Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

“Looking at the houses,” Tommy added, “you can tell who had the good crops this year.”

“How so?” Hunter asked.

“Anyplace that doesn’t look like it’s about to fall in on itself, the people did well.”

“What do they grow?” Ellie asked.

Tommy laughed. “In these hills, what do you think? Kickaha Gold.”

“You mean marijuana?”

“I don’t mean corn.”

“How do they get away with it?”

“Well, the cops send in choppers, but there’s a lot of wild land out there and they don’t find everything. This is kind of a new thing for the rez, actually. I mean people always grew a little dope, but not on the scale they do now. See, there used to be this hillbilly Mafia that lived up in Freakwater Hollow. The Morgans. They pretty much had all the major-league bootlegging and dope fields sewn up until back in the mid-eighties when the whole clan got wiped out. But before that happened, you just didn’t step on their turf.”

“What happened to them?” Hunter asked.

Tommy shrugged. “There’s different stories. Some said they got into a feud with some competitors. My aunts say they got on the wrong side of one of the manitou. The facts, at least according to the newspapers, is that this black guy got pissed off with them and cleaned them out, all on his own, if you can believe it. Went up with some army ordnance weaponry and took them all down, then just stood there waiting for the cops to show up and take him away. He got the death penalty and was executed back in ’84 or ’85,1 guess.”

“I think I remember reading about that,” Hunter said.

“Yeah, it was a big deal at the time. The Morgans weren’t particularly well liked or anything—we’re talking serious white trash, here—but he must’ve killed around forty of them, and nobody wants that kind of guy running around.”

“Why did your aunts think he was a spirit?” Ellie asked.

“Think about it. There’s forty or so well-armed and mean-tempered Morgans up there, and he’s this one guy. Those kind of odds only work out in a Bruce Willis movie.” He gave Ellie a grin. “Or spirit tales.”

“I still don’t see why the elders let this go on,” she said. “When you think of all the problems with addiction there already are on the rez…”

“Nobody sells their crops here,” Tommy told her. “It all goes out to the big cities. Hell, nobody here could afford to buy it except for the other growers, anyway, and why would they buy it? But personally, I don’t get all turned around about smoking a little dope. Kids here’ll do anything to get high. I’m not promoting it or anything, but I’d rather see them smoking dope than sniffing glue or gasoline or becoming an alkie like yours truly.”

“I suppose. But if it starts them on the road to harder drugs—”

“Oh, that’s such bullshit,” Tommy said. “What turns people into junkies and alkies is an addictive personality. Hell, most of us have a bent towards an addiction of some sort or another, we’re just not all as extreme. But when you combine a seriously addictive personality with the hopelessness of the poverty most of these kids grow up in, smoking a little dope barely enters into the equation.”

“I guess I got lucky,” Hunter put in. “I’m just addicted to music.”

“Amen, brother.”

“It seems so simplistic,” Ellie said. “When you put it like that.”

“I guess. But it’s a funny old world, isn’t it? Who knows what’ll set any one of us off on the road better not traveled. In a perfect world the kids wouldn’t need to get high just to get through a day, but it’s not a perfect world. We all know that firsthand.”

This was about as good an opening as Ellie thought she’d get to talk to Tommy about how she didn’t have a troubled past like everybody else working with Angel, but she wasn’t comfortable bringing it up with Hunter in the cab. Then the opportunity was gone.

“Okay, we’re coming up on my Aunt Nancy’s place,” Tommy said. “A word of warning. She fits the scary wise woman profile better than any of her sisters.”

“Oh great, “Ellie said.

“Don’t worry. She won’t be mean, or get all aggressive or anything. She’s just kind of… formidable. But she’s also got the most knowledge for the sorts of things we want to ask about because she draws on more than one tradition.”

“How’s that?” Hunter asked.

“She had a different father from the other aunts. He was a descendant of one of the freed slaves who came to the hills after the Civil War.”

“I don’t understand why she has such a normal name,” Ellie said. She turned to Hunter, adding, “All the aunts I’ve heard about so far have names like ‘Conception’ and ‘Serendipity.’ ”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “Maybe her father gave it to her.”

“What happened to him?”

“He had a fatal run-in with those Morgans I was telling you about earlier.”

He pulled into a laneway as he spoke, the pickup slewing sideways on the ice. Only the sharp incline of the land leading down to the house saved them from going into the ditch.

“I don’t know if we’re going to get back out of here,” Tommy said as they slid toward an old black Dodge Sedan.

He managed to stop the pickup before it kissed the Dodge’s bumper. For a moment they sat in their vehicle, looking at the house. It was a long bungalow that appeared to have been built in pieces, each added to the next when the inhabitants decided they needed more room. Sections had aluminum siding, others some kind of cheap wood paneling. The part of the building closest to the laneway was all Black Joe, peeling in places. Candlelight flickered dimly from one of the windows. Smoke billowed up from a stovepipe chimney that rose out of what appeared to be the oldest part of the house. Parked behind the Dodge was a Chevy pickup and a small Datsun that seemed to be held together by its rust.

“I take it her crop wasn’t that great this year,” Hunter said.

“Aunt Nancy doesn’t do much fieldwork these days.”

Ellie shot him a surprised look. “You mean she used to grow marijuana?”

Tommy laughed. “Hardly. But she did spend over half the year in the bush, running a trapline in the winter, harvesting medicines, that kind of thing. Now she just makes day trips. She’s in her sixties—still lively, but she says her bones don’t appreciate sleeping on dirt anymore.”

He opened his door and stepped cautiously out onto the icy lane.

“Watch it,” he warned them. “It’s slippery.”

They made a comical sight, working their way to the front door, hanging onto each other as their feet kept threatening to slip out from under them. Ellie kept an eye out for the antlered men they’d seen earlier, standing half-hidden in the trees alongside the highway, but she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Only the ice, so thick now that the cedars were bent almost in two, great arcs of encrusted limbs that touched the ground in places. They hadn’t seen the manitou since the pack of dogs had given up their chase earlier in the night. One moment the antlered men had been there, mysterious shapes standing guard against the intrusion of the Gentry, the next there were only the trees with nothing lying between them but ice-covered snow drifts.

Tommy knocked on the door, then opened it and ushered them into a warm, dark hall. There was a smoky smell in the air, mixed with other less easily defined odors. Sage, Ellie guessed. And maybe cedar.

“Smudgesticks,” Tommy said, as though reading her mind. “Whenever I smell that mix of sage, cedar, and sweetgrass, I know I’m home.”

Following his example, they hung their jackets on pegs, removed their boots, then followed him into a candlelit room where three women were waiting for them. Ellie recognized Sunday and nodded hello. Tommy introduced the others as Zulema and Nancy.