“This is what Letta and I trained on—this is some of what she showed you and the other girls at the garden. The basics, I guess you could call it. But what’s here is the whole enchilada. You keep up the worship down here, the better the Vine’ll come up everywhere. That’s all you’ll need from now on,” Mother Joseph said. “You’re ready for it, I can tell. Josiah and Harlan’ll be outside till you’re done—just out the door here.” Mother Joseph walked backward through the arch. “This is your job now, every Friday at sundown. You don’t wanna disappoint me.”
Joanie shook her head.
“Alrighty, see y’all at dinner.” Mother Joseph clapped her hands together with an odd, violent cheer. She vanished in the cool dark of the cellar, and Joanie was alone with the two men in the chapel.
“You all leaving or what?” she said.
“My, my, ain’t we eager?” Harlan said, pulling Josiah along with him toward the door. “No breaks, now, not till you’re done. We got to make sure you don’t disappoint.”
Joanie rolled her eyes and shut them out of the warm little room. She heard the thud of their bodies collapsing against the wall and floor. She allowed herself the rush of relief at being by herself, at being spared a more gruesome or repulsive task. Joanie believed she could do anything difficult, as long as they left her to do it alone.
Opening the books was easy, as natural as taking a drink when she felt thirsty. Closing them would be much more difficult. That day in the chapel, Joanie felt a new presence come over her, something outside of Josiah’s sweating bulk beside her in bed, or Mother Joseph’s constant obstacle course of tests. She felt something good. Mother Joseph meant for the work in the chapel to be another trial, another way to rough Joanie up, to subsume her in the smells and bodies—the living and the dead—of her new family. Her mother-in-law had catastrophically missed the mark.
The chapel did not torture Joanie. In the chapel, Joanie found a reward, peace. The notebooks, along with what information she had forced from Josiah, unfolded around her in a galaxy of possibility. Great-grandmother Joseph’s handwriting raged and slithered across every page. The cover of each book was printed with her name in jagged peaks of irregular capital letters: HELEN JOSEPH. Joanie understood she was meant to be disturbed by what she saw there. Instead, as she followed the pages through to their outrageous conclusions, she felt soothed. Comforted even, like Great-grandmother Joseph had written directly to her. She knew she was meant for those notebooks, the same way she knew not to touch a hot thing—she just knew.
Joanie heard Harlan and Josiah on the other side of the door, their lazy conversation seeping through the woven chapel walls. But their presence didn’t distract her or make her nervous. Rather, their existence on the other side of the door seemed diminished—they were nothing, those two. Equivalent to clumps of dust and hair to be swept from the baseboards.
Great-grandmother Joseph had drawn illustrations, too. Faded colored pencil filled in the inky outlines of recognizable copies of the Vine and its flowers. And there were patterns—pages and pages of colorful patterns. They weren’t quite geometric. They were globular and sprawling, like they had grown out of the earth under the house and had pressed through the floor, then the table, then through the book, up to Joanie’s eyes. She couldn’t look away—as though some invisible hand was trained at the back of her neck, daring her to stop reading.
Helen Joseph’s captions alone were instruction enough for the worship Joanie was meant to begin that day. Joanie knew to pour the salt on the floor, then to scoop and sift it into one of those patterns. There were pages of patterns for every day—not just the seven days of the week, or even for the month, but patterns for every day of the year. Friday patterns were more elaborate and repetitive, filled with curling swirls and curved, teardrop shapes. Joanie’s hands were scrubbed red as she moved the salt against the earth all afternoon. Perhaps her mother-in-law had meant to frustrate her with the monotony and apparent uselessness of the chore. Mother Joseph couldn’t have possibly imagined what Joanie would eventually extract from those notebooks.
Joanie slid her finger across the pages, and found that in every pattern, one feature was repeated: an arched doorway—just like the door to the chapel. As she poured the salt from the navy-blue box over the floor, she thought about what the shape had meant to Helen. She thought about it as she pushed and scraped the flecks of salt into the circles and loops of Helen’s drawings. She understood that she’d been wrong. Mother Joseph wasn’t the powerful one. Whatever power she held was a watery copy of what had rushed through the channels of Great-grandmother Joseph’s mind. With every scratch of her palm in the salt, Joanie felt the staggering strength of it moving through her—through her tissues and hair and teeth. The air around her thickened and blurred. She felt taken over, like her hands were moving without her mind, like her mind had lifted up through her head and out into the chapel. Like that arched doorway was letting something in. Joanie had never felt like this in the rudimentary Work she’d done with Letta. And just like that, at the thought of Letta and her old life, her body and mind were snapped back together. The walls settled and solidified back to their familiar woven shape around her, and she stopped pushing and pulling at the salt to consider what had just happened. She sat back on her heels and understood. This chapel was a place to find comfort and grandeur in what she thought was a small and rude life. In a corner of the salt sculpture, Joanie traced in her own sign of protection, the way an artist would sign a painting. It was one of the things Letta taught all the girls along with tilling—to create their own talismans against potential danger to the Vine. It felt right to add hers to Helen’s Work; it felt like growing. In the chapel, Joanie would not be wasted. In the chapel, Joanie would transcend.
* * *
In the muggy trailer, Joanie tingled with the secret that she and Sabina had built. She had a proper place to trace the limits of her own power, and perhaps to exceed them. She would make a new way to get what she needed, and she knew the Vine would help her. The Vine would not be able resist helping her. Joanie felt a surge of optimism; she could feel the shape of her baby beside her, and smelled his faint, sweet scent. She would build upon Helen’s work and, a green whisper in her ear explained, she would lift off.
15
It was still dark when Cello woke Marcela. He rolled out of bed and dressed. The empty envelope and the Stuckey’s on Route 9 jutted sharply into every thought. Marcela wasn’t as quiet, and Cello could tell that she’d woken up her sister and Joanie, too. He felt Joanie watching them as they slipped out of the trailer. He wondered what she thought, and was skewered by the thin, hopeful impression that she could possibly be jealous.
They trekked to the camouflaged spot behind the vegetable plot, expecting to arrive first and catch which direction Ben cycled in from. The stranger had beat them there, though; he was already waiting, sitting cross-legged in the wet grass. The boy’s long hair was damp, and slicked back in a dark knot behind his head. The face fully on display was older, sharper, than it had looked the day before. He slouched wearily over his lap as he waited.
“You’re early,” Cello said, itching at a bug bite on his leg. Ben’s gaze flickered toward them.
He shrugged. “Guess so.”
“So, where’s that money you promised us?” Marcela elbowed into the clearing behind the leaf screen. She rubbed her eyes with sleepy languor, and pretended nonchalance while Ben handed her a fold of cash. She didn’t even look at it, just passed it back to Cello with the casual flippancy used in yard games of hot potato. Cello wanted to count it, to chaperone it back to the Stuckey’s where he could throw another mantle of protection over the baby. But he understood that he couldn’t break whatever air of confidence that Marcela had cultivated.
The fresh dynamic unfolding between the three of them made Cello a little delirious. If they made their own money, maybe Cello could save enough to lure the kidnappers out, to t
ruly restore the baby. With enough money, he imagined being granted the power of a real father; together, he and Joanie and the baby could be their own family. He imagined the baby’s soft cheek on his shoulder, and Joanie’s relieved smile. At least he hoped. He hoped so thoroughly he practically lurched with the want of it.
“Better get started, then,” Ben said. Cello noted Ben’s stare and shook himself back into the conversation in the clearing.
“Okay, let’s go,” Marcela said, swinging her arms as she began to lead the way.
“Wait—do you know what you’re looking for?” Ben asked.
“Figure we’d just watch you do it.” Marcela reached up and pulled a spray of leaves from the strung-up wire.
“Hey, don’t touch that, okay?” Ben said, reaching to secure a dangling slip of greenery back onto the fretwork.
“Why not?” Cello asked.
Ben shook his head, and covered his face with both hands. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said, his voice muffled. Ben’s hands fell away, and he untied his hair, shaking it out to dry. Cello was startled by the familiarity of the gesture, something his foster sisters did all the time. Under Ben’s hands the motion was inverted into something else, some other magnetic thing.
“The plant we’re looking for is about a foot tall.” Ben held his hands up, dragging shapes into the air. “There’s a stalk, and then a couple of prongs. Only a three-or four-pronger is worth digging up. On each one you got five leaves, two little, three big. Sometimes you’ll see red berries in the middle, not always.”
Cello nodded, and Marcela widened her eyes and churned the air with her hands in a move-along motion.
“The stem’s soft—make sure it’s pliable before you dig it up, or else it’s not ginseng. You want to keep everything, the whole plant, but especially the root. Please, please be careful when you dig it out. Can’t sell broken roots to my guy.” Ben shook his head. “Beginners always fuck up the dig-out.”
Marcela’s face was bright with a triumphant little smile. She looked over at Cello, sharing a knowing glance.
“Alright, let’s go.” Cello led the way out of the clearing and Marcela followed. Ben hung back.
“I’m going to look on my own. Better haul that way,” he said.
“Fine,” Marcela called without looking over her shoulder.
As they walked, Cello realized he was enjoying this new camaraderie with his foster sister. It was nice to get a sense of Marcela alone. She was always so forceful within the group of kids. Cello thought that maybe he should explain to Marcela about the note and the package, and why he was really there, but quickly covered over the idea. This Marcela seemed so much happier—he didn’t want to stain that feeling. They hiked across the property to the line of wooded hills that edged the south side.
Cello knew the garden. He understood its obvious strengths and weaknesses, but he also knew its secrets. Ben had described the ginseng plants the way someone would describe a mutual acquaintance, and as Cello ran through the stranger’s rough picture, it caught—a vision, a snap, of exactly where he’d seen plants like that before.
“Come on,” Cello said to Marcela, who was already lagging behind him.
“How far? I don’t want to be out here all day.” She slapped a mosquito dead against the side of her bare calf.
“Will you hold this?” Cello shoved the crate they’d brought into Marcela’s hands. “I’m running up the hill a second.” Before she could push the crate back to him, Cello sprinted toward the spot where he remembered once seeing one of Ben’s plants. He skipped over the brush carefully, not wanting to fall and come back bleeding. Cello was halfway up the hill, in a dark-damp cluster of climbing bramble. There, at his feet, were the hand-like leaves, waving from atop their prongs. Three prongs, like Ben had said, and a bright clutch of crimson nestled in the centers.
Cello crouched over the plant and moved the soil away with his fingers, gently, the exact way he’d removed weeds from the earth when he was as small as Miracle and Emil. The root emerged like any other, like the finger of some long-dead creature. Cello loosened it until it came away from the ground completely, and he shook it out, the smell of damp soil radiant under the heat. Cello laid out the plant on the ground, like a tiny body, and stood to show Marcela.
“God, it’s early as butt,” Marcela muttered, unimpressed. “What time should we head back?”
Cello shrugged. “We haven’t even got started yet and you’re already trying to head back?”
“Give me a break. I’m just trying to—you know—get a sense of the day. I don’t want Letta to be missing us.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Ugh, shut up.”
Cello pretended to be annoyed, but the attempt evaporated under the hot promise of their successes. They worked and the pile grew. They hiked up the incline farther into the woods until Cello caught another flash of red. He blinked hard. They’d hit upon what looked like a flattened ray of space filled with ginseng plants. About half were too small to harvest, but there were plenty to dig up. Marcela preened with delight, bending down to check that the stems were soft. It was very suspicious, Cello thought, this profusion of wild ginseng just there for the taking—growing so neatly and abundantly. It had the familiar order of one of Sil’s plots. He knew Sil hadn’t planted it; Sil told Cello about each of his new plantings—the locations and instructions for care. “In case something happens to me,” he’d said. But maybe Sil hadn’t told him everything. Maybe Mother Joseph had set up another satellite farm and hadn’t told Sil or Letta. He didn’t like the idea of another of Mother Joseph’s gardens closing in on theirs.
Cello ducked away from the sinister shape his thoughts were circling. Marcela began to piece together her own suspicions as she walked through the line of plants.
“What the hell?” Marcela said.
Cello shook his head.
“It isn’t Sil’s, though?”
“No.”
“You sure?” Marcela picked at the dirt from under her fingernails. “Wait a second.” Her gaze moved from the ground to the top of the tree cover. “Again with this?” Cello followed her eyes to the edge of the makeshift plot. She hooked a finger around a piece of thread-thin wire—another curtain of camouflage. “It’s that Jesus-looking stranger’s, of course. How long has he been doing this?”
“Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I guess it’s ours now.” Cello and Marcela bent to the ground and started to dig. They dug with their hands and the blunt, tin spoons all of the kids carried during delicate harvests at the garden. The roots were elegant and jagged, but not difficult to free from the ground intact. Cello smiled as he recalled Ben’s despair at being at the mercy of a couple of ham-fisted beginners. Marcela started up a thin, cheerful whistle. Cello breathed a lungful of clean, cool air, and kept working.
“What’s going on over here?”
Cello and Marcela paused, their hands lifted from the plants they’d been working loose. Their heads turned toward to the source of the voice. For one awful moment, Cello thought the voice was Sil’s. When he stood, he saw it was Ben, a hand half covering his yawn.
“Look what we found,” Marcela said. Each of her words had the jab of a pointed finger.
“Wow, this is really lucky,” Ben answered, skittering away from the accusation in her tone.
“Isn’t it?” Cello said, unexpectedly enjoying the other boy’s discomfort.
“Wow, you guys already got a lot,” Ben said, the genuine surprise in his voice an obvious swerve from his carefully guarded earlier tone. He moved toward the pile of roots that loomed out of the ground between Cello and Marcela. Marcela put her hands on her hips, and Ben stood still. He looked closely at Marcela, and then at Cello—at their hands and faces and bare arms flecked with dirt.
“Okay, so what’s your deal? Are you all farmers?” he asked, looking from one of them to the
other.
“Not exactly.” Marcela laughed and coughed at the same time.
“Is your family really into gardening, then? Are you brother and sister?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“God, no!” This time, Marcela coughed more than she laughed, so that it sounded like she was choking. Ben reached out and gave her back a couple of solid thumps, but watched Cello the whole time. Cello stepped more deeply into the shade of one of the large oaks curling over them.
“None of your business,” Cello said.
“How long have you been doing this?” Ben gestured to the pile of roots and leaves warming under the sun. Marcela moved away from his hand still on her back.
“You ask a lot of questions for a trespasser,” she said. Cello winced as a vivid surge of doubt beat against his chest. This stranger showing up with convenient solutions right when they were needed—even Cello couldn’t be optimistic enough to ignore the darker explanations looming underneath.
Ben shook his head. “No, you’re absolutely right. Sorry.” He turned a bright look on Marcela and then at Cello, too—an obvious attempt to charm. “I think we have enough here, between what you pulled and what I got. Besides, if this batch gets a few more months, it’ll be more valuable. I can take what we have over to my guy this morning.”
“Ha!” Marcela released a single cackle. “That’s funny. We’ll be coming with you, of course.” She pulled on Cello’s arm so that they faced out, side by side, like a pair of athletes on the same team.
Cello leaned in closer to Marcela. “I think one of us needs to stay back. We can’t both disappear all day.”
Daughters of the Wild Page 15