Light to the Hills: A Novel (18)
There were Celia and Rue, sisters who lived on Straight Road and who seemed to be kin to ’most every soul on their side of the mountain or at least know them and their families as neighbors. Thalia and Esther were raising kids by themselves, like her, and tended to keep to their jobs and not linger for tea or chatter. Finally, there was Alice, the youngest of them, who could talk the ears off an elephant and saw the job as more of a social outlet than a means of delivering literature.
Most of them lived in the free town, like she did, or near enough. They’d each start at the office on Monday and head out two or three times a week, taking a different eighteen-mile route each day and repeating the process every two weeks. On the first and third Tuesdays, Amanda delivered to three separate communities, a loose term for a handful of houses that followed the natural bend and flow of a creek bed or fence line.
On the first and third Wednesdays, she headed north toward the edge of their county, passing abandoned mines and the house of a weathered old woman named Miz Hettie, who looked to be in her eighties but could just as easily have been decades younger and work-worn. Her features favored the little corn-husk dolls many mountain children counted as toys. Sometimes Amanda’s was the only face she’d seen since the last time she’d ridden through, so Amanda took extra time at her house, joining her for a cup of chicory coffee and reading passages to her from the Bible, her only request. In return, Miz Hettie would sit in her cane chair and teach Amanda about the different herbs and tinctures that lay on every open surface, musing about which ones were good for this or that ailment, which ones needed to be dosed with tea, and which parts of a plant to avoid.
“Miz Hettie, you ought to keep a record of all this,” Amanda told her, sweeping her hand around the room. “I don’t know how you keep it all inside your head.”
“Reckon when I’m gone, folks’ll find ’em another healer just as good.” She spat a long stream of tobacco into the dust and worked her toothless gums around the wad in her mouth.
“I doubt that.” Amanda laughed. “I’d say you’re rare as a shiny new penny.”
With that, Amanda persuaded Miz Hettie to agree to let her spend at least some of every visit writing down remedies and recipes. They would press dried leaves or stems and affix them to pages of a notebook, where Amanda recorded Miz Hettie’s prescriptions. Amanda called it Miz Hettie’s Complete Catalog of Cures, which made the old woman clap her hands.
“Now that’s a fine title,” Hettie proclaimed. “Real dignified.”
The second and fourth Thursdays brought Amanda to a schoolhouse where the teacher, Vessel McCann, taught fifteen students in the fall and spring, providing they could get there. So many were transient, dragged around by their parents to wherever they could eat and stay warm, that the students were often completely different between visits.
Amanda had become good friends with Vessel. A rare bird, Vessel had lived as far away as Louisville, stayed in school, and earned a teaching certificate. Her husband had brought her back east to his family’s land, where she’d been touched by the people who lived here, poor but resourceful, determined, and proud. If idle hands were the devil’s workshop, he was out of a job where Vessel was concerned. She’d managed to secure funding for the small school by writing to her people back home in the city, and with no children of her own, she labored tirelessly with the pupils who could make it to school.
Amanda and Vessel shared their lunch pails on Thursdays while the children gathered wood for the stove or swept out the schoolhouse. The two shared a love of words and learning as well, having had the luxury of finishing school and being raised in families that knew education could lift a person like a bird in flight. Coming from beyond the mountains knit them together in another way as well. They would always be “outsiders” in a sense, no matter how long they planted gardens or weathered winters in these mountains. If they hadn’t already been living here since the Revolutionary War, they were newcomers and would always remain so. They’d always have to work a bit harder to prove their mettle and their trustworthiness to the people who had sprung as seeds from the mountain soil.
Fridays brought Amanda’s last route for the week. Over those eighteen miles, she’d visit two farmhouses and meet one lone woman where Jag Leg crossed Muddy Road. Someone several miles down the left fork of the Jag Leg creek bed had heard tell of the woman who came through carting books and news, and every other week, Maude Harris walked six miles to meet the woman on her way, creating her own book stop. The first time Amanda came upon her alongside the dusty path, Junebug’s ears swiveled forward, curious about the wiry woman who sat strumming a banjo while she waited. Now, Maude met the mule with a nibble of cane sugar and a pat on the neck. She sat on a fallen log near the path, plucking strings or whittling to pass the time until she could trade the week’s books for the next batch. Amanda never met the folks down Maude’s road—it would’ve carried her too far off her regular route—but Maude brought her stories of how this or that one had enjoyed a particular book or magazine.
It was on the second-Thursday route that she met the MacInteers because of Sass and the rattlesnake. While she always made time to visit and chat, she didn’t make a habit of eating meals with the families. They already had hardship enough, and a regular extra mouth would wear out her welcome. She had received the makings for the apple pie from her friend and had been on her way home when she’d run into Sass in that downpour. They weren’t that far off her regular route, close enough that she calculated she could put a visit to their house on her schedule. And Mooney hadn’t known about the pie. Amanda had felt a pang of guilt sharing it without her, but Vessel was always bringing things to share; there’d be other pies.