YOU COME FROM a long line of women gifted in a way that scares most folks.
According to the stories your gran told me when I was young, our family’s roots grew deep in Scottish soil. Our ancestors lived in a small town known as Marc Innis, or Horse Meadow, which was once an island in the midst of a lake a long time past.
The women in this family have always run a public house, healing and helping in our blood, but so too have we always lived in fear of fire. Five times the Church of Scotland roved through the Lowlands, seeking out the accursed, pricking them with devices that would prove a woman was caught in the devil’s snare. Five times the Church of Scotland strung up the women in our family, and five times they burned them alive.
One of the earliest stories I remember concerns the fate of my great-great-great-grandmother Eimhir, who practiced necromancy when she could not accept the death of her beloved. She was one of the last to burn before our line departed the land that had sustained us for so long.
The women in this family are stubborn, but they are not stupid. Those who were able gathered up what little they needed to survive at sea and left the country in the 1600s. They were indentured servants in the beginning, working for the English in the New World.
Perhaps your gran will give you a greater account of how the roadhouse came to rest in their hands, but the way I heard it, one of her aunts married the fellow who owned the place, and the fellow did not die so much as he crawled inside a whiskey bottle and curled up at the bottom of it. It was just as well. If he had died before he gave her a son, your great-great-aunt would have had no recourse, legal or otherwise, for hanging on to the place.
The men in this family do not have the gift the women have. As near as I can tell, it has more to do with blood than with the body. Always in our histories, men have been responsible for keeping us rooted in the world. If not for them coming into the wilds aiming to tame it, we would have stayed wild ourselves, nettles in our hair and dirt for lip color. Such is the way of wild things.
Ours is not a religion. It is a way of life, and it is an abomination to those who do not understand it. The roadhouse is a sanctuary for us. I grew wild with your aunts and cousins in the nursery while men gambled and drank and smoked beneath our twiglet dolls and pretend altars.
Before I knew what it was to be a witch, I knew what it was to be different.
My wildness came from not knowing who my father was. You will have stories of your momma and your daddy both. I had only my imagination. From my imagination I drew pictures of highwaymen and wayward sons and rebellious heirs. Only in the mirror could I see traces of who he might have been. My hair was thick and black while my cousins had fine curls, red in the winter months and corn silk in the summer. While their eyes were big and green, their skin fair and freckled, my eyes were not so round and my skin would brown like bread by summer’s end. It freckled, sure, but I did not have to protect my skin the way my cousins had to protect theirs.
My earliest memory is of the nursery we shared. Sunlight from one window and the smell of the herbs from the back garden from the other. The rug beneath us as old as the roadhouse itself, older. If we aligned our tiny fingers with the piles, all of us in a circle, we could convince each other we heard the voices of the women who wove it, our ancestors, our blood. Girlhood is a magick all its own, and our girlhood was a shared one.
My mother dreaded my first day of school. In the week leading up to it, she stopped smiling altogether, started snapping her fingers to get our attention, slapping our wrists when we slipped up. Pulling a glass across the breakfast table with our Will instead of asking if someone would please pass the milk, or sharing our thoughts using mental projection instead of our words, shattering the silence with causeless giggling—these things would draw attention to us in a room full of strangers. We were young, and we were careless. Our wrists were red from all the disciplining by the time the aunts lined us up in the nursery to sit between their knees as they combed and braided our hair.
My mother had to comb mine with a particular fierceness, as it preferred to fall in waves. And though she smoothed the waves with a wetted palm, the baby hairs along the edge of my scalp would not lie flat. She stood me up when the braiding was done and held me still and called me her smart, brave girl before leaving the room, leaving my cousin Eva holding up our plaits side by side as if she had never noticed their contrasting color before.
“Look how dark your hair is, Lily,” she said to me. None of the younger girls could pronounce my name, Li Lian, given to honor my faceless father.
Some lessons I could learn from watching the other girls. I learned to braid a lilac flower into my hair to bring wisdom during lessons or to sprinkle playing cards with nutmeg to bring the dealer good fortune. Physical objects can serve as a focus for your magick, and they can also make less obvious the fact that you are using your Will to change the world around you.
Other lessons I had to learn myself. There are lessons you will have to learn for yourself. Some I hope like hell you will learn from what I have recorded here, though I am beginning to believe so far as hope is concerned, mine has run its course.
Every day on the way to school, we passed by the riverfront, where the men would unload the big boats, and horses would pull crates to meet up with the railroad. From time to time after school, we would walk along the railroad to collect coins and horseshoes and other metal objects abandoned along the tracks.
During my fourth year, when I was near the age of nine or so, I began to believe trouble and I were destined to spend our lives together. The lesson of the day concerned the advent of the steam engine and its implications, and the younger children were excused to the yard to practice their lessons or play, and I remember clear as yesterday a little blond boy named Daniel Chesterfield sticking his hand into the air and calling out without waiting for the teacher to give him permission.
Our schoolmistress was a thin woman with a long, sad face. I remember overhearing a remark that she was not much older than my cousin Agnes, Eva’s eldest sister, and though she was a maiden, she had the weary disposition of a crone. She did not want to ask Danny to repeat himself, this I could hear in her bones, but she did anyway.
“The men who work on the steamboats,” Danny said. “They all look like Lilian.”
“No, they don’t!” I said, because the men who worked on the steamboats were covered in dirt and coal dust and sweat, and though I would not hesitate to dig in the dirt with my bare hands, I did not spend my days in that state.
“Yes, they do,” he said, and then he put a thumb to the corner of either eye and pulled back the skin.
I threw my chalkboard at him then, which earned both of us time in opposite corners of the schoolhouse while the others completed their lesson and went outside to play. Danny would go on to enlist his friends in chasing me and my friends around the yard, pushing us down and spitting on us, pulling our hair and dropping insects down the backs of our dresses. When I told my mother of Danny’s reign of terror, she said, “You would do best to ignore that young man. He will get what is coming to him.”
Waiting was not in my nature. If you are anything like your father, you will find yourself quick to make friends. If you are more like your mother, you will find it easier to lose them.
About the worst thing I ever did in my early life was curse that boy. Your gran was not pleased to hear from the schoolmistress that I had cut free a lock of Danny’s hair with a pair of sewing scissors I had hidden away in my skirts that morning, and when she asked me what I had done with the hair, I did not want to tell her I had mixed it with cow dung and dirt and deposited it in the gutter for the water to carry away. I had, so I denied having been anywhere near the boy. When we learned he had taken to bed with dysentery, I told your gran he must have drunk out of the river like he was not supposed to.
Maybe she could have proven I was the one who made him ill, and shown me the proof. She did not. Nor did she lecture or punish me.
If I were born in Salem times and done to Danny what I done, folks would have dragged me in front of the judge and hanged me that afternoon. Eight is plenty old enough to die when the law thinks what you done is rotten enough. Luck and I have always had an understanding, but I know now the fear your gran felt for me after what I did in the schoolyard. Killing Danny on accident would have made this a different story, and a shorter one.
The same day Danny failed to appear for lessons, I too found myself beset by stomach ailments. I shall spare you the details, but I spent more time in the outhouse than I did at my desk, and when I returned home that afternoon ashen and sweat-soaked, your gran shook her head and asked me, “Was it worth it?”
Our powers come with a price. All power, I suppose, comes with a price. Your father would have had a scientific explanation for this property, cited a Newtonian law to explain nature’s love of balance. We have a simpler explanation for it—the law of three. What energy one sends out, whether it be fair or foul, returns threefold. While I am certain I suffered far greater pains than did Danny, he did not go home to a family of healers, and when we returned to school, the wind had gone out of his sails. He no longer ran about the yard as he once did.
Danny did not recognize what I had done as witchcraft, and he did not report it as such. But when in the yard in front of his friends he accused me of making him sick, I told him it was me who turned his guts to water and to leave my friends alone or it would be worse the next time.
He never came near any of us girls again, but neither did anyone else.
I hope you grow up to be a wild one, that you learn to spit and curse and shoot a gun. This country is not kind to soft women. Maybe back east it is. Back east I hear they drape their women in lace and gild their homes and change their clothing a half a dozen times a day. St. Louis is considerably more civilized than the frontier, where your home would have been, where we do not have such things. I wish I could say the openness of the plains and the danger waiting on those who go out into it unprepared would be enough to make men kinder to one another, but I do not believe it to be in a man’s nature to be kind. Hard times make for hard men.
Be wild, but be wise, darling.
I hope you will recognize the darkness in this story, that you will see your momma not as brave and bold but as stubborn and angry. I hope you will take after your father in temperament. Be kind and patient. Ask questions and know when to accept what is in front of you.
Even after all this time, I miss him. I should have been more careful.
When you are old enough, I hope you find a good man, brave and kind. I hope you take more care than I have.
You are the only good and pure thing to come out of all of this.