“Now,” Mother Joseph said, clasping her hands over her belly. “It’s the Sabbath so we’re not doing real labor today. I’m just giving you the tour.”
Joanie nodded, eyeing the bright green tangle of the stacked cuttings.
Her mother-in-law reached for the pile and unraveled one of the plants, holding it up in the fluorescent light like a necklace. Joanie had always known the Vine—she’d tended it since she was a toddler, watching its looping leaves filigree through one another and crawl across the ground, coiled in the grass like a nest or a serpent in repose. She’d watched the enormous brilliant blue blooms teeter up into the sun, and even then, only a little girl, she knew there was real charm in them.
“You know what’s in here?” Mother Joseph asked. “Heaven.” She snapped the Vine in half, and Joanie gasped at the sound and the fresh scent that wafted between them. Breaking a perfect cutting—harvested from the base of the root to the carefully intact blossom, every drop of sap sealed inside—it was the worst that the kids, or even Letta and Sil, could do. They’d treated each such infraction as a small death, burying the ruined slip of green in its own, individual grave. At the garden, breaking open the Vine roused the kind of guilt Joanie associated with real crime. Mother Joseph, though, didn’t look guilty at all. She smiled at Joanie’s shock.
“Letta’s done a good job with that at least,” she said. “Making sure you kids respect it.” Mother Joseph let the sap run over her fingers, and Joanie watched the fluid drip into her palm, greener than anything she’d seen in the garden. “Try it,” Mother Joseph said, holding a single, sap-coated thumb in front of Joanie’s mouth. Joanie didn’t know if it was a trick, or another test. Was she supposed to take it, or refuse? She stared into Mother Joseph’s small, dark eyes and saw no clues there. Joanie was trapped, but also beguiled. She swore the verdant liquid beckoned to her, lured her tongue closer, until she felt the rasp of Mother Joseph’s calloused finger in her mouth.
At first, Joanie was startled by the bright, sweet rush of juice. Her heart beat like an engine turning over in her chest—it was not only the ferocity she noticed, but also the thrill of a beginning and the movement that followed. Joanie was gathered up in a near-physical motion where everything was soft, warm and floating. The world around her was not blurred, though. It became an unblemished, sharper version of itself. She watched Mother Joseph’s mouth move quickly, nearly out of sync with the words she spoke.
“You never knew, did you?” she asked. Joanie couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or pleased. She held a hand out and clutched her mother-in-law’s upper arm, to steady herself. “Easy now,” Mother Joseph said. “The harvest from Letta’s is always the strongest.” She detached herself from Joanie’s grip and moved toward the trough.
“I don’t know if Letta told you, but our grandmother found the Vine of Heaven when she was a girl. She ran and told her mama about it. Great-grandmother Joseph had never seen anything like it, and she knew this land like the back of her hand.” Mother Joseph plucked cutting after cutting from the pile and tossed it in the trough. “It’s hard to grow, but that’s one thing you do know. And it’s not like anything else. It only grows on Joseph land, so our family, and only our family, is responsible for it—time you knew that. Yes, through the growing, but also the Work. What you girls do with Letta is just the beginning. This plant is our partner, a member of our family, too.”
Joanie stared at the flashing leaves that seemed nearly alive, winding over and around each other in the trough. “What do you do with it all?”
“We sell it, girl.” Mother Joseph chuckled that full-body laugh. “Family takes care of each other. But I bet you already knew that much, too.” When the trough was almost full of perfectly sealed stalks, Mother Joseph pulled up on a wooden lever. The trough contracted, and Joanie thought it looked as alive as the plants within it. It crunched down the layers of Vine, pressing the juice out. Mother Joseph pulled out a section of wood, a disguised, narrow channel, and directed the extracted liquid to the pan in the fireplace. She switched on the fire, an industrial kitchen-size natural gas flame. The green liquid began to bubble, and as it heated, the scent changed from organic and grassy to sharply mineral. Joanie shook her head clear of the smell, though the taste of the fresh sap remained in the back of her throat.
“How? Where do you sell it?”
“You think I’m going to tell you all my secrets? For now, I want you in here, anytime we get a delivery,” Mother Joseph said, switching off the flame.
“Why me?” Joanie asked, the words unspooling from her throat in an amber swirl.
“’Cause you’re a real Joseph now—it’s your responsibility, too. This is one of the most dangerous parts, adding the heat,” Mother Joseph said. “You heat it too much, and it’s ruined. You don’t get it hot enough, and, well, that’s another story.”
“Is this what the tenants buy off you?” Joanie asked. She knew the question would make Mother Joseph angry—she knew they were never supposed to ask about the tenants. Whatever Mother Joseph did to adulterate the sap in that smokehouse was a perversion of the Vine’s true power. Joanie had always known that Mother Joseph’s greed and not the Vine itself destroyed the tenants and others like them. She inhaled the fumes of transformation from the divine to the basely narcotic, and understood that her mother-in-law bore the shame of that greed, and hated to be reminded of how she had contorted the Vine to serve only herself.
Mother Joseph let loose a thick laugh. “You sure are a ballsy one, I’ll give you that. How about you don’t worry yourself about what the tenants buy off me? Y’all are so interested in the tenants!”
“Who else is interested in them?” Joanie asked.
Mother Joseph abruptly fell silent, like a fan switched off. Her arm was a blur, but Joanie knew she’d been struck. It didn’t hurt; the Vine seemed to have changed the way her body was feeling things, but she tasted blood.
“Maybe you should just pay attention to what I’m showing you, miss.” Mother Joseph held her sap-coated hands in a prim clasp at her waist. “Repeat what I told you.”
“Put the cuttings in here.” Joanie pointed to the trough. “Get out the juice and then heat it up till the smell changes.”
Mother Joseph nodded. “That’s right. And you put all the cooked juice in here.” She opened a narrow door made of a few roughly nailed-together rotting planks of wood. Behind it was a polished steel tank, with a small hatch built into the side. Joanie wondered why her new job involved so many layers of camouflage in the ancient smokehouse, but clenched her jaw closed against the question.
“Pour it from the pan right in here?” Joanie asked, fiddling with the hatch’s silver handle. “When it’s hot?”
“Yes! Lord, you can be simple, child.” Mother Joseph slapped Joanie’s hand down, and used the hem of her housedress to rub the handle free of fingerprints.
“Then what?” Joanie asked.
“Don’t worry about ‘then what,’ worry about right now. You do alright, I’ll show you what comes next.”
“How long exactly do I cook it for? Am I just supposed to leave it in the tank? What do I do when it’s full?” Joanie tried to swallow down the last traces of sap, sucking it out of the little pocks in her molars. She felt trapped by it—after that initial rush of pleasure, it made her throat itch. She coughed, hoping it would help. Mother Joseph laughed and smacked her on the back.
“I know you didn’t ask Analetta this many questions. She never liked that! When we were kids, she’d rather bite her own tongue off than answer anybody’s questions. One more thing, about Josiah’s medicine.” Mother Joseph paused to bite off a hangnail. Josiah had always been sickly—he’d been born too early. After the wedding, her mother-in-law had flashed the yellowed photos of his withered, newborn body in front of Joanie to prove it.
Mother Joseph spat the sliver of nail on the smokehouse floor and pulled a bro
wn glass bottle from the pocket of her dress. She pressed it into Joanie’s hand, but kept her eyes away from Joanie’s face. “Since you’re Josiah’s wife now, you make sure he gets his medicine every day. To keep him strong and healthy,” she said. In the dim light of their musty bedroom, Joanie had watched her new husband swallow down the daily doses his mother administered. She’d thought then, maybe it was some kind of vitamin. She understood, now, in the clearer light of the smokehouse, that the medicine he took morning and night was the Vine’s green sap.
“You can get it yourself, in here—when you run out. Make sure you only give him the fresh, not the cooked,” Mother Joseph said, not quite looking Joanie in the eye. “I don’t want to hear you told Josiah about where you got it, neither. The boy doesn’t have self-control. You’re responsible for him now, too.”
Mother Joseph never showed Joanie what came next, though. She kept Joanie in the smokehouse, blindly working that one step, over and over. Joanie was meant to be a babysitter: a babysitter for Josiah and a babysitter for the Vine press. After weeks of her new life’s routine—of hunching over the trough and the boiling pans of sap, waiting for the scent to change, of Josiah trying to get her pregnant, of dodging the ravenous eyes of the other Josephs on the compound, of ignoring the tenants haunting their side of the gate—Joanie got angry. She didn’t gain anything from this marriage—not the power she thought was coming to her, not even the chaotic but occasionally soothing family life she’d had at the garden. She was wasted there, in the cramped, hot smokehouse, and she hated it. The Vine seemed to seethe with her in encouragement and solidarity. Its bright green had the urgency of a traffic light, pushing her toward action like a palm at her back.
She was so angry that one morning she refused to give Josiah his medicine. Josiah’s dose the evening before had been the last in the bottle, and Joanie had not refilled it.
“Where is it?” he asked, sitting up in bed. Joanie averted her eyes from the sprinkle of acne over his widening, hairy gut. She pushed away the memory of Josiah’s scabrous belly slapping against her back.
“It’s empty,” she said as she pulled a faded, lavender shirt over her head.
“You gonna get more?” Josiah asked.
“Nope.” Joanie tossed the empty bottle onto the stained quilt.
“You have to get more,” he whispered. “I can’t get out of bed if I don’t get it.”
“Then I guess you know where you’ll be all day.” Joanie combed her fingers through her hair and turned to leave their room, but looked back when she heard a thud from the bed. Josiah rolled and kicked at the blankets, and then the wall, finally falling to the floor in a sweaty, bulbous heap.
“Mama’ll get it for me. And then she’ll whip you.”
“Yeah, no. I don’t think she will. It’s not up to her anymore if you get it or not.” Joanie pulled her hair into a bun off her neck, anticipating hours of sweating over the fire. “It’s up to me.”
“Why are you being a bitch about this?” he moaned. “I need my medicine.”
“Josiah, it’s not complicated. You give me something, and I’ll get you what you want.”
Josiah stilled and looked up at her from the floor. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Joanie said, kicking his flopped open thigh out of her path to the door, “tell me something I don’t know. No.” She bent at the waist and squinted down into his pasty, perspiring face. “Show me something.” If Joanie could see the full, closed circuit of Mother Joseph’s operations, then maybe one day she could take it over—or dismantle it.
* * *
Josiah let her into the barn that night, flicking a flashlight’s beam around the perimeter of the open space to make sure they were alone. She could smell the clamminess of his skin from where she stood.
“If somebody sees us, Mama’ll kill you,” he said. His hands trembled after his enforced day of abstinence, and he nearly dropped the flashlight.
Joanie shrugged. “If somebody sees us, we’ll tell them we’re fucking.” She plucked the flashlight out of his hands and left him at the door. Two stainless-steel tanks stood in the center of the room. Joanie walked around each one, looking for markings, but saw nothing. She was sure, though, that the green sap she extracted in the smokehouse was being transported here. Cardboard boxes were stacked on either side of the room. One stack looked empty, and the other towered with boxes that were already taped shut.
Joanie moved the flashlight to her armpit and illuminated the seal. She plucked an end of tape up and peeled the strip back. Josiah yelped at the scraping sound.
“Hush up and come hold this,” Joanie whispered. Josiah shuffled toward her and held the light as she opened the cardboard flaps. Inside, the box was filled with row after row of tiny brown glass bottles. Joanie picked one out and held it up in the light.
“You can’t do that—you didn’t say you were going to take anything,” Josiah whimpered.
Joanie turned to face him in the dull glow of the sagging flashlight. “What is this?” she asked. “Is it the juice from the Vine?”
“I don’t know,” Josiah said, trying to hand back the flashlight.
“Well?” She threw the bottle at him and he barely caught it. “Why were you bitching about it all day? You could’ve come in here by yourself and got it anytime. I don’t get why you’re still sick.”
Josiah rolled his eyes involuntarily. “No, just look at the bottle,” he insisted.
Joanie snatched back the flashlight and trained it on the container. It was a modest, four-ounce round bottle, all very ordinary. The label, though, was a surprise.
“Where’s she selling these?” Joanie asked.
“Catalogs, mainly. Stores where rich people shop. Places you go for vitamins,” Josiah said. “Now you gonna help me?”
“Catalogs?”
“Yeah, like the natural foods ones, the ones yuppies get,” Josiah said, scratching at the front of his throat.
“Who’s buying it?”
“I don’t know, people!”
“How much do they pay for it?”
“I don’t know—a lot! Come on, Joanie, I showed you—you promised me.”
“Yeah, okay,” Joanie said, slipping the bottle into the waistband of her pants. “Close that box, then I’ll take care of you.”
In their room, Josiah was spirited into a heavy sleep. Whatever else skipping a dose had done to him, eventually getting his spoonful of jade liquid turned him into a snoring, unmoving mass. Joanie switched on the lamp beside the bed and sneaked the bottle out of where she’d hidden it, in one of her shoes under the bed. She knew she’d have to get rid of it soon, but wanted to make sure she understood what she’d seen in the barn.
The label was simple—across the front in bold, gold capital letters it spelled HELEN’S CORDIAL. Underneath ran a thin line of italics: Our elixir made from an old family recipe with organic ingredients to improve vitality, fertility, appetite, aches and pains, and speed weight loss. The back of the label listed the ingredients, nothing else: water, sugar, natural flavors. She untwisted the black plastic cap, and poured a drop of liquid onto a fingertip. It wasn’t the near-glowing green, syrupy substance she had come to know so well at work in the smokehouse. It was the color and consistency of black coffee. She licked the elixir from her skin, and tasted nothing of the transcendent, grassy sweetness of fresh Vine extract. It was bitter, like the concentrated herbal tea Letta brewed for the kids when they got sick.
Mother Joseph had severely diluted the sap, but Joanie understood that it was still there—she could hear it humming through the glass bottle. The effects of the Vine had to be mild enough to keep the Josephs from suspicion, but Joanie knew that the plant’s seductive magic still twinkled in the murky brown liquid. She wondered exactly how much these people were paying for it, where the money was going and how much more there was. If she could intercep
t it somehow, both the lives she’d known—sweating in the sun at the garden and sweating over the fire in the smokehouse—could be over. Joanie didn’t know what next life, exactly, she would choose, but she knew it wouldn’t involve sweating for anybody else.
* * *
She hadn’t known then that she would become pregnant. That the baby would change everything. Living at the garden after he was born had felt more like a dream than anything else. Joanie knew they couldn’t stay there forever, but she hadn’t felt strong enough to move along. The half-formed plan she roped Cello into was proof that she was still not herself, that her good sense had been overtaken by desperation. Joanie pedaled at the water, willing the warm river to restore some of her old self.
She hadn’t done any real worship since her return home, and she wondered if her weakness came from that arrested practice. Joanie flipped onto her back, allowing the fluid to fill all of the space around her, leaving only her nose, mouth and eyes open to the air. She reached out through the water, through the soil, through all of the stones and roots in the way, to the Vine and asked a question: Can you help me? She kept thinking about what Letta had said, that the Work couldn’t protect people; it could only protect the Vine. But she wondered, with the night sky breathing down on her, if she could bend the worship to help her son. As she floated, she held the question lightly in her mind, waiting with her water-filled ears. Joanie had always believed she and the Vine were connected, that the Vine’s power favored her over anyone else—but after her failed attempt at escape, she wasn’t sure.
She’d been wrong to think Mother Joseph could remain ignorant of her grandson’s existence. Then there was the enormous and sickening chance that Mother Joseph knew about the attempted theft, too. Joanie chased the thought away by ducking her head under the tepid water. If life at the Josephs’ had been bad for her, it would be worse for her son. She didn’t want Mother Joseph’s dark influence over his rapidly growing brain. She didn’t want his wide, newborn eyes to ever see what Mother Joseph offered. Joanie didn’t want her child to see the inside of that house, and hoped, if he was there, that she could find him before he could remember anything about it. She prayed in the river, believing the water would amplify her plea. Help me, she begged, tugging insistently, experimentally, at her connection with the Vine. Help me get him back.
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