Birdie fixed biscuits, stewed tomatoes and slices of salty ham, and when they sat down together, Leah ate with relish. While Birdie cleaned the kitchen, Leah made ham biscuits from the leftovers, wrapped them in a feedsack napkin perfectly hemmed by her sister and tucked it into an oak basket. She would pick apples along the way and find cool, clear spring water to quench her thirst. She added a tin cup for the latter.
“I’ll be home come suppertime,” she promised her sister. “The dogs’ll watch out for you.”
“Whatever happens’ll happen. God’s will be done.”
Leah thought about that as she started down the road. Her sister was a contradiction. Birdie believed every superstition that had made its way to their mountain home, while also believing that all things rested in the hands of God. In contrast, Leah believed that she made her own destiny. She couldn’t imagine that lives were changed by something as silly as whether a wren built his nest near her house or a floor was swept after dark. Nor could she imagine a busybody God with the time or desire to control every living being.
She left the road once she was beyond the barn and scooped a few apples off the ground at the outskirts of their orchard. One of the dogs tried to follow, but she sent him back to stay with Birdie. It was more likely that trouble would come calling than that she would stumble over it in her beloved mountains.
She didn’t even feel the pull as she climbed to the top of the ridge that ran along the northern perimeter of the Blackburns’ land. This was the way she often walked to visit Puss Cade when Puss wasn’t staying in Stanardsville, taking care of her brother’s young children now that his wife had passed away.
Leah and Puss had been friends since they were old enough to find their way across meadows and hills when chores were done. The Cades and the Blackburns had always lent each other a hand when barns were raised or apple butter was simmered and canned in the fall. Together they butchered hogs, and this year Birdie and Leah would join them rather than have a butchering day at the Blackburn place. Come winter, with only two of them, they would not need the quantity of meat they had salted and smoked in the past.
When the path diverged, she didn’t turn toward the Cade place. Instead she went farther up the mountain, walking another mile before she slowed to look for the spot she remembered visiting with her mother last year. The woods, pungent with autumn’s crumbling leaves, were deep here, escaping for the time being, at least, the constant cutting and plowing of new fields that kept crops abundant. A field wore out and a farmer let it go to pastureland, choosing a new area and cutting or “deadening” the trees by chopping deeply into the bark in a circle around the trunk, so that the tree would die and be easier to remove in the future. Then crops were planted and the cycle began again.
This area was still heavily wooded, although the abundant and useful chestnut trees had died off in Leah’s childhood, and those that hadn’t been toppled were ghostly reminders of the disease that had destroyed this valuable resource. Once upon a time timber had been cut here, but the trees had grown back thick and tall. All the plants that made their home beneath the trees were lush and well-nourished by the rich soil of the forest floor.
She stopped to get her bearings. Had she known that this job would be left to her, she would have paid even closer attention to her mother’s words. Flossie had been so filled with robust good health, busy every moment, never tiring. That she and Dyer could be so quickly struck down, and neither Leah nor Birdie touched by the fever, still seemed impossible.
Clearing her mind, she stood in the quiet woods and listened. The birds had ceased their trilling and chattering as she moved farther inside. She heard rustling, and once something crashing through the brush. But bears had been gone here for as long as she remembered, hunted and killed by men who liked the taste of their meat or feared for the safety of families.
After a while she started farther into the woods, separating vines and briars with a long stick so she could pass more easily.
She was nearly where she wanted to go when she heard another crash. She stopped to listen. The bears might be gone but some residents of the hollow turned their hogs loose to forage, notching their ears so they could be rounded up and claimed when needed for butchering. There were stories about evil-tempered boars that decades ago had escaped capture and still roamed the forest, looking for revenge. She’d never believed it, but she knew better than to discount the possibility.
A shrill warble came from the direction of the crash, not the call of any bird she had ever heard. Then the warble turned into an expertly whistled rendition of “I Have No One to Love Me.”
Leah slapped her hands on her hips. “Jesse Spurlock, you come out this minute!”
The crashing began again, and a young man stepped out from between trees at the side of a thicket. “Leah Blackburn. Who would have guessed it?”
She put a hand over her heart, but she wasn’t sure if it was the surprise of his presence or simply his presence alone. Jesse Spurlock was a sight. Maybe they had grown up together, and maybe she was used to seeing him, but lately she couldn’t remember the little black-haired boy who had built a play cabin out of firewood and charged her a piece of molasses candy for a peek. Or the older one who had hid with her in the caves up the side of Little Lock Mountain and left her, when he tired, to find her way out alone.
This grown-up version was someone else. Jesse had broad shoulders and the Spurlock cheekbones—some people said there was Cherokee blood running through the lines. His upswept eyebrows loomed over golden brown eyes, and his jaw announced he could be stubborn.
And why would anyone who’d ever met him question that?
“Just what are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Seems to me these are Spurlock woods.”
“I don’t see a fence. Do you see a fence?” She looked around, as if one might materialize.
“Don’t need a fence. Everybody knows this land is ours. Did I scare the starch out of your backbone?”
“Nothing scares me. Are you trying to tell me I cain’t be here? That you’ve come to chase me off?”
“’Course not. But you’ll need an escort. You’re looking at him.”
Even as she pretended to glare, she desperately wanted to smooth her hair. She hadn’t worn a hat, and she was sure the braid that she’d tucked and pinned was now a nest of twigs and leaves. And why had she worn her oldest dress? The worn brown print was the most sensible thing for squeezing between trees and untangling briars. But she had known, hadn’t she, that Jesse might come looking for her?
“Did you know I’d be here?” She fought off the instinct to fix her hair and tugged down her skirt instead. Her legs were bare and probably scratched, and she wore the heavy scuffed shoes her mother had worn for years before her. She could picture herself as clearly as if she were staring in Mama’s dresser mirror.
“It’s just possible somebody mentioned you’d be collecting yarbs today,” he said with a grin. “But I cain’t be sure.”
Jesse grinning was something like the answer to a prayer. Leah’s heart did a little jig even as she told herself to be careful.
“You must really want to protect the Spurlocks from intruders, you ranging all the way out into these woods a-looking for me when you didn’t know for sure I was coming.”
“A man cain’t be too careful.”
“Well, that goes double for a woman.”
“You’re a woman now? Seems like yesterday you were just a girl.”
“Seems like yesterday you were just a boy riding your pa’s old sow for a day’s fun.”
“You remember that? Maybe you had a reason to think about me?”
Jesse was not one of the young men who had come calling on Leah after the deaths of her parents. He had come with his family to pay a sympathy call, and he had come to both funerals, looking appropriately somber. But a month had passed since her mother’s funeral, and although the Spurlock sons-in-law had come to chop wood and harvest corn, Jesse had not appeared again.
“I suppose, if I had a mind to, I could wonder why you weren’t with Glenn and Wilbur when they come to harvest our corn,” she said.
“Didn’t need but two doing it.”
She pondered that. “I got no more time to stand here and talk to you. I got work to do if you’ll let me.”
“Maybe I’ll just come along.”
She chose her direction again and started off. Asked to guess, she would have said he would follow, and he did. She could hear him right behind her as she searched for the area she’d visited with her mother for the past two autumns.
“You want to tell me what it is you’re looking for?” he asked behind her.
“Bloodroot. A big patch.”
“What do you need it for?”
She thought of all the uses for the plant. She knew she was showing off, but she couldn’t help herself. “You got to use it right. I tell you, you cain’t just go a-digging it and using it any old way. Make a tea, and it helps a sore throat, croup, a cough. Some folks say the sap’ll heal a sore on the skin that nothing else will, a killing sore. But you use too much, you’ll wish you hadn’t. It’s poison. Hurts your head and your stomach.”
“You still want to get some?”
“You just got to know how to use it. Mama has a patch of it near the house, but not enough to dig the root. There’s a patch up here, a big one. But you cain’t dig till after the greenery goes away. I’ll dig some root today and dry it.”
“Some folks say your ma taught you everything she knew, that you’ll be helping your neighbors just the way she did.”
“She was better’n I’ll ever be. But I’ll do what I can.”
“You and Birdie, you’re making do?”
She detected a note of sympathy in his voice. She glanced behind her and wished they could walk side by side. She liked to look at him. Maybe too much.
Her head snapped to the front, and she picked up her pace. “We are.”
“There’s talk you need a man living there.”
“I aim to be sure we don’t.”
“I reckon you might change your mind if the right one happened along.”
Her heart did another jig. If there had been a list of eligible young men for two hundred miles around, Jesse Spurlock was the most likely candidate for first place. Not only was he handsome and intelligent, he was a natural-born leader. Men already looked up to him, asking his help in settling disputes and solving problems. His father died when Jesse was her age, seventeen, but the man inside Jesse had already formed. And his stepfather, Luther Collins, had helped shape what remained.
The Spurlocks had always been well regarded by neighbors, and like the Blackburns, they had been successful enough to lend a hand to those who had less than they did. In every way, Jesse set local hearts fluttering.
He had set hers fluttering for two years, although the only person who knew it was Puss. Not even Birdie knew how she felt about Jesse Spurlock.
The silence stretched until she spotted the clearing where the bloodroot grew. The stalks were withered and brown. Had she not known what they looked like in the spring, she would not be certain what they were, but she had paid close attention to landmarks. She knew she was right.
“Well, you saw me all the way,” she said. “I could offer a ham biscuit and an apple in return.”
“Only fitting.” He smiled to show he was teasing.
“There’s a spring nearby. I brought a cup.”
“I know where it is. I’ll bring it to you.”
She unpacked her basket and handed him the cup. When he was out of sight, she sank to a rock and finally felt her hair to re-pin what she could.
She knew this was no chance encounter. Two possibilities occurred to her. One, that Jesse had noticed her the way she had noticed him. That she had not imagined the smiles they had exchanged, or the way he had examined her when he thought no one else was looking. The way he seemed to appear when an accidental meeting seemed unlikely.
The second possibility…well, even giving words to it in her head made her throat clench. Maybe Jesse was here to ask for permission to court her sister.
Jesse and Birdie, who were the same age, had always been friends. While other children had made fun of Birdie, Jesse had never once been unkind. He had lost a little sister to the polio that had partially spared Birdie. For a man who could be brash and sometimes temperamental, he could also be considerate. Birdie thought the world of him, although she never dwelled on it, but Leah didn’t know what her sister would say if Jesse asked her to marry him. Birdie had little interest in men. As if she realized what childbirth might do to her frail body, she had expressed no interest in marriage or the things that came with it.
Still, Birdie was beautiful and accomplished at the things her health and eyesight allowed. Leah loved her sister, but could she put her own feelings aside and rejoice at her good fortune? If indeed Birdie even considered Jesse as a husband?
He returned before she could work out that problem in her heart.
“There’s one cup but enough water for two if you’re willing,” he said.
“If it’s a question of dying of thirst or sharing with you, I propose we share.”
He laughed, a rich rumble in his chest that made her want to place her hand over it and feel the vibrations.
“I don’t see a bit of digging.” He perched next to her and gave her the cup for the first drink.
“I always eat first. Once I’ve gone and dug what I need, I’ll be too dirty.” She gave him the biscuit wrapped in a napkin, and she set the cup between them.
He bit into the biscuit, and his gaze warmed. “My granny made biscuits this good.”
“They’re Birdie’s. She does all our cooking. Even when Mama was alive, Birdie did the baking. I don’t bake if I don’t have to.”
“How do you propose to feed a husband?”
“With Birdie’s cooking.”
He considered that; then he cocked his head and took the cup. “And what if Birdie gets married?”
For a moment she didn’t breathe. She concentrated on the sounds around her. The cooing of a mourning dove. Leaves scurrying along the ground. A squirrel crashing from one branch to another.