Seven Wild Sisters

  “Well, I get nervous doing that sometimes, too,” Bess said. “Laurel’s the one who’s not scared of anything.”

  Laurel laughed. “What’s the worst that can happen? You make a fool of yourself, but life goes on.”

  “Except here we could’ve gotten ourselves shot like the queen did,” I said.

  Laurel went quiet pretty fast.

  “There’s that,” she said.

  I turned back to the Apple Tree Man.

  “It’s time we were going,” I said.

  I’d told the truth before, about not wanting to be in this place. But right now I didn’t want to go, because it meant leaving Aunt Lillian behind. I figured I’d probably see her from time to time, but nothing was going to be the same anymore. I was happy to look after that place of hers for her, but I was also thinking how that could be a lonely way to live, especially with her being gone and all.

  I guess she knew what I was thinking. She came up and put her arms around me and just held me for a time.

  “You’ll do fine, girl,” she said.

  I held on tight to her for a moment longer, then we gathered up Grace and Ruth from across the meadow, where they were playing leapfrog with Li’l Pater, and we all made our way back to where the door into the Apple Tree Man’s house opened out on this world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  guess Root pretty much thought he’d died and gone to heaven when me and all my sisters came traipsing out of the Apple Tree Man’s tree. He jumped up and barked and ran around in circles, not knowing who to greet first. But he finally settled on me, stood up, and put his paws on my stomach, looking at me like I was the best thing he could ever find in this world, which, I suppose, from his point of view I was, seeing’s how I’m the one that first found him and does most of the looking after for him. But he was a dog full of love, and after I’d fussed some with him, he went and visited everybody else, full of wet kisses, that tail of his wagging so hard you’d think it was going to come off.

  “Well, some things don’t change,” Adie said as she took Root’s paws in her hands and pushed him away from her. “I swear that dog’s got double his quota of loving enthusiasm.”

  “He just missed us,” Ruth said, bending down and not minding Root’s sloppy kisses all over her face.

  Adie pulled her to her feet.

  “Don’t let him do that,” she said. “He’s putting germs all over your face.”

  “Is that true?” Ruth asked Elsie, the Dillard expert in all things natural.

  Elsie shrugged. “Probably.”

  “Just think where that tongue of his has been,” Adie said.

  “Yeah,” Laurel put in. “You forget what he uses to lick his butt?”

  Seemed we were already settling right back into our usual sisterly ways.

  “Anybody know what time it is?” Adie asked.

  None of us had a watch, but I checked the position of the sun.

  “Four,” I said. “Maybe four thirty.”

  “We should get a move on,” Adie said. “Mama’s going to kill us, and don’t think for a minute she’s going to buy the story of what really happened to us today.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “I just need to get Henny back into the barn and feed the chickens.”

  “We’ll help,” Grace and Ruth chorused in the same breath.

  “And let’s have one more look in that chest of Aunt Lillian’s,” Elsie said.

  Adie started to shake her head, but as soon as Elsie brought it up, we were all interested.

  “What’s another half hour,” Bess asked, “when we’re already as late as we are?”

  “Yeah,” Laurel said to Adie. “You’ve already had a peek at all those pictures of hers.”

  I don’t suppose Adie had much choice in the matter, not with all of us determined. Laurel and Elsie rounded up Henny and put her back into the barn, milking her and making sure that she had water and feed, while the younger twins and I saw to the chickens. We threw down extra feed for them, in case I was late getting back up tomorrow. Then we all trooped into the house and up the stairs to the second floor.

  I guess with Aunt Lillian having been this famous artist, I should have expected her work to be good, but I was still right surprised when I got an actual look at all those fine drawings and paintings that filled the chest.

  “They’re not paintings,” Elsie explained, when Laurel wondered aloud why the wooden panels Aunt Lillian had used weren’t hanging in some museum. “They’re what you call studies, something you do in preparation for the real painting.”

  Ruth picked one up and held it closer to her face. “They look like real paintings to me.”

  “Sure do,” Grace said. “They look good enough to hang in a museum to me.” She turned to her twin. “Remember that school trip we took to the museum in Tyson? These pictures are better than half the stuff we saw in there.”

  Ruth nodded. “Yeah, at least these are about something.”

  “Any museum would pay top dollar to own these,” Elsie said.

  Laurel grinned. “I guess that means you’re rich, Janey.”

  “Only if she sells them,” Elsie reminded us. “She might not want to do that.”

  “I’ve got to think on it,” I said.

  Truth was, I was feeling a little overwhelmed. It was strange enough, knowing I’d be holding paper on the homestead and all the hills around us, without taking into account all these paintings and sketchbooks. What I really wanted was to have Aunt Lillian back and for things to be the way they’d been before. I already missed her something terrible.

  “You could probably afford to put in electricity and a phone line,” Adie said.

  Laurel laughed. “Why’s she got to do that? She can just buy herself a big old house in town—have cable and everything.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said.

  Adie shook her head. “So what is? To live hard and never have the time to enjoy life a little?”

  “I don’t know that it’s something I can explain,” I said. “I felt the same way as you do when I first came up here and saw how Aunt Lillian was living. But the more I helped out and the more I learned, the more I came to understand that easy’s not necessarily better. When you do pretty much everything for yourself, you appreciate the things you’ve got a lot more than if someone just up and hands it to you, or you buy it off the shelf in some store.”

  Adie looked at me for a long moment and I knew she still didn’t get it. But she wasn’t going to argue with me, neither.

  “We should go,” she said. “Mama’s going to be back by now and worried sick.”

  I nodded in agreement and was ready to leave, but just then Elsie pulled some more paintings from the bottom of the chest.

  “Here they are,” she said.

  “Are these paintings or—what did you call them—studies?” Ruth wanted to know.

  “They were done as studies, the same as those of Aunt Lillian, but I guess they’re paintings, too.”

  There were three of them and even I could tell right off that they’d been done by somebody else.

  The first was of the staircase waterfall, where the creek took a sudden tumble before heading on again at a quieter pace. The second was of that old deserted homestead up a side valley of the hollow, its tin roof sagging, rotting walls falling inward. The last one could have been painted anywhere in this forest, but it was easy to imagine it had been done down by the creek, looking up the slope into a view of yellow birches, beech, and sprucy-pines growing thick and dense, with a shaft of light coming through a break in the canopy.

  I don’t know much about art, but I liked these paintings a lot. They were kind of rough—without much detail—but I could recognize where they’d been done, and they were about as good as a picture gets. Not better than Aunt Lillian’s, just different. But Elsie got more excited than I’d seen her in a long time.

  “These are the ones by Milo Johnson,” she said.

  “The other famous artis
t,” Adie said. “One of the two fellows who disappeared in these woods back in the twenties or something that you were telling me about.”

  Elsie nodded. “And now we know where they ended up.”

  None of us said much for a time. We just sat there by the chest, thinking about the day we’d had.

  “Any of you got a bad urge to go back across?” I asked.

  Adie and the older twins shook their heads. The younger twins looked primed and ready, but I think that had more to do with the fun they’d had with Li’l Pater. Only Elsie got this kind of dreamy look that put a deep worry in me.

  “Say you won’t try to go back,” I said to her.

  She blinked, then looked at me. “I don’t know. Everything was so much more there than it is here. I hated all the business with those fairy courts, but I’ve got to admit that if the chance came up, I’d probably go.”

  “Promise me you won’t unless you talk to me first.”

  She met my gaze, then gave a slow nod.

  “Okay, I promise,” she said.

  “We have got to go home,” Adie said.

  We put everything back into the chest, except for one of the sketchbooks filled with drawings and little handwritten descriptions of various plants and such. I wanted to bring it home with me, so I put it in the backpack that Adie’d used to carry preserves for Aunt Lillian. Then I closed the door to her house—no, it’s my house now, I realized—and we headed for home, stopping only to collect Laurel’s and Bess’s instrument cases along the way.

  Grace and Ruth played innocent, but it didn’t take us long to figure out who’d played that trick of filling those cases with stones. I guess the only thing that saved them from getting a licking from the older twins was how close we’d all come to dying. Thing like that puts everything into a different perspective, that’s for sure.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  here was a thunderstorm in Mama’s eyes when we came trailing out of the woods and crossed the pasture to home. She didn’t even acknowledge Root’s happy greeting, just stood there with her hands on her hips as we came up to her.

  “Now remember,” Adie had warned when we were on the path coming home. “We lost track of time and we’ll just accept whatever Mama gives us in punishment. No talk about fairy courts and Otherworlds or we’ll all be looking at a licking.”

  Everybody’d agreed with her, though none of us felt real happy about the prospect of telling Mama such a big lie. Plus we still had to figure out a way to explain how Aunt Lillian had come to go away and leave all her property and lands to me.

  But agreeing’s one thing, doing’s another, and Ruth and Grace were just too excited by it all to remember to keep it to themselves.

  “Mama! Mama!” Grace cried as she broke from us and ran toward her. “You’re not going to believe the story we have to tell you.”

  For as Long a Time as Distance

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Sarah Jane

  was splitting wood and putting it up in the woodshed for the winter when Root gave a warning bark. I set down the ax and turned to see what had caught his attention. With Root it could be anything from crows in the corn to a groundhog getting too bold for his britches—just saying a groundhog wore britches.

  For a second I didn’t see anything. Then this fellow came out of the woods on the far side of the trees, moving so smooth and easy it was like he’d just appeared there. I had a moment’s worry, thinking maybe this was some more business with the fairies, but as he got closer, I could see he was human. Leastwise he looked human, though handsomer than most boys I’ve run across.

  He was wearing hiking boots, jeans, and a white T-shirt with a buckskin jacket overtop, and carrying an ax. His hair was black as a starless night under a baseball cap turned backward. His broad features had a coppery cast to them, so I figured he was probably from the rez. Even with that jacket on you could tell he was strong as well as graceful.

  “Hey,” he said. “Is Lily around?”

  My mouth felt too dry to talk, so I just shook my head.

  He smiled. “I see you’re doing my job.”

  “Your… job?” I managed.

  “Putting in the winter wood.”

  He held out a hand so that Root could give it a sniff, then bent and ruffled his fur. Standing up again, he came over and offered me his hand, too—to shake, not smell.

  “I’m Oliver,” he said. “Oliver Creek.”

  “Sarah Jane Dillard.”

  His palm was dry and a little rough, and my pulse just started going quicker. I let go of his hand and took a step back. I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I was feeling so hot I figured I must have a fever.

  “Are you always this quiet, Sarah Jane?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “My granddad’s a friend of Lily’s,” he went on. “We help her out with some of the heavier work around here.”

  “Like chopping wood.”

  He held up his ax and nodded. “You want a hand?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  We didn’t talk much as we worked. Oliver was better at chopping and splitting than I was, so I let him go to it and spent most of my time stacking the stove lengths in the woodshed. After a couple of hours, we took a break and sat on stumps by the woodpile, sipping iced tea.

  “So where’s Lily?” Oliver asked. “Out hunting and gathering?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “She’s… gone away.”

  He gave me a sharp look, and I realized what that had sounded like.

  “No, she’s not dead or anything,” I quickly said. “She’s just moved.…” I sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  “She’s gone into the Otherworld,” Oliver said.

  Now it was my turn to look hard at him.

  “You know about all of that?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “My mother’s got sixteen sisters and they’re all medicine women, so all I’ve ever heard since I was a kid was about the manitou and manidò-akì—the spiritworld. Never been there myself, though. Never seen a spirit, either, but I guess I believe they’re out there.”

  “So what makes you think Aunt Lillian went over there?”

  “Well, Granddad’s told me about this friendship she’s got with some tree spirit in the orchard and how every time he used to come up here he’d half expect her to have gone off into manidò-akì with him.”

  “John Creek,” I said. “That’s who your grandfather is, right?”

  It was coming back to me now.

  He smiled. “That’s right. And I’m still Oliver.”

  “Aunt Lillian’s told me about you.”

  “All good, I hope.”

  I don’t know why it came over me, but I had to duck my head to hide a blush.

  “Well, that’s where she went,” I said, hiding behind my hair and pretending to look at something on the ground. “Into that Otherworld with the Apple Tree Man.”

  “She leave the place in your care?”

  I nodded.

  “So you mind if I come by from time to time?” he asked.

  I looked up at him. “You don’t have to. I’m not as old as Aunt Lillian—at least not yet. I can do the heavy work.”

  “I wasn’t offering to do work,” he said, “though I’m happy to lend a hand. I was thinking more of just coming by to visit.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  I don’t know why that came out the way it did. I was just too nervous, I guess. And now I figured I’d just insulted him or something. But he only smiled.

  “Because I like you, Sarah Jane,” he said. “And I’d like to get to know you better.”

  He got up then and fetched his ax from where he’d stuck it in the chopping stump.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I promised Granddad I’d come by and give him a hand mending his traps before it got dark.”

  I stood up and didn’t know what to do with my hands.

  “Thanks for all your help,” I said. “I would?
??ve been at this all day if you hadn’t come by.”

  “No problem. You busy tomorrow?”

  I thought about a hundred things I still had to do, from chores to getting the place ready for winter, and almost said so when I realized what he was really asking.

  “No,” I said, and then I got real brave. “Would you like to come for dinner?”

  “I’ll count the minutes,” he said with a grin.

  He gave Root a quick pat, tapped his index finger against his temple, and pointed it at me, then headed off, back across the field. I just stood there watching him go until he disappeared among the trees, then sat back down on the stump and hugged my knees.

  “You hear that, Root?” I said. “He said he liked me.”

  So I guess that’s my story.

  If you want to know more about Aunt Lillian and the Apple Tree Man, or if the Father of Cats ever came to see me, or even what kind of mischief Ruth and Grace got into with Li’l Pater—those are all stories for another time.

  Anything else… well, it’s nobody’s business but my own.

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  Artist’s Note

  Most of the illustrations in this book were originally created as black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings for a limited edition of Seven Wild Sisters published many years ago. For this current edition, my publisher asked me to refresh those drawings with color. But because the original art had long since been sold, I only had access to digital scans. Using an Adobe Photoshop program, I transformed my complex weave of fine black lines into sepia tones more suited to my application of color. Then, after printing the images on Arches watercolor paper, I applied layer after layer of colored FW Inks.

  For the twenty-six illustrations that are new to this edition, I first worked them up in pencil, this time on Strathmore (4 ply) 500 Bristol paper, and then hatched a handmade sepia-toned ink over them using a Hunt Crow Quill 102 nib. In order to give these pieces the same density of line as the original set of illustrations, I momentarily pretended that they would be published only in black and white. Afterward, I erased any loose pencil lines and applied my colors. Can you tell which pieces are new and which ones are old?