Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

“If I pluck one in the spring when it’s warm and the light is long, it might grow roots. And then, over time, I could grow a new you,” Serena said.

“Just hope it never comes to that,” Harker said. They lay companionably on her embroidered pillows together.

“What a strange thing to say!”

“Why do you really think the doctor left?” Harker asked, stroking her arm. “You’re good looking and you were crazy fertile. Three girls, two boys. Some people wondered if the doctor might have wanted more children and left you for someone younger because of that?”

“That really would be crazy,” she said. “But now that he’s gone I can’t remember my anatomy. What does a kidney do? A liver?”

“They both clean things, I think, but what?” Harker asked. “The blood, the urine…”

“Why does urine need cleaning, if it’s leaving the body anyhow?” Serena asked.

“I can’t remember either. But I know why the doctor left you.”

“Why then, Harker?”

“Because of the poles. Once you had that much magic, you didn’t need him anymore.”

With the doctor, all Serena’s knowledge of medicine had fled. She used to help him clean wounds and set sprains and fractures and sew people up after surgery or knife fights. But, her mind newly blank, she couldn’t charge for her nursing, because she couldn’t nurse. She grew lots of food for herself and her sons, and worked part-time as a landscaper, but nothing paid like a paycheque. There weren’t many to be had since the call centre had closed. Even the feeder high school was only open half days now.

Serena hadn’t yet figured out that she could sell the magic poles if only she and her sons were willing to stand in the icy river from late April to early June, grabbing them as they flew past, in water both too cold and strong and deep to stand for long. It was giving her arthritis, she was sure of it. And Jake and Blake regularly came down with bronchitis and pneumonia.

In the morning she brought him fresh coffee. “Maybe head man doesn’t mean reeve or mayor but the man who sleeps with Serena. First the doctor, and now you.” Serena smiled to show it was a joke and pulled Harker out the door and to the river. She wanted him working.

He stood on the shore looking out as if he wasn’t sure why he was there. Serena pushed him, gently, from behind. He moved into the torrent and grabbed the first passing log. It fought him, like a big fish wanting to escape.

“I like it,” he said after he’d wrestled it to shore.

There were hardly any carvings, just what appeared to be a few leaves at one end. The carvings, Serena was starting to understand, didn’t create the magic, they only described it. In the upland village, where more things were magic, folks could probably differentiate in ways she couldn’t, or couldn’t yet. In addition to being carved, the poles were often warm to the touch, and attracted lint and crumbled leaves and other fine debris. They smelled of hot metal, even when they were made of wood, as this heavy, waterlogged log indeed was. She followed Harker out onto the little gravelly beach and slapped his hands away from the pole.

He paused, gazing at her owlishly. “I want to keep it in my room.”

She slapped his hands again, harder than before. “It isn’t yours.” She didn’t regret it at all this time.

“But I got it,” he said.

“You got it because I told you to. This is my corner of the river. Everything that comes out of the river here is mine.”

Which was a load of rot. Finders keepers, or I was here first, she knew, were specious school yard arguments. She began to drag the log home.

“I wanted to keep it,” Harker mewled, following. “The leaves are like my leaves.”

She was glad he didn’t know how much the poles were worth, or she’d have to fight him, and she didn’t know how to fight, at least not someone so much bigger than she was. Fighting was more dangerous than just being mean, she guessed.

She’d started selling the poles to out-of-towners over the winter. The buyers had appeared out of nowhere, usually late at night. Sombre men in cowls and cloaks, they had offered her staggering sums.

Setting the pole down, Serena massaged her abdomen where a dull chronic pain had turned into a searing one. “What does a kidney do exactly, do you know?” she asked Harker again. The doctor had taken away not just his encyclopedic knowledge, but his encyclopedias. She was fucked, standing in the freezing river day after day. How had her life come to this?

Harker looked at her pleadingly, his leafy eyebrows and big hands still dripping.

“You can keep the next one,” she said. “But we have to go back in the river to get it. I hope we didn’t miss one, standing here arguing.”

She’d seen Harker ring the necks of geese. A full-grown goose can break a man’s arm just by flapping her wings, they always said, but Serena wondered whether it was true. Maybe a smaller man than Harker. He gave the geese to poor families. Serena declined them. She wouldn’t have, before she began selling the poles.

“You should have the meat tested. The geese might be full of lead from the shot,” she said. “Or creosote.”

“From eating railroad ties.” Harker nodded helpfully.

She thought of how he looked vacant when he snapped the geese’s necks. There was no cruelty in it. It was just something he did.

She studied the pole. Fresh out of the water, it was already covered with a thin crusting of filth. Dead beetles and living. Dirt. Ground glass. Where had it all come from, so quickly?

Maybe the pole attracted crud because it was garbage magic, junk magic, failed magic. Maybe the folks upriver made a heap of their failures beside the icy bank and laughed, slapping their sides, when the spring torrent took the flotsam.

What if she found her way to the village and talked to people? She could ask them how they made the poles. The poles were much more magic than she’d guessed at first. She could sense it more and more as time went by.

Maybe the magic in the poles was what conditioned her to feel it.

She wondered, again, what their purpose was.

And what she might use them for.

Two very different questions.

“Let’s go inside,” she said, taking Harker’s hand. “We can come back out tomorrow. The water’s so cold today we’ll catch our deaths.”

Serena told Harker and the Akes to keep the poles a secret. The garbage magic was seemingly worth a very great deal on the black market. She figured it for a black market as the buyers came at night, wearing dark clothes. At first she’d wondered whether they were her neighbours from down the street, wearing disguises. But how could her neighbours know what the magic was worth and for when she didn’t?

She hid the money. She would use it for her sons’ tuition. Or she’d go downriver to search for her daughters, Mildred, Concepción and Agatha, if not their doctor father. Or upland to learn about magic.

They had gone to bed after pole catching, as was their ritual. It had been warming and companionable but she still hadn’t come.

“If I could figure out how to make them work I could cure cancer,” she told Harker, running her fingers through his chest moss. “Or I could use them to clean toxic waste dumps.”

“You wouldn’t bring your girls back?” he asked. “Mildred? Agatha, and…”

“Concepción.” It was nice of him, she thought, to have remembered some of her daughters’ names. “My daughters will come back if I cure cancer,” she said. “I mean, who wouldn’t? And you’re not supposed to use magic to make people do things they don’t want to do.”