Root Magic

by Eden Royce

  Doc’s eyes got real wide. “A fight in the house?” He stroked his salt-and-pepper beard. “Now that is bad. Would have been better if you had a tussle in the front yard. Get it outta your system.”

  “Will you stop? They don’t need any encouragement.” Mama dished up bowls of okra soup over the rice and placed them on the table.

  “Can I have my rice plain, Mama?” I asked.

  She sighed and handed me another bowl. “I swear, with these kids.”

  “Just remember, Janey. That’s all they are—kids. They’re growing up mighty fast, but inside—heart and mind—they’re only young.”

  Mama sat down to her dinner and didn’t reply. A few minutes later she nodded, almost like she was talking to herself. “Both of you finished? No rootwork lessons tonight; you’re going to bed early.”

  “Aw, Mama,” we both said.

  “No, not after that fight. You both have to learn to get along, so you’re going to your room to spend some more time together.” She crossed her arms, so I knew we didn’t stand a chance of changing her mind. “Go on.”

  We didn’t argue; we just washed our dishes, then headed off. Jay went to wash up first, but I climbed straight onto my bed. The night was hot for November, so I lay down on top of the covers. When I picked Dinah up, I could feel her disappointment like a heavy weight inside me.

  “I know, I know,” I said, feeling ashamed. “Mama told me.”

  Even though Dinah didn’t have eyes like real people, I knew she was looking at me. I couldn’t look back at her. I twirled her crepe wool hair around in my fingers instead. “I’m sorry I argued with Jay. I was upset and hurt.” My voice became a whisper.

  Dinah made a sound to herself, a low rumbling sound like faraway thunder.

  “I shouldn’t have yelled,” I whispered.

  I felt a tug on my fingers where they were wrapped in her hair. When I looked down, Dinah was nodding.

  I knew I had to start making good choices if I wanted to make it to being a grown-up. Even Miss Corrie told me that. I hugged Dinah close, not sure I was ready for what being grown meant. Mama and Doc both worried about being able to take care of the family. Now that me and Jay were getting older, we needed to start helping more.

  “Dinah, am I a witch?”

  “Sho,” she said, her creaky, squeaky voice in my head. “Da famblee is two-head.”

  Two-head. A name Gran used for a witch doctor. It was an old name, meaning you had one head in the real world and one in the magic world. I wondered if I would be able to live up to the name.

  For a while I watched the lights from the sky play around the trees and listened to the crickets singing. Then I closed my eyes and let everything fall away from me. I was tired from the day. Drained like I had been working on a chain gang, breaking rocks in the hot sun.

  As I lay there, I felt my body want to move. I started to get up, but my belly full of food kept me in place. One of my feet hung over the side of the bed but didn’t touch the floor. Both of my arms were flung out on the mattress, touching nothing. I breathed deep, taking in the smell of the marsh, the night, the wind outside. I relaxed every bit of me.

  And that’s when I felt myself rising like a balloon above a fair.

  I was rising out of myself, like I had at the marsh. I lifted, feeling the warm, moist air hold me up. I was drifting above my body, floating there like a bee above a flower. I didn’t weigh anything, and I felt—

  “Ow!” Jay yelled suddenly.

  At the sound, I lost the floaty feeling and dropped back down into my body with a thud. I struggled to sit up, confused. I grabbed Dinah for comfort.

  “What? What happened?” I didn’t know if I meant with Jay or with myself. Probably both. I hadn’t heard him come back in the room. Dinah squeaked as I tugged her hair too hard, her mouth in a thin, hard line. “Sorry,” I muttered, untwisting my fingers from her coils of hair. I hated when Gran had been rough with doing my hair, and I was glad I wasn’t the only one in the family who was tender headed.

  “I stubbed my baby toe! I think it’s broke!”

  I watched Jay sit on the bed and hold out his foot for me to see.

  “It isn’t. Just rub it really good to get the pain out.”

  He frowned, but he did it, wincing the whole time. “Don’t know how I missed the edge of the bed.”

  I grunted at him, upset now that I’d gotten interrupted.

  He gave me a look, then laughed softly. “You okay? You look strange in the face.”

  What could I say? That just before he went and stubbed his toe, I was actually floating? I still hadn’t told him about what I’d been able to do at the marsh pool, separate myself from my body, so it would be a long story that I didn’t feel up to telling tonight. And how would I explain it anyway? I came out of my body and— What was it that came out of my body? My soul? My spirit? This made me even more worried about the separation . . . but at the same time more eager to try it again.

  “I’m fine. Just dozed off and woke up to you yelling about your stupid toe.”

  “You fell asleep? You never sleep that quick.”

  “It was a long day.”

  “That’s the truth.” He slid back toward the head of the bed and got under the flat sheet. He took out a magazine I’d seen him reading the last few nights, with a plane on the cover. “We’re still okay, right?”

  “Of course,” I said, ready to get back to floating. “Always.”

  Once Jay’s light snores started, I kept ignoring sleep, instead trying and trying to lift out of my body again, but I couldn’t.

  The next morning was Saturday, and I woke up with drumbeats in my head. The sun coming into the room felt like knives going through my eyes, and I rolled over, hoping to get away from the pain. Even moving my head made it hurt. Maybe staying up most of the night trying to fly again wasn’t the best idea.

  “Ughh!” I groaned, hunching over and curling up like a grub to avoid the light.

  Soft laughter greeted me, and I realized it was Dinah. Faint giggles seemed to be coming through her red stitched mouth. The mouth stayed in a smile, but I heard her chuckles clearly in my head.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked. “I’m dying.”

  In a fading echo, I heard the words Lib eb’uhlastin.

  Life everlasting? What was that? It sounded like a potion Doc would sell.

  I stumbled up out of bed, past Jay, who was still sleeping with a pillow over his face, and into the kitchen. Mama was humming a song, and the tune was cracking my skull open like a nut.

  “Good morning,” she said, her smile unusually bright as she handed me a peach basket.

  “Morning,” I grumbled, taking the basket and shuffling outside to fill it with the ripest vegetables and fruit I could find. Then I came back in and handed her the overflowing container, sat down at the table, and put my head in my hands. Already I could tell the day was going to be hot, and I wanted to go to the bathroom and press my face against the edge of the tub, where it was cool. “You’re happy today,” I said.

  She didn’t seem to notice that I wasn’t. “I am, Miss Jezebel. How are you?”

  “I feel like dirt.” Dug up, turned over, raked through.

  Mama put a cup of tea in front of me and I held it between my hands; it felt like it would burn me. I groaned as she placed a bowl of hot grits in front of me. She’d cracked an egg into it and stirred it up, so the steaming-hot cornmeal softly scrambled the egg. It was one of my favorite breakfasts, and I sprinkled the top with a pinch of salt and pepper, but I couldn’t eat it. “Can I just have some rice, please?”

  “We don’t have any left over from dinner, I’d have to make more.”

  “Please!” I begged.

  “I’ll make you some Cream of Rice,” Mama said. “That’ll be faster.” She put a pot of water on the stove. When it boiled, she sprinkled in the fine grains and stirred.

  I yawned. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “Hm,” she said, putting he
r hand on my forehead to check my temperature. “Think you caught a little cold from those kids at school?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t get close enough to any of them to catch a cold. But I wasn’t going to tell Mama that maybe I made myself sick on rootwork and flying. “Do you know what ‘Life Everlasting’ is?”

  “It’s a medicine.” Mama watched me closely. “You got a fever or something?”

  “No, just tired. I didn’t sleep,” I answered.

  She felt my forehead again with the back of her hand. “Hmph. I don’t feel a fever. But you might need to skip lessons with Doc today.”

  “We can’t, Mama!” Jay cried from the doorway. “If you don’t let Jez go, Doc won’t do a lesson today at all. We need to learn this stuff.” Jay was even more eager to learn after this week; he’d brought to school one of the dried snakeskins we found out in the woods when we were gathering them for Doc’s storeroom, and it impressed all his friends. As for me, I had a long way to go before I was able to create my own spells beyond the root bags we’d made and a few of the basic potions Doc had taught us. Because of that, I didn’t want to miss a single lesson.

  “Jay’s right,” I agreed. “We can’t miss a lesson. Doc is counting on us.”

  “I don’t know . . . ,” Mama said.

  “I want to go. We’ll be fine.” When she hesitated, I added, “It’s one of the only things that make me feel closer to Gran.”

  She nodded, then got up to spoon steaming Cream of Rice into a bowl for me. “Want butter on it?”

  “No, ma’am.” I dug into the bowl like it was the fanciest dinner I’d ever had.

  “James, go wash up while your sister finishes breakfast. Then you two can go. I need some time to myself today.”

  He rushed off to the bathroom while I finished the soft, tender rice, then nodded at the pot on the stove as I stood up.

  “Thanks, Mama,” I said. “I’ll finish the rest of it later.”

  “Okay,” she said softly as me and Jay ran outside to Doc’s cabin. It was on the way that I realized she had never told me what the Life Everlasting was for, but I didn’t need it now. The rice had fixed what was wrong with me.

  I was especially focused on lessons, scribbling down everything Doc said. He was glad to see it. Much of rootwork from the old people way back wasn’t written down—it was passed on only by word of mouth, which made each telling a little bit different. But it also meant the stories could be lost. Preserving our people’s stories, Doc said, was the most important thing.

  I still wasn’t sure I was ready to tell Doc about my flying, but I hoped something in his lessons, at some point, could tell me what it was, and if I could ever manage to do it again. I’d felt afraid at first, then realized what a freedom it was. I wanted to know if I could go places when I was like that. Go outside, maybe follow Dinah if she ever went on another one of her outings.

  “Jezebel!” Doc’s voice cut through my daydream.

  “Yes?”

  “Were you listening to me?” Doc and Jay were both turned toward me, but only Jay was grinning. He got in trouble more than I did, and it must have been a real treat for him to see me get a talking to.

  “I’m sorry, I was . . . umm . . . thinking, I guess. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

  Doc moved his pipe around in his mouth. “This feels like you’re back in the classroom, doesn’t it? No wonder you’re drifting. Come on, let’s go do some real work.”

  We followed him out of the stuffy cabin into the humid air. It was still warm for November. Not burning hot like the middle of summer, but warm enough for me to not need a coat. Jay followed Doc first, and I tagged behind him, crossing the fields. The garlic stalks, which Mama hated and Doc loved, had recently blossomed into fat flowers, adding their sharp, stinging scent to the air.

  To the edge of the woods we headed, finally coming to the base of a fig tree. Doc motioned for us to sit while he showed us how to measure the strength of the herbs and roots that would go into the potions and incense he made.

  “The strength you need depends on the strength of the problem,” he said. “Less for a gentle potion, more for a particularly rough or evil spell.”

  “How do you know when you need a little or a lot?” Jay asked.

  “If it was a situation like a removal of a jinx—that’s a trick that is hurting someone—you need something strong. A person’s health, even their life, is on the line. What you’ll be left with after you remove the jinx is tainted, and until you learn how to keep the tainted water safely, be sure you dispose of it somewhere so you don’t get anything sticking to you or the customer. Bury it.” Doc’s eyes slid over to me. “That’s what I used against your attacker in the marsh. Some tainted floor wash I had from cleaning a bad spell out of a client’s house. The old magic in the cleaning water interrupted what the attacker was doing to you. It’s one of the uses of tainted water.” He stroked his beard thoughtfully.

  “Will doing that always work?” I asked.

  “Most times, it’s enough to interrupt someone’s magic. I was hoping it would break the hex and give me time to pull you out.” His eyes got a faraway look and he squinted them a little. “Glad I was right.”

  “What about doing jinxes ourselves?” I asked. Hoping for a spell to use on the kids at school, I held my pencil ready over a fresh page.

  Doc tapped his finger on his chin. “What sort of tricks you talking about?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I fidgeted and scribbled a drawing in my notebook, a circle of vines and roots that looked like my bracelet from Doc. “I mean tricks like . . . giving somebody bad luck or something like that. Or make someone scared of you.”

  Doc replied with seriousness in his voice. “Listen to me really close. When you lay a trick like that—one that has evil intentions, or is made to injure somebody—you better be very, very careful. They are dangerous, you hear? And not just to the person you’re jinxing. I don’t do them unless I have a good—no, a perfect reason.”

  “But why?” I knew I sounded frustrated, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Isn’t that part of why you do root? To get back at people who hurt you?”

  “Yeah,” said Jay. “Then they’ll be scared of us. It’s protecting ourselves, right?”

  Doc shook his head. “No, and I don’t know where you got that idea. The point of root is to try and make this world a better place to live in. Sometimes it means ridding the place of a person, but most times, it’s giving people strength, a reason to be better. Do you understand?”

  “But you said sometimes it means getting rid of somebody. Why can’t we learn that?” I tapped my notebook with the eraser end of my pencil.

  “You will learn it, just not now. Once I feel like you have a good understanding of the ways of this magic and how to use it right, then I’ll teach you everything I know. But those magics—the bad ones, the destructive ones—are dangerous even for me to use.” He drummed his fingers on his worktable. “Among other things, it is powerfully easy for a haint or a decent rootworker to reverse a spell back onto you. And that’s something I don’t want to have to deal with.”

  I nodded, a little bit embarrassed. I got so angry at the kids in school for not understanding what I could do, and here I was trying to force the information out of Doc. It wasn’t right. I needed to be more patient. Study hard, and let Doc guide us. I listened to the rest of the lesson and made my notes without any more questions.

  We finally finished the day in the late afternoon, before the sun started to set, and the air cooled enough to carry a slight chill. Jay went off to play with Tony for a bit before dinner; I hesitated only for a moment before heading down to the marsh. I had a shiver inside when I thought of the poppet, but the marsh was part of my life, and I wanted to watch our neighbors’ boats come in with nets full of shrimp and crabs. I’d be careful, but I couldn’t be afraid.

  I sat alone on the marsh bank for a while, my back against the thick trunk of the old live oak we called the
boar hog tree. Warmth radiated from the ground, and the breeze was just the right kind of cool. It made such a pleasant combination that I closed my eyes. I must have drifted off into sleep, because the next thing I knew, something was nudging me and I jolted.

  “Susie!” I hadn’t heard her at all. I thought the tall grasses would give me a signal someone was coming, but they didn’t. First there was nothing, then she was right in front of me. “Hi,” I said.

  “Is it okay if I sit with you?”

  I went to move my notebook so she could sit down but couldn’t find it. I spun around, afraid I’d misplaced it.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” Susie said. She had my notebook in her hand.

  “Yes!” I said. “Thanks.”

  “It slid down the bank.” She sat next to me, our backs against the rough bark.

  “What did you do today?” I asked.

  After a pause, Susie said, “Chores.” She shifted on the hard ground. “You?”

  “Some of that. And some rootworking lessons.”

  “What did you learn today?” She tucked her dress under her legs and bowed her head like she was praying.

  “Um, it’s kinda private.” Back and forth, I rocked my heels in the soft dirt near the water’s edge. I didn’t want to tell her about jinxing people; I didn’t need to give her any reason to think rootwork was scary.

  If she was put off, she didn’t show it. “Okay. Want to skip rocks?”

  “Well, I want to, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  I looked away, out over the calm water. “I can never get my rocks to skip. Jay always teases me about it.”

  “Is that all?” Susie sprang up from her seat. “I’ll show you the trick to it. You have to find the right kinda rock first. Small, flat ones.”

  We searched the ground near the edge of the marsh and gathered up as many flat stones as we could find. Most were no bigger than my thumb. Susie showed me how to crook my arm just the right way to get the best distance. Me and Susie took turns seeing who could skip them across the water the farthest. I even beat her a few times.

  A loud, angry cackle sounded from the edge of the reeds after my last throw, and a goose marched out. It stomped through the marsh grasses, wings spread wide, honking loudly. We must have disturbed its nest. It rushed toward us, flapping its huge wings.