Redwood and Wildfire

by Andrea Hairston

  “May Ellen, you all right?”

  The bed was stripped and cold. He tripped through soggy paper and shards of gray stoneware. Jugs he’d been saving in case of a dry spell had been smashed against Aunt Caitlin’s heirloom trunk. Books he’d borrowed from Doc Johnson were scattered on the floor. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was ripped in two. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein was wedged in a hole under the window. A cracked mirror hung lopsided from the wall. Slimy okra and mealy potatoes were smeared all over its glass face. May Ellen’s brush and comb weren’t on the bureau. Not a stitch of her clothing hung in the wardrobe he’d carpentered and carved special for her. Not a scent of her anywhere…

  May Ellen was gone. She’d finally left him.

  “What ’bout ’til death do us part?” Aidan shouted.

  He crumpled over Aunt Caitlin’s battered trunk. After the first jug, after stowing Princess in the shed, did he and May Ellen fight? Did she weep and scold and smash his jugs ’cause he was drinking too much? Did she say her sister warned her against marrying a drunk Irishman? That’s what she always said, but this evening, maybe she couldn’t holler at him anymore. Maybe she just watched while Aidan lost his mind and rampaged through the house hunting down War of the Worlds.

  Closing his eyes, Aidan heard echoes of ragged screams — in his voice all right — ’bout haints and have mercy. Mystery bruises on his knuckles and arms made sense now. So did the dent in his boot where he’d kicked at the stove before hurling dinner every which way. Had he left May Ellen cowering and wailing in the shed between Duchess and Princess and run off to his hunting perch?

  Was that a bad dream, or worse — a memory?

  Aidan tumbled off the trunk and dashed from room to room. There were only three, and nowhere for even a mouse to hide. He was chasing shadows. Shattered dishes cut at his boots in the kitchen. Broken chairs sent him sprawling to the floor. May Ellen’s braided rug reeked of piss and kerosene. The smell made him retch. Or maybe it was truth churning up his stomach. The house was empty. May Ellen had packed up her things, hitched Duchess to the wagon, and left him. Lurching again from room to room, disbelieving his eyes, disbelieving his drunken memory, wouldn’t bring her back.

  Aidan didn’t mean to scare her. He didn’t mean to hurt her, and he prayed to any God who was still listening to the likes of him that he hadn’t laid a hand to her. Black alcohol fog covered his memory and left him in torment. “Please Lord. Just tell me I didn’t hurt her.”

  The Lord wasn’t studying him.

  Aidan banged out onto the porch with such force that he almost knocked the flimsy door off its hinges. Blood spurted from his shoulder and soaked his shirt. He staggered in circles. He’d hidden one more jug from hisself under the porch, but would never find it in the dark. He’d save that for sunrise. Princess brayed and kicked against her stall. Nothing else to do, so he tromped into the shed and glowered at her.

  “What’s a matter with you, hollering in here?”

  Princess bared her teeth and wagged her head. The hair on her neck rippled and she stomped her forelegs. Aidan bowed his head as she chastised him. He walked toward her, mumbling what a fool he was and stretching his hand out. Princess nipped his fingers and then licked at peach slime on his shirt.

  “What am I goin’ do with myself?”

  Aidan found his red leather journal tied ’round Princess’ neck. Half a page had been ripped out. May Ellen wasn’t one for reading or writing. She must’ve spent an hour scrawling him a note:

  Coop

  Gone up to Cofee County to my sisters. Jenny warned me. Dont you dare come after me. Im just tellin you so you wont fret. If you aint died out in them woods then Im glad for you. My ma watched dady kill hisself drinkin. I aint her. Dont want to hate you, dont want to die in your shadow.

  May Ellen

  Aidan draped his arms over Princess and leaned his face against her neck. She was quiet as he slobbered and moaned on her.

  Three

  Peach Grove, 1903

  “What I tell you?” Redwood poked surly Brother George in the ribs. “We goin’ reach the swamp a good while ’fore dusk now.”

  He batted her hand away. “Just ’cause you finally be sixteen, you know it all, huh?”

  They stood at a crossroads on a gentle rise of land only an hour or two east of the Okefenokee Swamp. Doc Johnson had carried them in his buggy from Peach Grove to Silver Bluff. Redwood had promised him healing roots from the swamp and jumped onto the comfortable leather seat before George could refuse the ride.

  “Much better than walking all that way in this heat,” Redwood said.

  “So,” George muttered. “I still don’t have to like it.”

  She smiled. “You just ornery.”

  Silvery moss shimmered. Dust from the retreating carriage glinted like gold. Despite the afternoon’s enchanted edge, the air was sweaty and the sun mean.

  “And you grinning in that cracker’s face the whole ride,” George muttered.

  “Doc’s a nice man.” Redwood squeezed Leaves of Grass and The Awakening to her chest. Doc loaned her two books this time. Good thing — she’d run through Miz Subie’s stash.

  “Nice? Ha! You think everybody’s nice. No matter what.”

  “Naw. You got people fooled, Brother, but I know you ain’t nice.”

  “If they pat your head and give you nonsense to read, you’ll —”

  “You read every page I do.”

  George knocked the books into the dust and stormed away. He’d been working too many hours in somebody else’s field. Redwood scooped the books up, carefully brushed the covers clean, and stowed them in her pack. George veered from the road and charged down a path into snarled vegetation. His legs weren’t so long as hers, but when he was in a salty mood, he could march faster through crawling underbrush and domed cypress roots than anybody she knew. Couldn’t nobody keep up with George.

  “Road’s not good enough for you?” Redwood stumbled after him. Thick curtains of Spanish moss tried to swallow her. Hefty oak boughs reached out and almost knocked her down. “Wait,” she yelled. Sweat streamed down her belly and under the pack that dug into her shoulder and banged on her hip. Wet tiddies chafed against a rough cotton blouse that seemed to fit fine yesterday, but cut off her breath now. A heat rash bloomed ’cross her chest down to her thighs.

  “Since I ain’t nice, you better hurry on up.” George glared at her, meaner than the afternoon sun. Flinty eyes darted ’round his face. His furry new mustache wiggled like a poor creature caught on his lip, trembling before an impending blast of fire breath. Redwood sniggered at the thought of her handsome brother snorting flames and sprouting scaly wings too. He had all the gals in the county whispering and swooning ’cause they didn’t know how he really look.

  “Ain’t nothing funny.” George smacked waxy magnolia leaves and charged on.

  Big white flowers dipped down and smeared Redwood with pollen and scent. Satiny petals clung to her hair. She paused in the heavy fragrance. Going too fast to keep up with hisself, George stumbled and then pretended to shift his rucksack.

  “I ain’t waiting for you,” he said.

  “Go on then. I didn’t want to take this way no how. Road’s easier going.” She fanned herself in the shade. “I’ll do fine in the swamp on my own. I ain’t no little child begging you to take me along.” At sixteen, a lot of gals were married, bringing babies into the world, and keeping house. Redwood was a grown woman and didn’t need a testy big brother to chaperone her. “I don’t see why you so mad.”

  “What?” George halted and turned. “We lost our land. That make me more than mad.” He stomped toward her, ready to smack her fresh behind for talking foolish. “In the courthouse, white folk say the deed don’t count. They say Daddy and Mama didn’t own nothing. Jerome and Caroline Williams can steal our inheritance away. And colored Peach Grove just laughing at us poor chillun of uppity Raymond and Garnett Phipps.”

  “Uncle Ladd treat you better than some
men treat they sons. Don’t work you to death, and give you earnings.”

  “Twenty-five cents every now and then ain’t goin’ buy us a future.”

  “How much do the future cost?”

  “You, me, and Iris got to make our own way.” He grabbed her. “How can I do that on nothing? I ain’t no sharecropper.” He squeezed her shoulders together. She didn’t let on how much it hurt. “Raymond Jessup gotta be paying white folk now so he can work his own damn land. I ain’t hiring out to make some cracker rich. I ain’t landing on a chain gang worth nothing to myself even.” He spit words in her face and glowered worse than any fire-breathing dragon she could imagine.

  “Who’s telling you to do all that?” Redwood asked. “Mama and Daddy wanted to sell the land and go on up to Chicago town anyway. When they come back from the World’s Fair, they —”

  George released her and hit his forehead with the heel of his hand as if she was the dumbest thing living.

  “Talk to me if you think I don’t know something.” She rubbed bruised shoulders.

  “What you doing, going to the Okefenokee Swamp to hunt roots for? Why don’t you go teach school like Aunt Elisa? They ready to pay you a dollar, dollar fifty a week. You done read every book you can find. You can talk proper when you got a mind to.”

  “Aunt Elisa say I can’t do hoodoo conjuring and teach school. It’s a Christian school and they don’t want no truck with the devil.”

  “What kind of reason is that?”

  “I want to be like Mama was.”

  “Tell them fools what they want to hear and do how you want behind they backs.”

  Redwood shook her head. “I hate when you talk this way.” Tears filled up the back of her throat. “You scaring me.”

  “Don’t you care ’bout something ’sides yourself? Don’t you care ’bout educating colored folk, ’bout Iris, ’bout —” George whirled on his heels and charged away.

  Redwood scrambled after him, anger and hurt lending her speed. “I want to go on the stage. Singing and conjuring — that’s a good life.”

  “All your talk of being a grown woman and you still don’t know nothing.”

  “I can help you and Iris doing that.”

  “You living in a dream, gal.”

  “Better than living a nightmare. That’s what Miz Subie say.”

  “Why Subie got to humor you? Why everybody always humoring you?”

  She grabbed his left hand. The knuckles were bruised and caked with blood. “You been in a fight?” His ring finger was twisted and swollen. She caught his darting eye.

  He grunted. “Bubba Jackson call Mama out her name, so I —”

  “When Bubba goin’ learn better?” She straightened the bent joint. He yelped and tried to pull away. “Stop!” she hissed. Without letting him go, she got Miz Subie’s cure-all from her pack and smeared it over his gashes and bruises. She snapped off a smooth twig and wrapped it against the broken finger. He cussed through gritted teeth. She bandaged the bruised knuckles and pulled as much pain from him as she could. Pulling pain was the first spell Mama taught her. Use your good heart like a lodestone. Feel the whole Earth pulling on a stormy sky, pulling ’til lightning strike the hilltop. “Sorry if it still hurt. I got to practice. Miz Subie say I’ll be good as Mama some day.” She threw his hurting to the wind.

  George stared at the battered fingers like they belonged to somebody else’s hand. “We ain’t even got a horse or mule to our name.” Choking back a sob, he hugged Redwood. “The world ain’t full of good folk who want to lend a helping hand. Doc give you a ride, a book, but he don’t change anything. He just be feeling good ’bout his cracker self.” He sighed, kissed the top of her head, and soldiered on. “We need to get out of this backwater nowhere and go where a man can be a man.”

  “Where’s that?”

  George dodged a low hanging branch, but didn’t reply.

  “Soon, I’ll get paid to take away pain.” She scrambled after him. “You watch.”

  Miz Subie trusted Redwood enough to send her off hunting: Culver’s root, orangeroot, rattlesnake’s master, devil’s shoestring, man-root, swamp orchids, floating hearts. A dozen more blurred together in her mind ’cause they was skittish, growing magic that wanted to hide from her and not get plucked, even if she vowed to take only what she needed. Days of hot itchy work, and she might have to come back and do it again, if she got tricked into picking the wrong things or delicate roots gave out and lost the spirit before Miz Subie could get at them. Getting ’round the swamp without a boat would be a trick. Miz Subie say a conjure woman had to make her own way through life. Doc and his buggy was easy, but how was Redwood supposed to conjure a boat? She’d have to know a whole lot more spells to do that.

  “…and you could spend your whole life hunting down nothing.” George had been going on a while, and she’d missed most of what he was saying.

  “I’m goin’ do fine.”

  “Is that a fact or a wish?” He knew her like the back of his breath.

  “Hope’s better than a mule, a horse, or a canoe even.”

  “Do tell.” He was picking up speed again.

  “I’ll make good, and then you won’t need to go and —”

  “What, you’ll take care of me?” He spit at a tree trunk and missed.

  “You’ll see. Like Mama said. Watching out for each other.”

  George tried to ball his hands into fists, but the splint and bandages wouldn’t let him. A startled bird flew past his face, a screeching blur of red and green feathers. A nest toppled onto hard ground. Speckled eggs cracked and oozed cloudy white fluid flecked with yellow and red. A sign, but George fixed his eyes on the dwindling path in the distance.

  “Killing them birds just goin’ put you in a worse humor.” Redwood toed the shell.

  “Hardly none left to kill. Maybe I done already missed my chance.”

  George come out to hunt snowy egrets and purple swamp hens. A company in England was paying thirty-two dollars an ounce and didn’t care ’bout the color of the man doing the selling, long as they got purple jewel feathers and snowy white plumes for high-fashion hats. All over Europe, fancy rich ladies were styling Georgia birds. George didn’t want to waste time taking his sister nowhere. He was determined to get rich. Now.

  “You got me started in hunting feathers.” He wagged a bruised finger at her.

  “Birds I found were already dead.”

  “Folk gotta eat. Folk gotta survive. I don’t see you crusading for chickens. Ain’t nothing wrong with wringing a bird’s neck. I’d rather do that than starve.”

  “If you was eating the birds you catch, I don’t think I’d mind.”

  “Whether I eat ’em or not, ain’t no difference in how dead the birds be, but a big difference for our lives. On what I earn, I could get a piece of land, a wife —”

  “Just ’cause what you say sound good don’t make it right.”

  “You trying to tell me these birds be more important than your family?” He burped sour breath in her face.

  “See, your stomach’s turning. Miz Subie say it’s bad for your insides to go killing what you don’t need.”

  “That’s just her meat pie not sitting right in my belly. Ain’t no sign of nothing.”

  “You a bona fide citizen of the future.” Redwood mimicked the principal at the school where Aunt Eliza taught. “Too rational and forward thinking to heed the words of a superstitious ole conjure woman like Subie Edwards, like Mama, huh?”

  George swallowed a mouth full of fire breath for sure. She felt it burning in his belly. His deep voice crackled when he spoke. “You won’t have to watch me killing nothing, Miz Know-It-Better.”

  Redwood clamped down on more fighting words. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pick at you.” Fussing wasn’t no better than dirt in a wound. George did have a bunch of years on her. What if he actually knew something important that she didn’t? She stretched a hand toward him. He stayed just beyond her reach.

>   “I’ll take you far as the swamp. Then you be on your own, just how you want.”

  That wasn’t what Uncle Ladd told him, but Redwood didn’t argue.

  “Sure I’ll marry you.” Aidan blew out the lamp.

  Darkness cloaked his shabby house in sultry shadows. It was the middle of a hot night. He was half-naked and pleasantly drunk, and trying to get inside Josie Fields for the third time in a month. Josie had thrown down almost as much moonshine as Aidan. He buried his face in Josie’s sweet-smelling bosom and held on to her firm buttocks for dear life. He might have promised her anything.

  “All right.” Josie rode him ’til the ole bedsprings screeched and quivered. Just when the going was too good to be true, she whispered. “I’m two months pregnant, you see.”

  “Whoa, no!” Her confession didn’t stop the climax, but took Aidan’s breath away when he could’ve used a good mouthful or two. The way he counted, it wasn’t his child. Gasping and grunting he managed to add, “That’s a good time to be married.”

  “I thought you’d understand.” Josie didn’t claim it was his child. Her fields got plowed regularly, two-three times a day. That was the joke ’round Peach Grove. Aidan didn’t hold good loving against her — his mother would have been proud — but he felt queasy. They were at it again before he could think straight. He curled his tongue ’round a hard nipple and held off busting loose ’til she was sucking sharp breaths, ’til she couldn’t stand another second and neither could he. He let hisself go, a torrent of storm water through a gorge. Josie hollered in his ear.

  Aidan passed out.

  It was hardly morning. Dawn was just a pink slit in velvet dark, and Princess was already fussing in the shed. She was lonely since May Ellen left with Duchess. Aidan was too. His head throbbed so, Princess’s hooves could have been pounding his skull. Sunrise hurt, even with a sheet over his eyes. Aidan’s legs were wrapped ’round Josie’s thighs. His left foot was all pins and needles as he shifted her weight and got his blood flowing. Josie snored and chewed in a dream. He pulled his arm from under her head. Squinting at his dreary room, he blinked sleep out his eyes.