“Just come in, man,” Ben said, and his hand between Cello’s shoulder blades pushed him gently forward.
“Not the sharpest tool in the shed, is he?” Dr. Santo motioned them into the house. In the living room, everything matched: the sofa, the coffee table, the armchairs, even the curtains. Cello was stunned, like he’d fallen into someone else’s body. It couldn’t be him, Cello, standing in this harmonious and beautiful, sweet-smelling house. He looked at Ben, helpless, with the filthy sackcloth in his arms.
“Yeah, I’ll take that,” said Ben. “In the kitchen, Dr. S?”
“That’s where the scales are, Benjamin. Would you boys like a lemonade?”
“Sure, that’d be great,” Ben called from the brightly lit, gleaming white kitchen that Cello could barely see. It looks like heaven in here, he thought.
Dr. Santo left and returned with three glasses on a tray. He handed one to Cello. “It’s sweetened, I hope that’s alright. Just with a little agave.”
Cello took the glass, and examined the scrollwork etched into the rim. Little shreds of green floated among the ice cubes. He didn’t want to put his mouth on it. He looked at Dr. Santo and then at Ben, waiting for them to drink first. Maybe this is a trick, Cello thought. He recalled Letta’s warning never to take anything from the Josephs, not to eat or drink anything they offered.
Dr. Santo disappeared into the kitchen, and Cello followed, not wanting to stand alone in the pristine living room shedding dirt and mud onto the freshly vacuumed floor. In the kitchen, it was clear to Cello that Ben had been here before. Probably many times before. He gulped from the cold drink and Cello watched the other boy’s throat move as he swallowed. Cello felt an odd compulsion, to switch glasses with Ben and drink out of the half-filled glass, to put his mouth on that glass instead of the one in his hands. He looked over at Dr. Santo, who was openly studying him with narrowed eyes.
“What did you say your name was?” he asked.
“I didn’t. It’s Cello.” Cello watched Ben’s hands untangle the stems and leaves quickly but gently, bunching the ginseng together into weighable piles with similar-size roots.
“Like the instrument?”
Cello nodded.
“Huh. And how do you know Benjamin? Are you also a student at Grove?”
“What?”
“Grove College. Are you a student there, too?” Dr. Santo spoke slowly, as though trying to communicate with a speaker of some other language.
Cello shook his head and tried not to look too dazed.
“I guess not, since I’d probably know you, or at least about you, if that were indeed the case.” Dr. Santo directed his speech at Cello, but Cello got the sense he wasn’t actually being spoken to. That Dr. Santo conversed with some quiet person seated in a corner of the room. Cello looked around quickly, just to be sure.
There was no other person, but something suspicious, something colorful, caught his eye. A car seat patterned with yellow and green cartoon animals rested at the foot of the carpeted staircase. It made him nervous—it was the only trace of a baby in a house where no baby should be.
“Nice sweater,” Cello said, and flushed as red as Dr. Santo’s sunburn.
“Thank you. I got it when I was working with the peace corps. In Romania.”
“Oh,” said Cello, looking from Dr. Santo to Ben. Ben caught Cello’s eyes and smiled—the smile made Cello half-angry. Of course Ben was making fun of him; Ben wasn’t like them, all desperate and grasping. He was privileged, smart. He knew where the paper towels were kept in a kitchen like this.
“Dr. Santo was my history professor last year.”
“You were a brilliant student.” Dr. Santo shook his head and looked sadly into his lemonade. “I’m so sorry you didn’t enroll for next semester. Such a waste.”
“I’ve got a lot going on, Dr. S,” Ben said, removing a fallen, yellowed leaf from the front of his shirt.
“Yes, yes, I know. The hard sciences,” said Dr. Santo contemptuously, looking again at Cello. “And where are you in school, Cello-like-the-instrument?”
“I’m not,” said Cello, taking a careful sip of his drink—mint, that was what the bits of green were.
“Did you graduate? You look a little young—still in high school?”
Cello shook his head, chewing a sliver of mint.
“Where are you enrolled?” Dr. Santo persisted.
Cello gave Ben that same look from the doorway before they’d entered this strange, snow globe of a place.
“I think Cello was homeschooled, right?” Ben had emptied the sacks, and carefully refolded them. He washed his hands and gave Cello an odd look.
“Yeah,” said Cello, deciding that it was mostly true.
“Hmm, I see.” Dr. Santo tipped his head back and finished the last of the lemonade. Cello stared at the older man’s upper lip where bits of mint had lodged in his stubble. “Are you saving for college as well, young man? I like to think that our work here enriches all sorts of lives, even though it isn’t strictly under the law. But then so much of our Constitution is open to interpretation. Meant to be a flexible, living document, you know.”
Cello watched Ben dry his hands on a beige-checked towel with words printed on it. A towel with words on it, was all Cello could bring himself to think in that moment.
“I think we’re ready for weigh-in, sir,” said Ben.
“Very well, then.” Dr. Santo turned his attention to the piles of plants. He pulled a sleek glass-and-chrome scale from some secret compartment in the heaven-kitchen and began to weigh the piles, writing numbers down on a little pad by the scale. Cello was surprised, indignant even, that Ben was just letting this old sweater-wearing history teacher write whatever numbers down that he wanted. Cello tried to lean nonchalantly over the counter, to make sure the numbers on the scale matched the numbers Dr. Santo scratched onto the pad. He felt Ben looking at him, looked back and saw the trace of a smirk. Dr. Santo worked as quickly as Ben had, and soon his lips were moving as he added the numbers in his head.
“Six hundred and twelve. Does that sound right to you, Benjamin?”
Ben leaned over and looked at Dr. Santo’s paper for barely a second. “Looks good to me.”
Dr. Santo reached into his pocket and pulled out a bulging wallet, a thick, juicy pear of a wallet, Cello thought. He plucked a stack of bills out and counted out six hundred dollars. Cello watched Andrew Jackson’s face flashing continuously out until Dr. Santo stopped and looked up. “Don’t think I have the twelve. Okay if I get you next time?”
“Sure, Dr. S.” Ben nodded, smiling a cheerful, calm smile.
Cello thought maybe he should say something, like: “Absolutely not, give us our twelve goddamn dollars.” But he stayed quiet, understanding in a new and complete way his ignorance about what was happening, how people could behave this way with each other. Cello was stunned by the realization that he probably had no idea how most things happening in that house could be happening—how a floor could be so clean, how so much furniture could fit into a room and look beautiful and not stupid, what the peace corps was. He felt himself being ushered out, and shook Dr. Santo’s hand, bewildered. This, at least, he understood, he thought as he remembered the thousands of handshakes between Sil and the Josephs, between him and Sil even.
Back in the truck, he waited for Ben.
17
Joanie paced between the trailers, hoping the physical movement would propel her toward an answer to her problem. She needed to give the Vine some form of nourishment, something that would soothe it, and make it fully open to her. Joanie stopped, and stretched out on the ground; she closed her eyes and begged for a solution to materialize. She felt Letta before she saw her; the old woman pushed her foot against the side of Joanie’s leg. Joanie sat up, wiping away the grit left behind by Letta’s shoe.
“I don’t know what you be
en doing, but I need you to get back to honest work. Now.”
Joanie lowered her head between her knees. “Letta,” she began. “You need to tell me what you remember about the worship you used to do at the Josephs’. I know I can do, well, more. But I’m stuck. You have to know something that could help.” Joanie could hear a frenzied, devout heat swelling her voice.
Letta cleared her throat, shifting her hands from her hips to clasp in front of her chest. “Got in trouble, didn’t you? Isn’t that what I said would happen? And why on earth would you think I know anything about more?” Letta said, her voice hard.
“Mother Joseph told me you had us all baptized in the chapel. So you know something.” Joanie pushed her hair away from her face, and gathered it behind her neck into a rough braid.
“Well, that’s different. I’ve never been one to take Helen’s ideas to heart. Why do you think I’m all the way out here while Amberly’s in the main house?”
“I just know you can help.” Joanie took a deep, deliberate breath. “It could help me. And you owe me, Letta, after all I went through.”
“I owe you? I raised you like my own.” Letta moved a garish cocktail ring Sil had given her, back and forth, from one finger to another. “You, miss, owe me right now. You owe me hours and hours of missed work. You know I can’t keep covering for you. It barely works for me anymore, anyway. And the migraines that I get after don’t go away for days. The Work is your responsibility, as the oldest girl. Concentrate on that, instead of more.”
Joanie stood and moved to where their work boots were all lined up beneath the kids’ trailer step. She was calm, she thought, reasonable. “Well,” Joanie said, “if it’s my responsibility as the oldest girl, then it should be my choice how we tend to the Vine here. If it’s my responsibility and I think we need to do more, then we need to do more. If you help me do that, I can help you, too. You don’t know half the things I learned at Mother Joseph’s. You don’t know half the things I’m learning now.” She pulled the laces on her work shoes tight.
Letta put the heels of her hands to her forehead. “I don’t need none of that trouble,” she said. “I need you to do what we’ve been doing for years—and right now, I need you clean up all of what we picked. Go on out to the tent.”
“Think about what we could do,” Joanie said, pinning the long braid up off her neck. “What I could do.”
“I can’t go against Amberly like that,” Letta said, chewing on her lip. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Are you sure?” Joanie leaned in, relishing the few inches of height she stood taller than her foster mother. “Just think about it.” She left Letta beside the trailer, scratching nervously at an old mosquito bite. “Just see what you remember.”
Joanie walked to the patch of milky plastic under a blackening sky—the unmistakable crackle of a thunderstorm hung in the air. The tent was stuffy and warm. In that heat, surrounded by fragrant cuttings, Joanie was filled with a transcendent optimism; Letta’s fear felt like confirmation that she was on the right track. Surrounded by the humid embrace of the Vine’s cuttings all around her, she focused her mind, dived down into her gut and found that her instincts pointed to a solution as clear as a turn signal on the road. Joanie would prepare a recipe in the chapel, not one of Helen’s, but one of her own. A gift, to persuade the Vine to let her further in. It would work. She could feel the Vine’s affirmation all around her. If she could coerce her way more deeply inside of the Vine’s mysteries, she could persuade it to do anything she wanted—even track down her son.
Mother Joseph would never have dreamed that Joanie could make the worship belong to her. Mother Joseph would never have dreamed that any person could make the worship her own. Her mother-in-law’s worship was an unquestioning child’s devotion. But Joanie was curious, like Helen had been. Joanie traced the borders of the Work and understood how she could transform them. Mother Joseph had opened a secret door into the Vine’s power, leaving Joanie alone with those ragged books inside of the chapel.
She remembered the books being warped and rippled with damp, their cardboard covers mostly gray. Any trace of color had been leached out over the decades. When Joanie unbuckled the belt that held them together, she noticed they had been stacked in a deliberate order—the oldest ones on top, and the newest ones at the bottom. Reading through them had been like walking alongside Helen Joseph—witnessing her discoveries and theories about the Vine as she made them.
As she ransacked each book for secrets about her new family, Joanie came to a very clear and surprising realization. Helen believed that she was some kind of priestess, and that the line of Work she described could not be broken. Helen filled her books with warnings about upholding the practice, and the dangers of abandoning it.
One night, Josiah asked her about the hours she passed in the cellar. “You don’t have to do that every day,” he’d explained. “You just can’t skip Fridays. Mama’s strict about our Sabbath—she’s very superstitious.”
“How come?” They lay back on the pile of mildewed pillows, Joanie with a cigarette in her hand, Josiah with an oatmeal cream pie in his.
“It’s ’cause Letta’s sister died doing it different.”
“How?” Joanie turned to watch him explain. The pillows were ice cold against her cheek.
“I don’t know,” Josiah said, pressing the rest of the cookie into his mouth.
“You can tell me. We’re married now. I should know, right?”
Josiah chewed with his mouth open. The powerful chemical odor of factory-made cinnamon extract settled over the room. “She was doing the worship. Aunt May—Letta’s twin. What you’ve been doing, down in the cellar.”
“Yeah.” Joanie reached over Josiah’s body to ash her cigarette into an empty orange soda can. She felt Josiah reach up for her, but slapped away his sticky cinnamon grope. “Not now, Josiah. Finish telling me.”
“Then?” Josiah asked.
“Maybe.” Joanie lit a fresh cigarette off the old one and raised herself onto her elbows.
“Grandmother said she did it wrong.”
“What did she do wrong?”
“I don’t remember. Just something different. Not like how she did it before. But Aunt May told Mama whatever it was, it was out of our hands, and Aunt May couldn’t disrespect the worship without paying. And then she just died, right there in her bed—just, like, blood coming out of her mouth.”
Joanie winced and put a hand to her face, as though checking to see if all of her features were still there. “What happened? Did she get sick before?”
“No.” Josiah shook his head and she felt the entire bed wobble with the vehemence of his denial. “Just dropped dead out of nowhere. It’s why Mama’s making you do it. She doesn’t like to do it herself if she don’t have to—she’s scared.”
“Huh.” Joanie filled her lungs with smoke and then exhaled all of the heat back out into the winter-cold room.
“How come you don’t want me?” Josiah asked.
“What?”
“You never want me.”
“Quit whining, Josiah. Things would go a lot easier for you if you didn’t whine all the fucking time.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re the one who gives me my medicine now.” As he sulked, his body sank down into the sag of the mattress. “And I got to keep reminding you.”
“Well, Jesus—whose fault is that? If you didn’t need your medicine so much, maybe you wouldn’t be bitching all the time, would you?” Joanie stubbed her cigarette out on the wall on her side of the bed so she wouldn’t have to touch Josiah again.
* * *
She had never suspected that their conversation that night would precede Josiah’s death by just a few weeks. Joanie wondered, if she’d known then, if she would have done something else. Would she have tried to protect him? Would she have done more for him, if she’d known their
child was already a furiously expanding mass of cells inside her?
Joanie shuddered away from the thought. She hadn’t done differently, and he was dead. She couldn’t have helped Josiah by way of the worship, or otherwise. He was beyond help of that sort. Josiah was too empty. Too dependent on the Vine in the wrong way. Joanie knew whatever magic was in those books wouldn’t work in a vacuum. That power needed fuel, juice of the heart—it required a material of substance to catch and burn.
The power in those books, and those callous and fascinating lists of ingredients within them, had charmed her. She hadn’t made any of Helen’s recipes while she stayed at the Josephs’, though she considered it constantly. She thought about how easy it would be to tip the ingredients into the pan in the smokehouse.
Easy, because the worship worked.
One morning, Joanie asked her mother-in-law—from the kitchen where she scrubbed the breakfast pans—if there were more books. Splinters from the decaying floorboards poked through the thick socks on her feet, and the hot dishwater steamed in the freezing kitchen.
“More books?” Mother Joseph repeated. She was half-gone, drooping over a glass of whiskey. “You don’t have enough to keep busy downstairs?”
“I was just wondering if there’s any more. Those last ones get a little fuzzy.” Joanie heaved her weight into scraping off the scales of dried eggs.
“Those last ones?” Mother Joseph shouted. “Don’t be worrying about them. You just do what we’ve been doing for a hundred years. Those last books aren’t for you.”
“Who’re they for?” Joanie asked. Was there something she’d missed?
“For people who want to die. Now hush up and finish that. You still got to take the laundry out.”
Joanie nodded and kept washing. Before she went out to hang the laundry, she refilled Mother Joseph’s glass. She pulled on one of Harlan’s old jackets—it stank of sweat and smoke, but it was warm. On the porch, Joanie hauled out the clump of wet clothes from the washing machine and set it on the grass under the line. She thought about what Mother Joseph said, that the books were for people who wanted to die. Did she want to die? Was a divine discovery worth it? Her back was warmed by the sun, even as her reddened numb fingers worked slowly, clumsily prying apart the wooden pins and pinching the sodden fabric to the clothesline.
Daughters of the Wild Page 17