“I’ll put on tea and coffee,” my mama said.
“I’ll set and rest,” Daddy said, turning my mama’s rocking chair to face the table. He lowered himself into it, using one carved arm and his cane. He looked better than he had before the surgery, but he was still a mite pale. Daddy was a preacher now, in the church, a man ordained by God to speak. He was also an elder, chosen in the men’s council, as his wife, my mama, had been chosen in the women’s council as an elder.Daddy was a man with authority, and that advance in status had given him a purpose and the will to fight through the changes in his world and force his injured body to continue to heal.
Occam pulled a bench to the table and straddled it. He lifted my hands and studied them, angling them high and low, back and forth, before placing them on the tabletop. “You want me to try and pull them out or just cut them off?”
“I tried to pull them out. It hurt a lot. But maybe not so much now, with them cut away from the tree?” I tried to make fists. My hands didn’t want to bend, the joints stiff, creaky, and woody. This time, the invading roots felt as if they had attached to and wrapped around my bones. My hands looked strange too, bigger than normal, with things that looked like bones in places no normal human hand had bones. “I am Groot,” I said, releasing my fists.
“What?” Mama asked.
Occam smothered what might have been a snicker. Sam laughed aloud. Sam had been away to college and he had clearly watched secular movies there.
“Never mind,” I said. I wasn’t about to explain that Occam, Mud, and I had watched a film with a small tree character recently. Sentient talking trees were a little too close to reality for me to explain the humor without possibly sounding morbid.
Occam placed my hands on the clean, folded cloth diapers and inspected them again. He poured moonshine over the pliers, over my entire hands, and held me still when I hissed. He gripped a thin root high on my right hand. “Mama Carmel, you hold her wrist and her fingers steady,” he instructed. Her hands took mine where he indicated and, gently, Occam exerted pressure. That one came out, an inch long of straight root, with shorter multi-legs.
“Nell? You okay?” he asked.
“Not bad,” I lied, my breath fast and my heart pounding. “Go on.”
“I’ll watch the door,” Sam said, “to keep anyone from walking in.”
The surgery was swift, brutal, and, for me, impossible to watch. The pain was excruciating, my breath came in gasps, and tears ran down my face to splatter on my coat. But I couldn’t go to a hospital. There was no research on plant-people. Nomedical professional could have done any different from Occam.
Maybe a gardener…When I laughed at that thought, it sounded wet and pained. Occam studied my face before he bent back over his work.
Mama Carmel acted as restraint and nurse, and Mama Grace cleaned up the bloody mess, my bloody flesh, and tossed each bloody rootlet into the woodstove. Occam couldn’t pull out everything and had to snip some off. My mama watched, ran errands to the root cellar when they ran out of moonshine to clean my wounds, and offered general comfort, rubbing my shoulders and the back of my neck. When he had done what he could, Occam cleaned me with more moonshine and ordered me to make fists again.
I healed differently each time I read the earth too deeply and each time I communed with the Green Knight too long, especially in combat, which this had been. And this reading, so close to the heart of the vampire tree, may have left lasting damage. I worked my fists open and closed. “Still stiff,” I said, “but lots better.”
Occam frowned. “You need to see a surgeon.”
“You know a good tree surgeon?” I asked.
Mama Grace and my mama laughed. So did Daddy.
Mama Carmel frowned hard, patting the blood off my hands.
Occam’s own expression faded into a steady nothingness. He bandaged my hands and wrapped them with sticky wrap.
When he was done, he swiveled on his bench and faced the family. “Got something I need to say. Nell can speak for herself, but not for me, just like I don’t speak for her. That ain’t changing when we get married. We’re being married at our home, because that’s what we want. Nell will get the wedding she wants, no matter whether you folks agree with that or not. It ain’t likely we’ll be able to have children. That doesn’t matter to me at all, and I don’t think she cares either, because her family is our family, and Mud is her sister and my sister, and we’ll have plenty of nephews and nieces and halfsies to love and help with. Far as I’m concerned, you’ll always be welcome in our home and at our table, but Nell will have rules and everyone will be expected to follow them. And one of the rules will be to protect her, Mud, Esther, and the twins. The trees and the land are already doingthat. But Soulwood is only part of the equation. The rest of that equation is family.” He looked around at them. “We good?”
“We’re good,” Daddy said. In the Nicholson home that was law. “Your kind ever go feral?”
“Yes. Just like humans do. And we die for it. The grindylows police us and they have a second sense, and an ability to move through time and space I’ll never understand, to attack any were-creature acting in a way that might spread were-taint.”
“You got a were-creature who might be interested in Esther? She’s a plant-person like Nell. And she’s lonely too,” Mama Carmel said.
“I weren’t never lonely,” I said, falling deeper into church-speak. “Or not much,” I amended.
“No, ma’am,” Occam said. “Sorry ’bout that.”
“Jedidiah’s courting a girl,” Sam said. “And every man knows that Esther has a quick temper and a cuttin’ tongue. She scares most churchmen, even ones looking for a third wife or concubine. She’d bring discord into any home.”
Everyone at the table knew he was right. Esther had a lot working against her when it came to finding a husband, and she had been born and bred to believe all she’d ever be was a man’s helpmate and baby-birther. That thought hit me hard. What did my sister dream of besides a husband and babies and chickens? Did she have desires and hopes that she had long ago buried? Had I pushed her hard enough to consider something different?
Occam checked his cell and met my eyes. “FireWind has the men from the tree back at HQ and in the null room for interrogation.”
“For what reason? The church let them on the property. All they did was chop on a tree limb.”
