The Kitchen Charmer

  4

  January

  AFGHANISTAN TIME was eight-and-a-half hours ahead. Nine p.m. on a Sunday night at the farm was five-thirty a.m. Monday at Gus’s base. When Gus wasn’t on patrol, he called me before dawn, his time; meaning early evening at the farm. I sat on the knoll outside my barn, looking up at the cold night sky, wrapped in shawls and blankets, with the farm dogs snuggling me.

  Whenever we could arrange the schedule, Gus phoned me during the afternoons, my time. I introduced him to Brim on a blue-sky Tuesday when the temps hit a balmy fifty degrees.

  Brimmy. Brim. Short for Brimstone. Daughter of a quarter horse mother and a donkey father. A molly mule. Like all but a few exceptions in the mule world, her mixed parentage made her a sterile hybrid. She was smarter and stronger than a horse, able to survive on less food and in worse conditions, a hard worker, a loyal friend, and hell on anyone or anything who threatened her territory—or me. Her owners, a young married couple planning to live off the grid up here in the mountains with a mule to pull their garden plough, had boarded her at Rainbow Goddess the fall before.

  They went home to visit family and never came back. Brim’s lack of quaint country charm may have been a determining factor in their return to city life.

  I’d fallen in love with Brim from the first day, when I walked up to her in the pasture before I heard the warnings. She bared her teeth at me then tried to eat my hair. Her eyes shifted my way with bored disdain. They were such a dark, walnut brown; I had to look closely to find the pupil in the eye nearest me. Suddenly I was in my psychic zone. Her energies pummeled my face with intense sensations, alive with meaning. I saw every tiny hair on the dark skin around the smooth round jewel of her beautiful oculus. The dark well of the pupil had a fire deep inside it; not a hellish one that deserved her name but a heart of bleak, dull sorrows.

  I had pulled my shawl over her head and swept it around us both in a hugging motion. We stood there, tented inside the wool-scented warmth, our heads bent together. For a moment she drew her head up. I waited. Slowly, she relaxed. I leaned my face against the hard, bony plane of her temple.

  Sorry. Hurt. Sad. Friend.

  She snuffled my shoulder. And then she answered.

  Sorry. Hurt. Sad. Friend.

  I’d offered the owners one thousand dollars for her plus two queen-sized crocheted bedspreads.

  Since Brim’s transfer into my keeping, she and I had spent a lot of time in couples’ therapy. She had abuse issues.

  Gus officiated via the speaker on my cell phone. Two empaths communicating with a mule empath.

  Me: Friend. Safe.

  Brimstone: Friend. Food.

  “I smell carrots,” Gus had said. “How does that make you feel, Luce—bein’ regarded as nothing but a root vegetable?”

  His deep voice massaged me. “It’s not like that. I bring her carrots as a treat.”

  “I’m sensing some co-dependency issues here. Brim, is that true? Mmmm. I see. Go on. Really? Luce, she says y’all are as alike as two peas in a pod.”

  “Well, I do like carrots.”

  “That’s not what she means. Have you ever had an urge to bite me?”

  The first time Brim heard his voice she lunged at the phone and almost snapped it out of my hand. I had to hold her by the halter while Gus communed with her from a distance. After that introduction she tolerated his voice, although she cast unfriendly looks at the phone each time and flicked her ears back. Her owner had said she was trouble around men in general, and he’d had to work with her a long time to earn her trust.

  I understood.

  Gus went on. “Like Brim, do you have that urge to bite men in general, Ms. Parmenter?” He kept his tone light.

  Not if they respect my personal pasture space. I tried to do the same.

  Brim accepts carrots from you as a show of trust. What gift would you expect from a man?

  His trust, in return. I paused. And socks. I like socks. A crochet and knitting challenge.

  Brim jabbed her muzzle toward a small canvas pouch tied around my waist. Several carrots poked out, along with my phone. She snatched a carrot and the phone, slung the phone aside, and kept the carrot. The phone sailed at least twenty feet and landed in clumps of brown winter grass.

  I ran to it as if Gus were physically inside. Are you still there? Can you hear me? The connection was gone. As I began pressing commands and preparing to call him back, his text message came through with a large smile emoticon attached. I’m knitting socks for you. BUT NONE FOR HER.

  I laughed out loud.

  I LIVED FOR THOSE calls to Luce. I’d sit, wearing my winter gear and her scarf, on the wooden steps outside my tin can, looking at the night sky or squinting into the cold gold dawns. Average daily high—forty-something. In the twenties at night. Dry cold, coming off the steppes and the grasslands, not like the misty damp of the Appalachians.

  She described every phase of the moon over the Ten Sisters. “January is the Cold Moon,” she told me. “That’s what the Cherokees call it. A time for resting, and repairing tools and clothing. It’s ceremonial to put out your hearth fire and start a new one. Renewal.”

  “My grandmother’s family has a lot of Cherokee blood. The Netties. My mother said our talent for insights and predictions came from them.”

  “You were born with it?”

  “I’ve had it as long as I can remember.”

  “I wonder what explains me. I wasn’t born with this ability. I’m not part Cherokee or any other native tribe, that I know of.”

  “It comes to different people in different ways.”

  “How many others do you know?”

  “None like me and my sisters and our mother. No one like you. But hints of the gift in people. Yes. There’s an old villager here at the base; he runs a shop near the PX. Cigarettes, pirated DVDs, cheap sunglasses. The first time we met, I smelled a spice aura around him. He was staring at me, too. He waved me to the back of his shop and introduced me to his grandmother. I sat with her beside a small grill and a stone oven. I don’t speak a lot of Farsi and she spoke no English. Regardless, we talked. I’ve never done that before. I sensed what she wanted to say and she sensed what I said. She taught me to make mantu. It looks like ravioli, and it’s stuffed with minced meat. I’ve been back every week since then. She teaches me to cook, and we communicate in separate languages.”

  Luce said softly, “The first time I touched a section of wool roving and it ‘spoke’ to me, I thought I’d completely lost touch with reality. Lost my mind, Gus. That was right after I came here to the farm. I told Cathy Mitternich I wasn’t raised to believe anything like that was possible. But . . . looking back, I think I was raised to believe. The power of our senses goes so far beyond what we use them for ordinarily . . . who knows how much they’d tell us, if we knew open how to open those channels?”

  “I and my sisters learned early on not to share our talent with strangers. Especially after I told my third grade teacher her husband liked to grab her married sister.”

  Luce never quite laughed, but I could feel her smiling.

  “As a child,” she went on, almost whispering—as if her sheep and dogs and Brim the mule would overhear and gossip—“ when I was sick with colds I remember my great aunt smearing mentholated salve up my nose and around my throat, then wrapping and pinning an old scarf of hers around my neck. I felt like a vapored mummy. But that scent of the salve and the musky odor of the scarf is a memory that comes back to me; it makes me feel so safe, now. I wonder if . . . even then . . . was I tuned into the scarf’s energy, you know? That the wool was comforting me?”

  I’d like to comfort you. I didn’t say it out loud. Didn’t have to. Her breath broke and we were both silent for a few seconds.

  “Those memories are always tied to sleeping with her for extra war
mth, if she wasn’t in a mood. She told me to call her ‘Mr. Auntie,’ because she was Dad’s aunt. That made sense to her, if not to me. Mr. Auntie kept her side of our duplex super-warm. She had a coal furnace she refused to give up, even though Dad was afraid it would burn down the entire house. He had trouble finding a supplier to deliver coal in suburban Charlotte.

  “The old furnace rumbled and gushed heat up through a main grate in the hallway outside her bedroom door. I imagined that furnace burning black diamonds. That’s what the coal looked like to me. I dreamed dreams in her side of the house I never dreamed elsewhere. Scenes of beautiful fairytale places I just knew I had visited in a previous life. I asked Dad if I was going to hell for believing in reincarnation, because, being a minister’s daughter, it meant God would judge me harder than others. Being the daughter of a Southern Methodist minister carried even more responsibility.

  “Dad said, ‘Lucy, God gave us the brains to think up all sorts of heavens. If He hadn’t wanted us to ponder them, He’d have made us too dumb to care.’ Then he hugged me and added, ‘If you tell anyone in the congregation I said that, I’ll trade you to the Episcopalians for a case of wine.’”

  I laughed, the first laugh of a long, brutal week. “When I come home on leave, I want to hear a whole lot more about him.”

  “There’s a lovely half-moon tonight over the Ten Sisters. They have moon shadows on their tops. It’s beautiful.”

  “When you change the subject like that it tells me you don’t want to talk about your dad.” She was quiet for a long time. “I hear you knitting,” I said.

  “Thinking.”

  “Talk.”

  “You’re leaving on another patrol, soon. You don’t have to say so; I’m just guessing. I’m sitting out here in the pasture with a few of the farm’s sheep snuggled around me. I can sense them thinking, ‘This odd creature has no wool. So she wraps herself in ours. We must stay close to her shawls. They are part of our flock.’ Delta says every month’s moon has a different meaning. This month, January, is a Sleeping Moon—it’s all about hibernation. February is a Dying Moon—death to the weak and helpless in a severe winter. March, when you come to visit, is a Renewal Moon. The edge of Spring. A time for waking up, preparing to set new roots and grow new life. I love the old Appalachian folklore.”

  “Well, my mother called March a simmering month. She said it was a time to check the liquor in your cook pots. She didn’t mean alcohol; she meant the essence of the meals you’d cooked all winter. That boiled-down gravy. Soul gravy. I wonder what your dad would think of my soul gravy? About you pen palling with a godless army captain who claims he and his sisters can taste and smell the food aromas of other people’s thoughts?”

  “He’d threaten to trade you to the Episcopalians for wine.” She paused as I laughed again. “Dad would say, ‘Your strange Appalachian food witchery probably rates two cases of wine in a barter with the Episcopalians.’ But he’d like you. He’d be impressed with your honor, your kindness . . . and your knitting and crocheting. He did needlepoint. Mostly quotes from Franklin Roosevelt and Bible verses. But once he did a big one that just said, ‘Jesus Gives.’ He took it to sell at a church fundraiser.

  “Everyone was bewildered. ‘Jesus gives . . . what, Reverend Parmenter?’ Dad told them that was up for interpretation. I always wanted him to do a companion needlepoint that listed some possible answers: ‘Jesus gives . . . Good advice. Jesus gives . . . More than He gets. Jesus gives . . . Back. At work. A damn. A hoot. Coupons.’”

  I laughed until my sides ached. I felt her smiling again. I also felt her shifting her thighs, the love warm and wanting inside them. For me. Whoever had abused her, no matter what her ugly history—a boyfriend or ex-husband or—hell, it made me sick to think about it, a member of her own family—she’d tell me in her own good time. And we’d work it through, one touch at a time.

  “Your voice is a warm liquor,” she whispered. “Mr. Auntie took me to visit a branch of her family in Tennessee when I was a child. They gave me a little cup of Ginger Ale spiked with moonshine. I wandered the backyard talking to butterflies. Mr. Auntie never suspected. That’s how your voice feels, to me. Like a warm day in a garden where everything’s safe, and it’s safe to run free.”

  I felt a sudden fear in her, the drawing back that happened whenever either of us got too close.

  I changed the subject. Told her some lame news about the yarn club on base. I was one of its leaders. Painting a word-picture of hard-ass, young soldiers with dead shadows in their eyes. The ones who burned the air with threats if anyone dared tell the girlfriend or the boyfriend or the old buddies back home that I Am Sittin’ Here Fuckin’ Crocheting a Fuckin’ Scarf. How a lot of them quietly came back, each week, to slouch in folding chairs under hard fluorescent lights, talking trash and pretending they didn’t like it, while the yarn and the crochet hook or the knitting needles moved like prayers in their sunburned hands.

  “What you love doing with your hands,” Luce whispered, “Is what you love doing with your life.”

  “How did you end up at the farm? My sisters won’t tell me—they say it’s your choice. I won’t push you to talk about it, if you don’t want to.”

  Her stark silence filled my mind with the cold rot of a dead lamb in the sun.

  “You’ll tell me when you’re ready,” I added quickly. “I can’t and won’t even try to read your mind. Relax.”

  She never said another word that night. Pain came off her in waves that made me sick to my stomach. There’s an old Celtic word. Hiraeth. A homesickness for a home you can never go back to because maybe it never existed to begin with. It hurts. It’s a grief. You see pieces of it in dreams, and you never want to wake up.

  I’d been looking for redemption since Dad died on my watch and Mom not long after.

  Luce was it. My home. I desperately hoped that I was hers.

  I SPENT FAR TOO many hours gazing at photos Gus emailed me. They scrolled across an electronic photo frame beside my computer. I put my fingertips on his face. The big, broad-shouldered man in desert camo with reddish hair bleached almost as pale as mine. I saw his sisters in him—saw their strong-jawed Scots-Irish father and red-headed part-Cherokee mother, who’d both died when the three of them were children in Asheville, caught in a blood feud between Jay Wakefield’s uncle and an old legacy of land rights at Free Wheeler that tangled in most of the old families of the Crossroads Cove.

  I saw strength and pride and pull-yourself-up-determination.

  I saw his smile, and the lines creasing the corner of his eyes, and the enameled-green gaze that looked straight out at me and sizzled farther down into me than I could ever let any physical touch travel.

  I loved Gus MacBride, the most beautiful man I’d never have sex with in my life.

  Gus thought I was funny. Nice. I liked it that way. We were penpals. Text buddies. I loved the pictures he texted me of him cooking over campfires while local children and burka-clad women watched him eagerly, as fascinated by him as I was.

  Okay, I loved him from a distance. The best way. He would never come home to stay for good—he did not want anything to do with his memories of growing up in North Carolina, said Tal and Gabby, although I’d begun to worry about a change of heart. Both of them had returned to the mountains. Tal was with Doug Firth now, her and her daughter Eve. And Gabby had become the talk of the entire state with her Christmas drama alongside Jay Wakefield, up in the Little Fin Valley. They were a team. A couple. She wasn’t going back to her home in California.

  What if Gus had a change of heart, too?

  A storm’s coming, girl.

  Opal’s presence sang in my head. I adjusted the water flow to the livestock troughs. The water, from one of the farm’s three deep wells, was so cold it burned my fingers. I looked up at a clear blue sky.

  You don’t mean snow and ice. That’s
not in the forecast. Not yet, anyhow. It’s still only January.

  There’s a lotta kinds of storms, Miss Lucy. This one will be all kinds, put together.

  What do I need to know? I shivered. What do I need to do?

  Practice your courage. Every chance you get.

  I went inside the barn, which was warm and fertile with the scent of the animals. I sat on my stoop atop a wooden stool behind the spinning wheel. Spinning always loosened the vines of fear. I rested a foot on the treadle and pumped. The wheel whirred and turned. Feeding a fluffy streamer of roving into the yarn I’d started previously, I watched it twist into a slender strand, pivot through the orifice and wind neatly onto the bobbin. Below my little porch, the sheep and llamas and Brim snoozed under heaters that hung from the tall ceiling, their eyes half shut and muzzles mumbling in dreams. Some of the farm dogs and cats were curled up in the thick shavings among them.

  My four-legged family. I loved them all.

  My phone lit up. Ping, ping, ping, inside a knitted pocket attached to my skirt. My ringtone sounded like mice playing a xylophone. Nervous but organized.

  The roving gnarled in my fingers then leapt into the air, spreading tendrils and weaving a soft net, gray-blue, sad.

  Not too bad. Not something horrible.

  I pulled the phone out and read KNIGHTS on the I.D. But when I clicked to answer, the connection failed. I tucked the phone back in its pocket.

  They’d asked me to quit calling them the Apple Pie Knights, a name I had given them to make them seem less threatening at first. They still hid in the woods at Free Wheeler, but no longer sent all their messages written on notes delivered by Patton, the four-pawed military veteran who suffered from PTSD just as they did. He still stole small items from all over the neighborhood. Extracted, not stealing, the Knights called it.

  The Knights trusted me. Their phone messages ran the gamut from wistful to wild.