The Healing

Chapter 18





It was a hot day in late spring and a little more than a month had passed since Polly’s arrival. An ill-tempered midday sun was breaking from behind a ragged piece of cloud. Polly drove the wagon along a freshly plowed field with Granada hunched by her side, studying a string of women and children, nearly a hundred souls long, stretching from the road ditch all the way out to a distant horizon of cypress. They were stomping down newly scattered cottonseed into the swampy, black muck with their bare feet. The children, wearing only sackcloth shirts down to their knees, looked up at Granada with curious smiles and giggling laughter. Some waved.

The ebony, head-scarfed women, their legs caked in mud up to their tucked skirts, seemed more interested in Polly. They called out to each other excitedly and pointed in wide-eyed amazement like they were looking at somebody who could raise the dead. Then they turned to one another nodding and chattering, as if needing to confirm what they had seen.

Polly looked neither left nor right, keeping her eyes on the rumps of the mules, but Granada thought she noticed an almost imperceptible grin sneak across the woman’s face. She probably enjoyed being thought of as some kind of witch.

As for her, Granada still had her doubts about Polly’s powers, and the girl had watched closer than most. She studied the woman as she served the meat and poured the port into the tin cups but hadn’t seen her do anything that Aunt Sylvie didn’t do in the master’s kitchen. The miracle certainly couldn’t have come from the dirty roots and leaves that grew wild in the woods. No matter what the others said, she could see nothing special in any of it.

She thought for a while the magic might reside in the spells the woman whispered into the ears of the sick ones, thinking maybe they were a charm. But once, when Granada finally got close enough, all she heard the woman saying were Bible words: “In the beginning God created …” That was all. Kept repeating it over and over. Didn’t even say the whole verse.

As hard as she looked, for the life of her Granada couldn’t see where the magic was added.

Wherever her power came from, Polly Shine had definitely proved herself to the master, doing for his slaves what the white doctors could not. When he saw Big Dante rise from his pallet and praise Polly to high heaven, the master put plenty of slack in her rope. She got a traveling pass anytime she wanted to take the wagon to the outlying settlements and look in on the field slaves. She counseled the master on what foods would keep the slaves healthy and working, and prescribed special diets for those women who had not been able to bear new stock. The lists Granada brought to Aunt Sylvie to fill were growing longer and longer.

The master even allowed Polly to leave the plantation to gather ingredients for her remedies from the swamps and woods that surrounded his fields. She would return from her excursions with bulging sacks and overflowing baskets. She stayed up most the night crushing juices from leaves, scraping roots, and boiling down barks, preparing teas and poultices and salves and pine-resin pills.

Once she toted in a heap of yellowish clay from a vein she had discovered near the creek. She commenced to shape little crocks and fired them in the hearth. Then, with the juice of boiled roots and leaves, she painted the pots with strange geometric images and set them up on a shelf, empty and unused, warning Granada to never touch them.

The girl was beginning to believe that she would never be allowed to go along on one of the excursions, when that very morning Polly told Granada to put on her shoes and get in the wagon.

Granada had come in from hanging a washing of laundry. “Where we going?” she asked, but Granada could tell that Polly was done talking on the subject. Another query would only result in her being told to keep her mouth shut lest “flies get in the pot.”

Polly yanked hard on the reins, directing the mules onto a track only recently chopped from the towering cane that now walled the wagon on either side. The pulsing drone of insects along with the booming frogs filled the stony silence between Polly and Granada.

The track ended at the edge of a dense Delta forest the master hadn’t got around to burning yet. Polly tied off the reins and without a word climbed down from the wagon with her tote sack swinging off her shoulder. Granada watched as the old woman entered what looked to be an impenetrable wall of vegetation by a dim path that evidently only she could see, thrashing at the tangled growth of vines and briars with her snake stick, until she was swallowed up by the forest. Granada had not been asked to follow.

The sun raged from a cloudless sky and sweat trickled down the girl’s back. Polly hadn’t told her not to come, either. Granada jumped from the buckboard and followed the woman’s footprints. They had to lead to a place cooler than the open wagon.

As she carefully plucked her way through the stinging briars and pushed back on leafy branches that obscured her vision, Granada wondered if this barely perceptible path had once been traveled by those long-ago Indians, the ones who built the imposing mounds scattered about on the master’s land. Chester claimed that they ate their enemies and friends alike. Or perhaps this was the trail of some wild animal that had recently passed through. She knew the woods to be filled with black bear and panthers and so many snakes Adam couldn’t name them all. She decided to pick up her pace and scurried across the spongy ground to catch up with the old woman, mindless of the briars biting her arms and legs.

She found Polly in a place where daylight filtered though a lush canopy of honey locust and red maple. From there she watched as Polly bent over and began stabbing at the ground with her little pickax, digging up sundry plants by their roots. She examined them carefully, pinching the leaves, peeling back the bark, breaking open the stems.

Polly tasted everything. After chewing on a leaf or sucking on a piece of bark or bit of root, sampling an early-spring berry, or putting her tongue to gummy resin, she registered her verdict with either a nod or a shake of her head.

At first Granada thought Polly was talking to herself as she worked. But the girl had been wrong. Polly talked to the bits and pieces she was studying, like they were old friends not seen for a long time. Some she was just meeting. She spoke in a steady, rhythmic fashion that after a while sounded to Granada more like music than talk, lulling the girl into a dreamy, half-awake state. Eventually everything the woman said bled together and Granada really couldn’t tell if she was speaking words or just made-up sounds. Or perhaps she was singing.

The spell broke when Granada spied Polly doing something that she couldn’t keep silent about.

“Why you eating dirt?” Granada blurted. If it had been Little Lord doing such a foolish thing, she would have slapped his hand.

Polly eyed the girl briefly and then spit. She bent over and dug up a burdock plant and began to do the very same thing, scraping the root and putting the dirt in her mouth, squinting her eyes and creasing her forehead like Sylvie did when she was sampling a new batch of soup.

Granada shook her head, disgusted with Polly’s manners.

“Miss Prissy think I’m eating dirt,” Polly mumbled to herself. “If Miss Prissy was watching like I told her to, she’d see I ain’t eating dirt. I’m reading it.”

Polly hadn’t spoken to her in so long, Granada figured maybe she had misheard the words and laughed at the silliness of the idea. When the old woman scowled at her, she realized Polly had indeed spoken the words, and more than that, she was dead serious.

“What you say?” Granada asked, incredulous. “You reading dirt?”

Polly nodded once and then looked around her, taking in the entire forest with her gaze. “The plants and animals and even the dirt, they got they words, too.” Then she looked at Granada. “What makes Miss Prissy think she so special?”

“They talking to you?”

“They talk to anybody got a mind to listen.”

“What they saying right this minute?” Granada sassed.

“Don’t know why I wasting my breath, but I’ll tell Miss Prissy anyhow. They telling me of a place where there ain’t no sickness. No aches. No misery.”

Granada knew the answer to that riddle. “Heaven!” she blurted.

“What you know about heaven? I’m talking about right here!” Polly stabbed the ground with her stick. “In front of your face! The leaves, the bark, the roots, the berries, the dirt. They all got memory. They hold the memory of how things supposed to be. They all got secrets to tell.” Polly held out a pinch of the dirt before Granada. “They tell you how to put things right. All we got to do is listen.”

When Granada opened her mouth to argue, Polly slipped a bit of dirt on the girl’s tongue. Granada gagged and spat it out.

“You got to hold it in with your mouth shut, Miss Prissy! Open wide and be still.” She put another speck of dirt on Granada’s tongue. She held it in her mouth this time.

“What’s it say?”

As the girl stood there, the dirt turned to mud.

“Do it taste like salt or sugar or more like rust? Do it bite back? Do it draw up?” she asked, without pause. “Do it act like it want you to swallow? Or do it make you tired? Do it make your stomach rise up and want to heave?”

The only thing Granada knew was she had to get the miserable mess out of her mouth. She spat and then wiped her tongue with the hem of her dress.

Polly cackled at Granada’s squeamishness and the girl sassed, “You can’t read dirt no more than jaybirds can talk. You a silly old woman.” She took a step back, in case her words warranted a slap.

“And you ain’t nothing but a pishtail girl who don’t know nothing in the world except your own self. And pitiful little about that. You still ain’t ready.”

“How can I get ready if you don’t tell me nothing?”

“I can’t tell you how. A head full of ‘how’ ain’t going to do nobody no good. You got to stand back and watch and listen.” Polly looked up at the intricate weave of treetops and vines that sheltered them. “Just like all these trees, you got the memory, too.”

“How can I remember something I don’t even know?” she asked.

“When you start reaching out with something besides your greedy hands,” Polly shot back. “That’s how you slip into the remembering. You got to be quiet and let it come to you. You can’t go hunt it down. And showing off and having a smart mouth don’t make it come any quicker.”

Granada kicked at the ground. “Remembering. That don’t make sense.”

Polly turned and began to walk away, still laughing at the girl. She said over her shoulder, “Can’t do it in your hand until you see it in your heart. Like going to the river to fetch water without a bucket. No use even trying.”

More riddles. Granada used to love the riddles Chester told her. But Polly’s were too hard, and Granada was beginning to suspect that Polly’s riddles had no answers. It would be too soon if she ever heard another.

Granada waited at a distance, beneath a sheltering sweet gum, and watched until Polly had finally filled her tote sack with an assortment of found things that seemed to satisfy her taste.

Granada remained silent as she followed Polly through the checkered shade of the forest back to the road, feeling more useless than before. “Like tits on a boar hog,” she could hear Aunt Sylvie saying. They boarded the wagon and Polly took the reins.

“Giddap!” she cried, and the dozing beasts twitched their ears and began their slow, steady progress down the rough track.

The sun was in their faces, still an hour away from disappearing below the line of cypress off in the distance. Granada now had no problem keeping quiet. For a long time she studied her hands. They looked large and clumsy and Polly said that one day they would become even more grotesque.

Granada was tired of never knowing where to stand or to sit and not being able to say a word without it being wrong. There was no place for her anymore.