: do you see that, honey? The chain in his head was stronger than the one you undid every night. You remember that, now. It ain’t only dogs that is on chains.”
Mama, she didn’t seem to care much. “That old dog was getting up in years anyway,” said she. “It’ll save me the bother of knocking him on the head.”
Chapter 14
The Healing Plants
Dark Holler, Fall 1935
(Granny Beck)
I fixed a big vessel of the tea for your rheumaticks, Granny Beck. And I did it just according to how you said—gathered laurel, ivy, and dog-hobble leaves this morning and from the east side of the bushes. I put them in the pot and covered them over and as much again with water, then boiled them down good afore straining the tea.”
Least is standing there by my bed, holding a gallon crock with a dishtowel wrapped round it. The steam rises and makes a wreath around her pretty head. She sets the crock down careful-like on the chair by the bed.
“Let me help you set up to where you can soak your hands in this—it’s good and hot and ought to help with the aching—and while you do that, I’ll wet the towel and rub the tea on your legs.”
The child is so bright-eyed and hopeful that I can’t bring myself to tell her that what ails me is past curing. It ain’t only the rheumaticks, but there is something else amiss, something deep in my innards what ain’t right.
“Mama’s gone to Ransom to do some trading and she’ll not be back till this evening. I’ve got all my chores done up.…”
Her blue eyes are sparkling like the sun a-dance on the water as she lays back the quilts and begins to rub my poor old limbs. Her touch does me more good even than the medicine she has brewed.
Oh, how the child has changed in these few years! That half-wild, dirty-faced little creature I first saw is as pretty a girl as ever there was. I have poured all my learning into her, and my love too, like she was an empty pitcher and me a gushing spring. No, more like she was a piece of parched earth, thirsty for the rain, for a pitcher could overflow and she has soaked up every bit of learning and love I could give her.
“That’s done me a world of good, child,” I tell her when the tea begins to cool, and truth is, I do feel better. I look over out the window and see that the sun is shining hard and that the wind must of laid, for them dark old trees is still for once. “If it ain’t too cold, I’d like to set outside in the sunshine for a little.”
It is one of those bright October days with the sky that clear endless blue and the sun setting fire to the reds and golds of the mountain trees—the sourwoods and maples and hickories. Least brings out an armchair from the house and helps me to it, then tucks my Delectable Mountains quilt around me. My eyes has grown dim to where I can’t make out much more than shapes and colors but nevertheless it feels fine to be out in the air, breathing the smell of the deep woods that loom up across the way. It seems that as my eyes has begun to give out, my nose has taken up the slack. I can travel the woods even though I can’t leave the porch, and I draw in all the old friendly smells—leaf mold and rich dirt, along with a world of other scents—spice bush and the clean smell of the water in the branch over yon. There’s even a smell to the sun falling on a dry rock … and another for that same rock when the rain first strikes it and still another when the rock is soaked and cool. So many ways of knowing …
If I could get around a little better … if I could have walked with Least through those woods, showing her all the healing plants and how they look at the different times of the year, just the way my papaw did for me …
She sets herself down on the porch floorboards beside me and leans against my legs. There is a healing warmth in the child’s touch and I know that the Gifts are stronger in her than ever before.
“Least, honey,” I say, stroking her pretty dark hair, “do you remember what the Cherokee tell about how sickness came into the world?”
She turns her face up and smiles at me. “I’ll say it like you told me, Granny, so you can be sure I learned it right.”
I know that she has learned it all, but the pleasure of hearing her say over the words, same as I learned from my papaw long years since, is like a crown on the beauty of this day. I sit, feeling the sun on my face, smelling the woods, and listening to Least. I am hungry for all the good things of living, hungry to know them all at once, like a greedy young un left alone at a full table afore the company comes, trying to stuff some of everything in his mouth. I am greedy for life for I have heard the black wings beating and I know that afore much longer it’ll be over.
“… and when all the animals seen how bad that people was doing them, killing them or making them slaves or harming them for no reason at all, like young uns stomping on bugs just for the fun of it, well, all the animals got together in a council and one by one, each animal thought up some manner of sickness to punish man for his heedless ways …”
I remember my papaw acting out the story, even down to the part where the grub worm cuts such a shine at the thought of getting back at men that he jumps up in the air and falls on his back and has to go a-wiggling along that way forever after.
“… but then the plants felt sorry for men and so they got together in their council meeting and each plant said that it would be a medicine against one of those sicknesses the animals made up.…”
“And how did those first Injuns, those what hadn’t learned from their elders, how did they know which plant would be right—”
Least jumps right in, not waiting for the rest of the question. “The plants told them. If the Injun went into the field or woods and asked polite, ‘Oh, which of you Little Brothers will cure the fever my child has?’ why then, if that Injun waited silent and patient, one of the plants would begin to tremble and that was the way he knowed which one to use. But, after a while, folks learned by listening to their grannies.”
She rubs her head against me and goes on. “And when you collect plants like sang, you must always pass by the first three plants before you can take the fourth, and when you take a plant, you must put something good in the ground where it was—”
“They used to use red or white beads for payment,” I tell her, “but if you ain’t got a bead, there’s other things—a flower, or, if it’s sang, you must bury the shiny red seeds where you dug the plant out.”
Least leaps up from the porch floor. “Granny Beck, let’s us do the plant game now. You name a sickness and I’ll go see can I find the plant for it.”
It is a game we have played many a time. At first she would bring everwhat plants she didn’t know to me and I would tell her the name and what it was good for and how to fix the medicine. Now we do it different.
I think a minute, then say, “See what you can find for the summer complaint, for the whooping cough, for a fever, and for bad monthlies.”
The child fairly flies down the porch steps, making for the woods across the road. I call after her, “And chicken pox and headache too.”
She laughs and it sounds like bells and she turns and waves. In the gray-brown gingham dress she has on, and with my bad eyes, she looks most like a slender sapling herself and in the next moment she disappears into the woods.
&nb
sp; The child needs to know all these cures for when she has young uns of her own. The onliest medicines Fronie makes use of, besides that everlasting Cordelia Ledbetter tonic she is poisoning herself with, is turpentine or castor oil.
I close my eyes and let the sun warm my face. Fronie … ay, law … if Fronie has her way, Least’ll never marry nor have babes. There is nothing wrong with the child but folks don’t know that. Fronie has told it up and down that Least is simple … fit only to stay home and care for Fronie in her old age …
And the pity is that Least don’t know no better herself. I got to make her see …
The squeak of the wooden steps brings me back to myself. I have been wandering in a strange dream where there is a girl who, but for her bright red hair, might be Least. This girl is in a strange place full of fiddling and dance music and crowds of people—a dark place with little happiness in it though there is singing and bitter laughter. And there was a graveyard—but I have dreamed that dream before and it don’t frighten me none, no more than dreaming of my own bed would.
I open my eyes and she is standing before me, her basket brimming with fresh-cut bark—the clean sap smells tell me what kind they are—and knobby roots with the dirt still clinging to them. I can make out the strong scent of heavy clay on some and the rich, dark smell of moist woods dirt on some other. In her hand she has a bunch of branch mint, fresh and clean-smelling. I know she means to make a tea for later but I reach out and take a stem.
“Granny Beck,” she says, laying her basket at my feet, “I didn’t mean to wake you up. I tried to be quiet but that old step—there just ain’t no way to keep it from hollering out.”
“Hush, child,” I say, biting into the mint and feeling the wild cool nip of it in my mouth. “You’ve brought the woods to me and I want to smell and taste and feel of them. There’ll be time for sleeping soon enough.”
While she shows me one by one what she has brought, half my mind is listening and adding to what she already knows whilst the other half is puzzling how to get her loose from Fronie. How to get her free to live her own life …
“… bark from white oak and black oak and from the red sugar tree and the chestnut. If I pound them and shred them and soak them in cold water, the water’ll help with a woman’s monthly miseries. I had to go a far piece to find the chestnut—seems like they get harder and harder to find.”
“And how did you take the bark off?”
She grins real big for she likes it when I quiz her and she knows the answer. “A piece from the east side of the tree and with a downward stroke of the knife as the medicine’s for down here …”
Least lays her hand on her belly. I have warned her what to expect when her time comes. Fronie ain’t never said the first word to her about such things and the first show of blood might frighten the poor child. But now she knows it’s in the natural way of things. I even made sure she has a supply of rags ready and knows what to do with them for I see signs that she is ripening …
“… but if I was taking the bark so’s someone could chew it for mouth sores, why then I’d just naturally make the cut going up.”
“You have the right of it, child,” I say. “What else have you got there?”
While she is naming them over: blackberry roots and goldenrod roots to make teas for the summer complaint, dogwood bark for headache or chicken pox … I am listening and nodding, for she has found all the right things, but in the back of my mind I am planning how to tackle Fronie.
The Chestnut Tree by Dalilah B. Roberts—8-B
The Chestnut was once a valuable and plentiful tree in the mountains of N. Carolina, but a dizeeze disease has killed off almost all of them. It is said that the disease was brought in on plants from over seas, but I believe that it was God’s Will because of all the sinning there is these days.
When my daddy was a little boy they would turn the hogs loose in the woods to get fat eating the Mast which is the fallen chestnuts. Daddy says that it made the sweetest pig meat. And people ate the nuts too, and roasted them in the fire, and the Indians pounded the nuts into flour to make a kind of bread.
My daddy has showed me the old hollow stumps where they cut the dead chestnuts, and how a little tree will spring up from the old roots. But that little tree will always die and it is because of the sinning.
Chapter 15
The Threefold Law
Dark Holler, December 1935
(Least)
There is blood on my drawers this morning. For a moment I just set there, out in the freezing cold little house, wondering what has happened for I don’t remember hurting myself in any way. I stare the hardest at those drawers, ones that Granny Beck sewed for me out of bleached flour sacks. They are pulled down around my knees and in the middle of all that white is a big patch of brown dried blood.
What can it mean? I ask myself, and wonder am I dying. It seems hard that I should die at only thirteen years of age. There is so much more to learn—and I ain’t took a spell in the longest time. Granny Beck has said that she don’t see any reason I should stay at home all the time. She says that I am plenty smart.
I don’t feel like I am dying or even sick but I remember what Lilah has said about how death can come in the twinkling of an eye and we must be prepared. I sit looking at the blood and hearing the tiny tapping of the sleet on the tin roof and wonder will Mama be sad when I die. I know that Granny Beck will.
What will become of Granny Beck if I die? She ain’t doing no good these past months and I have to coax her to eat and help her to the chamber more and more. A few times she has had an accident in the bed and Mama has fussed to see me washing the sheets. Mama has said that if Granny Beck gets any worse and keeps me from my work, she will have to go to the county home for old people.
Maybe, I think, God will fix it so’s I don’t have to die and can stay here to take care of my sweet Granny Beck. I haven’t never asked Him for things but I bow my head like Lilah showed me. Then I remember where I am and that it ain’t a fitten place to talk to God. I know that He is everywhere but I bet He don’t watch when people are doing their business.
While I am pulling up my drawers, all of a sudden I remember what Granny Beck had told me about the monthlies. And when a few seconds later there comes a wrenching, twisting feeling in my belly that is like to double me over, I know the truth—now I am a woman.
“Oh, child,” says Granny Beck when I tell her. “So it’s come. And you was scared, thinking there was something dreadful wrong—I mind believing the same thing when the monthlies first come on me. But I’ll show you how to do so next time it don’t catch you unawares.”
She is laying in her bed like she does more and more these cold days. There are so many quilts piled atop her and she has lost so much flesh since fall that she don’t hardly make a bump under all the covers. But her eyes are twinkling and she stretches out a hand to catch hold of me.
“Bring here the calendar, Least honey,” she says and I go fetch it off the wall. Mama has marked off the days with a strong black X and we are at the first day of winter. When I show this to Granny Beck, she nods, and with the red knit cap she has on her head for warmth, she looks like some bright-eyed little bird.
“They’re powerful days, them that mark the turning of the seasons. And this one is the darkest. Oh, it’s full of hope and the coming of the light for this is the day the sun stops its travels to the south and turns back our way. But it’s the longest night too and in this crack between the seasons, there’s like to be things slipping out of the Dark into this world.”
I am a little scared, sometimes, when Granny Beck talks like that, but then she laughs and shows me how to draw a little sickle moon on the day that the bleeding first begins.
“And then, beginning with that day, you count ahead twenty-eight days—and that’s when you can expect your visitor again.”
Her gnarly old fingers is tapping out the days that will pass and I think about how many times in her life she must have done th
is.
“Now, here in the beginning,” Granny Beck says, “you’re not likely to be right regular. But after a time your body will find its rhythm and you’ll know when to be prepared.”
She tells me some more things—reminding me of what herbs are best to help against the cramps and about soaking the bloody rags in cold water. Then she says a thing I had not thought of.
“You know, Least, you getting the monthlies means that your body’s making ready for you to bear children.”
I busy myself with straightening up the quilts and fixing her pillows more comfortable-like. They are not much good, for most of the feathers has leaked out, but by doubling them, I can help Granny to raise up a bit. Sometimes she says she feels like she is smothering, and we have tried one remedy after another but every day she is a little weaker and it ain’t but very seldom she will leave her bed.
“Do you understand me, honey?” Granny Beck asks, catching my hand in hers.
“I reckon,” I say, and I feel my face getting hot. Lilah Bel has told me how ladies get babies and it gives me a funny feeling to think about it. “But it don’t matter about that, if I don’t never get married. And I don’t see how I could, for Mama says—”
“Child,” Granny Beck cries out, and struggles to set up higher, “child, there ain’t no reason—”
There is a sound in the doorway and I whirl around to see Mama. “There ain’t no reason for Least to spend the whole morning loafering in here with you. She has got more to do than hang about waiting on you hand and foot.”
Mama’s face is cold and hard and in her hand hanging at her side she has the little hatchet I use on the stove wood. Her hand is just a-tremble as she lifts up the hatchet and points it at me. “Go bust up the rest of that stove wood, Least. It won’t do to fall behind.”