The Healing (11 page)

The woman took a long, deep breath and smacked her lips like she could taste the air. Nodding thoughtfully, she looked in the direction of the kitchen where the evening’s meal was cooking—roast lamb. Then she threw back her head and exploded into a fit of high-pitched cackling that could be heard across the plantation yard.

The woman swung one last gaze over the yard full of dumbfounded spectators, and for the weightiest of moments her eyes settled on Granada, turning the girl’s skin to chicken flesh.

No one had ever looked at her that way before, studying her so thoroughly. The old woman’s all-consuming glare was nothing like the master’s sharp glances. Or the look she got from the cold blue eyes of the mistress, momentarily glinting in icy recollection but then frosting over opaque.

No, the strange woman’s eyes gripped her like two fists and held her tight. That stare was not one of questioning or of doubt, but one of rock-sure recognition. It gave Granada the eerie feeling that there was something she was supposed to yield up to the woman, and she had no idea what.

The woman nodded once to herself and pulled the door closed behind her.

Granada remained where she stood. She could still feel the woman’s eyes on her, peeling her back like the skin of an onion, reading her layer by layer. Not since she was a child, with troubling nightmares, had she felt this sense of foreboding. She would wake sweat-soaked from muddled dreams and random visions of people she knew, and those she didn’t—yet somehow was supposed to. They all came seeking, wanting something from her desperately, and she would wake to a terrible silence haunted by their grasping.

This woman’s evil gaze had cast exactly such a mood over Granada.

Aunt Sylvie was upset as well. “I got a bad feeling about this woman coming here,” she said. “Yes, Lord, I got a bad feeling in my bones about her. I know she some kind of conjure woman.”

“A conjure woman?” Granada gasped. Whatever it was, it sounded very bad.

“Uh-huh. Hoodoo woman. Got some Indian in her, too. They’re bad to put a fix on folks. You saw them snapping yellow eyes of hers. Snapping at people’s souls, she was. She’s done put a fix on the master for sure. Running round here like she Queen Sheba.”

Aunt Sylvie turned to the girl and waved a cook spoon in her face. “Granada, that woman’s going to bear watching. Whatever she’s up to, the devil is surely grinning with delight.”

T
he next morning Granada was in the kitchen with Aunt Sylvie when they heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs off the gallery. It was first light and early for any of the family to be out, but from the heaviness of the steps, Granada figured it had to be the master’s boots.

They spied on him through the kitchen window as he left the house and strode directly over to the old woman’s cabin. The door was open and she stepped out to meet him. No word was exchanged.

“Well, I’ll be,” Aunt Sylvie said. “What nature of rag she got tied on her head?”

Indeed the old woman had lost the tattered hat and feathers she had worn the previous day and now her hair was covered with a head rag, tied turban style. As the woman followed the master closely, Granada noticed something peculiar about the scarf. From it hung a fringe of a shiny metal that lined the old woman’s brow and glimmered in the early-morning light.

The two disappeared from sight as they walked in the direction of the quarter, the collection of cabins that sat on the plantation grounds. These were especially set aside for the slaves who worked closely with the family, those who did the ginning, weaving, blacksmithing, and the tending to the animals and vegetable gardens. The ones for whom Sylvie oversaw the cooking.

Aunt Sylvie shook her head worriedly. She was still suspicious as to why somebody should need a fireplace almost as big as hers. In spite of Chester’s reassurances, she hadn’t ruled out the possibility that the master had brought another cook to the plantation, especially when she spied all the supplies the woman had brought with her. Sylvie said maybe the woman knew secret recipes that made the slaves multiply faster. She said she had heard of such things. In fact, she herself had been told by Mistress Amanda to put cotton root in the food of the house servants with the lightest complexions to stop them from getting bigged-up with ever whiter children. “One day the mistress grew so flustered,” Sylvie had once said to everybody at the kitchen table, “she told me, ‘My God, Aunt Sylvie, can’t he bring one Negro into this house that doesn’t look like they dropped off the Satterfield family tree?’ ” Everybody had laughed then. But Sylvie wasn’t laughing now.

“I wager there are things that work the other way around,” Aunt Sylvie said. “Maybe that Chester wasn’t far off the track when he was pranking about triple-yolkers. Maybe that witch can make a stew that causes a woman to drop a litter like a cat.”

“You making me scared, Aunt Sylvie. I think she’s got her eye on me.”

“Well, I reckon you best go see what she up to.”

Granada gasped. “What if she conjure me?”

“Then don’t let her catch you looking! And mind your leavings. I hear they can take a hank of your hair or your toenails or even a shoelace and lay a curse on you.”

Granada took a step back, but Sylvie grabbed the girl’s arm. “Go on now. You come back here and tell me everything she does.”

Granada steeled herself and then slipped quietly down the kitchen steps. As she crept like a cat across the yard and down toward the cluster of cabins, Granada wondered exactly what it was she was supposed to be looking for. Whatever the woman did, the girl thought, was bound to be strange. For all she knew, the woman had already put a hex on her. When she got near enough to the cabins to watch, she made sure that she was well hidden behind the large cottonwood.

That’s when Granada got a better look at what the woman was wearing on her head. Unlike the sugar sacks or checked gingham or homespun cloth Granada had seen the other women wear for head scarves, this one was violently flowered and slightly faded. But that wasn’t the thing that riveted her attention. From the turban dangled bright disks that looked like coins. Even in the dim morning light her wrinkled brow seemed to be lit in a soft glow.

The master pounded on the door of the first cabin. “Cassius! Get your family out here.”

The cobbler, a long-faced, saddle-colored man, emerged from the cabin first. His woman, the milky-eyed Lizzie, followed him outside with his two little boys from his first wife. The children wiped the sleep from their eyes.

Lizzie and Cassius hadn’t been together long. A few years after the jealous mistress got Lizzie’s Rubina sent to the swamps, Lizzie had lost her husband to malaria. Aunt Sylvie never got tired of telling the story. She said Lizzie hadn’t wanted a man, swearing she would never have another child that could be snatched away so easily, but the master had insisted. That’s why she had chosen a man with a readymade family. But just in case she got with child and needed to be unfixed, Lizzie kept a supply of Aunt Sylvie’s cotton root hidden away.

Right there outside the front door, the old woman studied the eldest boy, rubbing his skin, peering into his eyes, and then caught his tongue with her fingers to get a closer look. She noisily sniffed his breath. She did the same with each member of the family. The only words she uttered were sharp commands to open a mouth or to roll an eyeball about in its socket. When she got to Lizzie and examined her milky eye, the one damaged by the excellent aim of the mistress, the old woman laid the palms of her withered hands against the luckless Lizzie’s face. The look she gave old sour Lizzie was so full of tenderness, Granada found herself suddenly lost in that astonishing act. For a moment she was filled not with the usual foreboding about Lizzie but with an overpowering love. Granada felt the deep, unrelenting
ache the woman had been carrying in her chest, that dark crevice of grief.

The girl had no idea how long it lasted, if it had been a fleeting moment or several minutes, only that during the spell she was aware of nothing but Lizzie. She came to her senses only when she found Polly Shine, her disks shimmering, staring hard in her direction, giving Granada a knowing look.

Granada tensed at having been found out, but the old woman smiled and turned away. She looked once more at Lizzie, and then cut her scalding gaze up toward the great house. As if pronouncing judgment, Polly Shine let go a hurtling stream of tobacco juice with so much fury the little disks that hung from her scarf commenced to jingle. Then, as if nothing had happened, she and the master went on to the next cabin, where she repeated her probing and prodding.

At the last cabin the old woman announced confidently, “Ain’t nothing wrong with this batch. Least nothing your family can catch. You best take me out to them you say is dying.”

That was it! The woman was looking for diseased slaves! Granada recalled all the frightened talk in the kitchen about the horrible sickness that had broken out among the slaves out at Mott’s quarter.

But what could this witch want with them? If the white doctor couldn’t save them, she asked herself, what was this meddlesome slave woman going to do? Maybe she was looking to cull them out like sick biddies, Granada guessed.

When the master called for Chester to bring both the buggy and the stallion, Granada decided it was time to return to the great house and report what she had observed. She stepped carefully from behind the tree, trying not to draw attention to herself. Granada had only gone a few feet when she heard the woman’s voice piercing the morning calm.

“Girl! You come with me.”

Granada stopped in her tracks, her feet rooted in the ground by the woman’s words. The girl waited, listening for the master’s voice,
hoping he would scold her for leaving the house and send her back to help Sylvie with breakfast.

“You heard her, Granada,” he said from up on his horse. “You ride with Polly.”

Before Granada could argue, he was off at a gallop.

• • •

Morning broke with a weak sun struggling to peek through a dirty smear of soot-colored clouds. The two rode side by side in the buggy, the woman called Polly Shine acting like she was more interested in the rumps of the mules than in Granada. Each time Polly flicked the reins, or the wheel found a deep rut throwing the buggy to one side, the little coins suspended from her scarf tinkled against one another like the crystal pendants in the mistress’s chandelier.

When they were out of sight of the plantation grounds, Polly all at once reined the mules to a stop, right in the middle of a canebrake. There was no one else in sight. The old woman turned to Granada and demanded, “Hold out your hands.”

“I ain’t took nothing of yours!” Granada exclaimed.

“Hold out your hands,” the old woman repeated in her bossy tone that didn’t require a raised voice.

Granada did as she was told.

Polly grabbed both hands and turned them palm-side up. She examined them for a long moment, and while she did, Granada became alarmed by the heat intensifying in the old woman’s grip. The woman’s hands were on fire. She finally released Granada.

Polly shook her head and grumbled, “I ain’t got no idea why the Lord chose somebody like you. Don’t make any sense, giving you the gift.”

“Chose me for what?” Granada asked. “Who’s giving me a gift?”

“And them hands,” Polly mused to herself, “one day they be big as dinner plates. Big enough to choke a boar hog. How they going to be any use to nobody?”

Polly glared straight into Granada’s eyes until the girl dropped her face. Polly snatched Granada roughly by the chin and lifted her head.

After a few moments of studying the girl, Polly’s grip softened. “But the eyes don’t lie, child,” the woman said, now smiling at Granada. “I seen you back there. You don’t know it, but you got the gift.”

Polly was right. Granada didn’t know what the old woman was getting at. The experience earlier at the quarters had been so foreign and fragile, it had already dissolved like sugar in tea.

Polly shook her head and laughed. “Lord save the people.”

That was all she had to say. The woman clucked the mules once and trained her eyes straight ahead. Every now and then as they progressed through the wilds she would rear up and spit a stream of tobacco juice over the wheel, but paid no more attention to Granada.

Nevertheless the girl was certain she was still being studied. She couldn’t shake the feeling that some part of her was being prodded, pulled back, exposed, and it frightened her. She sat on her hands, as if that could keep the woman away from places she didn’t belong.

A steady drizzle began to fall and steam rose from the heaving sides of the mules. The week had been cool and wet, so the road was mostly mud, and several times during the journey Polly had to get out and coax the mules across the log planking and cypress branches that work gangs had laid over the bottomless mud holes.

Soon the buggy rimmed the bank of a roadside slough. Rising out of the green-skimmed water was a grove of towering cypress, their bulging roots resembling the feet of trolls from Little Lord’s volume of the Brothers Grimm. Past the slough came an expanse of newly cleared fields hazed with the smoke from massive smoldering trunks of oak and sycamore. Set farther back on the horizon was a line of more cypress emerging from yet another swamp, their tops feathered with new growth brushing against the clouded sky.