Magda barely gave me the weekend to savor the first few days of summer, enjoying the end of mundane worries and schoolwork. I rode my bike to the public beach and swam for hours, or read magazines with Annie. At night, John picked me up, and we went to the movies in St. Agnes, or got Cokes at Sharp’s Soda Shop on Main Street, or drove around the cornfields listening to the radio and making out. I was too spooked to go any further. That truck, shared with an older brother who was in Vietnam, was John’s freedom, and for a few days that summer, it was mine too.
But Sunday evening after graduation, Magda summoned me to her room. She said it was time for me to attend to the family business. The next day, Mary and I rose early together and went our separate ways: Mary to the beach, where she was a lifeguard, and I to the lake to ground myself in water.
From a young age, I innately understood that I belonged to my grandmother and Mary belonged to our mother, Helene. As I watched from behind Magda’s flowy silk skirts and saw Mom’s pale hands silently braiding Mary’s long, dark hair or rocking her to sleep, jealousy like hot bile rose in the back of my throat. Fire obscured my senses. Magda taught me early on to cleanse my energy field with water, and eventually, I learned I wouldn’t make it long without the salve of water.
Our house—where my mother grew up, and Magda before her—was on the east side of Friedrich, where the houses on Lake Street began to thin and the shore dropped off sharply to the water below. Every day I rose early and descended the wooden staircase from the road to our family dock. The lake was like glass at that hour. By the time I heaved myself, dripping, onto the sturdy wooden dock, I had only pristine, radiant energy left. All jealousy, impatience, and unvoiced anger had drained into the water, and I returned with the calm confidence of the lake.
I returned the morning that Magda named as my first official day with my mind clear except for a persistent sort of first-day nerves. I fumbled with the antique Watry family coffeepot as lake water trailed across the rust-colored linoleum floor. I softened my gaze, holding the water particles with intention, urging them to vibrate. I made the requisite gesture, a subtle side-to-side motion and sweep of the hand, and mouthed the words to myself: Fiir und Wasser, Wasser und Fiir. As the last drops evaporated into the air, my mother came down the back stairs with Sam, the gray tabby cat that was her constant shadow, on her shoulder like a fourteen-pound parrot.
Mom looked pointedly at my cup of coffee.
“I know, I know. Always let water be the first thing to pass your lips,” I said, imitating Magda.
She nodded, and I rolled my eyes skyward. I sipped my coffee just the same.
My mother rolled her eyes right back at me in practiced exasperation. She opened the refrigerator for the water pitcher, then sat at the round oak kitchen table, all the while expertly balancing Sam across her thin shoulders. Sam stepped down gingerly and made himself comfortable on my father’s discarded newspaper.
“You’d better change,” Mom said. She pressed her lips together tightly, looking for all the world like her mother when she did, and I knew our conversation was over.
That was how it was with my mother. Sometimes she went weeks without saying two words to me. She rarely spoke to anyone, for that matter, except my father. I’d hear the low rumble of his voice from behind their bedroom door sometimes, and the unfamiliar alto of my mother’s voice. It made me so jealous, but that was my father’s privilege in the house. My mother would otherwise drift through the house, or shop for groceries and cook supper, but mostly she cared for the animals of the county, often with Sam on her shoulder. She understood animals in a way that neither Magda nor I had patience for, and I secretly thought she preferred them to us.
The cruelty of it all was that, except for a three-inch height difference and her painfully slim shoulders, I was the spitting image of my mother. Whereas Mary had the same long, elegant neck as Magda and the tall, lean build of our Dutch father, my mother and I shared a compactness, a tightly wound energy in every fiber. In my mother, this manifested as a skittish energy like a cat’s, while I was a coiled spring ready to explode at a moment’s notice. At least I had my father’s eyes, a sparkling Dutch blue. Mary had the same eyes, and we shared our father’s heart-shaped face. My mother was cursed with Magda’s eyes, a cool watery blue that appeared enormous in her thin face. But Magda’s eyes, that same shifting watercolor blue, were smaller, quicker, noticing everything.
I watched as Mom’s gaze drifted, seeing something beyond the kitchen walls, and she was out of reach again. Whatever she saw coming, I couldn’t sense it myself.
When I returned in blue jeans and a clean blue cotton blouse, the iron smell of lake water clinging to my blonde hair tumbling loose over my shoulders, Mom was nowhere to be seen. Magda was busy taking inventory of the rows of tiny glass bottles and jars of herbs, lake water, and God knows what that littered the shelves of the large oak armoire on the kitchen wall opposite the stove.
Without looking up, Magda handed me a ledger and pencil—just when I had thought I was done with the woody smell that instantly reminded me of long division.
“Update the numbers as we go,” she said without further explanation.
The book was opened to a page with a long list of ingredients in my grandmother’s tiny, neat cursive. She started to rattle off items as I frantically scribbled.
“Only seven water charms. Mugwort, half a jar. Need to dry more apple blossoms. Mustard seed, full jar. Good on rosemary, need sage from the garden today. Out of wolfsbane. Almost out of milk thistle. Three jars of valerian root. Good on lavender, need watercress.”
My hand flew across the page.
Despite being raised in that kitchen, Mary and I hadn’t seen the real work, the actual day-to-day that happened when we were at school or running around town in the summers. That summer was to be my initiation into all the things that made what we did in the kitchen a real business to sustain our family, which apparently included lots of inventory.
“Milkweed, twelve dried stalks. Catalpa sap, half a jar.”
Magda was holding a dark jar to her nose when she suddenly froze in place. Her head tilted to the side, flipping her thick silver braid over her shoulder. As I picked up what she sensed, I heard shuffling feet at the kitchen’s side door.
I was ready for this part of the day, ready to show off my skills for our good neighbors of Friedrich.
The supplicant didn’t wait to be bade to enter before swinging open the door, as was standard practice. A returning client, I thought. Mr. Leroy Lindsey, a rumpled, sun-weathered man with a large red nose and a broad, hunched back, stood in the doorway.
Magda pushed me forward with one hand, her attention fixed on the armoire.
“Elisabeth’s seeing clients today,” she said without looking at him.
I shook off the monotony of inventory and found a friendly smile. I took a step toward Mr. Lindsey, rolling my shoulders back to stand at my full five foot six before the hulking farmer, who seemed to take up half the kitchen.
“What can we do for you today, Mr. Lindsey?” I asked.
Mr. Lindsey removed his sweat-ringed hat and held it in both hands.
“Elisabeth,” he said, nodding to me. “Glad to see you.”
He glanced at Magda over my shoulder but seemed happy enough to be seen by me.
“Please, sit down. What can we do for you?” I repeated.
Mr. Lindsey lowered his frame into one of the kitchen chairs next to me. In close quarters, the sweet scent of grass from his skin and clothes was overwhelming, with a subtler note of earth and, underneath, animals. Cows. Chickens.
“Well, you see, I haven’t been feeling like myself since I lost my Emily last fall.”
As Mr. Lindsey began to speak, I took one of his hands in my own. In my peripheral vision, I noticed Magda reaching to replace a jar on the top shelf of the armoire, a challenge from where she stood at just over five feet. She gave up and, with a flick of the wrist, levitated the jar back into place. The armoire doors closed behind her as she turned away, locking neatly back into place with a quiet click, and Magda receded from the room.
I cast out the ice floe, the spirit world opening before me like a ghost map. All the energies in the vicinity appeared to me as small bursts of light, glowing auras with their own stories to tell. By tapping into the ice floe energy like an operator’s switchboard, we could manipulate it for the benefit of our clients. I reached for Mr. Lindsey’s hand as I swept my emerald-green energy through his energy, poring over every ounce of him. I sent my concentration into our joined hands and stared into him, eyes open but not seeing the man sitting before me. The kitchen faded away, and I truly saw.
Mr. Lindsey’s energy was a sort of dusky cornflower blue. It was one of the stillest energies I had ever seen, a pure wall of stagnant blue. I forced my emerald energy through his, leaving a trail of concentric rings, like a rock skipping on the lake’s surface, urging him to wake up. The words to a common incantation, a routine treatment for our clients, formed on my tongue. After years of shadowing Magda, I knew the words to say silently and sent them into Mr. Lindsey with all my focus. Wachst auf, wachst auf, I urged. Bisch do, bisch unter Lebenden, bisch do. I felt Magda’s regal amethyst energy at the edges of my vision. I took a deep breath and tried not to mind her checking my work.
Back in the kitchen, I nodded and rubbed Mr. Lindsey’s hand as he told me of the hardship of his first spring without Emily in sixty years. His children and grandchildren were hours away in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and he spent his days drinking at the VFW.
In the invisible ice floe, I swirled my energy through a cornflower-blue energy field, urging it to move with me, exploding a cluster in a firework ring of dark blue, buoyed up by my brilliant emerald energy. I said the words silently to myself: Bisch do, bisch unter Lebenden, bisch do. I patted Mr. Lindsey’s dusty-blue energy back into place, feeling the particles vibrating at a higher frequency than before, and smiled to myself.
In the kitchen, I was nodding as Mr. Lindsey talked, holding his large, callused hand in my own. I had started a final sweep over his body, energy all tucked back into place where it belonged, when I saw it. His liver was failing. Damn, I thought to myself, and instantly felt Magda chide me, her amethyst energy like a slap to the back of my head. I heard her clear as day in my ear: “Only positive energy when you’re reading a client, Lisbett.”
I took another deep breath and refocused. All the possibilities flashed through my mind, and I tried to hold on to the positive branches rushing into the future, the possible good outcomes for Mr. Lindsey, but I didn’t know what to do for a bum liver. So I sent all of my living, thriving energy into Mr. Lindsey’s liver, sealed it with the words of protection, and hoped for the best.
Bisch wiff. Bisch wusle. Bisch starch.
Coming back into myself in the kitchen, I squeezed Mr. Lindsey’s hand and said, “That’s tough,” as he ended his story.
He blinked and sat up straighter at the table, testing out the new vibrations in his body. “I feel a lot better already,” he said cautiously, as if waiting to see if it was true.
“Good,” I said, squeezing his hand again.
I glanced up at the clock above the sink and realized that half an hour had passed. I crossed the room to the armoire and unlocked it with a quick gesture.
“It sounds like you need a beacon, something to light you up again. That should do the trick,” I said. I started opening drawers and rolling twigs and herbs into a bundle.
“Yeah, that sounds like just the thing,” he said.
I could feel the change in him: his voice brighter, his energy quietly thrumming again. But it was easier to accept something tangible outside the spirit world. The men in particular had a difficult time believing in what they couldn’t hold and press and tear apart with their own two hands. The real work had already been done, but sending him home with a beacon, something to burn, would be easier for him to understand than me telling him he needed his energy rearranged.
I wrapped the bundle of sticks and herbs with twine three times, holding the elements, the building blocks of life, in my mind. I whispered on each pass of the twine: Fiir und Wasser, Äther und Ëërde. Äther und Ëërde, Fiir und Wasser. I tied it off with a square knot and presented it to Mr. Lindsey.
“I want you to burn this in every room of your house, then hold it up to each of the four cardinal directions around the foundation outside. It won’t flame, but it will smoke for some time. It will be most powerful at tonight’s full moon. And while it’s smoking, think about Emily, and think about how much life you have left.” I cringed internally, knowing it might not be much. “And think about how she would want you to live your life. When the beacon smolders down to ashes, you’ll be ready to face a new dawn and move forward.”
Mr. Lindsey held the beacon firmly in both hands. He wanted it to work so badly, hope radiating in his face and the square of his shoulders. Damn, I thought again.
He stood to go, delicately holding the beacon in one hand, as if it might come alive and bite him.
“Thanks. This looks like just the thing.”
Magda appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, arms folded over her chest like a witchy garden gnome, to appraise my customer service.
“Feel better, Leroy,” she said.
“Thanks, Magda.” He nodded toward me. “She did great today. You should be proud.”
Magda raised a thin eyebrow and nodded knowingly, as if this wasn’t news to her. It took immense self-control to not roll my eyes.
“Thank you, Mr. Lindsey,” I said, guiding him toward the door. “Come on back and see us in a few weeks. Let us know how you’re doing.”
“And lay off the bottle, Leroy,” Magda said to his turned back. She couldn’t help herself.
He paused but didn’t turn around. “Come on, then,” Mr. Lindsey said to me over his shoulder. “Your payment is in the truck.”
I followed him outside, walking barefoot out of habit, as uncomfortable as it was on the crushed-rock driveway. He handed me a squawking wooden crate with three black-and-white speckled hens inside. I stood there holding the crate as he drove away.
More chickens, I thought, suddenly tired.
We rarely accepted cash; too much prosperity would draw the wrong kind of attention. Magda typically haggled for handmade clothes or linens, fresh dairy, produce, baked goods, live animals, what have you—enough proper payment to run the business, purchase the necessities, feed the family, and supply Magda’s evening whiskey.
I prayed to the Virgin Mary and our grandmothers before us as Magda had taught me for Mr. Lindsey’s protection, more out of habit than belief, while I introduced the speckled beauties to the backyard coop. Dad would be happy to see them, at least. When I came in the side door, Magda sat at the kitchen table with the heavy leather-bound volume of client records open for my evaluation.
I slumped into a chair, drained from the effort of the reading. I had often seen Magda lie on the davenport in the living room for a half hour after a reading to recalibrate her own energy. Sometimes she took another approach, taking a nip of whiskey in the black coffee she drank all day.
Magda slid the book toward me. Each client had a line or two next to their name. It took a week, sometimes two, to fill a single page with notes. I wrote the date—June 10th, 1968—and Mr. Lindsey’s name, followed by a short description. Farmer, 70s, large man.
“Stop,” she said, before I could write the next line. Diagnosis. “Start at the beginning,” Magda instructed. “Tell me everything you saw.”
I know, I thought, but didn’t dare sass my grandmother out loud. As if I hadn’t done this with her hundreds of times before.
I closed my eyes to call up the exact pathways of the session. Although barely forty-five minutes had passed since Mr. Lindsey first walked through the kitchen door, it had begun to blur in my mind.
“His energy is blue,” I started. “Pale, dusty blue. Very still. It’s like he’s barely there. He’s just waiting to follow Mrs. Lindsey to the other side. I tried to wake him up. Give him my energy. Set a little fire in his vibrations.”
“And?” Magda asked.
I paused, and my tongue slipped between my teeth in concentration.
“He’s heartbroken,” I said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Magda gave me a pointed look under a raised eyebrow, like I was being purposefully obtuse. “And what else?” she asked in a singsong that made me cringe.
“Well … his liver …” I trailed off, unsure of the right words.
Magda nodded once. Right. “He was vibrating beautifully. That will bring him some peace in these last few months.”
I blinked hard. Months. “All that was for nothing?”
“There’s nothing any of us can do about that liver. I would’ve done the exact same as you,” Magda said firmly.
She softened when she saw the dismay on my face. “You’ll get used to it,” Magda said, gently. “We do what we can, but there are things out of our control. Your Grandpa Earl, rest in peace, would’ve lived forever if I had anything to do with it.”
Magda said this last part quietly, as she always did. It had been eighteen years, but mentioning the name of her late husband remained painful.
I nodded slowly and sighed, unconvinced.
“You have given Leroy more life in these coming months than he would’ve had otherwise. That will make his time easier when it comes. That is all we can do sometimes,” Magda said.
When I didn’t react, she tapped the tabletop with both palms and said, “Well, then.” My signal to get on with it.
I picked up the pencil and wrote in my round print, so different from Magda’s even cursive on the previous lines. Heartbreak, loneliness, liver disease. Treated with energy reading, rearrangement, recalibration. Fire beacon for home.
Magda squinted across the table at my work and nodded. “That about does it.”
The rest of the day flew by. Farmers from surrounding Kandiyohi County came by for water charms to bring the rains to their fields in what had been a dry year. Two giggling girls from Mary’s class stopped by for love charms, their summer plans clearly in sight. In the late-afternoon lull, I peeled potatoes at the kitchen table. My mother was silent as she set about roasting a chicken for supper, then she left to take a house call for Mr. Pedersen’s horses outside town, the only kind of clients she ever took.
Magda didn’t cook anymore, saying she had done her time in the kitchen after putting a hot meal on the table for Grandpa Earl for decades. When my mother was a newlywed and freshly installed with my father in the renovated attic bedroom, she had assumed all household duties—a baptism by literal fire, as she burned her first Thanksgiving turkey to a crisp without Magda’s supervision or the aid of magic. There were some things we liked to do the old-fashioned way, and cooking was one of them, a domestic magic in its own right. There was something soothing about peeling vegetables or kneading dough by hand after a day of moving invisible hands through the frozen energy river.
As I peeled potatoes, I pictured what my mother might have been like as a newlywed, filling the kitchen with thick black smoke as Magda, Grandpa Earl, my handsome young father, and Magda’s mother, my great-grandma Dorothy, all watched TV in the other room. My father never spoke about those early years or how they’d gotten together, but I guessed it was a familiar story. My parents had grown up together in Friedrich, and like John was for me, my father had always been there, except when he was serving in Europe. He didn’t talk about the war, but I knew my parents had gotten married as soon as my father came home. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine my mother introducing herself to him, or laughing at his jokes, or telling stories to his brothers. She must’ve done all those things at one time, but any shadow of that girl flirting with the handsome soldier was long gone.
I thought of Magda, fixing the broken hearts and making the rain come in our small town, day in and day out for decades on end, the queen of her realm—which felt smaller to me every time I heard my classmates talk about their plans for college and trade school and getting out of Dodge. I thought of my mother’s far-off gaze, as if she were seeing everything at once beyond our four walls. I was destined to end up like one of them, if I was to believe Magda’s version of my future, in which the women moved heaven and earth to help the people of Friedrich and managed to prepare hearty meals for the men of the household, who would return from their daily tinkering just in time for supper.
I was starting to see Magda’s point about having John by my side—a good man, a helpful man. I hoped I was strong enough to carry the responsibility like Magda, lest I crumple like my mother under the weight.
I felt that familiar fire rising in me as I put the potatoes to boil on the stovetop.
Don’t think about that, I said to myself. What choice do you have anyway?