“Hold on,” I say, and walk off the parking lot and along the tree line.
Mama always told me that if I look carefully enough, I can find what I need in the world. Starting when I was seven, Mama would lead me out in the woods around the house for walks, and she’d point out plants before digging them up or stripping their leaves and telling me how they could heal or hurt. The wind moved high in the trees, but nearly everything was silent below, except for me and Mama, who said: That right there is cow parsnip. You can use the young leaves like celery when you cook, but the roots is more useful. You can make a decoction for cold and flu. And if you make them into a poultice, you can ease and heal bruises, arthritis, and boils. She dug around the roots of the plant with a small shovel she carried on our walks, and then pulled the whole plant up by its leaves and doubled it up before putting it in the bag she carried across her chest. She searched the ground until she found another plant, and said: This pigweed. Ain’t good for any medicine, really, but you can cook with it, use it like you use spinach. Got a lot of vitamins in it, so it’s good for you. Your daddy like it sautéed with his rice, and he say his mama used to make bread with the ground-up seeds. I ain’t never tried that, though. On our way back to the house with the day’s haul, she quizzed me. As I grew older, it was easier for me to remember, to answer her quickly as we picked our way around tree roots. Wormseed, I would say. Good for getting rid of worms if you use it like seasoning in food. But it was hard for me to remember everything. Every day, Mama would point out a plant that had parts that could help women, specifically, seeing as how it was mostly women that searched her out, needing her skills and knowledge. She’d say: Remember you can use the leaves to make a tea that helps with cramps. And it could bring on a period, too. I’d look away and roll my eyes to the pines, wishing I were in front of the TV, not out trudging through the woods with my mama talking about periods. But now, as I walk through the clearing and peer into the woods, looking for milkweed, I wish I’d listened more carefully. I wish I could remember more than the fact that it has pinkish-purple flowers. And even though milkweed grows wild on parcels of land like this and flowers in the spring, I don’t see its white-beaded, downy leaves anywhere.
When Mama first realized that something was seriously wrong with her body, that it had betrayed her and turned cancerous, she began by treating it herself with herbs. I’d come home on those spring mornings to find her bed empty. She’d be out in the woods, picking and slowly dragging bushels of young pokeweed shoots behind her. Every time, she said: I’m telling you, it’s going to cure it. I’d take the bundles from her, put my arm around her waist, and help her up the steps and into the house, where I’d set her in a chair in the kitchen. I was always buzzing from the night before, so while I chopped and cleaned and boiled and made pitcher after pitcher of tea for her to drink, the high would trill through my veins like a discordant song. But it didn’t cure it. Her body broke down over the years until she took to her bed, permanently, and I forgot so much of what she taught me. I let her ideas drain from me so that the truth could pool instead. Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.
*
If the world were a right place, a place for the living, a place where men like Michael didn’t end up in jail, I’d be able to find wild strawberries. That’s what Mama would look for if she couldn’t find milkweed. I could boil the leaves at Michael’s lawyer’s house, where we’re staying before we go pick Michael up in the morning. Put a little sugar in it, a little food coloring like Mama used to do whenever I had an upset stomach as a child, and tell her it’s juice.
But the world ain’t that place. Ain’t no wild strawberries at the side of the road. It ain’t boggy enough up here. But this world might be a place that gives a little luck to the small, sometimes shows a little mercy, because after I walk awhile down the side of the road out of sight of the gas station, after I leave Misty gesturing out the window with her arm, yelling, “Fucking come on,” I find wild blackberries. Mama always told me they could be used for upset stomach, but only for adults. But if there was nothing else, she said I could make a tea and give it to kids. Not a lot, I remember her saying. From the leaves. Or was it from the vine? Or the roots? The heat beats down so hard I can’t remember. I miss the late-spring chill.
This is the kind of world it is. The kind of world that gives you a blackberry plant, a doughy memory, and a child that can’t keep nothing down. I kneel by the side of the road, grab the thorny stems as close to the earth as I can get them, and pull, and the vine pricks my hand, tears at the skin, draws blood in tiny points that smear. My palms burn. This the kind of world, Mama told me when I got my period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead. And devils them throughout. Even though the words were harsh, I saw hope in her face when she said them. She thought that if she taught me as much herbal healing as she could, if she gave me a map to the world as she knew it, a world plotted orderly by divine order, spirit in everything, I could navigate it. But I resented her when I was young, resented her for the lessons and the misplaced hope. And later, for still believing in good in a world that cursed her with cancer, that twisted her limp as an old dry rag and left her to disintegrate.
I kneel and lean back on my haunches. The day pulses like a flush vein. Wipe my eyes, smear dirt across my face, and make myself blind.
Chapter 5
Jojo