CHAPTER TWO
o, while Aunt Lillian wasn’t really Sarah Jane’s aunt, she as much became the one that Sarah Jane didn’t have. After that first meeting, Sarah Jane was a regular visitor to the Kindred homestead, sometimes with one or more of her sisters in tow, but usually it was just Root and her. The old woman was happy for the company and Mama didn’t seem to mind Sarah Jane neglecting some of her chores at home because she worked twice as hard for Aunt Lillian.
“She’s being a good neighbor,” Mama had said one time when Laurel complained that, as far as she was concerned, the rest of them were doing far too many of what were supposed to be Sarah Jane’s chores. “We should all be so lucky to have someone help us out when we get to Lillian Kindred’s age.”
But chores didn’t seem like work around Aunt Lillian. There was so much to learn—things that Sarah Jane had never even realized a curiosity about before, because there was so much about her life that she’d always taken for granted.
You needed milk or eggs or butter? She’d always gone to the supermarket. But with Aunt Lillian you had to milk the cow, churn the butter, chase down the secret nests of the hens to find their eggs.
In the Dillard household you simply put something in the fridge to keep it cold. Aunt Lillian had an ice house that was as easy to use in the winter, but come summer you had to haul in the ice from where it was dropped off for her at the Welch farm, chipping pieces off to make ice cubes for their tea.
You didn’t turn on the stove to cook. Before you could put on a single pot, you chopped wood, laid a fire in the big cast-iron stove in the kitchen, started it up, and waited for the heat to build.
Honey came fresh from a comb rather than a jar, though that was something Sarah Jane let Aunt Lillian harvest on her own. “You don’t have to worry about my bees,” Aunt Lillian assured a skeptical Sarah Jane. “I gift the spirits connected to them, so they don’t sting me. It’s the wild ones you need to be careful of.”
Soap started by making lye—pouring water over the fireplace ashes in the ash hopper, the resulting liquid caught in an old kettle. When there was enough lye for a run of soap, it was brought to a boil, dipping a chicken feather into the solution from time to time to see if it was ready. When the lye took the fuzz off the stem of the feather, it was strong enough to make soap. At that point Aunt Lillian added fat that the Welches had saved for her from when they killed their hogs. The lye would eventually eat the fat and become a thick brown soap.
Aunt Lillian didn’t take vitamins. Instead she made a tonic with a recipe that included ratsbane, bark from the yellow poplar, red dogwood and wild cherry, the roots of burdock, yellow dock, and sarsaparilla. She boiled it all in water until the result was thick and black, then bottled it with enough whiskey added to keep it from spoiling. It tasted terrible, but Aunt Lillian took a tablespoon every day and she was never sick.
And on and on it went. Every new revelation gave Sarah Jane a deeper appreciation for all the necessities that she’d simply taken for granted before this. And then there was the satisfaction of knowing that they had this bounty from work they’d done themselves.
Food was what really stood out in Sarah Jane’s mind. Everything tasted so much better. The ice cream they made in summer was thick and creamy, bursting with flavor. Biscuits, breads, fried pies. Stews, soups, salads. Everything.
“That’s because you’re making it from the ground up,” Aunt Lillian told her. “You know every moment of that plant’s life, from when you put the seed in the dirt to its sitting on the table in front of you. It’s like eating with family instead of strangers.”
Sarah Jane couldn’t explain to her sisters why it seemed like such a better way to live. She couldn’t even remember how she’d once been as incredulous as they were now that Aunt Lillian could simply ignore a hundred years of progress, which, for most, made the business of living so much easier. All she could say was that she liked to do things Aunt Lillian’s way. She finally understood what the term “an honest day’s work” meant because, after an afternoon tending to the animals and working in the garden, she just felt “righteously tired,” as Aunt Lillian would put it. She would return home with a spring in her step, never mind the long day she’d put in.
And then there were the stories.
The stories.
Sarah Jane loved them all. It didn’t matter if it was the simple history of some herb they were out looking for in the woods, the offhand explanation of why a strip of white cloth tied to a stake kept deer out of the garden, or the strange and tangled stories that centered on the magical neighbors who, Aunt Lillian assured her, lived in the woods all around them. It got so that Sarah Jane expected to see fairies, or the Father of Cats, or some magical being or other every time she made the trip through the woods to and from Aunt Lillian’s homestead.
But she never did. Not even the Apple Tree Man.
“He’s a shy old fellow,” Aunt Lillian explained one day when they were sitting on the porch, shucking peas. “I left biscuits under his tree every morning for more years than I can remember before he finally stepped out of the bark one day to talk to me.”
The old woman shook her head. “Not so much these past few years. Time was, if I didn’t talk to him every day, I’d at least see him crossing the meadow at dusk and we’d smile and wave to each other. But he’s a funny old fellow. Gets all these notions in his head.”
“Like what?” Sarah Jane wanted to know.
She was always full of questions when it came to Aunt Lillian’s magical neighbors. The more she heard about them, the more she needed to know.
Aunt Lillian shrugged. “Oh, you know. ‘Trouble’s brewing’ is a favorite of his, like there isn’t always some sort of feud going on with the fairy folk. They can be as cantankerous as old Bill Widgins at the post office, ready to take offense at the slightest provocation.”
“So do they fight each other?”
“You mean with sticks and little swords and the like?”
Sarah Jane nodded.
“I suppose they might, but I’ve never seen it. From what I can tell, mostly they play tricks on each other. I guess the longest-running feud in these hills is the one between the ’sangmen and the bee fairies. The Apple Tree Man has a song about how it all started, but I can never quite remember the words. I do recall the melody, though. It’s a lot like the one folks use for ‘Shady Grove’ these days.”
“So who are the good guys?” Sarah Jane asked. “The ’sangmen or the bee fairies?”
Aunt Lillian laughed. “There’s no real good or bad when it comes to fairies, girl. Not the way we think of it. They just are, and their disagreements can be pretty much incomprehensible to the likes of you and me. The only thing I do know for sure is not to get mixed up in the middle of it. That’s the one sure road to trouble.”
“I wouldn’t,” Sarah Jane assured her.
Easy to say, sitting on the porch the way they were, shaded from the afternoon sun, sharing a pleasant task with a friend. But quite another matter, alone in the dark in Tanglewood Forest, when the one sure thing, it seemed, was to choose a side or die.