When Autumn Leaves: A Novel (8 page)

“A door? What do you mean? And what is that stuff?”

Pearl held a small iron bowl in one hand, and a knife in the other. “For heaven’s sake, child. I’m throwin’ a circle, and this here’s salt. Keeps the hobgoblins out. That’s all you need to know for now.”

Stella’s eyes widened. “Granny, that there’s witch stuff! I done heard you tell about a million folks you ain’t no witch.” Pearl looked at her granddaughter with noticeable exasperation. Stella had seen her grandmother set a bone, lay her hand on a sick person and heal them. In fact, Stella had seen her do any number of things that defied logic or explanation. But this, whatever Stella was seeing, didn’t look organic at all. It was a ritual, and nothing like the ones she had seen in church. Looking at her grandmother, she had a feeling that what she was witnessing wasn’t anything Jesus talked about.

“Well, I ain’t no witch, child,” Pearl said with a great deal of force. “This is a trick passed on from my grandmama and from her grandmama before her, ’til, well, back to the beginnin’ of the Darlings. Ain’t nothin’ evil here. This is to help someone. Folks down in the church may not like it. But since when did I give a hoot what other people think? Besides, you think Jesus cares about a circle made a salt? He got more important things to be busy with.”

Stella took a step backwards. Pearl was transformed in the dim light, like someone else, a wizened old lady from a fairy tale. It sent a shiver down Stella’s spine.

“Sugar, look at me.” Pearl said it, knowing it was the last thing in the world Stella wanted to do. “It’s me, your Granny. Baby girl, you listen to me, this here’s earth magic. You get a handle of all that energy, and ya got to make sure you don’t bring the bad in with the good. I promise I’ll explain later. Don’t be afraid, Stella. You were born to this, it’s part a you. If you can’t trust me, trust that. You must feel it, the magic pullin’ at your belly.”

Stella closed her eyes, and she did feel it. It was like her ears were in her feet, a steady hum coming up through her shoes and winding around her chest. “Granny?” she asked. “What do you mean, build me a door?”

Try as she might, Stella could never recall in detail exactly what happened inside that circle. She could say the words: “It got darker,” or “The wind picked up and raced through our hair, and our clothes,” or “The hole that Granny dug for the bottle seemed to glow,” but she could not really remember the images. There was a moment when Pearl called down the storm, corralled it with her arms, and a streak of lightning hit the ground. That moment flashed clearly in her memory, but beyond that, she could not remember, as if her young mind had willed itself to forget, as if this thing was too big for her to carry around in her small body.

Stella never did see the bottle full of lightning. That afternoon when Dolores McDonald returned to the mountain, Pearl immediately pulled her into the house and closed the door. Stella tried to put an ear up to it, to hear what was going on. When that didn’t work, she snuck around the perimeter of the house, standing on her tiptoes to get a peak through a window, but she saw nothing. Dolores emerged a little while later. At first she looked the same, but then Stella caught her eye and was trapped there. The woman kept her in her gaze for a handful of seconds and then let her go. Stella felt strangely disappointed. She was not clear about what she saw there: wisdom, surely, and kindness too, of a sort, but most of all it was defiance, a look as determined as a brush fire. And then Dolores smiled, walked erectly down the stairs and down the path until she disappeared around the bend.

Stella thought about those fleeting moments for years. Was Dolores truly transformed? Was it only wishful thinking? She never saw Dolores McDonald again, but they received a Christmas card every year, and each year it was from a different place. All that moving around troubled Stella, because she thought the whole point was for Dolores to find her place in this world. But Pearl explained to her that it made a whole lot of sense, because after all, lightning never strikes the same place twice.

As she grew older, Stella’s restlessness baffled her family and friends. They loved her, they liked her, but they did not understand her, though they didn’t really try all that hard. A chasm grew that began to separate her from the others.

At least once a month she invented an excuse to go into town. She would walk around the wide streets, go into the stores with fluorescent lights and beautifully dressed mannequins, and then lose herself in at least two showings of the film playing at the old movie house. But when she brought a magazine home, filled with gossip and pictures of the stars she had just seen, her friends would give her an odd look with narrow eyes.

There was a boy, a young man really, Bailey Thomas, for whom she always had a special fondness. In fact, just about everyone thought they were going to marry. They weren’t perfectly suited but there were so few boys her age that were suitable at all. Stella liked Bailey, with his wide shoulders and hair the color of husked corn. Even his hands, so calloused and rough, felt good on the parts of her skin that were smooth and soft. But then one day, he simply stopped courting her, stopped really talking to her at all. When finally she walked the short distance to his house to ask him why, he simply said, “I like you, Stella. Hell, I might even love you. But you got a way of makin’ me feel small, like I don’t have enough of what you need. Couldn’t bear a lifetime of that.” Stella knew enough about herself not to protest, and liked Bailey Thomas enough to know that he deserved more. Eventually he married one of her sisters.

By the time Stella was twenty-one, she had all but taken over her grandmother’s position as mender. It was seductive, what she could do, reach out with her hands and pull sickness out of a body. Pearl did a lot of teaching and explaining, but there were no words exactly for what happened when Stella laid her hands on someone. She felt the essence of who they were jump up to her fingertips. Their energy ran hot and cold on the surface, easy for someone like Stella to read, and sometimes if that energy was wrong she could push it away with her hands.

It wasn’t as if she laid her hands on everyone, every minute of the day. Most of what she did required good old-fashioned herb remedies and tinctures and teas. She had memorized almost every plant on the mountain, and she remembered what she had seen her Granny do in that circle. Stella wanted to do it all, try every bit of folklore. She knew what Granny Pearl had been capable of: spells. And she had a feeling she was capable, too. She really didn’t think she was a witch. She knew she was different, but after all she did for the community, she was surprised at how wary the townsfolk were toward her. It was as if they could all read the secret longings of her heart and it made her feel smothered.

At the same time, Stella felt like an old woman. Every day she woke up and found it harder to get out of bed, and when she did she moved a little slower than the day before. She was tired: tired of working for nothing, tired of the struggle. It wasn’t things, possessions, she yearned for, but the idea of living a life of swimming with the current instead of against it.

When Pearl began to die, Stella ministered to her faithfully. One day, near the end, when she was in and out of consciousness, Stella was bringing her grandmother’s head up to get some water past her parched lips when Pearl grabbed her arm. She grabbed it so tightly that the tin cup flew out of Stella’s hands. She studied Stella’s face with narrow eyes.

“Good Lord, child! What are you still doin’ here?” Then she fell back into the pillow, into yet another coma-like sleep.

Stella tried to rouse her. She wanted to yell, “Wait! Wait! What do you mean, here? In this room? Or in this place? And where will I go? What will I do?” But Pearl would not wake. Stella sat on the narrow bed, crying tears of grief and helplessness.

Something happened soon after, though. Finally letting go of all that water, all those tears, inside her, she could see the light. Whatever her grandmother had meant, she was still there, in the very last place on earth she wanted to be. She knew the town needed her, or someone like her. But she was no martyr. She wasn’t afraid of hard work, but she was fed up with being unappreciated. She was tired of feeling like an outsider. The world was so very big, somewhere there was room enough for a different kind of girl like Stella to be happy. So she packed her bags, grabbed the $183 she had saved over the course of her lifetime, took Pearl’s book, wrote a note to her family, and walked down the mountain-side without looking back even once. Pearl was gone, and Stella was too.

She worked at a diner, renting a single room from an old widow who needed the extra cash. She scrimped and saved until she had enough money to buy a car. It was really a piece of crap, rusted inside and out, no windshield wipers. Its old radio only ever got two static stations. When she bought it, she quit her job and started driving west, making her way from town to town, eating peanut butter and white bread for breakfast and dinner. She would often sleep in her car, working odd jobs when she saw ads, picking crops when farmers needed seasonal labor, or selling remedies she would concoct from roadside plants to strangers she could just tell would need them.

One day, having crossed the entire country, she stumbled onto the car ferry to Avening. When her old car died half a mile from the dock, she took it as a sign. She’d been in Avening ever since.

Stella felt more at home in Avening than she ever had in Kentucky, which was amazing, since when she’d lived in Kentucky she’d had no way of knowing she didn’t feel at home. She knew that this was a place that was right for a person like her. Stella was one of those people with odd talents and special gifts. That energy that she felt when she laid her hands on someone floated through the air in Avening. The town buzzed and hummed and purred. It felt alive.

She enjoyed her job at the
Circle
, the local paper. She felt she helped people, even if it wasn’t on the personal level that she was trained for. The thought occasionally crossed her mind that she should get back into the business of mending. But it reminded her too much of home. It made her feel guilty. It just didn’t seem right that she would abandon her own kinfolk to tend to a bunch of strangers. So she helped out here and there where she could. She used her gifts, but she turned away from what she really was.

Eventually, though, that decision took its toll. Lately she had begun to feel that something was off. It was hard for Stella to be objective about much of anything, let alone herself. How could Stella have known, when she left home, how much of herself the mountain would take as a sacrifice? The years and time had revealed the gaps in Stella’s character. The mountain took that part of Stella that used to make others gravitate towards her. Out of fascination or fear or awe, she had drawn people to her. But now she forgot the rules of being social, so she blundered along, trying to be bigger than life in hopes that no one would miss her.

Stella knew she could never go home, for many reasons, but most important because home had irrevocably become Avening. Now she was caught in a place where she knew she belonged and yet which didn’t belong to her at all. Even if she did go back to haunt the former places of her childhood, she knew that in truth all she would find would be the ghosts of her former self. The mountain had let her go, and now she needed something solid, something she could hold onto.

There wasn’t really any particular aspect of her life that was totally wrong. And sometimes she wondered if maybe everything was in place, if maybe this is what it was like to be an adult, to constantly feel like she was waiting for something, or searching for something. Perhaps nothing was missing at all. Was happiness a thing? Something to be measured and defined? There were moments when Stella found herself thinking, yes, I am happy now. But in just thinking those thoughts, she drove them away, as if happiness itself was not a thing to be acknowledged. So she ignored it, hoping that somehow happiness would just settle on her. So far, that particular approach hadn’t worked.