Chapter 3 Wounded
Wounded
Kate Shaw
I walk the short aisle and leave the church and the rising voices.
Outside in the dusk waits a witch, a medicine woman, my mentor and friend.
She leans against the fender of the outsiders’ car, puffs on her corncob pipe, and squints through purple smoke.
During the decade I’ve known Birdie Rocas, little has changed.
She’s still a squatty woman with cotton-fuzz hair piled high on her head and layers of long skirts.
Her crow Samuel usually rides on her head, which elevates her stumpy stature, but tonight he’s absent.
She wears a long necklace of beads, bones, and feathers that hangs to her waist and a belt made of braided leather.
When I was new to mountain life and walked past her abode going and coming, it was entering that rusty trailer that I feared the most. Would I understand her speech? Would her smell be too ripe? And if I was repelled, would I become an enemy of someone I needed to befriend?
But the witch’s dwelling place wasn’t foul.
It was a mystical room with potent herbs and moss, with colored stones and delicate skeletons of tiny creatures that lined the window ledges.
It was a place of comfort. In those first months it was where I learned the rules of nature, because up here the rules are different, and I was only book smart.
Tonight I say, “Evening, Birdie,” and we leave the settlement together because we’ve heard enough good news.
We head up the creek trail to our homes spaced a half mile apart.
After a hundred paces, the worn path narrows, and I step behind the crone and we follow the rise into the darkening woods.
As always, her hips lumber from side to side like an ancient metronome.
Her skirts swish the ground, and her walking stick beats to a primitive drum. She is the leader and I follow.
I always imagined I would leave Baines Creek when I was physically unable to live this life. When old age and aching joints and a mind that had grown feeble would help me make the right decision. But not now. Not yet. Not with someone making the decision for me.
The niggling question that haunts me at this time in my tenure is what’s the point of it all.
After teaching for forty years I’m at a place where opportunities grow thin and purpose should be defined.
But I fear Judgment Day when the students take unfamiliar tests and the outcome, not my good intentions, will be the determinator.
I fear my students will fail and it will be my fault because I was lax.
We come to Birdie’s weathered trailer set back from the creek and up an incline.
She lights an oil lamp hanging from a low branch where Samuel perches, and we sit in the lamp’s glow on tree stumps in the dirt yard.
I haven’t been inside in years. We’ve become close neighbors, not close friends.
But tonight, she rests her gnarly hands on her knees covered in layers of fabric and she’s quiet.
Minutes build and then I chuckle wearily at the end of this arduous day. “What do you want me to say?”
She is blunt. “You took it,” she says, and hurts me.
“What do you mean?”
“You took it,” she repeats with greater disdain.
“What did you expect me to do?” My hackles rise in defense. “Shout? Lash out? Make a scene? Start a war with the education department?”
“Ya know what’s comin, don’t chu?” she goes on with a bitter drag on her pipe and hard exhale. “When down there come up here inside our chil’ren’s heads and scramble thinkin.”
“I have an inkling,” I mumble.
Birdie goes on. “All the hard livin we do ain’t gonna be good nuff.
They don’t get no good mark for huntin and whittlin, for weavin and quiltin.
For foragin in these woods and tellin the difference between killin and healin plants.
They ain’t taught our ways in county school.
That world’s a store-bought world our chil’ren ain’t ready for. ”
She sucks deeper on her pipe and I think she’s through with her rant, but she starts up again. “Them do-gooders is all messed up. They think they know best when they don’t know us a’tall, but that don’t stop change from rootin us out.”
Birdie reaches a crooked stick into the fire pit to poke ashes to life.
“They like busybodies who got nothin better to do but stir up trouble and change things.” The flames flare to reveal a wizened face that belongs here.
Her DNA is pure Appalachia. A weathered survivor.
A solid body at home in this wild place.
A place in danger of morphing into something it’s not meant to be.
“What can we do, Birdie? Aren’t we helpless to fight back?
Isn’t the law on their side?” I run my fingers through cropped hair.
“Are you really prepared to take a stand? To build a wall around this place to ward off outsiders?” I press fingertips against my temples and switch tactics.
“I’d like to think there’s some merit in all this.
Some benefit that could lead to a broader life for some of the children, especially for the likes of Eddie Dillard and Sassy Wright.
They’re bright and courageous and curious enough.
My hope is that they’ll fit in and find a bright future. ”
Birdie is puffed up like a toad till the heat leaves her, and her tone turns different. Her face is still and her eyes like bits of coal that glow.
“A kinship violation be crawlin outta the grave, Kate Shaw.”
I stop kneading my temples. She’s not talking about county schools and a bridge that spans a creek. She’s talking about something else the way she’s apt to do at odd times.
I whisper, “What kinship violation?” Her eyes have turned black as tar and don’t reflect firelight.
“How do you know what you know?” I ask as I’ve asked a hundred times about dangers out of sight.
A death, a season of drought, a wildfire, a traveling sickness, a blight.
And now a kinship violation is crawling outta the grave?
What a strange string of words. We don’t need another worry added to the pile.
She doesn’t explain and the drone of the night insects ratchets up and we look over each other’s shoulder having run out of steam, knowing we’ll soon run out of time.
“Will you write about this in your Books of Truth?”
“Done wrote it down,” she says wearily.
Of course she did. Birdie’s homemade books are at the heart of her days, and they’ve accumulated in her trailer over a lifetime.
They are precariously stacked around the inside perimeter of her space.
She writes with homemade quills and ink, then binds them in leather she cures.
Nobody reads them except by invitation, so their overarching purpose is unclear.
I’ve read sections she picked for me to understand, and my favorite is the mystical tale of the crows.
Especially the coming of the loyal corvid Samuel.
When Birdie was in her prime and out hunting, she wore the bearskin that her Cherokee mentor gifted her.
Mistaken for a bear by young hunters on that snowy day turning to sleet, she was shot in the back and left for dead.
She crawled beneath an evergreen prepared to die, but crows found her.
They brought her berries for sustenance and lured a passing mountain man to rescue her.
Against odds, Birdie was saved and healed, and one of the crows came home with her.
It’s an unusual union the likes of which I’ve never witnessed.
It’s as though the crow is Birdie’s appointed guardian.
Or they are a pair that together make a whole.
Birdie likely knew about the county’s decision as soon as I did, when Eli heard and delivered the news to the witch on the way to see me.
It’s not only the challenge of getting the children to town every weekday.
It’s the way that this isolated place will have to absorb outside thinking.
I am a lifelong advocate for education, but it is the clash of mountain traditions with the modern world that is the sorrow I carry tonight.
Not for the end of my teaching career which spans nursery rhymes to Greek classics, but for the end of this community’s cloistered uniqueness unified over generations.
Much as the Appalachian Mountains were transformed when the continental plates shifted three hundred million years ago, today’s world is coming for them.
Such a disruption could end the old ways entirely.
She repeats, “Done wrote down the kinship thang too,” and I feel a jagged chill pass through me, and I’ll have to wait to understand more.
The medicine woman takes pity on my headache and reaches deep in her skirt pocket for a tiny bag of herbs.
“Make tea, eat food, get sleep. This ain’t done,” she warns, then collects the oil lamp from the branch, lumbers up the two cinder blocks, touches the eight-sided star on the trailer wall, then shuts the door, leaving embers to illuminate the space.
I stare at the coals and wonder. Should I have done more to protect my students?
Should I have known sooner that this day would come?
Is there an alternative to following orders?
Is there middle ground that straddles precious tradition and the modern world where one doesn’t cancel out the other?
Misters Clooney and Jessup are now on their way back to their safe homes with their creature comforts and conveniences, but they left behind fault lines.
Fresh fractures that run deep in the hollers where ginseng grows, moonshine is brewed, and hunting traps are set.
On any given day that is to come, that fissure will crack and split and swallow the place whole.
But by then I’ll be somewhere different because I have to go.