“Now the way I see it,” Aunt Lillian said, “is there are only two reasons a body would hide in the bushes to spy on someone. Either they mean them harm, or they’re too shy to say hello hello and spend their time skulking around in the bushes instead. I wonder which you are, girl.”
Sarah Jane held herself stiller than she ever had before, her fingers tightening their pressure on Root’s head until he began to squirm a little. But it was no use. The old woman knew she was there as surely as Sarah Jane’s mother could spot a lie. She wasn’t even looking in Sarah Jane’s direction, but it was plain as plain could be who she was talking to.
“ ‘Course I’m hoping you’re just shy,” Aunt Lillian went on, “as I wouldn’t be minding me someone to talk to every once in a while. I’m not saying I get lonely, living up here on my ownsome the way I do, but everybody enjoys a spot of company—maybe a lending hand with a strong young back to put behind it.”
She didn’t sound so awful, Sarah Jane thought. She didn’t sound like her older sisters’ stories at all.
Swallowing her fear, Sarah Jane slowly rose from the bushes. She and the old woman looked at each other for a long moment, the woman patient, Sarah Jane not sure what she should say or do. Root broke the silence. Freed of Sarah Jane’s hand, he bounded out of the bushes.
“Shoo!” Aunt Lillian said. “Get out of my greens, you big lug!”
To Sarah Jane’s surprise, Root stopped dead in his tracks and carefully backed out of the garden.
“How’d you do that?” she asked. “It takes me forever just to get his attention long enough to make him stop digging or whatever.”
The answer came to her even while she was speaking: magic. The old lady was a witch woman. Of course she could make an animal do what she wanted it to.
She wished she’d never asked the question, but Aunt Lillian only smiled.
“He has to know you mean business,” she said. “That’s all. Dog’s like a man. He doesn’t think you’re serious, he’ll just carry right on with whatever mischief he’s getting himself into.” She cocked her head and winked. “ ‘Course you’ve still got a few years to go before you need to be worrying about men.”
“I know all about men.”
“Do you now?”
“Sure. I’ve got three older sisters. Adie says they only ever want one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Sex.”
Aunt Lillian nodded. “I suppose most of them do. You want some lemonade, girl?”
“Sure. My name’s Sarah Jane.”
“I’m guessing you’ll be one of the Dillard girls—the ones living on the old Shaffer farm.”
Sarah Jane shook her head. “No, it’s the Dillard farm,” she tried.
Aunt Lillian smiled again. “I’m Lily Kindred, but everybody calls me Aunt Lillian.”
“Why do they do that?”
“Same reason some folks ask a lot of questions, I guess, and that’s a different reason for each person. Now how about that lemonade?”
Sarah Jane followed the old woman back to her house. She sat on the steps of the porch with Root while Aunt Lillian went inside. Though the house itself was shaded by a beech tree on one side and a pair of old oaks on the other, there were no trees growing on the side where she was sitting. She had a fine view of the meadows that ran down the slope to the creek and watched a handful of crows playing in the air, dive-bombing each other like planes in an old war movie, until Aunt Lillian returned with a glass pitcher of lemonade. Ice clinked against the sides as she poured them each a tall glass.
“The ice house needs replenishing,” Aunt Lillian said as she down beside Sarah Jane. “Reckon it’s time to take a walk into town and make me a few orders.”
“You really live out here all alone?”
“I do now. Used to live with my aunt, but she passed away some time ago, God rest her soul.”
“Without running water or TV or anything?”
“Without anything? Girl, I’ve got the whole of the Lord’s creation right at my front door.”
“You know what I mean.”
Aunt Lillian nodded. “I’m happy out here. It’s where I’ve lived the most of my life. It’s not so easy now as it was when I was younger, but I get help. Folks in town will help pack my goods up the trail and there’s a fella lives deeper in the woods comes by from time to time to help me with the heavy work.”
Sarah Jane couldn’t imagine it.
“And what about you, girl?” Aunt Lillian said. “What brings you so far from home?”
Sarah Jane sighed.
“I guess you just forgot,” she said. “My name’s Sarah Jane.”
She hoped she didn’t sound impolite, but the way the woman kept referring to her as “girl” felt too much like someone talking about their dog or a cat.
“I didn’t forget,” Aunt Lillian said. “I may be a lot of things, but forgetful isn’t one of them. I just don’t like to be using a body’s name too often. You never know who or what might be listening in.”
That’s when she first began to tell Sarah Jane her stories about the Apple Tree Man and the other magical creatures that peopled these hills.
3
So while Aunt Lillian wasn’t really Sarah Jane’s aunt, she as much became the one that Sarah Jane didn’t have. After that first meeting, Sarah Jane was a regular visitor to the Kindred homestead, sometimes with one or more of her sisters in tow, but usually it was just Root and her. The old woman was happy for the company and Mama didn’t seem to mind Sarah Jane neglecting some of her chores at home because she worked twice as hard for Aunt Lillian.
“She’s being a good neighbor,” Mama said one time when Laurel complained that, as far as she was concerned, the rest of them were doing far too many of what were supposed to be Sarah Jane’s chores. “We should all be so lucky to have someone help us out when we get to Lillian Kindred’s age.”
But chores didn’t seem like work around Aunt Lillian. There was so much to learn—things that Sarah Jane had never even realized a curiosity about before, because there was so much about her life that she’d always taken for granted.
You wanted milk or eggs or butter? She’d always gone to the supermarket. But with Aunt Lillian you had to milk the cow, churn the butter, chase down the secret nests of the hens to find their eggs.
In the Dillard household you simply put something in the fridge to keep it cold. Aunt Lillian had an ice house that was as easy to use in the winter, but come summer you had to haul in the ice from where it was dropped off for her at the Welch farm, chipping pieces off to make ice cubes for their tea.
You didn’t turn on the stove to cook. Before you could put on a single pot, you chopped wood, laid a fire in the big cast iron stove in the kitchen, started it up and waited for the heat to build.
Honey came fresh from a comb rather than a jar, though that was something Sarah Jane let Aunt Lillian harvest on her own. “You don’t have to worry about my bees,” Aunt Lillian assured a skeptical Sarah Jane. “I gift the spirits connected to them, so they don’t sting me. It’s the wild ones you need to be careful of.”
Soap started with making lye by pouring water over the fireplace ashes in the ash hopper, the resulting liquid caught in an old kettle. When there was enough lye for a run of soap, it was brought to a boil, dipping a chicken feather into the solution from time to time to see if it was ready. When the lye took the fuzz off the stem of the feather, it was strong enough to make soap. At that point Aunt Lillian added fat that the Welchs had saved for her from when they killed their hogs. The lye would eventually eat the fat and become a thick, brown soap.
Aunt Lillian didn’t take vitamins. Instead she made a tonic with a recipe that included ratsbane, bark from the yellow poplar, red dogwood and wild cherry, the roots of burdock, yellow dock and sarsaparilla. She boiled it all in water until the result was thick and black, then bottled it with enough whiskey added to keep it from spoiling. It tasted terrible, but Aunt Lillian took a ta
blespoon every day and she was never sick.
And on and on it went. Every new revelation gave Sarah Jane a deeper appreciation for all the necessities that she’d simply taken for granted before this. And then there was the satisfaction of knowing that they had this bounty from work they’d done themselves.
Food was where it really stood out in Sarah Jane’s mind. Everything tasted so much better. The ice cream they made in summer was thick and creamy, bursting with flavor. Biscuits, breads, fried pies. Stews, soups, salads. Everything.
“That’s because you’re making it from the ground up,” Aunt Lillian told her. “You know every moment of that plant’s life, from when you put the seed in the dirt to its sitting on the table in front of you. It’s like eating with family instead of strangers.”
Sarah Jane couldn’t explain to her sisters why it seemed like such a better way to live. She couldn’t even remember how she’d once been as incredulous as they were now that someone could ignore a hundred years of progress that had made the simple business of living so much easier. All she could say was that she liked to do things Aunt Lillian’s way. She finally understood what the term “an honest day’s work” meant because after an afternoon tending to the animals and working in the garden, she just felt “righteously tired,” as Aunt Lillian would put it. She would return home with a spring in her step, never mind the long day she’d put in.
And then there were the stories.
The stories.
Sarah Jane loved them all. It didn’t matter if it was the simple history of some herb they were out looking for in the woods, the offhand explanation of why a strip of white cloth tied to a stake kept deer out of the garden, or the strange and tangled stories that centered around the magical neighbors that Aunt Lillian assured her lived in the woods all about them. It got so Sarah Jane expected to see fairies, or the Father of Cats, or some magical thing or other every time she made the trip through the woods, to and from Aunt Lillian’s homestead.
But she never did. Not even the Apple Tree Man.
“He’s a shy old fellow,” Aunt Lillian explained one day when they were sitting on the porch, shucking peas. “I left biscuits under his tree every morning for more years than I can remember before he finally stepped out of the bark one day to talk to me.”
“Does he still visit you?”
The old woman shook her head. “Not so much these past few years. Time was if I didn’t talk to him every day, I’d at least see him crossing the meadow at dusk and we’d smile and wave to each other. But he’s a funny old fellow. Gets all these notions in his head.”
“Like what?” Sarah Jane wanted to know.
She was always full of questions when it came to Aunt Lillian’s magical neighbors. The more she heard about them, the more she needed to know.
Aunt Lillian shrugged. “Oh, you know. ‘Trouble’s brewing’ is a favorite of his, like there isn’t always some sort of feud going on with the fairy folk. They can be as cantankerous as old Bill Widgins at the post office, ready to take offense at the slightest provocation.”
“So do they fight each other?”
“You mean like with sticks and little swords and the like?”
Sarah Jane nodded.
“I suppose they might, but I’ve never seen it. From what I can tell, mostly they play tricks on each other. I guess the longest running feud in these hills is the one between the ‘sangmen and the bee fairies. The Apple Tree Man has a song about how it all started, but I can never remember the words. I do recall the melody, though. It’s a lot like the one folks use for ‘Shady Grove’ these days.”
“So who are the good guys?” Sarah Jane asked. “The ‘sang fairies or the bee fairies?”
Aunt Lillian laughed. “There’s no real good or bad when it comes to fairies, girl. Not the way we think of it. They just are, and their disagreements can be pretty much incomprehensible to the likes of you and me. The only thing I do know for sure is not to get mixed up in the middle of it. That’s the one sure road to trouble.”
“I wouldn’t,” Sarah Jane assured her.
Easy to say, sitting on the porch the way they were, shaded from the afternoon sun, sharing a pleasant task with a friend. But quite another matter, alone in the dark in the midnight woods, when the one sure thing it seemed was to choose a side or die.
Away
Sarah Jane
I was never much good in school, I don’t know why. Grammar, math, geography, none of it meant all that much to me. I liked English for the stories, but I didn’t take to all the rules about language. I liked history, too—more stories, only these were true—but I couldn’t seem to care about what order they went in. Memorizing dates and names and such sure didn’t seem to make them any better or worse than they already were.
I was sixteen and didn’t know what I was ever going to do with my life. Laurel and Bess were eighteen now and they had their music. At fifteen, Elsie had her nature studies and art. The younger twins were only thirteen and not of an age where it mattered much yet. That left only Adie, at nineteen, and me, with our futures unaccounted for. I suppose you could say that Adie’d already taken on the role of the black sheep, though she hadn’t done anything particularly colorful in months.
“I don’t know what’s going to come of you,” Mama would say when I brought home another report card and none of it good.
I didn’t either. Leastways, not until I met Aunt Lillian and you already know how that came about. But once I understood how there was another way a body could live than the one that seemed to lie afore me, well, I took to it like a kitten chasing a butterfly.
I guess my story really starts that year I was seventeen, the third year I went harvesting ‘sang for Aunt Lillian, and maybe I should have started there. Miss Cook, my English composition teacher, says that’s the way to do it. You start when the story’s already underway and fit in whatever background you find yourself needing as you go along.
But I don’t think that way. I like to know the long history of a thing, not just where and what it might be now, and since this is my story, I suppose I can tell it any way I like. It’s not like Miss Cook’s going to mark me on it.
The beginning of September is the start of ‘sang season, running through to the first frost. ‘Sang’s one of the few things Aunt Lillian takes out of the ground that she didn’t put in herself, and it’s pretty much the only thing she takes to market. Most anything she needs she can grow or collect in the hills around her home, but she needs a little cash for the few items she can’t, and that’s where the ‘sang comes in.
She never takes much, just enough for her own needs and for the few extra dollars she spends in town. I asked her about that the first time we went harvesting, me trailing after her like the big-footed, clumsy town girl I still was, her walking with the grace and quiet of a cat, though she was five times my age. And she seemed tireless, too. Like her old bones didn’t know the meaning of being old.
I learned to walk like her. I learned pretty much everything I know from her.
“It doesn’t pay to be greedy,” she told me. “Truth is, I feel a little bad as it is, taking more than I need to pay my bills, but if I wasn’t selling ‘sang, I’d still be selling something, and the ‘sang and me, we’ve come to an agreement about all of this.”
I was kind of surprised when she let me go on my own that morning. It was the first time I can remember that she’d begged off on a ramble. She didn’t come right out and say she was feeling too old—”Got a mess of chores to do this morning. You go on ahead, girl.”—but I knew that’s what it was and my heart near broke. Still I didn’t say anything. Aunt Lillian was like us Dillard girls. She had her own mind about things and once it was made up, there was no shifting it. So I wasn’t going to argue and say she wasn’t too old. But I couldn’t help remembering something Mama said earlier in the summer.
“It makes you wonder,” she said as we were sitting down to breakfast. “What’s she going to do when she can’t make it
on her own anymore?”
“She’s got me,” I said.
“I know, sweetheart. But you’ve got a life to live, too. There’s going to come a point when Lily Kindred’s going to need full-time care and I hate to think of her in a state-run nursing home.”
“She’d die first.”
Mama didn’t say anything. She just nodded, standing at the stove, her back to me. I didn’t say anything about how I was planning to move up to Aunt Lillian’s and live there full-time once I was finished with school.
Anyway, I went out on my own that morning, leaving Root with Aunt Lillian. I love that dog but all he’s got to do is see me digging and he’d be right in there, helping me out, and two shakes of a stick later the whole patch’d be dug up, and that’s not the way to do it.
I had a knapsack on my back and a walking stick in hand and I made good time through the woods, heading for the north slopes where the ‘sang grows best under a thick canopy of poplar and beech, maple, dogwood and oak. The ground’s stony here and drains well, home to a whole mess of plants, each of them useful or just pretty. I smiled, thinking about that.
“That’s got no use except to be pretty,” Aunt Lillian told me once when I asked about some flower we came upon during one of our rambles. Then she grinned. “Though I guess pretty’s got its own use, seeing how it makes us feel so good just to look on it.”
In season, these slopes are home to all the ‘sang’s companion plants. Blue cohosh, baneberry and maidenhair fern. Jack-in-the-pulpit, yellow ladyslippers and trilliums. Bloodroot, false Solomon’s Seal and what some call the “little brother of the ‘sang”: goldenseal. You find them and if the conditions are right, you could find yourself some ‘sang.
Now there’s a right and a wrong way to harvest ‘sang.
The wrong way’s to go in and just start in digging up plants with no never you mind. Stripping the area, or harvesting the first plants. You do any of that, it rankles the spirits and when you come back you won’t find nothing growing but memories.