the step. The boards were so hot they near burnt up the back of my thighs.
“You stay outta those woods, Kathy, you hear me? I want you to promise me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, although I couldn’t see the sense in it. I hadn’t been in the woods. The naked man had practically driven right up to our own house, after all. Sometimes the way grown-ups think is a bafflement to me. I was suspicious that Mom wasn’t mad about the man at all but was, as usual, mad about Aunt Shirley and getting things all tangled up in her mind.
It was Aunt Shirley, my Dad’s sister, who taught me the magic of the woods, although if my Mom and Dad knew, they’d skin me alive and boil Aunt Shirley in oil. They already figured she was half-crazy, but she’s not. She knows stuff. And she’s a wood-walker, just like me.
I’ve always been drawn out into the woods like under some enchantment. In the field past the stone wall, the first stand of birch trees and the big oak is my special place: an abandoned apple orchard with a stream running through it that isn’t much more than a trickle in August, but runs like a chorus of glory in the springtime. The trees are all ramble-down and scrabble, pretty much forgotten by everybody.
Except me and Aunt Shirley, that is.
Aunt Shirley came down and spent three weeks with us every summer. Mom didn’t like it much and didn’t put flowers in her room like she did when her own sister came to visit. For me, though, it was the best time of the year.
We went walking out in the woods early every morning she was there. Sometimes she’d come and get me before the house was even awake. She put her fingers against my lips to rouse me quietly and we snuck down the narrow stairs in the dusty shimmers of first light, being careful of the creaky third step. It was our private ritual, she said. We went out across the back field and over the stone fence, which was slick with moss and dew. Our feet got wet and we shivered against the chill, but stood it, knowing we’d be warm as soon as the sun was full up in the sky. She showed me plants that made medicine.
“The forests and meadows are God’s drugstore, Kat,” she said. “A living, breathing pharmacy.”
We picked stuff like five-finger grass, which is good for loose bowels; yarrow, which cleans the blood and treats the piles; blue cohosh for women’s cramps, and black snakeroot for bad skin and nervousness. Aunt Shirley gathered the plants in her sweetgrass basket that had been woven by a special friend. Then we’d go to the stand of cedars near the stream and she’d put her basket down and raise her hands up to the light.
“You must always breathe in beauty, walk in beauty, dance in beauty,” she’d say. She twirled around in slow circles with her robin’s-egg blue shawl that came all the way from Spain and her black hair swirling around her. I thought Aunt Shirley was the most beautiful woman in the world.
“There is magic all around,” she said, holding my face in her cool hands, my nostrils filling up with her smell of vanilla and something deep and woody. “Close your eyes and repeat after me: God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is alive. Magic is afoot.”
We repeated the words over and over until they became a chant and then a song and then nothing but sound rising in the air. She caught my hands in hers and we spun around and around and fell back on the soft mossy earth, the sky reeling, and our eyes wet from laughing.
She taught me it was places like this, under the protection of the trees and sky, which were most sacred to God.
“Church is all right as far as it goes,” she said, “and I suppose that’s pretty far for some, but for me, this is where the Spirit lives.” Her eyes were bright as black stones on a sun-dazzled river bottom. “Can’t you just feel it?”
I was sure I could.
Mornings were for Aunt Shirley and me, and magic.
“You’re just like your Aunt Shirley,” Mom would say and mean it not in a good way. “You be careful you don’t end up like her, too.” By which she meant living in a railway caboose sixty miles north of Scout’s Landing on Blue Bird Lake, near the Red Dog Indian Reservation.
“She lets Indians sit at her table,” she’d whisper and shake her head.
I remember one day Mom and her friend Sylvia were sitting around smoking cigarettes and picking at a cinnamon coffee cake.
“A woman alone like that, well,” Mom said, “you can imagine.” She made her eyes as wide as possible and raised her eyebrows. She pulled her chin to her chest and three rolls of fat puffed out her neck. “I’d be very interested to know how she makes ends meet, if you catch my meaning.”
I was moused-up in a corner stool in the kitchen, under the African violets that crowded the windowsill. I ate spoonfuls of chocolate milk powder from the tin and tried to stay quiet enough so they’d forget I was listening.
“A touch of the tar brush there, I suspect,” she said. “You know, she’s only Bob’s half-sister. Some say their mother was—how shall I put this nicely?—friendly with...,” and she leaned over to Sylvia’s waiting ear and whispered something.
“No!” said Sylvia, her eyes wide as an owl.
“It’s what they say,” said Mom, nodding wisely, her finger against the side of her beaky nose.
I’d never heard that ‘tar brush’ expression before. I got my behind smacked smart later for asking Dad what it meant.
“It just means that whereas all the rest of the family’s fair, your Aunt Shirley’s got olive skin and black hair and brown eyes. That’s all it means, you understand?” said Dad. “Do you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, rubbing my stinging backside and feeling the injustice of the world. “I just asked.”
“Well, don’t,” he said, and huffed off to find Mom.
Then came the day of the third naked man, the one down in the orchard. It was one of those days when even though the sky’s clear as the chlorine-shocked public pool, there’s a crackle of something in the air. You wake up just knowing everybody’s going to be snappish and if something nasty has been waiting to happen, it’s going to happen today. And, sure enough, it wasn’t but lunch when all hell broke loose.
My mom and dad and Aunt Shirley had a whopper of a fight. The kind where I was thrown out of the house for the duration. Aunt Shirley’d been kinda sick on and off her whole visit, so sick a couple of days that we’d missed our wood walks. I thought it was mean as hell, my mother picking on her the way she did, and Mom chose a day when she was particularly under the weather to start the fight.
“You’d best go out and play for a time, Kathy. I need to have a few words with her,” Mom’d said jerking her neck in the direction of the bathroom where sounds of Aunt Shirley being sick could be heard.
“I want to stay and make sure she’s all right.”
“No. Out. Now.” She pointed to the door.
“D-a-a-d,” I pleaded.
“Go pick some berries or something,” he said, his stubby hands pushed way deep into the pockets of his jeans, his fingers rattling all his coins, which was never a good sign.
“Fine,” I said, as unhappily as I could, and grabbed
