Fiction Vortex - September 2013 Page 10

  “Excellent! Jackie, ring the lady up. You won’t be disappointed Madame, I assure you," Uncle E. addresses her then whispers to me, “It’s just that easy."

  A ten, so that’s a dollar. Smile for the lady. Should I bow? I guess I should bow after I give her the vial. Or not. What the hell am I — I’m bobbing, a grinning idiot bobbing back and forth in this lady’s face. When I get home, in a mirror I’m going to practice my delivery.

  I’ve got to give it to him. Uncle E. reeled her right in, a fisherman with words. It seems like you have to watch and bark. When someone glances at the booth give them your full attention.

  Although, I have noticed some sellers don’t have booths. They strap a box around their neck and walk the lanes calling out things like, “Sand for the hourglass. Get your sand here. Sand for the hourglass. Get your sand.”

  I see the strolling seller passing our booth, and he’s just a thing to witness, another spectacle in the lots.

  Uncle E. sees him and can't help saying, “I used to be one of these poor fools, cruising the aisles with fifty pounds hanging from my neck, selling minutes for pennies. Well, we all have to start somewhere. I started with three hours. Some folks kick up with less. I had to work up to having a booth.”

  I don’t plan on owning a booth. This is, with any luck, just a summer gig. I mean, I wouldn’t mind doing this every summer, I guess. It’d be nice to have some cash of my own. Dad tries to toss me a five now and again, but I feel guilty taking it. It barely pays for anything, and I know I’m just wasting it. What I really need is Time.

  If Dad used some he’d be able to do his job with one hand. There are no restrictions on using it to operate equipment. In fact, most people are practically encouraged to do so. But Dad would never go for it.

  Mom might, however, that would just make the two of them fight more. They fight too much now as it is.

  I could sell it. That is, if I had my own stash I could sell it to people my age. Typically, no one under eighteen is allowed to buy Time. So I could charge whatever I wanted. I’d only need a few hours. The trick is getting some.

  Uncle E. counted the bottles the moment he unlocked his case. I bet he counts them before he locks up and makes sure the tally always matches the next day. I guess I can’t fault him for running a tight ship. But he did mention brewing.

  “That’s a hell of a breeze striking up. Jackie, keep an eye on the platform. We don’t want dirt blowing right back on our clean floor.”

  I noticed Uncle E. filled a few vials from a larger bottle. Drops get spilled all the time, I’m sure. Besides, my hands can be clumsy on occasion. Whatever gets spilled is mopped up, and if I hung on to those drops seconds add up to minutes, which turn into hours, and so on and so forth.

  Uncle E. says, “At least it’s blowing toward the factory. It’ll help keep the industrial aroma at bay. My good man, sir. Sir!”

  I can’t keep it at home though. If Dad found it he’d go ballistic. And Uncle E. is sure to find anything I stash around the booth.

  Uncle E. remarks, “... ah well. Enough of this one on one. Let me show you how the pros get things done, eh?

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IF I MAY HAVE YOUR ATTENTION. THE FINEST TIMES — MINUTES, HOURS, DAYS — FOR THE LOW, LOW PRICE OF ...”

  I’ve got it. Back one or two Falls, Mom and I came here to visit Uncle E. I figure Mom was really trying to maybe catch a glimpse of her cousin. Ivy. Her name was, is Ivy. Anyhow, we sat in this little nook. It’s set on the opposite side of the factory away from the bazaar. I guess it’s for Harvesters to sit at when they’re on break, but I don’t think any of them ever use it. Mom and I sat on this rusted old bench surrounded by wild flowers and weeds. I thought it was cool. I’ll check it out when I get the chance. Quiet and secluded, I figure I could keep a stash hid there.

  Thinking about that trip with Mom, I liked this place then. We didn’t see any Harvesters. Now there are more and more as if ...

  “... the factory is letting out. Do you see this, Jackie?”

  Yeah, and they all glance at me. Some even glare.

  A bolt of purple lightning erupts from the other side of the factory and before it has a chance to register a siren is screaming. The electric wail draws a flurry of activity all over the bazaar.

  I don’t even have to ask, Uncle E. just starts explaining, “Pack up everything. We’ve gotta head out. The siren means there’s a time spill near the factory, and we do not want to be last in line.”

  “Last in line for what?” My first words all day.

  “Clean up detail. You have to sign up. Volunteers only, first come first served, and they only take a hundred or so.

  “I won’t lie to you. It’s dangerous, but the pay is great. A few weeks worth of work, and we can live like kings.”

  I like the sound of that. Mom won’t, but we need the money. Or maybe this’ll force Dad to find a job. Either way, this is what we need.

  Uncle E. says to me, “Plus, there’s the betting. Right now there’s no telling when this thing started, so me and some of the other guys like to have a sort of pool as it were. Depending on how bad it gets, the spill could have happened today, tomorrow, or even weeks or months from now. Hell, I’ve seen ones that started on a yesterday and didn’t show up till some tomorrow. But it gets cleaned up. All it takes is a little time. Ha, ha, ha! Come on, you got to laugh in the face of the storm, you know why Jackie?”

  Because we are the people who endure.

  J. Rohr is an internationally published author. His work has appeared in magazines such as Britain's Jupiter (issue #39) as well as Annalemma, The Mad Scientist Journal, and Silverthought Press Online. Currently, he runs the blog www.honestyisnotcontagious.com in order to deal with the more corrosive aspects of everyday life. A Chicago native, he has a passion for history and midnight barbeques.

  (Back to Table of Contents)

  The Grannywoman of Devil's Backbone

  by Teel James Glenn; published September 27, 2013

  Prologue: Drawing Lines

  “Tain’t never cottoned to outsiders, no less Yankees tellin’ me what to do, sonny,” the wizened woman called Granny Liz said. “And I sure as hell ain’t gonna let none traipse about up them hills.” She waved a thin hand at a wooded section of the countryside. “Specially not where Cloud family bones is buried.”

  The Arkansas State Trooper who stood before her sighed. “I know, Liz,” he said.

  “Miss Cloud,” the silver-haired woman corrected. She was dressed in layers of blue and red gingham with a gray shawl tossed over her narrow shoulders, but at barely five feet tall she looked painfully small next to the burly officer.

  “Miss Cloud,” he said. “They are not going to hurt the land and they have a perfect legal right with documents from the state government to harvest turpentine.”

  “Ain’t no government that can give no permission to desecrate graves —”

  “They are not going to desecrate any graves, Miss Cloud,” he said. “Turpentiners tap into the sap layers of the tree under the pine bark. The trees got something called oleoresin they put on the wound to protect it and seal the opening. Turpentiners channel the oleoresin into containers to make spirits of turpentine. They don’t disturb the ground at all.”

  “They’s walkin’ on it ain’t they?” The old woman spat. “Yankee boots like yours walking on ground my pappy fought the blue coats for.”

  “Now Miss Cloud you know I ain’t no Yankee. I come from less than fifty miles north of here,” the officer said. “And the state can give turping rights to that Collin’s Company, so don’t be yelling at them no more.”

  The old woman squeezed her face into an unpleasant expression and tilted her head like a cat regarding a mouse. “The name of these mountains is made of two Choctaw words: ouac, their name for a buffalo, and chito, which is large.” She looked up at the trooper and then waved a gnarled hand at the plains and hills around them. “When my pappy’s pappy came out here there were still herds of
those animals that covered the prairies of Ouachita and gave life to the Choctaw. They used every part of any animal they killed and gave thanks to its spirit for the life it gave them.”

  She walked past the officer to a wooden statue of a distinguished, middle-aged man in full confederate officer’s uniform looking out over the flat land of the hollow. It was aged by weather but even a casual glance could see that the features of the wooden man bore a striking resemblance to the old woman.

  “White men saw only something to conquer and kill. Greedy hunters killed them for their hides, left their bones to bleach in the sun and the meat to rot.” The woman continued, “Eastern and northern folks pushed their way past here heading to the rich lands to the west, taking what they wanted. But the folks that settled here were different, learned to scratch a living out of this land and not waste; to listen to the earth and live with it.”

  “Now, Granny Liz,” the trooper slipped into the familiar address, “no one is talking about enslaving you or conquering the land, they just want to slash a few trees for the sap; people need the money — things are bad outside these hills since the crash.”

  “Ain’t no crash for those what work with their hands,” the woman countered.

  “Then you don’t need that shotgun you was pointing at them boys down in the hollow,” the trooper said. When she turned back to squint at him he smiled. “I will talk to them about staying on the other side of the stream even though they have the right from the governor to come over here.”

  She made a noise like a cat hissing, but his smile stayed fixed and she accepted it as a peace offering. She pulled out a corncob pipe and a match from a dress pocket and lit up.

  “Governor’s paper ain’t no real right, but if they stay over the stream I won’t pepper’em with shot.”

  “Miss Cloud I will have to ask you not to pepper them at all,” he said. “Even if they do stray on your side of the stream. Call me.”

  She glared at him in an attempt to make his smile crack but finally nodded. “But mark my words, Vernon Stuckie,” she said. “I knowed you when you was barely in long pants — don’t you lie to me.”

  “I promise Miss Cloud, as long as you promise to not shoot anyone or I’ll have to take your shotgun.” He tried a stern look at her, but his expression strayed from sour to a smile when she just turned her back to head toward her ramshackle log cabin.

  “Pick up some of my peach preserves ‘fore you leave, boy,” she said. “But leave my squirrel gun alone.”

  ~~~~~

  “The trooper is leaving the old hag's place now, Mister Collins,” Henry Duck said as he lowered the field glasses from his eyes. “He took something with him into his patrol car.”

  “Did you see what it was?” Joe Collins, unlike his foreman, was a thin man, almost delicate of features and with long thin fingers that he drummed against his thighs constantly. He was not dressed for the woods like Duck.

  “No, sir,” Duck said. “Maybe a box or something.”

  “Back country bribe. Pigs feet or some other delicacy.” Collins said with disgust. “I can’t count on the law backing me up.”

  “You got the governor’s paper, boss; the law’s gotta back you up.”

  “Not down here,” Collins said. “These Rubes stick together.” He scowled from his fedora to his thin-soled patent leather shoes, now covered with mud from the Arkansas hills.

  “So how do we handle it?” Duck said. The deformed ear and scar tissue under his eyes were souvenirs of his failed ring career, and his accent and his attitude were from the streets of Chicago’s South Side.

  “Same way you handled it in Florida,” Collins said as he picked burrs from his pants before getting into his crème-colored coupe. “That old bag has the best pine trees in this whole area along those flats on either side of that stream. I want them all cut and bleeding for us by the end of the month or we’ll lose the season.”

  “Won’t that state cop get suspicious if we say we shot her in self defense after he talked to her?”

  The delicate Collins paused at his picking and pursed his lips, giving the burly man a cross look. “No reason to go that far — yet. And besides, the state cop seemed pretty friendly with the old bat.”

  Duck put the binoculars up to his eyes and studied the clearing where Elizabeth Cloud’s cabin and outbuildings were located.

  Duck gave a gap-toothed smile. “That dump looks pretty rickety to me, boss. “Seems like an old lady like that could knock over a candle or maybe fall asleep smoking in bed, ya know?"

  “I was thinking that a good Samaritan who was maybe working across the stream close by might see the fire and manage to save her, but, not the house, ya know? The old bag of bones would have to move out, but would be, ya know, grateful and all.”

  “Have I mentioned that you are a gem, Mister Duck?” Collins slid into his coupe and closed the door softly. “A regular diamond in the rough.”

  Chapter One: Old Potions and Odd Notions

  Elizabeth Cloud had lived in the valley at the foot of the Devil’s Backbone her whole life. She had been born on a farm down the other end of the valley.

  Arlan, her oldest brother, had died fighting the European war that was supposed to end all wars. Josephus, next oldest, had been killed in a bar fight with one of the Gillie brothers; that had started a feud that took Micah, the youngest, before her pa and cousins had killed the four Gillies and ended it.

  Micah’s death had taken the heart out of her mother, who withered away and died shortly after. Elizabeth’s father followed her a few months later.

  That was when Old Granny Jenny had taken in Elizabeth as her full-time apprentice; though, in fact, she had spent much of her free time growing up helping old Jenny gather herbs and always knew she was destined to be a grannywoman.

  She had moved to the north side of the little stream and into Jenny’s cabin toward the older woman’s end and had stayed almost eighteen years.

  In that time the surrounding valleys had come to rely on Granny Liz when sicknesses came on them, children were to be born, or when there was suspicion (or need) of a curse. She grew her own vegetables and herbs and gathered many rare plants for her poultices and potions. Things like skunk salve for clearing congestion, and tea made from tubers of the Barnyard Blue Flower for soothing colic.

  It was inherited knowledge from the frontier immigrants who brought European herbal knowledge and learned from the native tribes along the way. The Grannywomen who had passed the knowledge down to Old Jenny and then to Liz had also revealed secrets beyond medicinals. Dark secrets that lurked in the shadows, though no pastor would ever speak about it at the pulpit.

  Everyone in the Ozarks knew the power of the grannywomen and so they were respected and feared and tacitly ignored by the men of the cloth who kept their preaching confined mostly to the daylight hours and on Sundays, leaving the nights to the wisewomen.

  ~~~~~

  State Trooper Vernon Stuckie knocked on the door of the offices of Collins Enterprises. He had driven from Granny Liz’s place to the town of Greenwood where the turpentine company had its local headquarters, but the storefront office was closed for the day. He regarded the ‘out to dinner’ sign with a jaundiced eye.

  Greenwood was the county seat of Sebastian County and was named for Judge Alfred Burton Greenwood. The business district spread over four blocks and had a number of restaurants that Stuckie knew of. He considered which one of them the city-bred Collins might choose.

  His guess was the Arkansas House, a steakhouse two blocks from the office.

  He was right.

  “Ah, Trooper Stuckie,” Collins said with a wide smile. “What a coincidence, you chowing down here.” The table before the slight man was laden with enough food for three men the trooper’s size.

  “I’m afraid I’m here to talk to you about the turpentine collection down on the bottoms over at the Backbone.”

  “What about it, officer?” The businessman held a glass of beer in
one hand and poked at a steak with his fork.

  “Your man had trouble today with old Miss Cloud.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Collins said. “I heard about some trouble with the owner. An old woman, right?” He motioned for the officer to sit at an empty chair at the table. “She pulled a gun on my guys.”

  “More a force of nature,” the trooper said as he sat. “And she did brandish a gun at them, but I have her assurances that will not happen again.”

  “Well good,” Collins said. “It’s nice to see my tax dollars are doing their work —”

  “But there is a slight complication.”

  “Complication?” The businessman paused in the process of pushing a piece of steak into his mouth. “What complication? I got permits from the state to have my boys cut all those trees on the state land down there in the hollow.”

  “Yes, technically, you do, sir,” Stuckie said. “But the survey lines of the state land extend to the west side of the little stream that runs through that hollow. Quite a ways, in fact.”

  “So? I got rights to tap the trees there.”

  “Yes,” the trooper said. “Technically, but the folks here abouts do things a little less formally — the state park line was never really marked so they got kinfolk buried on that land.”

  “So? We ain’t strip mining the place, just cuttin’ some trees.”

  “Well, she still sees it as, well, kinda sacrilegious.”

  The businessman set down his drink and fork and leaned forward. “It ain’t no such thing; it is legal and I expect you to enforce the law or I can talk to my lawyer and your governor. That bottom land is prime for turp-sap, and I want it all.”

  “And I will,” Stuckie said with bite in his tone. “I’ve gotten Miss Cloud to agree to not bother any of your men as long as they stay on the East side of the stream —”

  “But we —”

  “I know you have the right,” the lawman continued. “But it will keep peace if you stay east. Leave that land for last and let me work on her some more. I’m sure we can resolve this peacefully.”

  Collins sat back in his chair and picked up his beer. “Yeah,” he smiled before he took a deep draught of his beer. “No bloodshed. Sure, I’m a reasonable guy. We can start in the other sections, and that’ll give you plenty of time to convince the old hag. Sure.”