Page 3 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
Cora clears her throat, reboils the water in the kettle. She sets about making breakfast, cracking the eggs to poach them, the way she likes them, and placing two more in a saucepan for Howard. She can’t remember how Carrie likes her eggs, and for a moment that bothers her. Scrambled? Or perhaps fried, on slabs of white bread thick with butter? The corner of a slice of toast slips through her fingertips and she drops it, butter smearing the flagstone floor.
“Just my luck,” Cora says, her eighty-year-old knees creaking as she bends to wipe it up. A blast of cold air finds its way through a crack in the window frame and she sniffs. The scent of frost burns her nose—too sweet, too bitter. She frowns, wondering if it means something after all, this early sign of winter. A decade on, and now everything, she realizes, is about to change again.
She butters more toast, cuts it on the diagonal, and places the slices in the toast rack. She knows you’re meant to butter toast at the table, but it always goes too cold. She likes the butter melted in, turning to sunshine on her plate.
Cora brings it all to the table, and as Howard shuffles his way in, she thinks about how he used to look. How he seems to have crumpled like a tissue in the last few years. He used to bring her flowers, and she would kiss that shiny brown forehead, dipping her chin and patting his cheek. He was always shorter than her, even in school, a boy who never sat still, always moving, always talking and planning and sketching thoughts in the air with his hands. He wasn’t intimidated by a tall woman, or by her last name. In fact, he embraced it. She kept her surname when they married, just as every Morgan woman does. And he kept his.
She pulls out a chair, the legs scraping against the floor, just as he does the same.
And she freezes.
Howard looks up at her, something like fear glinting in hiseyes, but only for a heartbeat. Cora looks to the door, as if she can see through it. Past it. All the way to ten years ago, when Carrie left and broke her heart.
The world seems to hold its breath.
Then a tap, quiet and hesitant, sounds at the door.
“She’s here,” Cora breathes.
Chapter 3
Carrie
Abigail had wildflowers left on her doorstep for a month and a day this summer.
—Clemence Morgan, December 18, 1875
Cora opens the door as though she is confronting a ghost, her own skin skull white, eyes glistening slightly. She’s still wearing her dressing gown, the one she’s always worn. It’s pink and felted, with buttons instead of a cord. More of a housecoat. She opens then closes her mouth, and I can’t help the smile bubbling up my throat. I’ve never known my great-aunt to be anything less than effusive, with a snap or a crackle to her words.
I say, “I can come back later or...” just as her arms come around me. I hesitate, her scent and the nip of her bones crushing me, before I bring my arms around her. She’s all sage and coffee and snow, ribs too sharp, just like always. I still can’t pass a coffee shop, even now, without picturing Cora and her kitchen.
“You got my letter?” she asks, finally letting me go. She stares up at me with those watery blue eyes of hers, the irises circled with a deep navy blue. “Did the mountains want you back?”
“I did,” I say, my hand straying to my pocket. For some reason, ever since it arrived on that damp day three weeks ago, I haven’t been able to put it down. I’ve scoured Cora’s letter and the terms of Ivy’s will as though searching for hidden meanings, secretsburied within secrets. “And they... I think so. I walked up to the lookout. But I thought I saw or heard... I don’t know.”
Her blue gaze narrows. She knows. “Did you leave the path?”
“Not once.”
She exhales, her sharp edges softening, and the house at her back exhales along with her. “You best come in. Howard’s eating his breakfast. You want eggs? Toast? There’s a fresh pot of coffee, but if it’s not enough I can make more.”
Her words trail away with her as she turns from me, making her way deeper into the house. I linger for a heartbeat, remembering the last time I was here. How I pulled all the pins out of my perfectly tamed hair, leaving them in a snarled little heap on the sofa.
And then I left.
I step along the hallway. Past the old photographs lining the walls, the sepia-toned images of families long dead. The portraits of ancestors, of trappers and the men of the mountains. Cora collects them. She finds them in charity shops and junk sales around Woodsmoke. Dusting them off, she carries them back home like a magpie. She says they are the history that no one else will remember. That’s up to us, up to every Morgan woman, she says, to remember the stories and preserve them. Because when a story is no longer shared, it becomes a secret. Then it all too easily either withers and dies or grows into something quite monstrous: a curse.
There is one photograph I remember, one that she acquired a year or so before I left. It chills me even now. A black-and-white photograph of a man, standing with his back to the mountains. It’s actually not that old, taken just before Cora acquired it, which is why my eyes are drawn to it. His eyes, flint and hunger staring back, as though he will somehow reach out and snatch you in. A shiver curls down the back of my neck as I catch sight of it, and Iwalk a little quicker. It lingered at the corners of my dreams before I left, but now, glancing at that portrait with fresh, older eyes a decade later, I see he is around my age. Handsome in that rugged way that few men are nowadays. Perhaps his true story wasn’t recorded by a Morgan woman, and that’s why he’s so hungry to tell it. Perhaps his true story withered and died along with him. That’s all I know, all Cora told me. That the man in this portrait was lost to the mountains.
I walk into the dining room, and Howard raises himself from his chair. He looks at me the way he always does, with a slight smirk turning up his sunken brown cheeks. Like we have a private joke that only we know. He never shares that look with Cora.
“Good journey, my flower?” he asks in his cracked old voice.
I grin. I haven’t been called that in so long.Flower. “Not bad. The car didn’t give out on me, so...”
He shrugs, waving his hand at a seat. “Coffee’s hot still. Good to see you, Carrie.”
“Good to see you too.” I take the mug from Cora, hovering next to me, and we all sit in uncomfortable, charged silence. I sip the coffee, trying not to look at either of them. Wondering why in these moments I don’t have a single word in my head. Like I’ve forgotten the entire dictionary.
