The Kitchen Charmer

by Deborah Smith

  I WAS TRAPPED at the farm; I was trapped in my own fears.

  “HE WOKE UP at the base hospital and asked about you right away,” Tal told me via the ham radio. She, Gabby, and Jay were about to board Jay’s private helicopter for a flight from Asheville to the ice-free coast, where they’d take a chartered jet at the Coastal Carolina Regional Airport in New Bern. “Gabby and I are a little worried about his vibes. He’s disconnected from us, just as he is from you. But that’s probably temporary. Normal for a man who just killed a warlord, saved a village and almost lost a leg. I wish you could come with us.” Tal paused. “No, you’re not a moldy olive. That’s not what Gabby thinks.”

  “She knows I have panic attacks when I travel.”

  “You don’t have any choice. We can’t retrieve you fast enough. The storm’s too big.”

  “He’ll think I don’t care.”

  “No, he won’t. He’s got broken ribs, he lost his spleen, and his left leg’s a mess. He’s on heavy medication. He won’t even realize you’re not there. And with any luck, we’ll get him home soon. Jay knows a couple of generals.”

  “But what if he asks . . . ”

  “We’ll tell him the truth. You’re stuck in the mountains. You wanted to come, but you couldn’t get out.”

  “Time’s up,” Gabby called. I heard her voice in the background. “Helicopter’s waiting.”

  I bit back a groan.

  Tal wrapped me in a psychic hug. “You listen to me. I’m the biscuit witch, and I know my food molds. Molds are the reason we have delicious mushrooms. Blue cheese, sake, and oh, penicillin, by the way. Yeast. Without molds there’d be no antibiotics, no bread, and no beer—which would make Gus very unhappy. I don’t know why terrible things happen to sweet people like you. But the darkness gave you a charmer’s gift, and maybe more than that. Maybe your moldy spots are growing a future we can’t live without.”

  I thanked her and said goodbye, then sat in Alberta’s office staring at the mic on the ham radio as if it might explode.

  I can’t be there for Gus when he needs me most.

  “WELCOME TO GERMANY, Captain MacBride.”

  They sent me to Landstuhl. That’s how bad this is.

  Lights revolved, and people moved my body without me engaged in the process; conversations happened around me, but they were all ordinary. All among the living and the present. No psychic flavors, no intuitions, no kaleidoscope of sensations. Luce was hidden by walls and curtains; thousands of miles away, over the curve of the planet. Where were Mama and Dad, filling my senses with comforting whispers?

  Tal and Gabby and Jay came and went. I heard their voices, saw them through bleary eyes, but never felt their emotions.

  A cool washcloth dabbed my forehead. “Up and at ’em, soldier. Wake up. Your sisters have assigned me to greet you, man to man.” Jay’s deep, boardroom drawl seeped through the ringing in my ears. “It’s to inform you, man to man, that you still have a penis and testicles.”

  He’s wiping my face with a washcloth, like I’m helpless. They’re taking charge of me.

  When we were kids growing up in the over-the-river backwoods of West Asheville, Jay, the richest orphan in western North Carolina, had himself dropped off at our house by George Avery, his lawyer and guardian. Without invitation or warning, Jay intended to make good on his father’s pledge to redeem what the Wakefields had done to our grandparents.

  Instead he ended up in a slug-out with me on the front lawn, while Tal made excited chirpy noises from her hiding place in a forsythia hedge and Gabby tried to smack him with a serving spoon. He’d taken one of her meat-stuffed pickles out of a smoker, tasted it, then tossed it in the hedge. That meant war.

  I was back in that yard, wrestling him.

  “Outta my face. Kick your ass. Where’s the pickle?” My throat felt like a sandpaper tunnel. “Where’s the goddamn pickle?” In my bleary, humiliated thoughts, it all came down to that.

  “Your pickle’s fine. I swear to you. The doctors explained to us that the first thing most soldiers want to know when they wake up is, ‘Do I still have my junk?’ Yours is right where it’s supposed to be. I’m not really interested in playing ‘Male Nurse Fantasy,’ but if you insist, I’ll snap a picture for you with my phone. I’d prefer that you just trust me.”

  My eyes felt gummy. I was weighted or weightless—hard to tell which. I heard the beeps of machines, the shush of an air compressor adjusting the mattress under me, and the voices filtered through speakers, somewhere. Hospital. Vague memories of being transported began to surface.

  Where’s Luce? I need Luce.

  “Luce?”

  Jay kept dabbing my face. “Snowstorm in the mountains. We couldn’t get her out in time, or she’d be here. She desperately wanted to come.”

  It took all my effort to unglue my eyes. In the middle of the ordeal the washcloth came down on them, and I didn’t protest. I blinked and saw dim outlines, and for a panicked moment thought I’d lost part of my eyesight. Then my vision cleared and I made out the hospital room, drapes drawn, light low, an edge of sunshine outlining a window. What were all those odd things in the foreground?

  Those were me—left leg propped on cushions with steel pins and a frame attached to it. IVs went into my arms and side; a catheter tube snaked under the sheet down lower. Wires straggled across my bare chest, nursing at nipple-sized electrode pads stuck to the shaved spots in my chest hair. I felt . . . puffy, like a blow-up doll.

  A hand appeared in front of my eyes, middle finger up. “How many do you see?” Jay asked. His voice was loud, the way people talk to an old person whose hearing aid battery’s gone dead.

  I turned my head toward him and raised my right arm to flip him off back, taking a tangle of IV’s with it. The arm couldn’t be mine. It was bloated.

  Jay clamped a hand on my wrist. “Don’t move around. They’ll come in and rearrange your catheter. Neither of us want to be part of that.”

  I studied him, squinting. He was only six weeks into recovery from a near-fatal bullet wound to the chest. A little pale, a little thinner than his usual brawny self. A visitor’s pass dangled over a gray sweater with a coffee stain on it. And his eyes were tired. Or maybe full of worry. For me.

  I lowered my arm. On the edge of my brain, pain receptors said I’d regret the arm wrestling. My whole body was stuffed in a glove of drugs and bindings and surrounded by a halo of dark fear unlike anything I’d ever felt before. The fear of being flat on my back, broken, and unable to take care of myself or anyone else. But also, that emptiness. A world without the taste and flavor of Luce.

  “Tell me,” I whispered. “No bullshit.”

  Jay tossed the washcloth and pulled up a chair. “You have a punctured lung, broken ribs, a concussion, a really unhappy spleen—which has been donated to science, thank you—a lot of interesting shrapnel wounds that will give you fascinating scars to show the grandkids, and, last but not least, a seriously torn up lower left leg. The surgeons debated amputating it above the knee, but you’re in the clear, for now. They’ve left some of the incisions open. Looking for infection.”

  They’re cleaning debris out of me. They’re hunting for more tiny pieces of dirt and shrapnel, and the exploded body of the man I killed. Pieces of Sarbanri. The bastard’s vaporized body is inside my leg.

  “Get. Him. Out.”

  “Who, buddy?” Jay’s voice was gentle. He didn’t understand.

  I tried to explain but the words made no sense.

  “You’ll get knee replacement surgery, and then the army is sending you home.” He paused. “They don’t want publicity. Wouldn’t look good to court-martial a soldier who disobeyed orders to kill a sadistic warlord the U.S. put on its payroll. So . . . you’re getting an honorable discharge. You’re done. You’re out.”

  “Good.” My voice wa
s gravel on a washboard. It hurt to move my lips. “Call. Luce. Now.”

  “The storm’s shut down everything at home. Tell me what you want her to know. Besides the fact that you’re in one piece and you’re coming home.”

  My eyelids sagged. “Tell her to watch her back. Have to move on this situation, pronto.”

  “What situation?”

  “Him.”

  “Who?”

  “All of him. Them.”

  I felt his hand on my shoulder. “She’s safe. I swear to you.”

  A nurse marched in. “Awake and talking?”

  “Yes, thank you. And he’s doing pretty well, also.”

  She laughed, then began checking my tubes and fiddling with IV bags. Jay leaned down and spoke close to my ear. “You’re a bonafide hero, in our book. And you’re going home. Lucy’s waiting to meet you.”

  Her blueberry and honey will come through now and conquer the blood and the fear.

  But only her screams filled my darkness.

  “Gus? Gus.” Jay shook me a little and touched the oxygen cannula taped under my nose. “He’s breathing hard.”

  “I’ll bump up his flow.”

  I could live with the physical damages from war. No problem. But if I’d lost my way of understanding people—life—through the taste and texture of the grapes and hops and grains and grasses that distilled into their thoughts . . .

  I’d be disabled.

  “MORE SNOW COMING. Shit.” Alberta grunted as she chugged by on a tractor, heading toward the communal dorms. Ice dotted her ear-flapped gray-green hat. I had knitted it for her. She was short, thick, pug-nosed and burly. Threats and humiliations bounced off her aura like firecrackers thrown at a tank. “This is when I worry the most about Tayton Hornsby. His wife gets mean when she’s hemmed in. Lemme know if you get a wooly-sense on him.”

  I nodded. Tayton and the missus lived in a doublewide two miles from Rainbow Goddess. He did plowing and maintenance work for us. Tayton was physically huge but mentally small. His wife bullied him. I stroked my wool scarf. “Things have been better since I told him the rabbits don’t hate him. If she eats them, they won’t blame him.”

  Alberta grunted again and drove up the snowy slope, swaying like a large Hobbit. Her ear flaps bounced. A wool and rayon blend. Mixed signals, to me.

  I went back to the barns to wrap more insulation around the hose bibs. I barely knew when I was touching them. Even the bitter cold couldn’t penetrate my wool mittens. Gus will be all right, the injuries aren’t life threatening. His leg will heal. He’ll come back inside me, inside my mind.

  Swaddled in coats, shawls, a sock cap, gloves, arm warmers, sweat pants under my skirt, and knee-high rubber boots, I fed livestock and helped break ice on the water troughs, toted firewood to the big hearths in the community house, and entertained bored kids by making sure war didn’t break out over the selection of movies and games.

  Two large propane-powered generators ran enough electrical service to keep the lights on at the main house, the dorm areas, and community center and, more important, the blowers that circulated heat from the gas furnaces. But not at my stall in the barn. “Come bunk on our couch,” Macy ordered.

  “I might sleep too sound and miss a call.” I pulled out my cell phone, convinced it had buzzed. Snowflakes feathered the screen. Still dead.

  By nightfall I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t even calm myself with yarn. Swaddled in layers of coats and shawls and a blanket, I plowed through the snow to the special spot in the pasture, dragging supplies behind me on a blanket. I sat down with the blanket and my skirt cushioned under me, and closed my eyes. Several dogs burrowed under the blanket and curled around my hips. Our combined breath puffed from the fabric tent in soft silver curls. Smoke signals.

  I built a fire, set a camp grill over it, then placed a large stock pot atop the grill. I scooped snow into it first, then added vegetables and beef I’d already cooked on a gas camp stove in the barn. As if arranging china on a banquet table, I placed deep metal bowls in the snow alongside a bucket of silverware. I unwrapped loaves of bread and laid out blocks of butter.

  Shadows formed in the snowy mist. A dozen of them, one using a cane, several crouching like assassins, and one on four paws. All of them carrying long rifles.

  The lost and forgotten, veterans, most with PTSD and some wanted for minor crimes. Hiding in the vast woods and caves beyond my pasture. Protecting the farm from a distance, protecting me. The Knights had come to sit with me.

  I couldn’t bring Gus home; yet, I could bring the warrior spirit he embraced.

  When they were all seated around the fire, holding steaming bowls of stew, Gutsy ordered, “Speak, Yarny. Whazzup with your captain?”

  “He may walk with a limp. But he should be able to come home to a normal life.”

  When several of the Knights snorted I added, “I understand that ‘normal’ won’t be the same for him. He’s already not the same person. His . . . emotions. His reactions. That’s why I want to ask you all some questions. He didn’t suffer a head injury. And as far as we know, his psychological evaluations are on track with this type of experience and recovery.”

  Trey cleared his throat. “It may seem that way, at first.”

  “I’m hoping you all can tell me what might be going through his head.”

  “Everything,” Sink said. Sink was lean, with jet-black hair braided in a long que down the front of a thick brown jacket smeared with dark stains that might be dried blood. Deer blood, I hoped. “Every fucking thing is going through his head, and he wishes it would stop.”

  “Or nothing,” Cowboy added. “Like it’s a big, empty room with no windows.”

  Gutsy swallowed a mouthful of stew, nodding as she did. “I had the nothing. Felt like my mind was blank as shit. Didn’t start to see any light until I was racing the state patrol in Alabama.” She paused, smiling. “They didn’t catch me.”

  “I broke a Dumpster once.”

  We all looked at The Berg. Short for Iceberg. Six-five, at least, with a prosthetic left arm and a right arm as thick as a small tree. A vertical scar slashed one side of his dark-skinned face, making a deep dimple beside a mouth that rarely smiled.

  “Ran over it with a jacked-up monster truck. Tires taller than me.”

  Sink craned his head. “Where the hell did you get a truck like that?”

  “Stole it. I needed my psych meds adjusted.”

  “Speakin’ of crazy,” Cowboy said. He set his stew aside and fumbled in a backpack, producing a bulky plastic bag. The tossled hair and dazed eyes of several Barbie dolls peered out the top. Patton raised his muzzle from his bowl, sniffing at them. “Corporal Patton was having a weird day. He doesn’t usually take kids’ stuff. These came from the Shelton farm. Can you find a way to drop ’em off at the mailbox?”

  I stashed the bag by my feet. Patton’s heists mainly focused on towels and yard tools.

  Cowboy’s smile hardened. “Swear to me you’ll return those dolls to the children. I don’t steal from children. I don’t harm children. Not anymore.”

  I felt the blood leaving my face. Bandit, slurping stew with his head down so far that the brim of his camo hat hid his face, looked up quickly. “He means in combat. Artillery.”

  My breath caught. “I would never harm a child. Or steal from one. You have my word.”

  Berg clamped a hand on his shoulder. “Deep breath. She’s not the enemy, man.”

  “Steady,” Trey ordered. “Settle down.”

  Cowboy shut his eyes, then opened them. “I apologize.”

  “No need. I understand.”

  “So, Yarny,” Gutsy barked. “About your captain. We don’t need to know anything else about him to tell you what’s wrong with him. It’s brain damage.”

  “But I told yo
u . . . ”

  “His brains are rattled,” Doc said. “That’s not a clinical term, of course.” Doc was the oldest of the Knights; fiftyish. He had been a surgeon in a field hospital. Other than that I only knew what I deduced. The broken veins on his nose combined with the image of a yarn that had been torn apart and mended at a weak spot. I sensed the challenge of addictions around him.

  “It’s called a Traumatic Brain Injury. TBI. Hell, kids playing high school sports get a TBI sooner or later. It’s very common. In the best case scenario the person feels a little down, can’t sleep, gets edgy. It goes away in a few days, a couple of weeks. The not-so-mild cases can make the person lose words and memories. There’s a whole range of symptoms.”

  “Some people get mad as a fucking rattlesnake.” That comment came from Dragon, who wagged her spoon at me and hissed.

  This must be why Gus lost his psychic ability. “In the worst cases, does the person eventually heal?”

  “Yes, but it could take months.”

  Berg said, “Your captain probably feels like a zombie right now.” Berg lifted his artificial arm. “Even though he didn’t lose his leg, it’s a foreign object. It doesn’t work the way it should. He can’t control it right now; he can’t depend on it. He’s crippled.”

  Sink leaned toward me, so close to the camp fire that snow melted on his jacket. “He can’t see himself anymore,” Sink said softly, his accent rolling the more into a dark skein of meaning. “He’s blind inside.”

  “Can a TBI affect a soldier’s basic senses? Vision, hearing, sense of smell—”

  “I heard Christmas music for a month,” Berg said. “And it was July. In the psych ward, they called me ‘The Summer Santa.’”

  Gutsy smiled. “I liked seeing halos and sparkles, but when I stepped off curbs and my eyes said I was free-falling from ten-thousand feet, well . . . let’s just say it takes a lot to scare a New York driver, but there’s a few whose assholes still clinch up every time they think of me flailing like a duck right in front of their bumpers.”