39. Then Forager
THEN: FORAGER
Magda gave us hard labor for the first seven days.
We weeded her gardens. We climbed up the trees of her orchard and snipped off dead branches.
We watered and fed the animals, swept her floors, and cooked her meals.
The first time one of us snagged the hem of a dress in these tasks, she gave us old tunics and boys’ breeches to wear every day.
“These make your backside look even bigger,” commented my twin, but not unkindly. “It truly grows every day.”
I snorted with ready laughter, for even though I was tired from my labor, Magda’s house was a happy one compared to our own.
Sometimes she left us to attend a birthing or visit one of Lord Sheridan’s sharecropper families to check on a newly delivered babe. She never asked us to go with her.
“When is she going to teach us anything?” I had complained at the end of the first week, calling to my sister while we were in the orchard.
I was straddling a V shape in a pear tree, using shears to clip off twigs that looked dead.
I was anxious to learn, and though I enjoyed the liberation from our father’s house, I wondered when my education would begin.
Something shaped like a nut—but sticky and wet—hit me in the arm. I peered through the branches to see my grinning twin sliding down from her perch in a peach tree with juice on her face.
There were times during the early days with Magda when I saw that Rowena forgot to be careful, to be a good daughter of Rodwin, and simply let herself be a smiling girl, dappled in sunlight, throwing peach pits at her sister.
At night we spent hours packing jars with dried herbs and topping them with oil from sunflowers. Magda explained the herbs would infuse the oil and could be used for things like joint pain, a chill in the chest, and phlegm in the throat. But she did not bother to tell us what each herb was.
We would then go to bed in her bedroom, a tidier room with more stacks of books along the wall and a bedside table with candles on it. Under beautifully rendered quilts with what seemed to be pagan patterns on them, we would discuss what we had done that day and guessed at why.
The second week, she gave us more than labor. We finally got a lesson.
She gave us each a spade and a basket and told us to follow her into Nyossa.
Her cat, an aggressive, attention-seeking thing named Dewdrop, followed us down one of the skinny footpaths that only allowed for the span of one person to walk on them at a time.
Then she saw a fleeting body of something in the bushes, a coney or a fox or a badger, and ran squalling back to the farm.
“Fool of a thing,” Magda muttered, pulling a branch out of her face.
Nyossa’s terrain was varied. There were whole portions of it where the trees were so tight, a person could not see beyond them.
There were parts where the river was fast and thick and bisected the land.
There were tributaries and creeks that were slovenly, forking off from the river to create pools and inlets where whole worlds seemed to live underwater.
And every so often, there was a break in the trees where a spot of land, free from monstrous tree roots, was able to flourish, playing host to countless flowers, mushrooms, wild ferns, and herbaceous plants.
“We’re collecting indigo today for the roots,” Magda said when she introduced us to one of these openings.
“I think we used to play in this,” Rowena said, looking around.
“You did,” Magda commented, ignoring the surprise on our faces.
“How much did she see?” I whispered to my twin.
The midwife carried on speaking, squatting over a cluster of plants. “We’re here for its roots, but it’s best to use all of a plant if you are going to cut its life short, so the flowers and seed pods we’ll set aside for making dyes.”
Magda rolled up her sleeves as she spoke.
She waved the tips of her fingers at me, indicating I was to give her my spade.
With deftness, she plunged it into the ground and began to lever it back and forth.
As she dug, she taught. “This is indigo. See it is shaped like a spike, and the flowers shoot out from the main stem part. They look like clover leaves, but they are either violet or blue. You’ll see yellow or white indigo now and then, but not often hereabouts.
You’ll want to be careful with the roots when you dig.
You should not sever it, so plant your spades carefully.
You’ll find yourself digging around one indigo spike and see that you’ve severed the roots of another. Patience is the best approach here.”
She stood up, having pulled a whole plant up by its roots, and tossed it to me, bits of earth flying in the air.
I caught it with my hands but dropped my basket in the process.
“Fill your baskets, and then you can go home and eat your lunch,” Magda said. Then she sat down at the base of a fat, whitish hemlock in the tree line that bordered the field.
Rowena struggled. Every time she dug her spade into the earth, she seemed to cut a root. She would groan and look up to a half-asleep Magda, who would murmur something about making sure whichever plant’s root was cut, that plant was pulled entirely from the field too.
“Since you’ve gone and killed it.”
“What do these roots even do?” mumbled Rowena, slapping at a fly on her neck.
I did not struggle. I pointed the tip of my spade straight into the earth, wedged it to one side, and levered up an undamaged plant every time.
When my basket was full, I began to help Rowena fill hers, which was mostly full of broken roots.
I tried to keep my pride from my expression; I did not want to upset my twin.
But so often she was the more liked of us, the more affable.
She was prettier and more pleasant. Our father liked her much more than he did me, even if he loved us the same.
Even our mother, fair as she was, found Rowena easier.
To naturally outdo her, after a childhood of being seen as the foil to her goodness, was a feeling I had never known.
Back at the farm, we trimmed the leaves and flowers from the roots and tied them in bundles with twine, adding them to the other harvests hanging from the rafters in the kitchen. At the end of that week’s time with Magda, they were dry. And she showed us how to make a decoction from them.
She had a small well in her yard that drew cold water. Sometimes it had a citric or salty tang to it, but I thought it tasted better than the water our mill’s waterwheel churned in town.
We drew up buckets of the water and boiled it, adding the ground indigo root to it. After an hour or so, once it had cooled, we strained it through cheesecloth into jars and little clay pots. It smelled akin to waste rotting in the earth, and we both tried to breathe through our mouths.
Magda chuckled at this from her rocking chair, half shouting directions to us in between puffs from her little pipe, from which strands of thin, rose-colored smoke drifted.
I was unsure what it was she smoked as I never saw her pack the pipe.
“What’s this even for?” asked Rowena, her arms straining from lifting another bucket of well water over the cauldron on the hearth.
“Guess,” said the old woman, eyes flitting between us.
When my twin did not speak, I said, “Something with breath.”
Magda turned to me and bit down on her pipe. “Explain.”
I did not know where to begin. “I cannot explain it. But it has a nasty feeling in my nose that makes me want to sneeze. Maybe it clears out the head when there is phlegm? Maybe it rids the lungs of a chill?”
“Best when combined with other plants, but yes,” said Magda. “By itself it is good for ulcers of the mouth. It’ll keep the gums free from rot. It’s a good thing to drink, no matter the foulness, for your mouth and throat’s health.”
“I hate this,” Rowena said, an apology in her expression. “This and the gathering of it. If I am honest, madam.”
The midwife took her pipe from her mouth and pointed it at me. “I guess you’ll be the forager, Roberta.”
“Oh I hope so,” declared Rowena.
Magda beamed at her. “You’re both forthright. You, Rowena, are kinder about it. But I like the honesty in the two of you. True, your sister is better with plants and the making of them into medicine. But you’ll both be studying my herbalism books, mind you.”
Something I had never felt before bloomed in my breast. Pride.