Goldeline by Jimmy Cajoleas (i read books txt) 📕

And we wouldn’t see him again for years and years, and even then I wouldn’t remember.

I run inside and hold my momma while she cries. I cover her with my own body. I hold her and I kiss her eyes and I let her hold me too.

When she can sit up I help her. She tells me to get her certain things, roots and leaves, weird stuff she uses in her healings, and bring them to her. Some I have to go out and pick. It takes me all night but I do it. Every few minutes I come in and check on her and she seems a little better, a little less upset each time. It’s a miracle, what my momma can do. It’s her magic.

When I have all the ingredients and the sun is just breaking the trees and turning the dark world soft again, she bids me build her a fire and I do. We fill the cauldron with water, and I watch my momma drop in each powder, each leaf and root, singing all the while, singing each magic word in a language I don’t know, lovely as birdsong.

The smell fills the room, a sick oily dead smell, the worst I ever sniffed. She’s making tea from the forgetting herbs, same as what I would do for Gruff years later. Momma taught me this magic, it’s the only thing of hers I still have with me, the only magic she let me keep. I guess that’s why Momma never taught me any more of it. She was trying to protect me from men like the Preacher.

“Taste this,” Momma says, holding a big spoonful toward me.

I don’t want to. It smells awful, it smells like death and rot. But she grabs me by the hair and yanks my head back and my mouth opens and she plunges the spoon in. Then another and another. I gag and choke, it burns my mouth, it tastes yucky, my eyes go black. I almost vomit it up but Momma holds her hand over my mouth.

“Swallow it,” she says, and I do.

My stomach swirls and my hands tingle and I feel dizzy. Momma carries me over to the bed and sits me down on it. She kneels in front of me. I almost topple over but she holds me up with both her hands.

“Open your eyes,” she says.

“But, Momma, I can’t.”

“Open your eyes.”

I can hardly see her. Everything is hazy and soft, the white of the light through the window, fuzzy as cat fur.

“Say what I say.”

“Yes, Momma.”

“Last night was all a dream.”

“Last night was all a dream.”

“Mr. Cyrus was never here.”

“Mr. Cyrus was never here.”

“It was all a bad dream.”

“Just a dream.”

“There’s no Preacher coming to see us again. Never has been.”

“No Preacher, never has been.”

“You never saw that man once before in your whole life.”

“Never saw anybody.”

“Your momma loves you more than anything. She’s never gonna let anything happen to you.”

“Momma loves me more than anything. Nothing bad will happen to me.”

“That’s my Goldy,” she says, and pulls me to her. We lie down together on the bed and while she kisses my hair and cries soft so as not to wake me, I think, This is all a dream, this is just a dream, none of this ever happened, until all I see is nothing and all I hear is nothing and finally I’m asleep.

SEVENTEEN

Footsteps crunch the leaves beside my head. I don’t know how I fell asleep, how the memory became a dream again. But there are boots beside me, a man with a bald head peering down at me.

“Well, what do we got here?” he says.

I grab Tommy across his chest and pull him to me. He mumbles to himself, fever-hot, yelling at folks in his dreams.

“Your friend don’t look too good,” the man says. “Might better let me take a look at him.”

I shake my head no, and when the man tries to grab at Tommy I snap my teeth at his fingers. He yanks his hand back and laughs a little.

“You are a mighty tough one, aren’t you? Have to be, to survive out here in these woods. Especially with certain folks afoot. Unwanted folk, prowling around here, if you know what I mean.”

Again I shake my head no and growl at him. He’ll have to kill me if he wants to take Tommy. I don’t trust anybody anymore. The whole world is full of wretched and evil people and even the ones you love like your own momma aren’t perfect, they can be mean and cruel even if they don’t deserve at all what comes to them. My momma with her face all angry, the Preacher crying on his knees, kissing her fingers. Not a lick of it do I understand. Not one bit at all.

The man bends down and squints his eyes at me. His eyebrows crinkle up, fat as caterpillars.

“I don’t expect you to trust me. Heck, I wouldn’t much trust myself out here. But your friend’s got a break in his ankle. A bad break. The bone is poking through. Now you could stay out here, have him lose the foot, maybe his whole leg. Shoot, might be too late for him already. Or you can help me get him back to my place, have ol’ Chester take a look at him. He ain’t any doctor or anything, but in my experience a not-doctor sometimes can out-doctor a real doctor, if you follow me.”

I think maybe I kind of do. That’s what my momma was when she healed people. A good not-doctor. She helped babies and pregnant women and old ladies with hands crumpled up like claws. Momma could soothe them, could make their fingers spread out again. She knew all kinds of things. But I still don’t trust this man. I don’t know anything about him.

“My name is Lance,” he says. “And I’m trying to save your friend’s life. Do you understand? If you stay here, your