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 surewhichever 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.
40
THEN: NETTLE
Any pride was soon quelled when we attended our first birth with Magda. Rowena’s nature lent itself to a bedside manner. She helped Magda soothe the sharecropper’s wife, who moaned and writhed in her bed. She petted the woman’s forehead with a damp cloth and intuited when to assist Magda and when to observe. She helped the woman situate herself on all fours. She cooed at the screeching infant when it was forced from between the woman’s legs, out from her sex. She cut the cord that tethered child to mother and began to wipe the blood and slime from its skin.
I fled the house and vomited up my breakfast.
“You’ll be the midwife, I guess,” Magda said to Rowena when the two of them found me outside using my apron to clean off my mouth.
“You’ve never had a weak belly,” my sister said, puzzled.
I blanched. “That was the most foul thing I have ever seen.”
