Chapter 10 Folklore
Folklore
Lydia Brown
I’d counted on Birdie Rocas being the crux of the Folklore article.
Counted on the start of a friendship that would allow me to return.
She sees we’re tied together in some mystical way I can’t understand yet.
Otherwise, why did she remember my name, read my mind, and say it wasn’t time for me to know her secrets?
But Birdie and I will meet again. Saturday was the beginning, not the end.
For now, she’s unwilling to participate, I’ve procrastinated long enough, the Friday deadline looms, and I must settle for another subject for my article.
I choose a different healer for the article, one who lives closer to the haunted wood.
One suggested by Professor Covey at the bookstore.
He said Romi Harker is a recluse who follows the old apothecary ways and is not tainted by the modern world.
She tends to the hill folks we never see.
But there’s no map to Romi’s door. Nothing as easy as driving narrow dirt roads and crossing swift water to enter a clearing, then walking a marked path.
At sunrise Monday morning, I meet a guide named Tonto outside the bookstore.
He, too, was recommended by the professor.
My canvas backpack holds a recorder, notebooks, pens, a camera, and extra rolls of film.
I’ve thrown in chocolate bars because I heard Romi’s partial to dark chocolate.
We start driving south on the Blue Ridge Parkway, then take a narrow fire trail to the end and beyond.
His truck fords two streams before it can go no further and we hike the final stretch, me struggling while Tonto watches the ridge, looking for signs.
When we pause for a rest, I say, “If she’s willing to speak to me, I’ll want to stay.”
“I ain’t staying.”
“Then how will I get home?”
“Tell me when to fetch you and I’ll come back—but I ain’t staying on this here mountain.”
He is emphatic about an unnamed danger. I ask, “Do I have anything to fear? Is where we’re going safe?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“If she takes a likin’ to you.”
We continue around an outcropping of rocks and past massive laurels.
I’m pondering this worrisome conversation when Tonto stops and points to smoke that’s different from regular.
It’s rose-colored like Professor Covey said we’d find.
I feel a rush of excitement. Tonto covers his nose with his bandanna, distrustful of the smoke.
I’d feared that Romi Harker might not be alive, but the woman I find in the clearing commands a royal presence. When I step forward, the intoxicating smoke embraces me and I drop my guard. Her eyes meet mine, and the shock of the familiar sparks between us.
She looks like Trula Freed! My dear childhood friend.
Silver hair, simple caftan on a straight frame.
A smooth arm full of gold bangles. I am disassociated for a moment, almost expecting to see a red door with a brass lock and an old yellow dog named Biscuit lying across the threshold.
She looks the same as she did twenty-five years ago, and that’s the clear warning that this vision is not real.
Trula is long dead. My brother Emmett called me with the news.
But today I am drawn to a past I suddenly miss with a primal ache.
I long to be a child again and enter Mama’s fragrant kitchen and eat at the long table with my brothers and sisters and walk the dirt path between Daddy’s tobacco fields and enter the pines to Trula Freed’s place, which always felt perfect and safe.
I shake my head to scatter those dead memories, but they cling to me like the rose-colored smoke.
Romi’s homestead holds four perfect apple trees and four beehives.
The bee boxes are painted with an artist’s hand, like a mosaic glass, and the honeybees’ legs are thick with pollen.
Jars of honey are lined up on a ledge. They glow golden.
A small corral confines a handsome horse, a plump milk cow, and two goats.
Fancy chickens peck for grub and their plumage is fit for hats in France.
Romi’s lean-to perches at the mouth of a cave, and although that sounds common, the whole of the space is regal and faces east overlooking a verdant valley. This is a rich and healthy place.
I glance back at Tonto, who trembles inside the tree line, then I walk toward this woman hoping she won’t turn me away like Birdie did. I think history will want to remember Romi Harker. I want to remember her.
“Welcome, Lydia Brown,” she says as though I arrived at the appointed hour instead of showing up unannounced. Behind me Tonto mumbles godamighty, godamighty and stumbles deeper into the tree line. If he leaves and doesn’t return, I’ll struggle to find my way home, but I’ll take that risk.
“Would you come back for me, Tonto?” I ask over my shoulder, without acknowledging the oddity of the witch knowing my name.
“When?” His voice quivers.
“Tomorrow,” I say, though I’ve had no invitation to stay.
“You gonna stay here?” His tone is incredulous, as though I’ve lost my mind, but he says, “I be back,” and off he goes, slipping and sliding through the brush till the sound of him is swallowed by the forest.
Having invited myself overnight, I say lamely, “You look like a friend I used to have.” Me, the brazen stranger who has barged into her domain.
I take a step closer. “Her name was Trula Freed.” I have rarely said that name out loud over the decades, yet it rolls off my tongue like a comfort.
“She could read minds and tell the future. She was a healer who saved my family from a killing sickness. She counseled me about my spirit gift. She was kind when I didn’t deserve it.
But she’s dead now. I didn’t go to her funeral. ” The trigon on my palm burns.
A stew simmers in an iron pot over the fire.
Romi spoons a ladleful into a crafted burl bowl and offers it to me.
I come forward and drop my backpack full of questions on the ground and take a seat on a stool.
I’m ravenous, and the stew is delicious.
Romi Harker has only spoken my name, but I’m at peace in her presence.
That afternoon we walk the virgin forest to collect botanicals for her apothecary, me with pen and paper, the healer with her gathering bag.
Garlic mustard, columbine, nettle, goldenseal.
We gather colorful mushrooms and drink from pure springs.
I think my questions, and she reads my mind like Birdie did, but unlike Birdie, this witch answers me.
Those answers fill cassette tapes, and I take copious notes and only occasionally feel the presence of something ominous lurking underneath.
My notes are extensive, and that night I sleep as close to heaven as I’ve ever been, competing with the majesty of Mount Mitchell’s elevation of over sixty-six hundred feet.
In my dream I dance with a coven of women in a clearing.
We wear gossamer gowns in shades of lavender and gold.
Romi is in the coven, and all the women have the same birthmark on their right palms they raise to the moon.
Their faces morph between fresh maiden and haggard crone.
After a night of celebrating, I wake refreshed under a crystal sky of lapis glass.
Too soon, Tonto comes for me as he said he would, and he calls from within the tree line.
Once more, he is careful not to breathe the witch’s smoke.
Before I leave, I hug Romi deeply. She has been generous to me.
She is the sweet childhood I’ve lost and today miss desperately.
Little of the last twenty-four hours makes sense.
I want to stay. Please let me stay. But I leave because Romi says it’s time to go.
After we get back to his truck, Tonto says, “That witchy woman scared me somethin’ terrible with her warts and black gums and that bald, spotted head.
Her old hag of a horse was bout bent in two, and them scrawny chickens scratching in the dirt was painful to look upon.
I almost didn’t come for you, but a promise is a promise, and I promised. ”
Romi didn’t appear to me as she did to Tonto.
I believe he speaks his truth because in my time with her, there were crippled shadows and sour smells that didn’t fit the perfection I saw.
When I listen later to our conversations on cassette tapes, they unnerve me.
The scratchy voice is not what I heard spoken by the gracious woman I saw.
And when the rolls of color film are developed, the pictures show watery forms in shades of dirty gray.
There is no discernible person. There is no beauty to behold. There are only disturbing fragments.
Romi must possess great magic to shift into someone else. Maybe Trula Freed offered to be that someone. Maybe Trula wanted to remind me that, once upon a time, when I was innocent, I had a guide and a friend. Maybe this is a sign that I can have those things again.
I complete my article, but I withhold much of what Romi Harker revealed. Some things are too fantastical to put on paper. Readers grounded in the modern world can stretch their thinking only so far.
But Romi’s story isn’t Birdie’s story.