When Autumn Leaves: A Novel (7 page)

The light turned again, and Autumn softly pressed her foot into the gas. The universe was providing her with plenty to deal with. Her biggest problem yet was Nina. Nina was incredibly powerful, possibly too powerful. She didn’t know enough yet to gauge whether Nina was simply born a bitch or made one by circumstance, and that made all the difference. But her abilities would have to be dealt with one way or the other, so she too was in the running.

Autumn passed Justy’s and considered pulling in just to give him a piece of her mind. He knew the rules. But it had started to rain, and the rain was washing away the snow, which made her feel a little sad, and annoyed. Besides, Autumn was tired. It was only the first day of winter. She rolled her eyes. It was definitely going to be one of those years.

S
TELLA DARLING AWOKE WITH THE FAMILIAR RUMBLE of a hollow stomach. It was the ghost of hunger, of too many childhood nights going to bed without enough food; dreaming always took her back.

Stella kicked off her blankets and pulled back the curtain with one brisk movement. She tasted the metallic tang on her tongue before she saw the clouds, low and outlined in a purplish gray. Stella ran down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the back door, her cats leaping behind her. She stepped out into the small patch of concrete that made up her patio and closed her eyes, taking in a big breath through her nose. A storm, maybe two hours away. Stella’s face broke into a wide grin. She threw her eyes upward in a silent thank you to the heavens and raced back inside.

Stella’s heart pounded with both excitement and relief. For years she had waited for a stormy Spring Equinox, and today, finally, the Gods, the Universe, Jesus, or whatever, had rewarded her patience and vigilant prayers. Today was going to be her day. In less than two hours, Stella Darling would catch lightning in a bottle.

In her small, outdated kitchen, she put the kettle on the stove, then turned to her pantry for two tins of breakfast for Lucy and Ethel. After she emptied the cat food in their bowls, she walked briskly to the bookshelf that lined one full wall of the living room and pulled an aging scrapbook from the top shelf. It was the one true legacy of the Darling family, her grandmother Pearl’s
Journal of Remedies and Miracles
. She carefully turned the pages until she came to the one she wanted.

Stella stared at her grandmother’s neat and careful hand. Beside the directions were pencil sketches of various bottles. Stella mentally raced through her inventory: yes, she had the perfect one, an identical match to the bottle Pearl had put a bold asterisk beneath. She could do it.

More than thirty years ago, Stella had seen her grandmother catch lightning. Up above the blue grasses of Kentucky, in the dense mountains of her childhood home, in a place called Look Pass, Stella had been groomed from a young age to take over for her Granny Pearl. It had nothing to do with her genetic makeup or her heritage, or order of birth, or physical attributes: a mender was born and called so within the first few hours of her arrival in the world. It was something in babies’ eyes, in the calm acceptance of their mother’s breast, in the energy that swam around them, making a hand tingle when placed on their tiny heads. Stella, it turned out, was one of those babies, just like her Granny Pearl had been.

Looking back, Stella would have called her family dirt poor. Not the kind of poor portrayed quaintly on TV or supermarket paperbacks, but real poverty. Stella’s father was a coal miner with a gaggle of daughters and two sons too young to join him in that dark, black mouth of coal mine that seemed to swallow so many other husbands and fathers whole. And so Stella’s mama made do on that single paycheck. She kept those boys in school so eventually they could go on and do something else. She despised that mine as much as she hated the devil himself.

Still, it wasn’t the Darling way to focus on everything they didn’t have. Stella knew that this wasn’t because they were better people or closer to God; it was just that they didn’t have enough exposure to the rest of the world to make any kind of real comparisons. They were ignorant, plain and simple. There was too much to do, or make, or stretch in order to accommodate the ever-growing Darling family for them to have any contact with or concept of the world beyond their piney, secluded town. In the handful of hours Stella found herself without work to do, she would sit and watch the clouds thunder by, or listen to the wind shake through the trees. She was so grateful for the rest, boredom simply didn’t occur to her.

She went to school some, but she was the second oldest and a mender to boot. School was a luxury; she was lucky if she could go two days a week. The boys of course went every day, rain or shine. And Stella understood her mama wanted something different for them. Still she kept up with her studies, and what’s more, she enjoyed them. Even from a young age, Stella knew if she hadn’t been born on the mountain, if she’d been the daughter of a banker or a shopkeeper even, she would be a different person, the kind of person that had more choices.

Stella also understood what her life would become eventually when she took over from her Granny Pearl. In her poor mountain community, a mender wasn’t simply an eccentric character; a mender was a real necessity. Not everyone who lived in Look Pass could afford an actual doctor—in fact, the majority couldn’t—and getting up and down the mountain on roads poorly kept and unprotected by tax dollars could be a treacherous business even if they had the money. So women like Pearl served as physical and spiritual healers, healing broken bones and hearts in equal measures. Not a day went by that Pearl wasn’t tending to someone, or making preparations for something she somehow knew would soon be needed. Stella would watch her with a rapt adoration, marveling at the speed of her hands, her almost photographic memory, and her musical voice, which changed depending on the seriousness of the situation. Stella watched and learned, knowing that one day she would be the one to whom the folks would come.

When Granny Pearl caught the lightning, Stella was only twelve. Technically, it was still winter, but the mountain was unseasonably warm and the air heavy and cumbersome. Pearl spent the previous afternoon writing laboriously in her scrapbook, taking moments here and there to catch just the right word. Stella was sitting on the porch, watching the dull overcast sky and waiting for her baby sister to wake up from her nap.

“You hear somethin’?” Pearl said through the open door.

“Nope, too hot even for the birds to sing, Granny.”

“Hear somethin’ now?”

Stella turned her head to look at her grandmother, but she could only see her elbow moving in a lazy rhythm. “No. You expectin’ someone?”

“Maybe,” Pearl replied. Stella closed her eyes and tried to throw her ears out along the dirt path that led to their small little house. Sure enough, she soon heard the sound of foot-steps dragging towards them. She waited for a moment or two, until Granny Pearl’s guest emerged from around the bend of pines. Stella cocked her head in surprise. She didn’t recognize the young woman, who was wearing an obviously store-bought, light pink dress and floppy straw hat that shaded her eyes from the mountain’s haze. As she came closer, Stella could see that despite her clothes, she had a somewhat mousy complexion. Her cheeks were flushed from either the weather or the walk, or both.

The woman stopped dead in front of Stella and, in a small, quiet voice, said, “Oh, hello. I’m looking for a woman named Pearl Darling. Does she live here?”

“You walk all the way up here?” asked Stella.

“Oh no, I drove most of the way, but then . . . the road just ended, and . . . ”

“Yeah, ’cause them’s not very good shoes for walkin’.”

“I’m sorry, I hate to be rude, but I’m just about dyin’ of thirst. Could you please tell me if Pearl Darling lives here?” The young woman did look awfully faint, and Stella felt a stab of guilt that she hadn’t acted more hospitably. Just as she was about to call out for her grandmother, Pearl appeared in the doorway. She could be a fierce-looking woman when she wanted to, and she was coolly reserved when it came to city folks. It all depended on who sent them to her, and whether or not they could make peace with the mountain. The mountain was an excellent judge of character, repelling those who weren’t strong enough, clinging to those who were. The stranger blanched at the old woman’s unflinching appraisal.

“Humph, who sent you here?” Pearl asked.

“Marj Pennybaker.” The city woman’s face cracked into a tentative smile. “She also said you’d be as mean as a polecat till I told you it was her.”

At that, Pearl smiled widely. Marj was Pearl’s first cousin, who had grown up on the mountain but married a preacher from town. “She’s a hoot, that ole lady,” Pearl said. “I tell ya, that Billy Pennybaker married our Marj so he could love the heathen ways right on out of her, and she married him just to prove that God didn’t live in no church.”

The woman, looking a little embarrassed, smoothed out her dress over her knees. “Ahem. Mrs. Darling, I don’t want to take up too much of your time. I understand you’re a very busy woman, but Marj suggested you might be able to help me, and truth be told I’m at my wit’s end.”

“Well, if Marj sent y’all up here, it must be important. She don’t usually send no one up this way. Jis go on an’ tell me what’s weighin’ on you so heavy. Don’t worry, I save the judgin’ to God.”

“You don’t know me, Mrs. Darling . . .”

“Call me Pearl.”

“Well, Miss Pearl, I’m very pleased to meet you. My name’s Dolores, Dolores McDonald.” The woman smoothed her dress again, a little nervously. “You don’t know me, Miss Pearl, but if you did, you’d know that comin’ up here is just about the bravest thing I’ve done in my whole life.”

Dolores looked up at Granny Pearl, as if for encouragement, but Granny Pearl just stared back. Dolores would have to spit out her whole problem on her own.

“The thing is,” she said tentatively. “I feel like . . . Well, I feel like my whole life is a movie and I’m just watchin’ it happen. I try to get involved with things but . . . I don’t fit right. It’s like . . . like I’m not too good at makin’ decisions, and then before I know it other people make ’em for me. I just kind of let life spill around me, and then nothin’ quite goes right.”

Granny Pearl gave Dolores a shrewd look. “What do you mean, darlin’?”

Dolores chewed on the corner of her mouth. It took a second or two before she began again. “Well . . . the truth is I don’t feel comfortable in my own skin. Especially when it comes to men. Whatever I say, sounds right in my own head, but ends up comin’ out totally wrong.” Dolores leaned back after that, obviously close to tears. “I know this is going to sound crazy, but I feel like I’m trapped where someone else is supposed to be, someone who could fit right into my shoes. Like there is someone out there who’s livin’ my life, and I’m livin’ theirs. That make any sense to you at all?”

Pearl said nothing for a moment, taking a long, hard look at the woman before her. “Well, I don’t rightly know if I can help you, Sugar. But if I had it to give, I’d give you a good hard dose of courage. I know when people don’t make their own decisions it’s usually because they don’t reckon they’re smart enough or good enough to make the right ones. But everybody gets it wrong sometimes. That’s just part of life. We have to be strong and give it a go anyway.”

Dolores’s eyes looked pleadingly toward Pearl. “Don’t you have anything that’s like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like a dose of courage?”

Pearl gave out a great hoot of laughter. “Nothing but a big ole jug of moonshine out back there.” Pearl took Dolores’s hands, pulling her up from her seat. “Now wait a minute, don’t go lookin’ like someone shot your dog.” She stood there, holding her hands for a moment, deciding. “Now, I think I can help you, but I can’t promise you nothin’. You know the first day of spring is tomorrow? Well, if the Lord sees fit to give us a storm on that day, well, then, I can give you what you need. If not, you’ll have to wait for next year. All right?”

“Okay,” Dolores croaked.” But . . . I don’t understand . . .”

“Don’t reckon you need to. If everything happens in our favor, then I’ll give you your dose of courage. I’ll give you back the cord that connects you to your body, and it’ll jolt you right into the place you wanna be.”

“Sounds like lightning, Miss Pearl,” Dolores said with half a laugh.

“That’s exactly what it is, child: lightning in a bottle.”

Stella, who had watched the whole dialogue curiously from the doorstep, had never heard of such a thing. She figured it might be one of Pearl’s placebos. Sometimes, just the suggestion of magic was enough to help people make their own magic. But Stella that afternoon saw her grandmother move with determination, gathering the rarest of herbs and checking and then rechecking her journal, and began to think otherwise.

Stella crawled into bed that night too excited to actually sleep. She lay there, in that small space, listening to her grandmother’s slow and patient prayers for rain from down the hall, like a familiar song that she did not know the words to. Stella could not be sure, but she thought she heard the distant drum of thunder south of her open window.

In the gray hours before full morning, Pearl gently brushed a strawberry blonde curl from Stella’s face, and then bent down to whisper in her ear, “Come on, Sugar, get dressed and meet me outside.”

Stella blinked in the twilight. She slid out of bed and dressed quickly in the hall, pulling on the pair of overalls she had slung over her chair the night before. She opened the screen door that led to the backyard. There was just enough light to see her grandmother marking out a circle about nine feet in diameter.

“Whatcha doin’, Granny?” Stella stepped toward the circle, but her grandmother stopped her with a raised hand.

“Don’t go walking in here till I build you a door.”