Strange Folk, page 4
Belva began pulling jars down and setting them on the table. She opened one marked “rainwater, thunderstorm” with an unintelligible date, dipped her fingertips, and dabbed her forehead, behind her ears, and at her wrists like perfume. She dabbed Lee and Otis in the same places.
“Opaline, I need fresh mugwort. Can you snip a few stalks? Otis, you go with her.” She handed Lee a pair of garden shears and left the room.
Otis followed Lee out to the garden. As they silently walked up and down the rows using their phones as flashlights, she tried to conjure a memory of mugwort. For years, before her father died and her mother cut her off from Belva, she’d spent afternoons with her in the garden, learning the names and powers of the plants. But now she couldn’t access that knowledge, as if the effort to erase that life had erased even the tiny, beautiful blooms of it.
She could feel Otis getting impatient. The urgency of his father’s pain weighed heavily over them.
“So what are we looking for, exactly? If you describe it, I might be able to help.”
“Um… it’s hard to describe… it’s been a long time…”
“That’s a first.”
She looked up at him, and there was a smile beneath his concern. “What do you mean by that?”
“You used to have all the answers.” He turned to his phone and googled it, holding up an image showing small yellow buds.
Lee made a noise of recognition and searched the garden. At the very edge, she thought she saw dots of yellow against the darkness, and she stepped into the woods. That was the thing about Belva’s garden—it didn’t really end. The woods were a part of it too, with its offerings covering the mountains for miles.
A memory suddenly resurfaced of an afternoon in early spring when Belva had taken Lee and Dreama on a hike through the woods, pointing out the various plants she used in her remedies. She’d bent over and ruffled her hand over a stalk of flowering yellow. “Mugwort. Dangerous for pregnant women. Good for bad dreams and insomnia, digestion, irregular periods, bad liver.” Lee remembered fingering the small blooms and feeling the power they contained.
Finally, Lee saw the plant, snapped off a few stalks, and returned to Otis.
They found Belva looming over a steaming pot in her workshop, her face pink and wet from exertion. She took the stalks, ran her fist down their lengths, and tossed a handful of the flowers into the brew. The smell of hot sauce and lavender thickened in the room, and Lee could feel her body going numb. She looked over at Otis and could see he was feeling something, too. Belva asked her something she couldn’t quite make out, and when Lee didn’t answer, she ushered both of them outside to get some fresh air.
The chill immediately revived them, and they stood there breathing deeply for a few minutes without talking.
“It’s MS.” Otis kept staring ahead.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m still getting used to taking care of him. My sister was doing it for a while, but she started taking from his pill stash and took off.”
Lee nodded knowingly. “That’s why your dad won’t take the drugs for the pain. It makes sense.”
He shrugged. “He also hates how it makes him feel—like a corpse, he says, so he might as well be dead. At least the pain is a feeling.”
“The hospital can’t help him?”
“He got a nasty infection there last time. He always feels worse when he goes there, so we try to avoid it. I still want him to have a choice. It’s his body. His life.”
Lee had the impulse to reach out and touch him, as if this was something she did often, but then Luann stepped out into the porch light. “We’re ready for you.”
Inside, Otis picked his father up off the couch like a parent putting a sleeping child to bed. Belva went out the back door, and the rest followed, with Luann holding an oil lantern to light their way. The old man grunted and moaned like a wounded animal in the dark.
When they were children, Otis’s father reminded her of a rooster. Thin and sinewy and mean as hell. If you’d had to eat him to survive, he would have been stringy and tough, the small segments of meat spoiled and dried out. Once in middle school, when she and Otis spent most of a tedious, all-day Easter egg hunt talking, she’d overheard him telling his son “not to mingle with that devil woman.” At the time, she felt nearly honored by the notion, but she’d also felt the sear of his aversion.
Now he was utterly vulnerable, all of his gristle stripped away until he was nothing but a small, raw creature, like this was at the center of all of our bodies, and what you saw were just layers of covering added over the years. This was the soft, red center of us all. She was bewildered by it.
When they reached the creek, Belva kicked off her shoes and waded in. She motioned for Otis to follow, and he hesitated, looking from her to the water with his brow furrowed.
“Are you sure? What is this going to do?”
“Otis, you can trust me. This will help with his pain.” Her voice was calm but forceful, and Lee couldn’t imagine disobeying.
Otis attempted to pry his boots off while balancing his father in his arms. As he struggled, Lee kneeled in front of him and unlaced them, feeling the warmth of his feet under the thin leather. She guided each ankle out of its shoe, and they met eyes for a moment before he stepped slowly into the creek. Luann followed Otis into the water, and Belva made the same beckoning gesture at Lee.
She obeyed and waded in, clenching her teeth to block the reaction to the chill. But the water was like a bath ten minutes in—soothing and warm, the temperature of her own skin. She felt her clothes inflate and float, writhing around her like sea plants as she made her way over to them in the waist-high water.
The women surrounded Otis and his father, with Belva by the old man’s head. She uncorked a bottle from a floating basket and brought its amber glass to the man’s lips. As the liquid flowed down his throat, Lee watched his body and face unclench, and then his arms and legs extended outward until he was entirely unfurled and serene, floating unaided on the surface of the water like a lily. Lee felt herself relax as well, and she watched in amazement as they all instinctively brought their arms out and, starting with Belva, began to float on the surface of the water together.
With the warm water lapping against Lee’s ears, there was only gurgling silence and the sky above her. She felt an arm against hers and allowed it to rest there, unwilling to break the spell to find out who it was.
They floated there for a while, until Lee felt a disturbance below the surface. She brought her feet to the muddy bottom, and Otis was standing next to her. Belva motioned to the floating old man, who had fallen asleep with a slight smile on his face. Otis pulled him into his arms, and they filed out with Luann’s lantern guiding their way along the path back to the house.
Belva helped Otis wrap the old man in a towel, and they set him down in front of the living room fire to dry and sleep. They all took towels for themselves and sat in old cane chairs around him in a comfortable silence. Lee could still feel the flicker of that wild liquor in her veins, now mixed with an airy, pore-opening high from the creek float. She hovered there, feeling a bit lightheaded, willing the fire to ground her.
She studied Otis across from her, the flames illuminating the line of his jaw, and her chest tightened and heated as it once had.
Lee had spent her adolescence in a state of isolation. She’d mostly preferred it that way, but sometimes the yearning became too much. She would periodically pick a boy on whom to project all of her passionate desires, fueling her vivid imagination. But she was never entirely fulfilled by this. She wanted more, and by senior year of high school, the burn of it was overwhelming.
There was one boy in school. He was tall, handsome, muscular. The shape of his nose and mouth together was both angular and luscious. She was convinced this area was the key to attraction, though people could rarely identify it. He sat in the back of the class and rarely spoke, but she knew he got good grades. He liked to sit at lunch away from the others, on a bench out by the football field, and read beautiful, violent books like those of Cormac McCarthy. He had this tranquil confidence that sometimes bordered on arrogance. One could never be sure what he thought of them. They were the type of people who should have been friends but had never gotten past each other’s introverted natures. They’d bantered a bit through the years. She liked to insult him to see what he would do, but he never took the bait. Otis was impenetrable.
Then one day at school, a few months before graduation, she was so restless she thought she might leave her skin behind. She followed Otis to his locker after the last bell and brought her face up to his ear. She told him to take her to his car in a firm voice, not inviting any questions. To her surprise, he obeyed. As they walked out to the lot without looking at one another, she’d never felt more calm and assured. She was in control.
She got into the passenger side of his dark blue Bronco and told him to drive somewhere private. There was a field behind the high school that had lain fallow for years, and he pulled to a stop under a tree on the far side. When they turned toward one another, she hesitated, and in that moment the dynamic shifted, and he took her face in his hands and kissed her. He smelled like blueberries with the dust of nature still on them. Opaline forgot herself entirely in that kiss, something wild and uncontrollable unfurling inside of her. When he pulled away, she nibbled on his jaw with unrestrained desire, wanting to devour it whole.
She felt him stiffen, and she pulled back. He seemed bewildered. Not disgusted. No, it wasn’t that. But in that moment, a shame filled her. This overwhelming desire inside of her had been exposed, and the spell was broken.
She asked him to take her back to school, and she caught the bus back home. As she lay in bed that night, she replayed the interaction in her head. He’d held power over her for those few moments in the car. He’d taken her to a more raw, vulnerable place than she ever allowed herself to go. And she wanted more of it.
She had become a master of controlling hunger of all kinds, but her hunger for him felt mad and untamable as it swelled inside of her, and she was terrified. She was mere months from leaving this place behind for good. She had resolved to be untethered when she left, and she wouldn’t let anything hold her down.
The next day, he waited for her after school and reached for her arm as she walked past. She forced herself to wrench it back and throw him a contemptuous look before continuing to the bus. Her arm burned from his touch as she watched him walk forlornly to his car from the dirty bus window.
He kept his distance after that, and she had moments of profound regret, but then they went off to college and it didn’t matter anymore. She hadn’t seen or spoken to Otis since, but over the years she thought of that kiss whenever she felt particularly ordinary. It had been a strange, transcendent moment, like the experience they had tonight in the creek. She wanted more of that feeling.
Across the room, Otis readied to leave. He asked Belva about payment, and she brought him into the kitchen. Lee watched as he handed over a thin fold of cash in exchange for a small jar of liquid.
As he carried his father through the living room and toward the door, she saw the earnest, sturdy boy she had fantasized about years ago, and it was easy to see why he had intrigued her. He had an element of the unexpected that he kept carefully guarded, and that was a rare trait to find in anyone. But in Otis, it was uniquely alluring.
He caught her staring at him, and they held eye contact for a brief, charged moment. And then he was gone.
FOUR
MEREDITH
The woman next to Meredith was losing it.
She held her arms up toward the preacher with pink, tear-soaked cheeks and chanted, “Yes, Jesus. Yes, Jesus.” She was under its spell.
And Meredith was here for it.
Since they came to Craw Valley a week ago, she had witnessed one strange thing after the other. It had been days since she was bored or felt a haze pulling her under.
Back in California, she awoke every morning to a heavy, dirty cloud hovering above her. They drove through the flinty, sun-parched suburbs to school, and she tried not to pass out from how depressing it was. She liked some of her classes, but most of it was distant and numbing, like a show playing in the background of a room. Even her friends felt a little fake, like they were just going through the motions. Their conversations at school were inert, their texts brief and empty. Everyone was either too sick or lazy or busy with other things to actually hang out on weekends—and what would they have done? Watched a show? Walked around the mall? Made a video? She got bored just imagining it.
But out here, in the middle of nowhere, there were real things happening. And there was an energy. She could feel it at night lying on her cot in Belva’s cabin, a light electricity coursing through her that made it hard to sleep. It had been the strongest last night, after those men came over and her mom locked her in her room. She’d barely slept at all.
She should have been exhausted, but she felt the opposite. She was buzzing.
What is Mom keeping from me?
Meredith was no stranger to alternative medicine; a friend’s mom had dabbled in Reiki back in California and used her daughter’s friends as guinea pigs. She’d felt the pricks of something on her table. But it was nothing like what she felt here.
Her mother had always treated her like she was an equal, even when she was very young. She didn’t bullshit her. She gave her adult books to read, and they watched the same shows together. To call a mother a best friend was usually pathetic or saccharine, but in this case it was an unvarnished truth. They told each other everything.
But her mother had been keeping secrets. A secret name, and a secret family that she’d told them about only a few weeks ago. And now, something else. Something just beyond Meredith’s reach.
They stood up to sing another song, and Cliff flipped to the page in the hymnal indicated on the program. They’d been confused at first, but Cliff had picked it up quickly. As they launched into the song, Meredith sang discordantly, and Cliff shook with silent laughter while he tried to stay in tune. He always tried to do the right thing, even when most only saw the wrong in him. It made her heart hurt.
Meredith could feel eyes on her, and she looked down the row to see Belva giving her a blistering stare. A cold sweat broke along the back of her neck, and she immediately changed her voice to meld with the others.
Soon, the service was over and people started collecting their things and shaking each other’s hands. She watched as her mom scooted quickly out of the pew and motioned for them to follow to avoid the swarms of friendly grasping palms.
They filed out of the church in a line past the ancient preacher and the corny youth pastor. When it was Meredith’s turn, the old man took her palm and rubbed his finger lightly across her wrist, giving her the chills. His eyes were pink and blue and glistening like raw oysters, and he reminded her of an ancient oracle. She wondered if he could see her future.
They’d barely gone a few feet in the grass out front before they were accosted by Mom’s cousin Dreama and a group of women who looked like knock-off versions of her. They were a flock of patterned sundresses and ankle-strapped heels.
“Meredith, honey, would you like to volunteer for our fundraiser in a few weeks?” Dreama asked. “All the young ladies are doing it.” She smiled brightly and turned toward Mom. “It’s at the new restaurant my husband and I built near Exit 115. It’s beautiful and the menu is amazing. We’re in talks with investors to franchise.”
Meredith tried not to roll her eyes. “What are you raising money for?”
“We want to build Pastor Jax a new church out near 81. It’ll fit thousands and have a school and a bookstore and a little coffee shop. It’s just what this community needs. Most people don’t want to drive out to this old place, but that kind of church will attract a crowd. I guarantee it.”
Meredith and her mother looked at the church behind them with its simple bell tower and white paint wearing thin at the wood. It filled Meredith with the same feeling as Belva’s house—it felt undeniably a part of the place, as if raised from the ground like any other tree or rock. There was a tiny waterfall behind it that flowed down from some unseen place in the mountains and turned into a creek that completed the pastoral vibes. She wasn’t sure about the Christian God (actually, she was pretty sure it was a fantasy), but one could feel close to nature here, at least. That was one thing she loved about being in Craw Valley.
As the adults continued their conversation, Meredith and Cliff walked away toward the creek on the far side of the lawn. Billy stood on the bank, scanning the water through his sunglasses.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Looking for fish. These glasses are polarized, so I can see through the glare into the water.” He took them off and gave them to Cliff so he could take a look. “Y’all wanna catch crawdads?”
Cliff looked to Meredith with the sunglasses obscuring his small face.
“You should do it. I’ll stand right here and watch.”
She thought he would decline, but Cliff nodded and started rolling up his pants legs like Billy. Cliff had always been a curious kid, but she’d seen that punished over and over again, especially by their dad and the people at school, and he’d learned to retreat into himself and explore only within.
But he was slowly opening up to the world again, his curious mind set loose on the landscape of Craw Valley with Billy’s steadying presence beside him. She was happy to see it.
As she watched him wade in, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around to find a girl from one of her classes.
Tiffany Wang.
Everyone called her by both names as if she were a celebrity. She sat in the back of geometry with an intimidating look on her face, daring anyone to mess with her.
“Hey. You’re Meredith, right?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it like living with a witch?”
The word reverberated inside of her. “What are you talking about?”
