Wash (32 page)

Then she smeared the cool clay onto the tops of my feet. She drew a thin line, running up the front of my shin to circle around my knee and coming on up, crossing over the front of my hip bone before ending at my navel. Then she did my other leg. I felt myself laying there and I tried to keep breathing.

Stay, is what I kept saying to myself. Stay here.

She lifted my arms and laid em out straight over my head, palms up, and said look here. I turned my head to see. She had the reddest clay cupped in both palms. I looked back at the sky and closed my eyes. She used that reddest clay for my palms, rising up on her knees to reach, rubbing and rubbing like she was rubbing it in, not just coating it like she had done my feet. I felt the grit in the clay harsh on my palms, scratching some kind of itch, and the ground pressing up underneath.

She brought that red down in two thin lines, running from each palm across the insides of my wrists and my elbows. She was careful to draw both lines at the same time, coming along my arms all the way to a point right behind each ear, then back down the sides of my neck and across my chest to meet at my navel. All her lines met at my very middle.

Where you came from, she kept saying. In the beginding.

I felt her hovering over me in the moonbright dark, asking and asking. Then she used the last of the reddest clay for the soles of my feet. Leaned across me to rinse her hands then scooped some different clay, holding it close for me to see it glowing white. Used that white for my lips and drew a line down from the middle of my bottom lip over my chin and along my throat to the hollow place between my collarbones at the base of my throat. She filled that hollow with white.

Like a pool, she kept saying. Like a pool.

She went on down my front, making short bars of white, one below the next, down the bony middle of my chest, then dabbing a scoop into my navel where all the lines came together, saying there’s you another pool, and then keeping on with the bars of white until she made it to the end of my low belly. She used the last of the white to graze each tit.

She greased my face with some oil, real slow and careful not to mess the white on my mouth. Then she took two sandstone rocks and she held them just above my face, between me and the moon, telling me hold your eyes closed now. I heard her grinding those stones together and I felt their fine sand falling onto my skin, soft as breath, catching in my eyelashes and the corners of my mouth. She grunted as she lifted herself to her knees and turned to do the same over my crotch. I listened to those stones rub against each other and felt the sand drifting down, tickling a little, but I kept breathing.

When I lifted my head to look, I saw those white bars she’d drawn leading like steps down my front and I saw those shiny bits of mica glittering in my curls of hair. I laid my head back and tilted my chin up, knowing my face was glittering too in the moonlight. I felt the clay drying and tightening where she’d painted me. And I felt myself floating in the air right close above me, but drawing closer and closer, like my lost and gone feeling might be coming to an end.

Phoebe was still praying over me but then her tone shifted and I knew she was talking to the runaway part of me that kept trying to pull away from this life. Telling it to come on home. Saying this body is how you came into this world and this body is your only door. If you ever want to live for yourself, you best find a way to step back inside it and stay put.

Her harshness softened as she ran her fingers real slow up the lines she’d painted, always starting at the tips and working her way to the middle, like she was attaching my parts to my middle with thread, saying come back here.

And I felt my runaway self floating right above me, all jittery and trapped, like it knew its wandering was ending. Phoebe was hunting me down to the end of my trail. She told me just keep breathing slow and steady. Said we’d stay here as long as it took.

I don’t know how much time went by of her stitching me back together and me trying to let her. But all at once, I felt something shift. The jittery feeling settled and I got real calm, like I was filling up with warm water or maybe honey. I let loose of my struggling and I felt myself sinking right down inside me. Dropped right back in like I’d never been gone. And I was home. Just that quick, after all that time.

I was so surprised I caught my breath. Phoebe said mmm hmmm, smoothing my forehead, the soft grit grinding a little under her palm.

After a long while, I opened my eyes. Phoebe’s face came over me, looking at me so tender. And I lay there, feeling the smile coming across my mouth cracking the white clay she’d painted it with.

Then it felt like time. Phoebe helped me stand and walked me to the edge of the water. The day had been hot and the water was that kind of warm where you can hardly feel it on you. Phoebe urged me out in it with her hand resting on the small of my back. The sandy bottom scrunched up between my toes feeling good and the warm rose around me. I looked down and saw the clay patterns she painted starting to melt into pale swirls on that smooth shiny mirror.

The water kept moving and broke me into shimmery edges but I saw it was me and all I could do was stare. I ran my own eyes over my own self like I’d seen other people do, but this time, I felt it from the inside and the outside. I saw me standing there, glimmering and shimmering in the swaying moonbright water, and I reached out for more.

Phoebe said lift your head up and back, baby. Up and back now.

When I did like she told me, I saw she was lifting a wooden bowl full of water, fixing to pour it over my head, and I pulled away, saying no, not yet.

“Ain’t nothing ending, baby. Ain’t nothing ever ending. Now lift your head up and back like I’m telling you.”

And so I did. I felt that silky water coming down around me and it felt like I was God breathing. Phoebe bent and scooped and lifted and poured while I stood there with my face tilted to the sky.

I felt the water tugging the tight patches of clay loose from my skin and when I opened my eyes and looked into the water and saw all Phoebe had drawn on me running in swooping streaks, I saw she was right. This new sight was as nice as the last and I was still here. Standing here with myself and not going nowhere.

I lifted my head up and back and said pour some more on me Phoebe, pour me some more.

Phoebe brought me back to this world and I let her. But she had to help me find ways to stay, or else all her work was for nothing because I could leave again just that quick. Once you get your door blown open, just because you find a way to reach out and pull it closed don’t mean it won’t get blown open again. Seems like it wants to go where it knows the way.

I started learning how to shut my door, and better yet, how to hold it closed in the first place. The medicine helped. Like Phoebe said, it kept folks from trying to crowd me. She told me all about it, talking and talking like she was making up for everything she hadn’t told me before.

“Long as you have some knowing in your eyes they need, they’ll stay back. This medicine, they leave you alone with it. Never hurts to let people think you can turn it on em. Keep em wondering, that’s the best way.”

When Phoebe took me under her wing to teach me the work, I went. She kept saying she was about ready to head on out and she wanted to hand her medicine over to me. The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea. If I hadn’t had no babies after three years at Drummond’s place, then I’m not having none. And I’d best find some way to make myself useful or else I’d be gone to market with the next load of logs.

I was perfect, she said. I needed the medicine and it needed me. Lord knows my mind was good, remembering everything I ought to forget.

Phoebe told me those called to healing always got some kind of sick, right around the edge of coming into grown. Just like I did. She said death needs to draw close. Any healer worth anything tends to linger on the threshold between this world and the next, deciding whether to stay or go, just like I did. And it didn’t matter that my sickness got put on me instead of coming on its own. Sick is still sick, she said, no matter how it meets you. You’ve been gone and you’ve been back so you know what you need to know.

I sat there listening to her. What she was telling me was so big I could only touch the edges of it. Everything that happened to me was what made me ready for this work. Soon as this knowing came over me, everything started to shift.

Phoebe said don’t think I’m somebody special. Said healing’s heavy work, with people coming to you for every little thing and plenty of big ones too. And they stay yours, even after they leave.

I thought about the life most folks want. A cabin and a husband giving me children when God knows what will become of any of us. That picture felt so far from me I couldn’t ever reach it, not even in my mind’s eye, and I was glad.

I saw myself living in a cabin I had the right to lock up on account of my medicines. I saw myself traveling from place to place, gathering and tending, then coming home. And once I got home, leaving again whenever I needed to.

I sat there smiling and Phoebe said all right then, come here to me and let me show you.

So I walked and I looked. All through the rest of that summer and into the fall. The more I looked, the more I saw. Pale mushrooms glowing white in the shaded hollows of fallen logs. Light falling on the bright green hairs of thick moss growing on the scaly gray bark of that tree. The sound of our feet moving through the loose winter leaves, crunchy and loud higher up the hillside, but limp and tender and dark in the low places.

When Phoebe stopped, I did too. Never knew for sure what Phoebe was looking for at first, but I found myself things to see. Trees growing into each other’s arms like sisters, trunks arching in curves, overlapping against the sky. Thick dark knots of squirrels’ nests scattered through the stitchwork of bare branches. It was winter turning to spring by the time I started to really see where I was. Branches still naked against the pale sky, just starting to hint at budding out, but still small and brown and tucked into themselves.

Phoebe kept telling me, now’s the time to pay attention. Now’s the time when you can read the world. With the leaves still down. You see that little hill humping up over there?

I nodded yes.

“You see how the top of it lines up with that notch in the ridgeline behind it? That’s how you know you headed right. See how the ground sinks down between? Creek runs through the bottom. That’s where we find a lot of what we need.”

As spring wore on, Phoebe started taking me down to the creek. Then through it and a little way up the far bank. One day, she stopped at a stand of plants growing thigh high. She stood close, fanning her hand back and forth through the leaves, saying look at this, do you see?

I crouched with green filling my mind. All those leaves close to my face, bending for Phoebe’s hand combing through em and then springing back.

“You know how you used to look at things so hard we’d slap you for it? Look at these plants right here just like that. Drink it up.”

I stared into that green until I started to see how they grew together in a stand. Like a group of people. Each with one main smooth stem rising straight from the ground, then arching like somebody bowing at you. And big leaves coming off that straight stem, starting halfway up then unwrapping broad and flat, with lines like little valleys, running side by side, coming together at its tip. And right where each leaf unwraps, a creamy white flower hanging underneath.

Phoebe called me back to her.

“Look where you been and where you headed. Sun rising behind you means you facing west. Hear your feet squishing in the low ground? See those spindly trees thinning out and feel these bigger trees looming over you? See that second hill humping up over there where you headed?”

I looked and I saw and I felt my map fall in place inside me.

“See these plants all growing in a patch, just like a bunch of people standing here? In the summer, look for dark blue berries.”

I watched Phoebe’s hands moving through the stand of plants, showing me. After a while, I nodded and she bent to take hold of a few by the base of their stems, pulling em up real careful, then tucking their tops under her waistband with dirt from the roots falling down her skirt.

“Well, good then. Let’s take some. Folks stay wanting Solomon’s Seal. Supposed to make men manly. Don’t know what we need with more of that mess, but at least trading for it will keep food in your belly. It’s the root you want but take you one with the whole plant so you can remember how it looks.”

That was how I remembered things. When I knelt in front of a plant, looking to see was it the one I wanted, I’d go back in my mind to when Phoebe first showed it to me. Waiting to hear her voice and see her hands moving through the cool green of those broad leaves arching out from that main stem. If I couldn’t see Phoebe’s hands moving through the leaves, I didn’t take it.

Phoebe had two whole years of showing me before she died. Each of the seasons and then again. She told me not to cry for her and whatever I did, don’t go stand by her grave. She kept saying I’m here with you. Right here with you when you come out in these woods is where I stay.

I loved gathering. I’d been trying to wander the world all my life and Phoebe gave me the key. A reason. My feet and my hands finally free to follow my eyes and my mind. I wasn’t tied up no more and I wasn’t afraid neither. In the woods, I could usually hear trouble in plenty of time to get out of the way, and Miller let me wear a knife. Said that was just him looking after his investment.