I looked away and drove on. I had done this. I had to stop it. I didn’t know how much blood it might take to take the tree back over. I didn’t know what I’d be when it was done.
We parked at the Nicholson house, a three-story cube in the saltbox tradition, with few architectural elements to add style. “You let me talk unless I need you to confirm or deny. Okay?”
“Not okay.” Mud had her stubborn face on, eyes squinted, mouth firm.
“Mud . . .”
“I want it on record that I’m against all this sharing about what you’un is. About what we’uns is. Are. About what we are,” she said, speaking proper English for the very first time.
“So noted,” I said gravely, and I pushed open my truck door.
We knocked and entered. Mama called from the kitchen, “Welcome back home. Hospitality and safety while you’rn here.”
“Peace and joy upon all who dwell here,” I said, in one of several appropriate responses.
As I spoke Mama Grace and Mama Carmel bustled in and hugged us both. Hugs were a rarity in my life and might become even more of a rarity after today. I hugged back extra hard.
Mud extended a basket filled with loaves of bread. “I been bakin’. Three loaves. Raisin cinnamon, sourdough, and herb bread. The herb bread is good to dip in olive oil.”
“Well, ain’t that sweet. Nell, you’un settle. Mindy, you go on upstairs and put away your’n things, and get on to class,” Mama Carmel said. “We’uns need to hear about our Nellie’s undercover life.”
“She needs to be here,” I said. “She’s part of why I’m here.”
All three women turned to face me and stared. They were wearing dresses in various shades of blue and pink—colors said to make women look prettier. I was wearing jeans and a navy jacket, my shirt untucked and my hair down and flowing to my shoulders in all its curly multicolored shades of brown and red. Pointedly, Mama looked Mud and me over and said, “Mindy’s bunned up, but she’s too young to . . .” Mama stopped, firmed her mouth, and said, “Too young to marry. We won’t be letting our girls marry young no more.”
Mama Carmel said softly, “You’un ain’t here to talk undercover. About coming back to the church.”
I took in the good china cups and linen napkins on the table. Gently I said, “No, ma’am. I’m sorry I wasn’t clear on the phone. I’m here to talk about what we are. Mud and me. And maybe Daddy. Or Mama.”
All three of the mamas blinked, taking in my statement, standing motionless, like dead trees in still air. Panic flooding the air, they looked at each other, communicating silently, the way people who have lived together for a long time can. Mama shook her head, saying she had no idea what was happening. Long seconds later, she looked down and wiped her hands on a towel. “Well. You’uns come on in then. Set a spell.”
Mud and I sat on the long bench at the kitchen table, side by side. Mama poured us each a cup of coffee and passed the creamer and sugar for us to fix to our tastes. Today I took it black, straight up, and bitter, like the meeting we were about to have. From the back of the house I heard shuffling steps and a cane, and Daddy rounded the corner to take his place at the head of the table. He looked awful, gray-faced as the salamander nanny, skin sagging where he had lost weight, his hair disheveled. He accepted a mug of coffee and drank a while, the lines on his face easing. “Forgive me for overhearing, Nellie,” he said, “but we’uns had hoped you’un were coming to tell us good news. Am I to understand that was a mistaken impression?”
“Yes, you were mistaken. I’m here to talk about witches and magic.”
“We had you’un tested,” Mama said, her voice sharp. “You’un ain’t no witch.”
“No, ma’am. I’m not a witch.” I took a slow breath and let it out, jumping in with both feet and praying I wasn’t gonna drown. “I’m something else. And Mud is like me.”
No one replied. No one looked up from their coffee cups. It was so quiet, I could have heard angels dancing on the head of a pin, to mix two of Mama’s sayings.
“Some months back,” I said, “’round a year or so ago, a Cherokee woman came to my house looking for a way onto church property to rescue a vampire.” Still, no one moved. I wasn’t sure they were even breathing, except for Mud, whose eyes were darting from face to face so fast I was surprised her head didn’t fall off. “That was when the Department of Social Services raided the church and took away so many children. I never hid the fact that the vampire hunter came across my land to raid the church. What I didn’t tell you is that she told me I’m not human.”
Mama closed her eyes and her lips moved, praying silently. Probably for strength, or maybe for protection from my evil.
“Her name is Jane Yellowrock and she’s a vampire hunter. Lives in New Orleans. I called her today to get the names she called me, the Cherokee words for what I am or might be. She called me a yinehi. Or yvwi tsvdi. Or amayinehi. I’m not pronouncing them right, but that’s close. They’re Cherokee for fairies or wood nymphs or brownies. Maybe dryads.”
I stopped. Mama stopped praying. Daddy said, “But not a witch.”
“Not a witch,” I agreed.
“And your’n sister ain’t a witch either.”
“No, sir.”
“She’s one of what . . . whatever you are.”
“Yes, sir.”
Daddy’s brown eyes latched on to me. “Bible don’t say nothing about none of those things. Long as you’uns both not a witch, you jist keep it to yourself and we’uns’ll all be fine.”
Beneath the table, Mud grabbed my hand and squeezed. I patted hers with my free one and eased my fingers away. I stood. “It isn’t so easy, Daddy. Whatever I am, it shows.”
All four of the Nicholsons shot covert glances at me. “How so?” Daddy barked. “The color of your’n eyes and hair? Them contact lenses and hair dye, or a wig like you’un was wearing when Ben come to visit?”
“Not contacts. Not dye. Not a wig. I’m changing physically. I grow leaves.”
Daddy reared back in his chair.
I approached the head of the table and knelt at Daddy’s knee. I pulled my hair to the side and up to expose the nape of my neck to the patriarch of the Nicholson family. To do that, I had to bow my neck, which meant I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see any of their faces. I was staring at the underside of the table and the floor. “You can touch them,” I said. “Pull on them. I cut them when needed. Lately, I trim them every day.”
I felt Daddy’s fingers on the back of my neck. Felt him tugging and pulling on the vines and leaves. Felt the mamas all move closer and tug and pull. Mama said, “When you trim them, do they bleed?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Mindy’s gonna grow leaves?” Daddy asked, his tone disturbed.
I dropped my hair and moved back to my seat. “I think I can keep that from happening. I think I made mistakes because I didn’t know what I was and those mistakes caused the leaves and vines to grow. If Mud—Mindy—lives with me, I think I can keep her from making the same mistakes.”
“Lives with you’un?” Mama said. “No. I forbid it. It was hard enough with her staying with you while you healed. Mindy is too young to live away from home for good.”
“She’s too young to move out,” Daddy said.
“But she’s not too young to have churchmen hovering around her like bees to flowers?” I asked. “Not too young for a churchman to ask for her?”
Mama’s mouth went firm and I recognized one of my own expressions—stubborn and boxed into a corner. Mama said, “We’uns protecting her.”
“For how long? How well?” I didn’t add that Mama had been taken by Brother Ephraim (may he burn in magma forever), raped, and punished. I didn’t ask after my half brother, who was part Ephraim. I didn’t have to ask after him because the fact of him was there between us all, like a pack of playing cards spread, fac
eup, on the table. “Mindy can’t marry into the church,” I said. “You know that a husband would disown her if she grew leaves. Some might even burn her at the stake, if it was discovered after she married that she wasn’t human.”
“Where’d it come from?” Daddy asked, one hand lifting toward my leaves. “One of us is carrying that trait?”
“Probably,” I said. “Probably more than one of you. Probably you and Mama both got the trait in recessive genes. Probably Priss and Esther and Judith got it too in one form or another.”
“My other girls ain’t grown no leaves,” Mama said.
“No. I’m thinking it needs a specific stimulus in the teenaged years. Fear. Danger. Fighting for your life. All my other sisters are older or well established in good and happy marriages. As young women, teenagers, they never had to fight for their lives. Fighting for your life seems to start the process of change into whatever I am.”
“You had to fight for—” Mama stopped. I hadn’t told her about the man who tried to rape me years ago. “Esther was raped,” Mama said, the words bald and unadorned by the usual prevarication of a churchwoman talking about sexual abuse. But Mama had been raped too. Maybe she was tired of putting a good face on an evil.
“I know she was,” I said. “But not one of us knows if she grew leaves. It’s possible that she and Jedidiah Whisnut are hiding it.” The mamas looked at one another fast, and back to their mugs. “Jedidiah loves Esther to the moon and back. He’d hide most anything to protect her.” I didn’t add, And she hadn’t been on the ground when she was attacked. She hadn’t scratched the attacker and found his blood on her hands. She hadn’t fought back. She was too well trained to fight. She had taken whatever was dished out. I didn’t know what kind of woman Esther had turned into since the attack. This conversation made me want to find out.
I said, “I don’t know enough about genetics to figure out how it might work. But Mud—Mindy—is the same kind of creature I am. And she’s at risk.” I took a big breath and said all at once, “I want her to come live with me. I want you to give me custody.”
Mama burst into tears.
Daddy patted her shoulder.
Through her tears, Mama demanded, “You’un think it’s my blood that’s bad, don’t you’un?”
I scowled at her. “You stop that right now, Mama.” At my tone Mama’s head jerked up and her eyes went wide. So did Daddy’s. “Being whatever I am isn’t bad or good. It just is. And no. I really think it’s a combination of you and Daddy together.” I looked at his middle. “It’s possible that’s what is wrong with his belly. He might know tomorrow. After the surgery.”
“Who all knows this?”
I scowled. If Daddy was thinking to control the information he was being foolish. “I told Sam.”
Daddy scowled back. “That tree in the compound. That part of this mess with you growing leaves?”
The man was entirely too smart. “Maybe,” I said. “Probably.”
“You’un gonna be fixing that tree?”
“I’ll be trying as soon as I leave here. Now. You all talk it over and decide. I need to get Mud moved into my place soon so she can start public school.”
“Public—” Mama’s words cut off sharply.
“Public school,” I emphasized. “Mud will need a proper education to fit in the human world. In the townie world.”
“What about church services?” Daddy asked.
And I knew I had won, because this was Daddy’s negotiation tone. Some of the tension left my shoulders, though I didn’t let that show.
I pretended to think about his words for a while, trying to decide what I could give up and what I wouldn’t. I tapped my fingertips on the table and then clenched my fist, knowing I had given something away to the master negotiator. I scowled and glared at him. “We’ll both come to Sunday services once each Sunday. We’ll come to weekday morning devotions or evening devotions once a week. The exception to this rule is if I’m on a difficult case, or Mud has exams, in which situation we’ll make up for half of missed services.”
“Exams?” Mud said, startled. I kicked her under the table.
“Twice a week to devotions,” Daddy bargained.
“Twice a week,” I agreed. “But we only make up one missed service per week if we have to miss due to a case.”
“You’ll bring a note from your boss.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
Daddy squinted at me and my bossy tone.
“I’m your child. I don’t lie.”
Daddy nodded slowly. I noticed he was rubbing his belly, where the medical problem was, the one that might show him to be nonhuman in tomorrow’s surgery. “No note. Clothing?” he asked. “I insist on my daughter being properly and demurely dressed.”
“Dresses to below her knees or pants. No bare legs and nothing tight-fitting until she’s eighteen.”
“Who sits with her when you’rn on a case?”
“She comes to headquarters with me. Plus, I take off and do computer work at home. I already spoke to my bosses. They’ll work with me on this.”
A silence thick with tension filled the space between us. Daddy drummed his fingertips on the table and I realized where I got the nervous habit. He stopped instantly and shot me a look. I stared back at him with a Gotcha look.
“The mamas and I’ll talk it over. You’uns get on outta here.” Mud and I stood. “And Nell? You’un take care a your sister.”
“Yes, sir. Always.”
“I want her to have a dowry, or whatever townie women get when they don’t marry. I want all my girls protected.”
“I’ll see that she’s protected. I’ll see that she gets land. And education. And money. And while we’re negotiating, I need a rooster.”
“A what?” Daddy asked.
“A rooster. A big one.”
Daddy shook his head at the vagaries of womenfolk. “Mud, you know which one to give your sister.” He dropped his chin and pointed a single finger to the door. Mud and I took off, stopping by the chicken coop on the way down the road. “You sure it’s the one?” I asked, watching the huge rooster strut around.
“That rooster ain’t nothing but trouble. He starts yelling at three in the morning and he pecks the feathers offa the small hens. Mama’s been threatening to feed it to us in a stew pot for weeks now. I’m surprised it’s still struttin’ and still has its head.”
Good enough. I put my hand on the earth and reached. Small vines stretched up and snared the rooster’s ankles. Mud gasped and then laughed. “I need to learn how to do that.”
I held out my fingers to show her the leaves that were already sprouting from my fingernail beds. This was a demonstration, and worth any long-term effects of working or reading the land. “I can teach you, and you can grow leaves. Or you can not learn and stay human.”
Mud’s expression fell and she said, “Ohhh.”
I opened the door of the chicken coop and slipped a bit of cloth over the rooster’s head like a hood, wrapping the ties loosely. Then I tied off the rooster’s feet, tore away the vines that had imprisoned him, and carried the huge bird to the back of my truck. It musta weighed twenty pounds.
Guilt swept through me. I wasn’t sure about any of this. I was feeling my way through it all. I had talked it over with Jane Yellowrock and she called it flying by the seat of her pants, which made no sense to me at all. But . . . now I had a plan. And a rooster.
• • •
“What we’uns doin’?” Mud asked. “It might kill us, just sittin’ here.”
“It might try.” I got out of the truck and picked up the rooster. Carried it closer to the tree, watching it. Feeling the tree through the ground. It was aware. It was angry. And it was my fault.
From behind me Mud said, “That ol’ tree’s mean as a snake.”
“You feel that?” r />
“I feel it.”
“I feel it too,” a soft voice said.
I smiled without turning. “Tandy. Thank you for coming. You know my sister.”
“I do,” the empath said. “What is my job, precisely?”
“This is the vampire tree. It’s sentient. It needs a place to grow, a way to reproduce, and a job. I tried to make that happen and it didn’t listen because of . . . well, because of an interference problem. That problem has been resolved, but the tree has taken over a good two acres of the compound and it’s started killing pets.”
“That will never do,” Tandy said.
“I want you to help me tell it to behave.”
“I see.” Tandy’s tone suggested that he didn’t see at all and didn’t know how to go about talking to a vampire tree.
“You think you can get close to the tree?”
“It likes me,” Tandy said. “So yes.”
“Okay. You get close. I’ll sit right here. With your keeping it calm and my hands in the earth, I’ll tell it the facts of life, survival, and death. Then we’ll sacrifice a rooster.”
Tandy was silent a moment. He said, “We’ll do what?”
“When I claim land I use blood. I want to claim the tree and all its saplings, and the land they live on. Jane Yellowrock said it may take blood to accomplish that.”
“I see,” he said again. But it was clear he didn’t. Tandy stepped to the vampire tree and put his hand on the bark. He leaned his head in and touched it. Then he laid his entire body against the tree. Minutes passed. “Now,” he said quietly.
I dropped my dirty pink blanket to the ground and sat, the rooster squirming in my lap. I pulled off my shoes and put my bare feet flat on the ground. Instantly vines burst from the ground and twined around my feet and ankles.