The Day of Small Things (11 page)

“… but then the plants felt sorry for men and so
they
got together in their council meeting and each plant said that it would be a medicine against one of those sicknesses the animals made up.…”

“And how did those first Injuns, those what hadn’t learned from their elders, how did they know which plant would be right—”

Least jumps right in, not waiting for the rest of the question. “The plants told them. If the Injun went into the field or woods and asked polite, ‘Oh, which of you Little Brothers will cure the fever my child has?’ why then, if that Injun waited silent and patient, one of the plants would begin to tremble and that was the way he knowed which one to use. But, after a while, folks learned by listening to their grannies.”

She rubs her head against me and goes on. “And when you collect plants like sang, you must always pass by the first three plants before you can take the fourth, and when
you take a plant, you must put something good in the ground where it was—”

“They used to use red or white beads for payment,” I tell her, “but if you ain’t got a bead, there’s other things—a flower, or, if it’s sang, you must bury the shiny red seeds where you dug the plant out.”

Least leaps up from the porch floor. “Granny Beck, let’s us do the plant game now. You name a sickness and I’ll go see can I find the plant for it.”

It is a game we have played many a time. At first she would bring everwhat plants she didn’t know to me and I would tell her the name and what it was good for and how to fix the medicine. Now we do it different.

I think a minute, then say, “See what you can find for the summer complaint, for the whooping cough, for a fever, and for bad monthlies.”

The child fairly flies down the porch steps, making for the woods across the road. I call after her, “And chicken pox and headache too.”

She laughs and it sounds like bells and she turns and waves. In the gray-brown gingham dress she has on, and with my bad eyes, she looks most like a slender sapling herself and in the next moment she disappears into the woods.

The child needs to know all these cures for when she has young uns of her own. The onliest medicines Fronie makes use of, besides that everlasting Cordelia Ledbetter tonic she is poisoning herself with, is turpentine or castor oil.

I close my eyes and let the sun warm my face. Fronie … ay, law … if Fronie has her way, Least’ll never marry nor have babes. There is nothing wrong with the child but folks don’t know that. Fronie has told it up and down that
Least is simple … fit only to stay home and care for Fronie in her old age …

And the pity is that Least don’t know no better herself. I got to make her see …

The squeak of the wooden steps brings me back to myself. I have been wandering in a strange dream where there is a girl who, but for her bright red hair, might be Least. This girl is in a strange place full of fiddling and dance music and crowds of people—a dark place with little happiness in it though there is singing and bitter laughter. And there was a graveyard—but I have dreamed that dream before and it don’t frighten me none, no more than dreaming of my own bed would.

I open my eyes and she is standing before me, her basket brimming with fresh-cut bark—the clean sap smells tell me what kind they are—and knobby roots with the dirt still clinging to them. I can make out the strong scent of heavy clay on some and the rich, dark smell of moist woods dirt on some other. In her hand she has a bunch of branch mint, fresh and clean-smelling. I know she means to make a tea for later but I reach out and take a stem.

“Granny Beck,” she says, laying her basket at my feet, “I didn’t mean to wake you up. I tried to be quiet but that old step—there just ain’t no way to keep it from hollering out.”

“Hush, child,” I say, biting into the mint and feeling the wild cool nip of it in my mouth. “You’ve brought the woods to me and I want to smell and taste and feel of them. There’ll be time for sleeping soon enough.”

While she shows me one by one what she has brought, half my mind is listening and adding to what she already
knows whilst the other half is puzzling how to get her loose from Fronie. How to get her free to live her own life …

“… bark from white oak and black oak and from the red sugar tree and the chestnut. If I pound them and shred them and soak them in cold water, the water’ll help with a woman’s monthly miseries. I had to go a far piece to find the chestnut—seems like they get harder and harder to find.”

“And how did you take the bark off?”

She grins real big for she likes it when I quiz her and she knows the answer. “A piece from the east side of the tree and with a downward stroke of the knife as the medicine’s for down here …”

Least lays her hand on her belly. I have warned her what to expect when her time comes. Fronie ain’t never said the first word to her about such things and the first show of blood might frighten the poor child. But now she knows it’s in the natural way of things. I even made sure she has a supply of rags ready and knows what to do with them for I see signs that she is ripening …

“… but if I was taking the bark so’s someone could chew it for mouth sores, why then I’d just naturally make the cut going up.”

“You have the right of it, child,” I say. “What else have you got there?”

While she is naming them over: blackberry roots and goldenrod roots to make teas for the summer complaint, dogwood bark for headache or chicken pox … I am listening and nodding, for she has found all the right things, but in the back of my mind I am planning how to tackle Fronie.

The Chestnut Tree by Dalilah B. Roberts—8-B

(Least)

T
here is blood on my drawers this morning. For a moment I just set there, out in the freezing cold little house, wondering what has happened for I don’t remember hurting myself in any way. I stare the hardest at those drawers, ones that Granny Beck sewed for me out of bleached flour sacks. They are pulled down around my knees and in the middle of all that white is a big patch of brown dried blood.

What can it mean? I ask myself, and wonder am I dying. It seems hard that I should die at only thirteen years of age. There is so much more to learn—and I ain’t took a spell in the longest time. Granny Beck has said that she don’t see any reason I should stay at home all the time. She says that I am plenty smart.

I don’t feel like I am dying or even sick but I remember what Lilah has said about how death can come in the twinkling of an eye and we must be prepared. I sit looking at the blood and hearing the tiny tapping of the sleet on
the tin roof and wonder will Mama be sad when I die. I know that Granny Beck will.

What will become of Granny Beck if I die? She ain’t doing no good these past months and I have to coax her to eat and help her to the chamber more and more. A few times she has had an accident in the bed and Mama has fussed to see me washing the sheets. Mama has said that if Granny Beck gets any worse and keeps me from my work, she will have to go to the county home for old people.

Maybe, I think, God will fix it so’s I don’t have to die and can stay here to take care of my sweet Granny Beck. I haven’t never asked Him for things but I bow my head like Lilah showed me. Then I remember where I am and that it ain’t a fitten place to talk to God. I know that He is everywhere but I bet He don’t watch when people are doing their business.

While I am pulling up my drawers, all of a sudden I remember what Granny Beck had told me about the monthlies. And when a few seconds later there comes a wrenching, twisting feeling in my belly that is like to double me over, I know the truth—now I am a woman.

“Oh, child,” says Granny Beck when I tell her. “So it’s come. And you was scared, thinking there was something dreadful wrong—I mind believing the same thing when the monthlies first come on me. But I’ll show you how to do so next time it don’t catch you unawares.”

She is laying in her bed like she does more and more these cold days. There are so many quilts piled atop her and she has lost so much flesh since fall that she don’t
hardly make a bump under all the covers. But her eyes are twinkling and she stretches out a hand to catch hold of me.

“Bring here the calendar, Least honey,” she says and I go fetch it off the wall. Mama has marked off the days with a strong black X and we are at the first day of winter. When I show this to Granny Beck, she nods, and with the red knit cap she has on her head for warmth, she looks like some bright-eyed little bird.

“They’re powerful days, them that mark the turning of the seasons. And this one is the darkest. Oh, it’s full of hope and the coming of the light for this is the day the sun stops its travels to the south and turns back our way. But it’s the longest night too and in this crack between the seasons, there’s like to be things slipping out of the Dark into this world.”

I am a little scared, sometimes, when Granny Beck talks like that, but then she laughs and shows me how to draw a little sickle moon on the day that the bleeding first begins.

“And then, beginning with that day, you count ahead twenty-eight days—and that’s when you can expect your visitor again.”

Her gnarly old fingers is tapping out the days that will pass and I think about how many times in her life she must have done this.

“Now, here in the beginning,” Granny Beck says, “you’re not likely to be right regular. But after a time your body will find its rhythm and you’ll know when to be prepared.”

She tells me some more things—reminding me of what herbs are best to help against the cramps and about soaking
the bloody rags in cold water. Then she says a thing I had not thought of.

“You know, Least, you getting the monthlies means that your body’s making ready for you to bear children.”

I busy myself with straightening up the quilts and fixing her pillows more comfortable-like. They are not much good, for most of the feathers has leaked out, but by doubling them, I can help Granny to raise up a bit. Sometimes she says she feels like she is smothering, and we have tried one remedy after another but every day she is a little weaker and it ain’t but very seldom she will leave her bed.

“Do you understand me, honey?” Granny Beck asks, catching my hand in hers.

“I reckon,” I say, and I feel my face getting hot. Lilah Bel has told me how ladies get babies and it gives me a funny feeling to think about it. “But it don’t matter about that, if I don’t never get married. And I don’t see how I could, for Mama says—”

“Child,” Granny Beck cries out, and struggles to set up higher, “child, there ain’t no reason—”

There is a sound in the doorway and I whirl around to see Mama. “There ain’t no reason for Least to spend the whole morning loafering in here with you. She has got more to do than hang about waiting on you hand and foot.”

Mama’s face is cold and hard and in her hand hanging at her side she has the little hatchet I use on the stove wood. Her hand is just a-tremble as she lifts up the hatchet and points it at me. “Go bust up the rest of that stove wood, Least. It won’t do to fall behind.”

“I was aiming to do that right after I brought Granny Beck some breakfast,” I say but Granny speaks up.

“Do like your mama says, Least honey. I ain’t a bit hungry just now.”

So I pull on an old coat that used to belong to Fairlight, then take the little hatchet from Mama and go out to the woodshed and set in on the pile of branches and trimming that is there. I can hear them quarreling back in the house and I bring the hatchet down hard, pretending that …

But then I remember the Threefold Law.

“Now, this ain’t from my granddaddy’s teaching,” Granny Beck told me back when I asked couldn’t she use some Cherokee Magic to stop Mama being so angry all the time. “No, this is something a granny woman I used to know told me. That old woman, for she seemed old to me at the time, me being not yet thirty and her well past the half-century mark …”

Granny Beck stopped in her talk and looked down at her hands. “Law, I remember how I used to wonder what it would be like to be old and how I’d think that I’d as soon die young before I went to getting all wrinkled and ugly.”

“You ain’t ugly, Granny Beck!” I cried and flung my arms about her and rubbed my face against her cheek. “And I like your wrinkles—they make you look all soft and … and loving. Not like—”