Wildwood Whispers

by Willa Reece

  I’d read to keep my trash contained safely so as not to attract black bears or raccoons. And I had no outside pets that might attract coyotes. So, while I still had much to learn about living in the country, I wasn’t afraid to walk into the forest with my basket to take care of the garden.

  At least not afraid of animals.

  There were dangers on the mountain that didn’t walk on four feet.

  The break-in that hadn’t required any breaking was always on my mind. As were my Sect stalkers. Just because I hadn’t seen them outside of town, didn’t mean I didn’t expect to. I would be a fool to forget them and, no matter the beauty of my surroundings or the fairy-tale frost and fox, I was nobody’s fool. My background had instilled in me the necessity of always looking and listening and bracing for what may come. So even as the nonmigratory birds began to sing around me, I was less relaxed than other gardeners would be.

  To calm myself, I listened to the varied birdcalls as I set my basket down beside the twining vines of the blackberry bushes. I would learn to tell which birds were singing eventually; for now, they were an anonymous cheerful chorus. I picked up the striped canvas gardening gloves and put them on. As the garden prepared to slumber for the winter, the black locusts at its corners were becoming more prominent. I tried to imagine that the Ross women were resting in peace and that if there were such things as restless spirits they would at least appreciate me tending the plants they had tended when they were alive.

  I knew Sarah would like me here. Although she’d be astonished at all I was trying to learn. At my decision to become someone besides a mere survivor.

  There were sketched diagrams in the Ross Remedy Book that came after the blackberry preserves recipe. A Ross ancestor from way before Sarah’s time had illustrated the care and tending of the blackberry vines. I’d studied them carefully and asked questions of Granny so it wasn’t hard to trim the side and lateral shoots, which would give the plant’s energy to the fruit. I also cut back the dead or damaged vines and trimmed the length of the longer canes.

  “I thought you might leave after summer.”

  My earlier thoughts of diligence mocked me. I’d been too involved in my task. The soothing snip, snip, snip had lulled me. I straightened and turned to see Jacob coming into the garden clearing from the woods on the opposite side of the path. He must have gotten a very early start that morning to come from that direction because Granny had told me the forest stretched for miles and miles before it reached the Sect settlement on the other side.

  “You warned me it would be hard to leave,” I replied. “And I told you I was going to stay.” I rolled my shoulders and puffed a stray lock of hair from my eyes. “I like the work. It’s peaceful and necessary somehow.”

  “It’s the continuity of it. It feels good to take up where others left off. Plus there’s satisfaction in caretaking. Not only in seeing the results of your physical labor, but in the simple exertion of the labor itself,” Jacob said. “It’s one thing to work out in a gym—run around a track, lift weights. It’s another thing to dig and plant, grow and harvest.”

  “Hike,” I added. “You do a lot of hiking.”

  His sudden appearance had startled me, but now I was soothed. Unlike my Sect creepers, Jacob’s presence always felt right somehow. I wasn’t quite sure how he fit in my wildwood puzzle, but I was certain he did.

  “I’ll admit I’d probably do it even if it wasn’t a part of my job. I’ve always loved the forest even when I was a kid. Only now I have a good excuse to practically live here,” Jacob said.

  He’d stepped into the garden, carefully going around the raised beds and spiraling rows. I watched him approach and tried not to feel anticipation as he came closer and closer. He could have easily shortened and quickened his trip by crossing over the rows where the plants had dried and died down. He didn’t. He strolled the long way around as if he was a monk enjoying a meandering maze. Watching him was almost a meditation as well and I had to blink to keep myself from being mesmerized by his graceful movements.

  He might not jog or lift weights at a gym, but he was incredibly physical. You could see it in the way he placed his boots on the ground, sure-footed and certain. It was obvious in the way his body moved beneath his clothes, not an inch of spare flesh.

  Finally, he came to the row of blackberry bushes and we stood together, hemmed in by the pile of vines I’d trimmed on one side of us and the wall of thorns on the other. I tried to casually accept his nearness.

  “Granny told you how to trim?” Jacob asked.

  He examined my morning’s work and the pile on the ground.

  “Yes. Granny said Tom would know it was for me to do this time,” I explained.

  “Did she give you those gloves?”

  “No, I bought these. The thorns are intimidating. Especially on the older, woodier vines,” I said. I held up both hands to show where the thorns had pricked the tough material of the gloves.

  “Tom has tended the garden for a long time, but Granny wanted you to trim the blackberry bushes this year. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you why,” Jacob said. “May I?” He had reached for my left hand, but paused to ask permission before taking it.

  The pause. The request. Suddenly, I had less of a problem with closeness than I’d had minutes before. I nodded. Just that. I didn’t lower my hand or meet him halfway. I only nodded and waited to see what he planned to do.

  Okay. I also held my breath when he reached to carefully pull the glove from my raised left hand, finger by finger. Once the glove came free, he tossed it into the basket on the ground. Then, he grasped my hand in his. I didn’t pull away or try to step back.

  “Do you trust me?” Jacob asked.

  Our hands were between us. He wasn’t crowding me. And he had asked permission to touch me. But my pulse was racing and the breath I’d held while the glove was removed came too quickly, now, between my lips.

  “I don’t trust anyone,” I confessed and heat suffused my face when he looked up from my hand as if he was surprised by my candid reply. But was it candid? Deep down, deeper than logic, the memory of him tending the bergamot plant had stayed with me like a visual mantra repeated time and again. I did trust him. And Lu. I just wasn’t ready to share that vulnerable truth with him yet.

  “There’s an old wives’ tale about wild berries. I first heard it when I was a little boy running around this mountain like an Appalachian Mowgli. They said if you want cobblers and pies and to fill your larder with preserves you have to make a sacrifice to the bushes. That’s why they have thorns. I pricked myself on purpose many a time back then. What do you say, Mel? Do you believe in old wives’ tales? Are you willing to go there? Beyond the tea and tisanes? To ashes buried under black locust trees and sacrificing your blood to the blackberry briars?” Jacob moved his hand to hold my middle finger extended, but, like before, he paused.

  He waited for my permission.

  My breathing slowed as warmth settled in the pit of my stomach, from his touch, from his whimsy, from the intimacy of him knowing I was on the precipice of a new philosophy I didn’t fully understand.

  And from the certain knowledge that, understanding or not, I was going to let him prick my index finger.

  He must have felt the release of tension in my shoulder and arm before I spoke. Because he moved my hand to the nearest vine and was already pressing the swell of my fingertip to its sharpest thorn when I breathed, “Yes.”

  The pressure was slight, but inexorable between his fingers and the plant. With my vulnerable finger caught in between. The thorn pierced my skin and blood welled, but there was only a fleeting sting before Jacob pulled my finger away.

  He didn’t ask my permission for what came next. I think it was an instinctive move on his part because his eyes widened above my hand with my shocked gasp as if he was as shocked himself.

  His mouth hotly closed over the tip of my finger and he soothed the prick with his tongue. I managed to stay on my feet in spite of su
ddenly liquid knees and the loss of his slight support when he dropped my hand as if my blood had burned him.

  I closed my bare hand into a fist to stop its trembling and watched as Jacob pressed his own fingers against his palm. He didn’t make a fist. It was more like he was cupping a memory in his hand.

  “Granny needs to tell you the stories. The wildwood isn’t a soft escape from what you’ve known,” Jacob said. “It can be a place of blood and pain.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do with soft if I found it,” I said. The sting in my finger was already gone. My finger had a heartbeat. A fast one. But that was more due to the memory of Jacob’s lips than the thorn prick. “I’m not looking for soft. I’m only looking for home.”

  Jacob opened his hand and ran his fingers through the thick waves of his hair.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  I was too embarrassed to ask if he was talking about the prick or the taste.

  “It’s fine,” I said. Talking about both. It wasn’t. At all. I was trashed. By the intimacy of the thorn, his lips, sharing my blood, not the pain.

  “Nature can be peaceful. But it can also be harsh. Granny knows. If you’ve decided to stay, you should know that too,” Jacob said.

  “I can deal with the thorns,” I replied. I pulled the other glove from my hand and threw it into the basket to join the one that Jacob had removed. His gaze dropped to my naked fingers, but only for a second. His cheeks were ruddy when he looked back at me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. But before I could accept or reject his apology he turned away. He didn’t hike down the path toward the cabin. He leapt over a dying zucchini squash bed and headed back into the trees from the direction he’d initially come.

  I sank down to the walled edge of the squash bed. The world came alive around me. A blackbird sang. That one I knew already. The stream gurgled. Leaves floated to the ground. I turned my hand over in my lap. My finger was fine. The prick had been negligible. I wasn’t sure why it still throbbed. I examined it for a long time, but it kept its secrets.

  Twenty-Four

  My Gathering dream hadn’t prepared me for the intensity of the labor involved with baking so much fresh bread. I settled into a rhythm of pull, twist, roll and slap. The cadence of the process soon echoed in my bones. The scent of the yeast was released from the dough as I worked, and deep within its sweet, pungent possibilities was the life of the wildwood from where it came. My mind was filled with visions of acorns falling to a moist carpet of soil, of tendrils bursting forth, of saplings reaching for the sun. The forest had breathed into the bread—morning mist and evening shadow—and I breathed the scent of the bread into me.

  With each batch of dough, I became so in tune that I knew when it was ready to sit in a crockery bowl covered with a fresh clean cheesecloth to rise. I was a novice. But I wasn’t. Because I had nurtured and tended. And now I communed with what we had done together—the wildwood and me. By the time I came to the last batch, I could feel the perfect moment from its springiness in my fingers.

  I’d given my blood to the blackberry thorn. I gave my sweat to the rye dough. And the wildwood gave back to me. I was tired. Exhausted. But I was also replete with a whole summer of wildwood scents and sensations.

  Only then, when the cadence eased and let me go, did I realize how extreme the physical exertion had been. I blinked and looked around the brightening kitchen. Sunlight hit the surface of the orb casting amethyst rays around the room.

  Sarah had been much tougher than I was because the ache I’d experienced in her memory was nothing compared to the stabbing pain between my shoulder blades or the leaden weight of the overworked muscles in my forearms.

  “I bake several loaves a week and Gathering still kicks my ass,” Joyce grumbled when she noticed me rolling my shoulders. She’d come with Granny the day before and insisted the older woman not be allowed near the kitchen. Of course, Granny had stubbornly helped some “for old times’ sake” before Joyce had succeeded in sending her to bed.

  Kara and Sadie had arrived several hours after Joyce and Granny. Sadie had rolled her sleeves to reveal tight, toned arms ropey with the muscles she’d built from years of twisting and tying branches into shape. I shuddered to think what my back would have felt like by now if Sadie hadn’t been there. Together, we’d worked through the night even after Granny had grudgingly gone to sleep. I wondered if Sadie had experienced the same visions of the forest I’d experienced while we’d worked the dough, side by side. Neither of us had spoken much through the wee hours of the morning. Had we been too focused on work for conversation or had we both been in commune with the trees?

  “Fewer people come every year and I try not to be glad about that, but I can’t help what my back thinks,” Joyce said. She arranged cooling loaves on the counter in fragrant golden-brown rows.

  “It’s a shame. Lots of young backs in this town to take over, but there’s no interest in it. That’s why Granny overdid it apprenticing you. It’s good to pass on what we know when we can. How it’s meant to be,” Sadie said.

  “The natural order of things has been interrupted. No one wants to commune with the land. They only want the money they can make from it. More pavement. More mining. ‘Ecotourism.’ Thrill seekers don’t really care about where they raft or run,” Kara said.

  “Some do,” Sadie argued. “I’ll take the outdoorsy types any day over the politicians and polluters. There are lots of hikers and river rats who love the mountain almost as much as we do.”

  “The more time spent in the wildwood, the better,” Joyce agreed. “This year we couldn’t even get a single church interested in making apple butter the old way. Oh, some of us made small batches and Kara made some cider, but it isn’t the same.”

  I’d experienced an old-timey apple butter day in my dreams, so I was able to commiserate with the ladies more than they knew. My pang for the old times was just as strong as if I’d lived through them myself.

  Charm sat on my shoulder and no one paid him any attention whatsoever. Probably because they’d all brought pets of their own. Granny’s CC had claimed the back of the armchair Charm had vacated. Joyce had a long-eared hound on the front porch that looked like a cross between a Doberman and a bloodhound, all loose wrinkly skin and white teeth. Kara had a bright red cardinal. And no cage. He came and went through the front door whenever anyone opened and closed it as if he needed to stretch his wings.

  And of course Sadie had her bees. Only a few. Nothing like the swarm that had engulfed her body when the Sect man had threatened her. But definitely unusual. Each one danced along her arm when it landed as if to communicate with her in the same way it would communicate with its hive.

  Charm perched on my shoulder was nothing in comparison.

  We had time as the loaves cooled in the kitchen to take turns freshening up. Even though my body was sore, I didn’t feel like I’d been awake all night. There was a pulsing energy to my steps, as if I was a freshly sprouted sapling, and when I paused in a ray of sunlight on my way back downstairs I basked in its warmth as if my cells plumped from its nourishment.

  I was closer to hearing the whispers of the wildwood than I’d been before. Outside, there was a breeze and Kara propped both doors open, front and back, so the air could flow and clear out the heat from all the baking. But what the circulating wind accomplished was to scent both front and back with savory rye so that from the driveway to the trees Gathering began before the first bite was taken.

  When I made it back downstairs, I found Granny alone in the kitchen. She was sitting on a stool with the valerian tea tin open, and still full, in front of her on the counter. I hadn’t gone so far as to dump any of it out. Not wanting to worry her and actively trying to deceive her were two different things.

  “No wonder you have circles under your eyes,” she said. Her forehead was more wrinkled than usual by concern.

  “Maybe the dreams are coming from the wildwood. I need to dr
eam. I need to listen,” I said.

  Granny placed the lid back on the tin and pressed it closed. “Each of us chooses our steps. Everyone’s relationship with the wildwood is different. Some listen to the bees. Some share love with stitches. Some soothe pain with dandelion wine. You have a path too. A process that will be your own.” She handed me the tin and I put it back on the counter by the stove. “It’s there if you need it. Use it when you need to rest. We all need to rest sometimes. The wildwood won’t mind. Even the garden is fallow in winter,” Granny said gently.

  I was relieved. That she finally knew I had opened myself to the dreams and that she understood. Even if she was still warning me to be careful, just as Joyce had warned her when she’d worn herself out with mentoring me.

  I would still avoid using the tea, but I appreciated that she cared.

  Even though I’d been warned, the trickle of guests that began to arrive after midday took me by surprise. For me, the Gathering dream was so recent that the dwindled number of people attending stood out in sharp contrast to the crowd Sarah had fed. But Granny and the other wisewomen seemed pleased. Just like in my dream, we cut and served ourselves the first slices. I ate mine plain to taste the rich whole grain. I marveled at the depth of flavor that exploded against my tongue. It was pure fantasy to imagine I could taste woodsy moss and gurgling creek and forest shadows baked into the bread itself.

  Or was it? I’d seen the visions of what the yeast had fed upon in my own mind. I’d seen and felt the magic of its beginnings and the ardor that had embraced me during its making. As I chewed I felt the cadence again. Pull, twist, roll and slap. Only this time it was my heart being kneaded and worked and shaped into something worthwhile.