The first was of the staircase waterfall where the creek took a sudden tumble before heading on again at a quieter pace. The second was of that old deserted homestead up a side valley of the hollow, the tin roof sagging, the rotting walls falling inward. The last one could have been painted anywhere in this forest but it was easy to imagine it had been done down by the creek, looking up the slope into a view of yellow birches, beech and sprucey-pines growing thick and dense, with a burst of light coming through a break in the canopy.
I guess I don’t know much about art, but I liked these paintings a lot. They were kind of rough—not a whole lot of detail—but I could recognize where they’d been done, and they were about as good as a picture gets. Not better than Aunt Lillian’s, just different. But Elsie got more excited than I’d seen her in a long time.
“These are the ones by Milo Johnson,” she said.
“The other famous artist,” Adie said. “One of the two fellows who disappeared in these woods back in the twenties or something that you were telling me about.”
Elsie nodded. “And I guess we know where they ended up.”
None of us said much for a time. We just sat there by the chest, thinking about the day we’d had.
“Any of you got a bad urge to go back across?” I asked.
Adie and the older twins shook their heads. The younger twins looked primed and ready, but I think that had more to do with the fun they’d been having at the end with Li’l Pater. Only Elsie got this kind of dreamy look that put a deep worry in me.
“You won’t try to go back,” I said to her.
She blinked, then looked at me. “I don’t know. Everything was so much more there than it is here. I hated all the business with those fairy courts, but I’ve got to admit, that if the chance came up, I’d probably go.”
“Promise me you won’t unless you talk to me first.”
She met my gaze, then gave a slow nod.
“You’ve got that promise,” she said.
“We have got to go,” Adie said.
We put everything back into the chest except I kept out one of the sketchbooks, filled with drawings and little handwritten descriptions of various plants and such to bring home with me. I put it in the backpack that Adie’d used to bring up some preserves for Aunt Lillian, then I closed the door on her house—no, it’s my house now, I realized—and we headed for home, stopping only to collect Laurel’s and Bess’s instrument cases along the way.
Grace and Ruth played innocent but there wasn’t one of us didn’t figure we knew who’d played that trick of filling them with stones. I guess the only thing that saved them from getting a licking from the older twins was how close we’d all come to dying today. Thing like that puts everything into a different perspective, that’s for sure.
11
There was a thunderstorm in Mama’s eyes when we come trailing out of the woods and crossed the pasture to home. She didn’t even acknowledge Root’s happy greeting, just stood there with her hands on her hips as we came up to her.
“Now remember,” Adie had warned when we were on the path coming home. “We lost track of time and we’ll just take what Mama gives us in punishment. No talk about fairy courts and other-worlds or we’ll all be looking at a licking.”
Everybody’d agreed with her, though none of us felt real happy about telling Mama a lie as big as the one we’d be telling her now. And then we still had to figure out a way to explain how Aunt Lillian had come to leave all her property and lands to me.
But agreeing’s one thing, doing’s another, and the younger twins were just too excited by it all to remember to keep it to themselves.
“Mama! Mama!” Grace cried as she broke from us and ran toward her. “You’re not going to believe the story we have to tell you.”
For as Long a Time as Distance
Sarah Jane
Mama took it better than I’d ever have thought she would.
Once Grace started into the whole story, we couldn’t just leave her hanging, so we all filled in our parts. We started talking in the field behind the house and ended up sitting around the picnic table in the backyard, Mama looking from one to the other of us, waiting for one of us to admit we were just pulling her leg.
“You know what this sounds like, don’t you?” she said when we were finally done.
I just pushed the sketchbook across the table to her. It didn’t really prove anything, except that Aunt Lillian was quite the artist. There was nothing in the book to confirm bee fairies and ‘sangmen and otherworlds and any of it. There was only our word.
Mama looked up from the sketchbook.
“Well, I’ve heard stranger stories,” she said. “But that was late at night when folks were spinning yarns and maybe we’d partook of a jar or two of ‘shine.”
“We weren’t drinking,” Ruth assured her.
Mama laughed. “No, I don’t suppose you were.”
“But you believe us, don’t you?” Grace said.
I could see that she didn’t want to. It was a hard, strange story to swallow. But I knew what she was thinking. We were her own girls, and maybe we’d told a fib or two in our time, trying to get out of a chore or go someplace that maybe we shouldn’t, like some of the dances Laurel and Bess went to, but we’d never lied to her about nothing important. It just wasn’t something we’d do. So maybe what we’d told her sounded too much like some old storyteller’s crazy yarn, but come down to the crunch, she didn’t have much choice.
“I suppose I have to,” she said with a slow nod.
I guess it helped when Aunt Lillian came by a couple of days later and took Mama and me into town to see her lawyer. I think what I liked best was that Mama never came right out and asked Aunt Lillian about the strange story we’d told her. Once she’d taken us at our word, it wasn’t something she needed to have anybody confirm. But the business we conducted with the lawyer allowed her to see that this much of the story we’d told was true, without her having to go asking anybody about it.
“Are you sure about what you’re doing here?” she asked Aunt Lillian as we drove into town.
“ ‘Bout as sure as a body can be about a thing they don’t know is right or wrong, they just feel it’s something they’ve got to do. For as long a time as distance I’ve been steady, doing what I should do. I reckon maybe it’s time I took me a chance.”
I saw the corner of Mama’s mouth twitch with a smile.
“I know that feeling,” Mama said.
“We all do, girl,” Aunt Lillian told her. “It’s what makes us human.”
As the months went by, our adventures in that otherworld pretty much started to seem like a dream. But I had the homestead and the maps of the hills marking off my property that the lawyer gave me to prove that it really did happen, and we talked about it among ourselves, my sisters and me.
My schooling never did progress. I moved out to Aunt Lillian’s homestead not long after we got back and there was nothing no one could say or do to make me change my mind. I’m a Dillard woman, through and through, headstrong as any in my family. I guess Mama knew that, and maybe she also knew that I was a woman out of time, that I was always going to be more comfortable on the homestead than I’d ever be in the modern world.
“Least this way we can still see each other from time to time,” she said. “ ‘Stead of having you run off somewhere and never knowing where you are or how you’re doing.”
She’d come up once in a while and I always made a point of stopping by the farm whenever I went to town. And I had all my supplies delivered there instead of to the Welches’ like Aunt Lillian used to have done.
I sold those three Milo Johnson paintings and we got more money for them than I thought it was possible to get for a thing. I divided that money in eight equal portions for Mama and the seven of us girls. Mine I just gave to the foundation that had been looking after Aunt Lillian’s money for all those years.
I didn’t sell any of Aunt Lillian’s work, but through the fo
undation I donated all of what Elsie called the color studies and field paintings to the Newford Museum of Art, and they were pretty pleased as they were just starting in on a retrospective of her work. They tried to get in touch with me or Aunt Lillian through the foundation, but the foundation wasn’t giving out my name or whereabouts and I got left in peace.
The money changed things—not who we were, just our circumstances. Mama paid off the mortgage on the farm. If she’d wanted to live simple like me, she didn’t need to work anymore, but she liked the going into town and staying busy that holding her job entailed, though she went from full-time to part-time. Mornings she’d be at her work— dispatch in the sheriff’s office. Afternoons she’d visit old folks like Mrs. Runion or do charity work at the hospital in Tyson, or at the old folks’ home in town.
Adie didn’t get married, but she had herself a child, a little red-haired girl that she named Lily. She and Lily lived with Mama on the farm and Adie squirreled away her share of what we got from the paintings in a college fund for Lily.
I remember thinking sometimes how she’d seemed lonely, even with six sisters and all those boyfriends she always had. After Lily came along, she never seemed like that to me again.
Laurel and Bess took the money and made themselves a CD which is doing pretty good, they say, but it’s old-timey music, so you’re not about to hear it on the radio anytime soon. Especially not since in among all those old tunes and songs, they did a few covers of stuff by the Clash, Barry White, and a funny version of “Blue Suede Shoes” with the chorus line changed to “don’t you step on my blue-grass shoes.”
They’re traveling all the time, playing music festivals across the country in the summer, then touring in Europe during the winter. Seems like folks over there in places like Germany and Italy and such appreciate their kind of music more’n folks do here at home.
Elsie came to live with me, but not right away. She finished high school, then went on to study art at Butler University in Newford before she finally moved in with me. She was kind of a throwback there, the same way I’ve been ever since that day Root and I first met Aunt Lillian. Instead of slapping any old thing down on a canvas and finding something smart to say about it, she was drawing from life, sketching and cataloguing what she saw in the city the same way she’d done in the woods and around the homestead.
She loved to go through Aunt Lillian’s journals, comparing how Aunt Lillian took to a subject to how she herself put it down on paper. But most of her time she spent out in the woods, summer and winter, painting and drawing. We fixed up a big studio for her in the barn with good northern light and a potbellied old woodstove for the colder weather. She didn’t paint at night—we still didn’t have electricity or running water, and not much interest in getting either. Evenings we’d spend on the porch in the summer, just soaking in the night music of the hills. In the winter we’d read by oil lamps and candles in the parlor, or sitting at the kitchen table. Sometimes we’d just talk the whole of the night away.
About our only concession to the modern world was getting a cell phone. We kept it charged using a twelve-volt, but it was a pain hauling that old car battery back and forth through the woods for it to get charged. The only place we could get that phone to work is from the top of the hill, up back of the house.
I asked her once after she’d moved in with me if, given the chance, she’d still go back into that otherworld.
“Only if I knew I could come back here,” she said.
Not long after we had our adventure, Grace and Ruth got themselves a new friend, this fourteen-year-old boy named Peter Little. They were always talking about him, visiting with him, or he’d be at the farm with them. It was a few months before I finally got to meet him and when I did, I took him aside.
“You look different,” I said.
He was a little taller than me, maybe sixteen, a wiry teenager with crow-black hair and dark blue eyes that were sort of almond-shaped.
“Better or worse?” Li’l Pater asked.
I shook my head. “Not much of either. Just different. The girls know who you are?”
He hesitated for a moment, then nodded.
“You actually have a place you’re living?”
“Just the woods.”
“You’re not going to hurt them in any way, are you?”
He gave me a shocked look that told me more than any words he could have used. It just come up on him sudden, before he could even start to speak, and I held up a hand.
“I just had to ask,” I said. “They’re my sisters.”
“And I know how protective you are about them.”
“I guess you do.” I cocked my head and gave him a considering look. “So what are the three of you doing all the time?”
“I’m … teaching them about magic.”
“Nothing dangerous, I hope.”
I was thinking of the mischief that pair could get into all on their own without adding spells and what-have-you into the equation.
He shook his head.
“And what about you?” I asked. “What are you getting out of it?”
“I’m learning what it’s like to be human.”
I guess you’re wondering about what I was doing, how my life got changed by the adventure and all that money. Well, the truth is, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference one way or the other. I missed Aunt Lillian something awful, but looking after the homestead kept me busy. I loved living up there full-time, just me and Root, and I never really got lonely. If I did, it was just a short ramble along the creek and I’d be back at the farm with Mama and my sisters.
I did try my hand at drawing like Elsie and Aunt Lillian, but it wasn’t something I could ever get the hang of, don’t ask me why. But I took to writing pretty well. It’s not like I have the language I read in the books Mama gets for me from the library. But I find I like to put things down on paper. The stories Aunt Lillian told me. Things I see in the fields and woods around the homestead. Thoughts and dreams and such.
Elsie wants us to do a book together, a kind of field guide or collection of essays about these hills of ours. I’d write the words and she’d draw the pictures. I’m thinking on it, though I’m not sure that I want to write something that any old body could just pick up and read. Elsie says I just need to learn to let the words go once I’ve put them down on paper, but I don’t know.
Anywise, my life wasn’t changed too much by the adventure or the money or even living up here on Aunt Lillian’s homestead—not inside me. Not who I am. That came from a whole different direction, one I wasn’t even close to expecting.
I was splitting wood and putting it up in the woodshed for the winter when Root gave a warning bark. I set down the ax and turned to see what had caught his attention. With Root it could be anything from crows in the corn to a groundhog getting too bold for his britches—just saying a groundhog wore britches.
For a second I didn’t see anything. Then this fellow came out of the woods on the far side of the trees, moving so smooth and easy it was like he’d just appeared there. I had a moment’s worry, thinking maybe this was some more business with the fairies, but as he got closer, I could see he was human. Leastwise he looked human, though handsomer than most boys I’ve run across.
He was maybe eighteen, wearing hiking boots, jeans and a white T-shirt with a buckskin jacket over top, and carrying an ax. His hair was black as a starless night under a baseball cap turned backwards. His broad features had a coppery cast to them so I figured he was probably from the rez. Even with that jacket on you could tell he was strong as well as graceful.
My pulse started to quicken and I told it to hold up there. Whatever reason this boy had to come here, it wasn’t to court me. But my heart wouldn’t listen.
“Hey,” he said. “Is Lily around?”
My mouth felt too dry to talk so I just shook my head.
He smiled. “I see you’re doing my job.”
“Your … job?” I managed.
; “Putting in the winter wood.”
He held out a hand so that Root could give it a sniff, then bent and ruffled his fur. Standing up again, he came over and offered me his hand, too—to shake, not smell.
“I’m Oliver,” he said. “Oliver Creek.”
“Sarah Jane Dillard.”
His palm was dry and a little rough and my pulse just started going quicker. I let go of his hand and took a step back. I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I was feeling so hot I figured I must have a fever.
“Are you always this quiet, Sarah Jane?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“My granddad’s a friend of Lily’s,” he went on. “We help her out with some of the heavier work around here.”
“Like chopping wood.”
He held up his ax and nodded. “You want a hand?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
We didn’t talk much as we worked. Oliver was better at chopping and splitting than I was, so I let him go to it and spent most of my time stacking the stove-lengths in the woodshed. After a couple of hours, we took a break and sat on stumps by the wood pile, sipping iced tea.
“So where’s Lily?” Oliver asked. “Out hunting and gathering?”
I smiled and shook my head. “She’s … gone away.”
He gave me a sharp look and I realized what that had sounded like.
“No, she’s not dead or anything,” I quickly said. “She’s just moved …” I sighed. “It’s complicated.”
“She’s gone into the otherworld,” Oliver said.
Now it was my turn to look hard at him.
“You know about all of that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “My mother’s got sixteen sisters and they’re all medicine women, so all I’ve ever heard since I was a kid was about the manitou and manidò-akì—the spiritworld. Never been there myself, though. Never seen a spirit either, but I guess I believe they’re out there.”