“Alright!” my sister bleated. “I’m sorry. It’s just overwhelming.”
“A woman’s life is overwhelming,” Magda pronounced.
Sensing discord between the people I liked most in the world, I said, “It is a lot you set before us tonight, Magda.”
The midwife looked at me. Up until now I had only called her “madam.”
“I’m sorry,” Rowena repeated.
Magda frowned. “I suppose I have lost my touch. I forget you are girls and not women. But you are soon to womanhood. If I could keep you from the trials of this life, believe me, I would.”
Magda went on to explain how to use the second tool to sweep out a womb, that for the first several moons of a pregnancy, the formation of the babe was so small it could not be seen, that it was like a clot of blood. She also explained that if a woman had miscarried her babe, she could bleed to death or grow feverish and that to clear out her womb was a way to prevent this.
“I only have one set of these tools though,” said Magda, looking between us. “Rowena, if you have a woman miscarry and bleed too heavily, you’ll have to send for Robbie. It’s not common, but it’s not without occurrence.”
We listened to her nearly all night, pausing only to eat jerky andcheese she put in front of us. As the sun rose, she still waxed on, detailing all the women she had needed to perform an act of care on over the winters, explaining each case as if she had just seen those women the day before. When she was done, I realized the number of acts of care equaled to only one or two for every winter Magda had been in Sheridan.
“So it won’t be something I have to do often,” I said.
The midwife shook her head. “Not with the gathering and dispensing of the mother’s moss. Which, if your church truly found this to be sinful, they would not criminalize the moss. But that is another rant for another day.”
She let us sleep the rest of the day, waking us in the afternoon, feeding us a stew she had made with a tough kind of bread she seemed to favor baking. She was gentle with us, asked no tasks be done, and sent us back to bed after she insisted we bathe as we both smelled of vinegar and sweat. It was as if Magda was apologizing to us, perhaps for her terseness and blunt manner, but also for our having been privy to knowledge that was heavy and esoteric.
It was so unlike her, it was perplexing. I could tell Rowena thought so too, and we were both relieved to be bossed around and shouted at the following day. But I was grateful for the brief moment, as she set a plate of stew before me, of her gnarled hand on my back and the slight squeeze she made there before removing it.
44
THEN: TINKERS
Not all of our days with Magda were so solemn. At the dawn of our first summer with her, she made us mount Dusty next to her up on Apple Dumpling, and we rode to the outskirts of the next settlement, Carver. There she introduced us to the tinkers.
“A tinker is a person who travels for a living and sells and trades in metals,” she explained as their wagons and colorful tents came into view spread out in a vast field. “They can fix things too. They used to be invited in Sheridan to mend people’s ironworks, but your Lord Torm declared all such things be brought to the smithy and to leave the tinkers out of it.”
“Because they are godless and hail from Eccleston?” asked Rowena.
“Some do. That’s how tinkers started, but now they hail from all over. And they live freely from any country. Some have no homes, so everywhere is home. They trade in everything. There is music and dance. There is a tattooist. There are wagons full of secondhand goods for trade. There are wagons full of frivolous things like jewelry.There are even books to be bought.” She directed the last part to me, knowing I was already reading her books in my free time.
We tied our horses up at a hitching post nearly already too crowded with other animals and then walked into the campground. The field was packed with both tinkers and citizens of Carver. The tinkers could be distinguished from the Carver people as many of them had inked patterns on their arms and necks. I was fascinated in particular by this. A man with a fiddle was playing as if he could never tire of it, enthusiastic and joyful melodies floating over the crowd. The scents astounded us. The half-putrid, half-sweet scent of lightleaf was everywhere, along with oils for sale that were meant for no reason other than to make a person smell good.
Everywhere we went, Magda was recognized and greeted. From a satchel she had slung across her back, she traded tins of mother’s moss paste for various goods. After a friendly but combative round of bartering with a tinker who sold metal goods like combs, nail files, and the like, she shooed us away. “He thinks you’re my kin and I have to buy for you. He’s trying to prey on my alleged grandmotherly nature. Begone.”
Enraptured, we drifted from tent to wagon to tent, our attention captured by one thing and then another and another. We walked past a wagon where an attractive young man, bare chested and covered in tattoos, was bending over a table on which another young man was laid out, also bare chested. There were flowers drawn with dark paint down the body of the lying man. Along the lines of the flowers, the standing man was piercing a needle dripping with ink, the inkwell resting next to the lying man’s head.
I was transfixed by both their tattoos and their bodies. And I found myself pining for Thane. I tried to put him out of my mind as much as I could, but these two men, not boys but still young, had the same lean figure Thane would have as he grew. Wistful, I looked at them until Rowena pinched me that Magda had already called twice for us.
45
THEN: LOVE
Ihad seen less and less of Thane as I spent a full four seasons and then another four under Magda’s roof. Before I knew it, two winters had passed without us really speaking to each other. I of course saw him on tenth days and in the town here and there, but those encounters could not replace all of our stolen, sunlit kisses and secrets in Nyossa. He would look at me and give me a sad smile. I would give him one and then lie in bed next to Rowena at night fretting over whether or not he had finally charmed Ilsit now that she and Rowena could no longer see each other. I worried that he had met some other girl, perhaps from Carver, a fiefdom nearly the same size as Sheridan but whose crops never yielded what ours did. I had heard the lord had daughters close in age to Bertram and Thane and that two of them might make wives some day for each of Torm’s sons. This vexed me to no end. I tormented myself wondering if those kisses had meant as much to him as they did to me.
But my woe over Thane was ended one evening when I was alone at Magda’s farm. It was often that someone’s brother or husband came riding hurriedly to the farm, begging for a midwife. Magda andRowena had left on Magda’s Apple Dumpling and our old mare. I had begged off, saying I would be of no help.
I was humming to myself, bent over in one of the vegetable patches, snapping off sugar peas and dropping them into my skirt held up by my left hand. In between my hums, I was listening to the medley of the flat-faced white owls at their early evening hooting as they watched from the trees to assess whether the cat’s presence meant mice would be near. Dewdrop was winding around my exposed ankles, howling at me to pick her up so she could do as she always did and go limp in my arms and be petted.
“Shut your whiskered mouth, my gods,” I groaned as I practically tripped over her and sent an apron full of pea pods flying.
“Idoshave now, but I wasn’t even talking, Robbie.”
