Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

The woman looked immensely pleased. Siena looked at the black hooded sweatshirt draped over her arm. “My son would’ve liked that,” she said, suddenly not wanting to end the conversation, challenging as it was. She thought it might be the first one she’d had in years.

The woman stared. “You used to have a family once, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Yes,” Siena said.

“Your daughter was very bad. She sold drugs at the high school and was killed by the bikers who supplied her when she didn’t pay. They cut up her body and distributed it in many places, so they could never be caught.”

Siena figured then the woman had been so poor for so long it had driven her crazy, and forgave her this new assault. Besides, Noelle had been loud and unkempt and never did anything anyone asked, laughing at them instead, or crying, but that had been the extent of it. “That was Paul Hubert,” she said. “I heard that story too. It wasn’t Noelle, not at all. And even with Paul, why didn’t someone help him, teach him to love himself enough so he wouldn’t have to turn to drugs?”

This last line she knew came out of the witch wisdom her own mother had taught her. She hadn’t said anything like that in years, was surprised at herself. After Noelle’s disappearance, what had any of it mattered? She couldn’t believe in it anymore. If her magic hadn’t been able to protect Noelle, it was worse than useless.

The woman looked startled. “They said you couldn’t even really talk anymore.”

“I couldn’t. But I had to defend Noelle. Usually I don’t hear the rumours. No one says them to my face.”

“That was so long ago,” the woman said, memory dawning like daybreak on her creased face. But she didn’t continue, and Siena didn’t know whether she was referring to Noelle, or to Paul Hubert, or to her own demise. “We’re not any of us as young as we used to be,” she continued, peering into Siena’s face. She looked familiar, as if they’d once sat on committees together. They’d baked for the same fundraisers, surely. “Sally,” the woman said, stretching out her hand. “Sally Fish.”

Ah, the minister’s wife. What had happened to her? Siena must’ve heard, and then forgotten, just as Sally had mistaken Noelle’s story for Paul Hubert’s. Even in a village, memory was fickle. And what about Siena herself? Did she really sleep under sticks? The village had watched her lose everything, and grow prematurely old because of it. Whatever her life had become, it sure wasn’t what she’d planned. Siena shook Sally’s hand. “Siena Straw.”

“I know who you are, Siena. You had the most beautiful gardens, flowers and vegetables both. You were a really good herbalist and you always looked elegant.”

“I was just born with skinny genes, is all. And I was good at putting together outfits from thrift stores. If I had money for new clothes I gave it to the kids.”

“It was always so important to them,” Sally said, “the right kind of sneakers and jeans at school.”

“Yes.”

They parted, and the next Thursday Sally wasn’t out, nor the next. Siena went back to piling sticks and talking to herself. “The paths through the cedars all grown over with brambles and garbage. The slabs of Styrofoam and piles of old shoes replicating each night so that in the morning there were even more. Why always this bleak blackbadness, inconsolable beyond hope at the core, at the bottom, collecting at the fallen logs. The beads of dirty Styrofoam, disintegrating. Siena thought she might die under the weight of it. But she couldn’t; what if her daughter came back and her mother wasn’t there? Siena knew at one time or another she’d felt a little of what Noelle might’ve felt when she’d run through town shouting obscenities at the minister and the principal and the constable. Perhaps what Siena could not speak, the girl had. And so the stones they threw at Noelle had in their way been meant for her.

“Maybe they’ll give Noelle back if I take their garbage as well as my own. Heaping it into a higher and higher mound each night after spending hours and hours and hours collecting it. And then burrowing beneath it to sleep, in spite of it smelling rather badly. There, I’ve just admitted it, even to myself. I’m looking for my daughter’s body,” Siena muttered, piling sticks. She’d misplaced it somewhere, she knew. “My daughter isn’t dead, only mad or missing. Maybe she’s not out here at all. I bet they’ve got her in a basement somewhere.”

The week after that the geese were flying overhead in pairs, looking for nesting spots, just as Siena and her husband had come here from the city, looking for a quiet pretty place to raise their brood. The geese flew over her piles and honked derisively, and Siena built herself an actual lean-to out of deadfall and Styrofoam instead of burrowing under her shame pile that night, and tried not to talk to herself so much. Her conversation with Sally had been so short, and now weeks old, but still it had reminded her of the difference. Her husband had often made fun of her constant mumbling. She’d done it even then, when he was still around. But that too had been different. Mumbling to a person didn’t get you called crazy; it was just a little rude.

She unwound string from a tangle of sticks and sat down on a pile of other sticks and began to make a spider web, part God’s eye, part dream catcher. It was obsessive but she couldn’t help herself; when Siena found string she had to make something out of it. Something more or less circular to hang in a tree. Siena told herself she was making magic; it was a witchy thing, not a dream catcher but a daughter catcher. Still the objects never seemed beautiful and powerful as she’d intended when she was done but rather sad and lonely as she felt, and possibly mad. And yet consciousness glimmered on, and Siena survived the spring’s windiest gale in her makeshift lean-to. Her shelter looked a little like an igloo from a distance, the water rounded white slabs piled into circular walls. The Styrofoam had good insulation value.

The geese flew overhead several times each day, and at last Siena broke down and cried, missing her husband so badly she couldn’t give the pain a name. Geese mated for life, as she’d always felt she and her husband would. As the years passed and Siena outgrew her youthful restlessness, the boredom that came after the first thrill of marriage was replaced each year by joy at discovering its yet undiscovered riches: for each year there were more. She should’ve gone with him. Then they could’ve still had a kind of happiness, if not the ridiculous happiness they’d had before. Now she was alone without any of them, cleaning up after people who scorned her.

But he’d left, and their son had gone with him, although the young man was old enough to go out on his own now, seek a wife and a fortune. But he and the old man got along well. Any wife the lad found would have to make herself part of their life more than they’d ever make themselves part of hers. She could do the books and mind the clutter; they had never been high on organizational skills, Siena’s men hadn’t. They liked the same things: military history and beer. They worked together now, she’d heard back when she still spoke to people, in some faraway town, setting up a shop selling memorabilia of oh, so many wars. But between them they knew most of their facts, would be able to back up each piece of begged or borrowed or stolen or scavenged bit of merchandise with a story, quite likely to be true. Siena missed them desperately. Twice in the woods she had found old old guns, and saved them for her men, should they ever pass back through. But why would they?

And so she talked to herself, and performed her forest cleaning tasks, even though there was always more to do; it was an obscenely endless job. Sometimes she realized she’d thought she was talking to her daughter, and then Siena would start to cry again. She and Noelle had been as close as the old man and the young man, in their way. They’d liked the same things: poetry and painting and witching. It got you every time, that witching. They should’ve chosen different professions. A witch would always have stones thrown at her, at one time or another in her life, it was true. Her own mother, a witch also, had told Siena that, trying to herd her to a gentler occupation. But for Siena the witching was the gentlest task she knew, and the most necessary. And so she’d turned her back on her own mother’s words, her own mother’s tears, sure she and her daughter could together change things, together change the world’s view of what a witch was. She longed for the days her mother had told her about: the days when witches were well paid and cared for with kindness, invited to good parties and not forgotten but necessary, and not ostracized in the ragged woods at the bottom of the gardens. Her mother had been right of course, except that Siena herself had avoided the stoning her entire life; and the gossip she’d inured herself against. It was her daughter who hadn’t found the strength of will to turn the stones back in midair, or as Siena herself was able to do, before they even flew. She’d been too young, the girl had, and too full of fun and too full of love; that had bothered people.