Page 43 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
“He played guitar, and he spent hours working out each song, finding the right notes to something we heard on the radio. And... he was the one who made my whole family laugh. Real belly laughs, the kind that tip you backward in your chair at the dinner table.” He huffs a laugh, looking at me. And I leave the space for him to keep talking.
As we sit there, with the sun wending its way through the sky, I figure Cora can’t be right. He’s just the quiet type, someone who chooses not to go into Woodsmoke too often. Or maybe he shops the next town over, perhaps avoiding memories of Henri. I do know how that feels, but I can imagine him being caught in cobwebs of memories if he traipsed through town.
He has to be real. How could someone who carries this much love and grief and promise not be?
Chapter 34
Cora
The next day Cora is sure that the mountains will take more from her. That there is always a higher price. Maybe she never understood the bargains she made to begin with. Howard is shuffling more slowly, and his breath is raspy and thick, as though the mountains have taken root in his lungs, using up all the space, all the air. She tries to make him sit still so she can keep him anchored here with her and fully assess the extent of the damage to his body caused by the passage of time.
“Give over,” he says gruffly, yanking the pail of chicken feed out of her hands. “When have you ever done the feeding? Not in all the years we’ve had the layers.”
“Maybe I should learn. Maybe it’s about time you showed me. You know full well I’m twice as capable as those young’uns in town, Howard Price.” She fidgets, pulling on her coat, following him out into the yard. The cold pinches everything, making her shrink back down inside herself. She chews on her lip as Howard slowly paces the yard, throwing out feed to the clucking mess of feathers at his feet. Cora steps over chicken shit, eyeing him as he stops for a moment to take a long, wheezing breath. “The winter isn’t good for you. You should be in the warm, by the fire—”
“Coraline, for the love of...” He pulls off his cap, shaking his head. He’s far more stooped over than last winter, closer to the ground, as he places the pail on the dirt. “It’s just age. We’re getting older, and there’s no use in just sitting inside and waiting for death to come knocking, is there?”
“You need a checkup. When was the last time you went to the doctor? That nice receptionist, the one with the mole, you know? She always finds you a good appointment time. I can phone her; you could be seen tomorrow...” Cora trails off as Howard shakes his head again.
He places his cap on his head and picks up the pail again. “When will you learn? Meddling. Always meddling. I know that Jess Gray was here last night. I’m not dumb as well as old.”
“I refused her this time, if you must know.”
“That book is the real killer,” he says, shaking his head. “Your superstitions have grown a life of their own. Look at your mother. Your grandma Tabitha. All bitter and gray and cheated in the end. Like they’d been stuck with a jack when they really wanted the queen. The only one who escaped was Ivy, by giving the damn thing to you. The best thing you can do is throw it on the fire, where it belongs. Should have been turned to ash years ago.” He pauses, surveying the yard thoughtfully. “Would make great compost.”
Cora splutters, readying her sharp tongue. But Howard suddenly clutches at his shoulder. “Howard?”
He makes a noise that sounds like a deflating beach ball and bends over almost double, clutching his arm to his chest.
“Howard!” Cora hobbles over to him, prodding and poking at him to make him walk inside. She can’t help thinking of all the chickens, how they’ll peck at him if he falls, how she won’t be able to lift him again, not with her knees, not with this gnawing cold—
“Woman!” he says gruffly, pulling his arm away from her. His glare could light a match, and she stumbles back, startled. “It’s just my shoulder, just myuseless, bloody body giving up, bit by bit. And before you say it,no doctors. No nice receptionist with the mole. And no bloody bargains with that book!”
She watches him for a moment, the blood still heating her cheeks and throat. “Fine.”
Then she turns on her heel, marches back into the house, and slams the door so hard the picture on the opposite wall rattles and falls clean off. She jumps when she sees it staring up at her from the floor. It’s a picture of Carrie and Lillian, back when Carrie was so young that she would still curl up in Cora’s lap like a kitten. Cora bends down and scoops up the framed picture, her hips clicking and protesting at the effort. She feels every movement now, every twist, as though a knife is probing her joints.
She pulls the back door open and eyes Howard critically for a heartbeat. His suntanned skin isn’t as full of life as it used to be, but drawn and gray. She worries. Is this the cost of one of her workings? Has the price been drawn from the one she loves?
Carrie. She could speak to Carrie. Howard might not talk to doctors, but maybe he’ll listen to Carrie. Howard has always had a soft spot for his grandniece. Besides, Cora needs a reason, an excuse, to reach out...
“Just popping out!”
She’s off, hobbling through the house on purposeful feet, checking that she has tissues in the pocket of her coat, grabbing her hat, her gloves, putting the mobile phone she never switches on into the other pocket. She leaves before he can question her, before he untangles her thoughts and realizes where she is heading. She can’t wait until the moment he collapses, until he has no will of his own and it’s too damn late. Carrie is the last of the Morgans in Woodsmoke with her. The only person besides herself she can really trust. And who else will persuade him to take it easy? Meddling, he calls it. Well, she calls itfixing.
Ivy’s old cottage is silent when she arrives. Too silent, too watchful, swollen with memories of years past. Cora has avoidedthis cottage, just like she avoided Ivy in the end. Just like Ivy avoided her. After Carrie left, after she admitted to Ivy what she’d done the night that Jess came to her, they argued one final time and never spoke again.
But now, she doesn’t wait for an invitation. As she steps over the threshold, the scents of new wood and fresh paint envelop her, jarring her out of the past. The cottage has been reborn, stripped bare of the past and made ready for the future. But the familiar still lingers and haunts the corners of the rooms. As Cora walks through the lounge, marveling at the way Carrie has transformed the place, she can still see flickering images from before. The day Ivy, as she fed Lillian, offering her the book, telling her there was a story inside, a way to break its bond with Ivy and form it anew with Cora. For a price. Cora can see the day she was last here, the day of their final row, how Ivy ran her hand over the mantelpiece as everything came crashing down. Ivy never forgave her for all her meddling, and she blamed her for Carrie’s departure. Then, when Lillian left, Ivy drew even further away, and Cora knew they would never reconcile.
She shakes off that day with a shudder, reminding herself that Ivy forgave her in the end, with that will and that message stitched into the quilt. Death is the greatest leveler of them all.
As Cora walks through to the kitchen, discovering a space that looks like a showroom, she sees Carrie’s handwritten list on the counter. Her neat little loops and swirls, the handwriting Cora always hoped to find peering up at her on an envelope, slipped through the letter box one day. It’s a to-do list, of sorts, with more items crossed off than not—plaster back bedroom, for instance, andpaint skirting on the ground floor. Then she sees another person’s scrawl along the bottom of the list. A stranger’s handwriting, all spiky and uneven and wrong. It says simply,Take a day off with me.
“He’s back, then,” she murmurs to herself. Then she looks outof the kitchen window, eyeing the mountains and their white crowns. “Back with the frost...”
She taps a fingernail on the handwriting, wondering where he’s taken her Carrie. She searches her mind, trying to remember the stories, the echoes inside other stories, of people disappearing in the snow and cold. Of people disappearing with the frost who shouldn’t have. She draws in a breath, suddenly restless, wishing she could still walk the old trails, follow the veins and arteries into the beating heart of the mountains. But her hips, her knees... Age robs people of many things, she thought, stealing little pieces of a person until all that’s left is so shrunken and small that it can hardly be called a life. And now Howard, with his strained, drawn features, his crumpling over, his refusal, his pig-stubbornrefusalto concede even the smallest inch of ground—
Her heart thumps once, twice, pulling her back to her own needs, her own body. Her mind turns soft at the edges, and she throws out a hand, gripping the wall. Palpitations. Endless reminders of her own edges now, the boundaries of her shrinking world.
