by Willa Reece
A harsh truth that didn’t exactly capture the reality of her legacy kept forever in the Ross Remedy Book, with Granny and the trio and other wisewomen I barely knew. She continued to help long after she was gone, but only because there were women following in her footsteps. If I quit now, who would carry on Melody’s legacy? Sarah’s legacy?
“She still helps as long as any of us are helping.” I paused and leaned against the door. The wood felt cool on my forehead and my fingers, but for only a second before I drew back and pushed the bolt open.
“Listen to yourself. ‘Us.’ ‘We.’ When did you decide to become a part of this?” He stalked forward, completely focused on me, as if he hadn’t noticed I’d opened the door wide for him to leave. I didn’t even know if his Jeep was outside. I hadn’t heard a vehicle. I only knew I needed the energy I’d somehow absorbed from him to dissipate. And that could happen only if he went away and took whatever secrets he was hiding with him.
Jacob stopped a foot away from me. “She might come back. If she does, call me,” he said. “I’ll go back into the woods at dawn to see if I can pick up her trail.” He waited for me to reply until it was obvious I wouldn’t agree to call him. He pushed his hair back from his forehead with one hand in frustration. “Or call anyone—Granny, Lu. Just don’t try to help her alone. Reverend Moon doesn’t let people go easily. Trust me,” Jacob continued. “We’ll have to try to help her discreetly.”
My eyes must have widened. My nostrils must have flared. Because Jacob noticed my silent rejection of his plan to keep me out of danger. His eyes narrowed. His hands settled at his sides and he stepped closer, barely glancing at the photographs on the table that had seemed to frighten Lorelei away.
He stopped beside me in the open doorway. A cool breeze from the night outside flowed over us. We stood shoulder to shoulder, him facing out, me facing in, and I refused to look up at him. I simply waited for him to leave. I could wait all night. He must have felt my determination. But he didn’t walk away.
“I grew up in these mountains. Played in the wildwood from the time I could crawl. My mother was a minister’s wife, but when he died, she was left a widow with a small child to feed. Folks helped. They sure did. But my mother wasn’t from around here. Not originally. She never understood my desire for the woods. She found Granny and the women like her strange. Different. And, unlike my father, she could never reconcile their beliefs with her own. So we had to go. I followed her and my father’s Bible off the mountain. All the way to Charlottesville. But I never left. Not really. The wildwood already had me. And it will never let me go.” When his story had trailed off, I lifted my chin to meet his eyes. The halo from the nearest lamp didn’t illuminate his expression. He’d stood in the open doorway as if it was a shadowed confessional.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said.
“Yes you do. You already know. You feel it yourself. Might have felt it before you put the first foot in Morgan’s Gap,” Jacob said.
“Granny says she brewed me here,” I said softly. The breeze died, having left a heavy lock of hair on Jacob’s forehead.
“Maybe she did. Or maybe you were called in ways even Granny wouldn’t understand,” Jacob said. His last “maybe” sounded pained. And somehow I understood because an echo of a similar pain was in my own chest. If the wildwood was causing us to be drawn together, his secrets and my reservations were keeping us apart.
“Sarah’s mother said that some people hear the wildwood,” I replied. I needed him to go. I wanted him to stay. Most of all, I wanted to hear more about his past, about his plans and dreams and the reasons why he always seemed to show up, wherever I was, especially when I needed support.
“Lots of people hear. A select few listen,” Jacob clarified. He paused. I saw his chest go still. His lids lowered. I could barely see the shadow of his lashes against the lighter color of his cheek. “My father was a minister, but he was born on this mountain. He listened.”
“Are you one of the select few?” I asked. I had always considered myself a loner. Even after Sarah came into my life. In my mind, we were outcasts, together. Taking on the world by ourselves. In Morgan’s Gap, I was either beginning to believe in community or my circle of outcasts was growing. I had fewer reservations about Jacob than I’d had only a few moments before. All I needed to accept the connection growing between us was for him to be open to it as well. And open up with me about where he stood, what he believed and who had caused those scratches on his face.
Then, we could work together to find Lorelei, to help her.
I cursed the lack of light when Jacob stepped out on the porch. Had he nodded or had his sudden movement simply caused a noncommittal shifting of shadows? I didn’t know. I couldn’t be sure. Trust was for suckers. Something I’d always believed. But when I closed the door and locked it behind him the heat in my belly had changed to a cold hollow. Granny had said we were all here for love, but she’d been wrong. Jacob was in Morgan’s Gap for something else. And ultimately, whatever it was kept us apart.
Her mother was proud.
Sarah did all the usual things she did when her mother was presiding over a birth, but she couldn’t help noticing the warmth of her mother’s smile when she handed her towels. Or the shine in her eyes when she asked for some tea.
If the Sect woman hadn’t gone into labor, Sarah would have gone to the wildwood garden this very afternoon to complete the ritual. She was to become a wisewoman like her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother. And all the mothers all the way back to the Old Country… and beyond.
The first Ross was said to have been born from woman, but fathered by the Tuatha Dé Danann, an ancient Irish race with supernatural abilities. Hill folk. Fair folk. Fairies. It was only a story, but her mother always said there was a grain of truth in every fairy tale.
Beneath her breath, Sarah practiced the words she had learned from the Ross Remedy Book. The revelation of the ritual had happened that morning after breakfast. Sudden. But not so sudden. She’d been waiting and checking the book every day for a long time. Tomorrow was her twelfth birthday.
Her mother had completed the ritual when she’d been a year younger than her.
“You’ll be shown when it’s time,” her mother had said. Always patient. Always certain.
Sarah had been afraid her time would never come. She’d studied. She’d helped. Little by little, she learned as much as she could by her mother’s side.
They helped the Sect woman deliver her baby, but there was an undercurrent of celebration in addition to the happiness of birth. Tomorrow was her birthday. And it was time for her to join the ranks of Ross wisewomen who had ministered to the Morgan’s Gap community since long before she was born.
Twenty-Six
I rushed to the garden at first light after my strange dream about Sarah. It had been brief and hazy. In all my other dreams, I had been Sarah, looking through her eyes, feeling her emotions. This one had been vague and distant. A strange flash of an intense moment in her life and then it had been gone. I’d tossed and turned the rest of the night. Worrying about Lorelei. Hoping Jacob would find her or that she would somehow make her way to Granny in town.
There was no sign of her in the woods.
Only the usual tangle of vines.
I pushed all thought from my mind of what it had been like to be carried back home out of the dark woods by Jacob Walker.
After a quick shower, cool enough so my skin wouldn’t recall the hot washcloth in Jacob’s hand, I pulled on jeans hardened by the wind and fresh from being baked in the sun on the outdoor line. I used the blow-dryer only long enough to keep my hair from dripping on my clothes. It was a bright, sunny day so even though we were headed toward winter, I needed only a flannel shirt as a jacket over my T-shirt. I’d been outdoors enough that my skin was slightly tanned and sprinkled with freckles. To that, I added a smudge of gloss, a smear of mascara and some powder.
I’d rarely worn makeup this summer, b
ut I was trying to hide my sleepless night and the bags under my eyes from Granny.
When I came out of the bathroom, more than ready to go, I stopped in the hallway outside of the kitchen. Charm was on the counter, but what startled me was what was beside him.
The Ross Remedy Book was open on the counter.
Charm sniffed around its edges, but there was no way the tiny mouse could have retrieved the book from my fox bag, carried it up to the counter and then opened it. The book weighed several pounds, at least. Charm’s weight would have measured in ounces.
As quickly as I had frozen, I burst into action. I rushed first to the back door and then to the front. Both doors were shut tight and locked by a dead bolt and by the sliding bolts I’d installed myself. After checking the doors, I went through the house to make sure no one had managed to get inside while I had been to the garden in the early morning hours.
The cabin was peaceful and quiet. Charm and I were the only living souls inside the house.
“The book was in my bag before I hit the shower,” I said to Charm as I came back downstairs. He was still sniffing around the book as if he was also trying to figure out how it had gotten in its current position with no help from me.
I turned around in a circle in the middle of the living room. Nothing else was out of place and the embroidered fox bag was exactly as I’d left it, hanging on the back of a chair.
One thing immediately caught my attention: The remedy book was open to a page I didn’t recognize.
I’d studied all the way through the book a thousand times. I thought I knew it from cover to cover. But from where I stood in the living room I could suddenly tell the book was open to a page that was thicker than the rest. I moved toward the kitchen counter to get a closer look and as I did Charm placed his front two paws on the page and sniffed as if he too was clued in to the page’s oddity by my reaction.
I could see the page was different because it was larger than the rest of the pages in the book. It had been folded into the size and shape of the other pages, but the creased paper had increased its thickness.
Charm looked up at me expectantly as if to say he couldn’t unfold the page, but I should. He stepped back as I reached to do exactly that, carefully and gently, because it was obvious the unusual insertion was older than the rest of the book.
The paper was yellow, stained and slightly brittle. Its creases were permanent and greatly defined. They’d obviously been first folded ages ago and rarely unfolded in the life of the page.
It was a part of the book. Down the center of the opened folds, a stitching held the page in place almost in the dead center of the remedy book. I couldn’t tell what the thread was made of—cotton or something thicker like sinew. I could only tell that the stains on the paper were a combination of age, and soil, and possibly something darker—like blood.
There was tight and tiny scripted writing on the page. But what caught my attention, besides the stains, were the sketches of blackberry bushes, finely wrought in indelible ink, although they must have been rendered many, many years ago.
On the yellowed paper, the ink looked greenish-brown, but its color didn’t negate the drops of blood that trailed from the forefingers that had also been sketched on the page.
An old wives’ tale? Or a ritual the Ross women had practiced for generations?
I’d had to resort several times to a silver magnifying glass I’d found in a kitchen drawer when I’d been studying the older recipes and remedies in the book. I rummaged for it now so I could read the words my unfolding had revealed. My hands shook. I was clumsy as I skimmed the glass over the page.
In my dream, Sarah had been excited and nervous because she was preparing for a rite of passage. It must have been very close to the time her mother was killed because she’d been the same Sarah I had first met except for the lack of shadows under her eyes. I hadn’t seen the remedy book in my dream, but Sarah had been happy because she’d finally earned her place among the wisewomen on the mountain. How had Melody and Sarah known the time was right? Did this page reveal itself only when it was time to follow in the footsteps of all the Ross women who had come before?
Sarah had murmured words I couldn’t understand. The words I tried to read under the magnifying glass were written in what seemed to be an archaic form of English. I could make them out, but I resisted the urge to whisper them out loud. If this was some kind of a spell, I didn’t want to set something in motion I couldn’t control or, worse, something that hadn’t been meant for me.
It was one thing to learn to make blackberry preserves, bread and pickles. It was another to perform a ritual that involved thorns, blood and the Ross family’s legacy.
Sarah had wanted me to come to the mountain. Granny had given me the book. And, now, this page had suddenly appeared. Had I merely missed it before? Had it been there, folded, all this time?
My mind tried to rationalize what it couldn’t explain, but my heart knew the page hadn’t been there the night before. It had appeared after I’d dreamed about it appearing to Sarah. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed a page that hadn’t seemed to be there before. The bee balm ritual had been illuminated by lightning when I needed it. Now this.
Did that mean it was meant for me or did it simply mean I’d awakened something through my connection to my dead adopted sister?
Jacob had already pricked my thumb on a blackberry thorn, but that moment had been dark whimsy that had morphed into something more. Maybe he had set something in motion. But there was a clear process of steps listed on this page I had yet to follow.
Both forefingers pricked, deeply enough to drip blood on the ground.
Promises made to cultivate and cherish the land.
Life and growth celebrated and accepted from sacred earth.
It was a recipe like all the other pages of the book, but one that didn’t involve baking, canning or preparing a poultice or tisane. I folded the page, returning the instructive sketches and text to its slumber. Charm watched me with curious, blinking eyes. Granny was expecting me. I’d called her that morning using an ancient wall phone with an echoing connection. I wasn’t sure the page had been meant for me. It would be presumptuous to rush into the wildwood and complete a ritual that was meant for Ross women.
Besides, I felt a stirring deep inside my bones. The decision to establish such an intimate connection with the wildwood garden was a momentous one. Such a connection would entail me giving up the walls I’d always depended on to keep me safe and independent from others.
I closed the book. And, not entirely sure I would mind if the folded page disappeared, I shoved it back in my fox bag as I left the house.
With curls still slightly damp, I jumped into the old Chevy and pumped the clutch. Every time it started was an adventure in figuring out what magic combination of lever, pedal and prayers would cause it to fire up and chug its special blend of blue-tinged smoke to the sky.
Charm stayed at home. It wasn’t an abandonment. It felt more like he was holding down the fort and although I couldn’t imagine the little rodent being able to do much to defend our home I appreciated the intention inherent in the sparkle of his eye and the twitch of his nose.
All the movement made me feel less helpless, until I hit the outer limits of town only to encounter a roadblock. Two county squad cars were parked by the side of the road and two sheriff’s deputies were stopping cars entering or leaving town.
“You’re the one living out at the Ross cabin. I heard Joseph got this old fella up and running again,” the deputy said when I stopped and rolled down my window with a crank that sounded like the hounds of hell. “Seen or heard anything unusual out that way? We got ourselves a missing person alert. A runaway. Girl by the name of Lorelei Moon.”
I held the crank with one hand and the ancient loose steering wheel with the other as dizziness slammed into me. Moon. Wife? Daughter? Sister? Some version of all three? Nausea rose at the back of my throat and I had to swallow its bitterne
ss down before I could speak.
“No. I’m sorry, officer. It’s quiet out that way.” The deputy didn’t seem to have half of Jacob Walker’s observational skills. He didn’t notice my shaking hand on the wheel or the squeak in my voice while I lied through my teeth.
“All right, then. Drive safely and let us know if you see or hear anything,” he said. He hit the side of the truck a couple of times as a goodbye or to urge me along; I couldn’t be sure. The hollow metallic thumps made me jump and let off on the clutch too quickly. I had to grab for the wheel to keep the truck on the road as I depressed the gas to keep the chugging engine from stalling. The deputy laughed. No doubt amused by my lack of skill and not alerted at all to my guilty mental state. So, really, who lacked skill in this situation?
What if I lied for the girl when what she really needed was professional medical help? What if the authorities only wanted to help Lorelei Moon?
I’d run away from bad situations too many times to fall for those nagging doubts. I’d seen the way the townspeople treated Reverend Moon. I’d seen the way they made way for him and treated him as someone to respect. I’d seen Lorelei’s fear.
Maybe she’d made her way undetected all the way to town. Maybe she was hiding with Granny or one of the other wisewomen right now.
There was no one hiding at Granny’s house. CC met me at the door and I told Granny everything that had happened while she helped to pack my new willow basket full of deliveries. We both thought that a stroll through town meeting our regular customers would be the best way to find out if anyone had seen Lorelei. When I got to the part about the strange shock I’d received from the glass orb and the story Jacob had told me at the door, Granny stopped packing the basket and closed her eyes as if she was in pain.
“She never should have taken him away. He belonged on the mountain. Anyone could see that,” Granny fretted.
