by Ann Hite

It was the twenty-second of June, a Saturday night. One of the Brown twins—Maude wasn’t sure if it was Bob or Andy—ran up the path to her house. Maude was in bed with a book when she heard the beat of his bare feet on the path outside her window.

“Miss Tuggle, Mama’s finally having that baby. Can you come?” He stood on the porch, cap in his hand, uncomfortable, twisting and looking at his feet.

“I’ll be right behind you. Which one are you?”

This won a slight smile. “I’m Andy.”

“You run on back to the cabin. Let your parents know I’m right behind.”

He dawdled a minute and then took off running like the devil himself was chasing him. Them boys had this foolish notion that Maude’s daddy, bless him, could be seen swaying from the old oak tree where he hung himself years before. She found it downright funny. That old mountain was full of superstitions and ghost stories like the one that said Hobbs Pritchard’s skull was found in the hollow tree next to his house. Them boys probably found some dern animal skull. Maude had no doubt Hobbs was dead somewhere from a woman’s hand, but she doubted he died on Black Mountain. Folks were too scared to do anything about Hobbs. They just tolerated him. And secrets just didn’t exist. It broke her heart to think that sweet little wife of his had died due to him or his neglect. She just wandered off in a fog. Them woods were way too dangerous for that kind of actions. It was a pure shame. She was one of the only good things that happened to the Pritchard family. Maude figured one man could only be so mean because she treated a bad cut and a black eye on his sister. Liz never did admit that he was the one who hurt her. She was a quiet thing that just blended into the background. It wasn’t long after that incident that Liz married Allen. It was right tragic when he took his own life. Liz left the mountain. With those thoughts in her head, Maude was right proud she didn’t have any family left to drive her crazy.

She gathered up her bag and checked for essentials; clean scissors, a variety of herbs and powders for pain, a needle and thread, and a hook tool just in case the baby died before birth and she had to remove it. The Brown farm was just over the hill, a thirty-minute walk through her field. She filled the lamp and took out.

The weeds were the only growing thing that was plentiful in her herb garden. The ground was hard as a rock. The red clover was her biggest worry. She used it with a little honey to make a syrup for the whooping cough that plagued the mountain. It was the worse sickness to hit the mountain since the Spanish flu. She remembered the horror that illness brought. And just like the Spanish flu, book doctors couldn’t find a cure for whooping cough.

All the Tuggle women had been granny women, beginning with Maude’s great grandmother, who learned her skills from a Cherokee medicine woman. Being the mountain’s granny woman just came to Maude naturally. Living alone fit her like a nice loose dress.

The lantern she carried provided a good size circle of light as she crossed the field. Carlton’s headstone loomed to her right in the dim light. The worn letters that she chiseled into the rock had lasted for years.

“You know, Carlton, lately I’ve been thinking we probably wouldn’t have even liked each other after a year or two had you lived. You were rich, or so you said. I never could find your family. The baby would be a grown up man of nineteen. And where am I? Still talking to graves. If I could see him one time, it would make up for all the heartache. I really ought to get the nerve to move off this mountain like Liz Pritchard. I don’t want to spend another twenty years mourning.” Maude almost tripped in a hole, but caught herself. “I don’t want to deliver any more babies. I don’t want watch any more people die. I just want off this silly old mountain.” She looked like some fool yelling at the sky, but there wasn’t no one around to hear.

She kept on walking. But in her mind she pictured her life. Lord folks on the mountain saw her as a useful old maid. She guessed they were right, but not in a million years did they figure Maude had a secret so big it would have ruined her life if it was found out. Only one soul had known, and Mama took it with her to the grave. It was all so long ago that Maude just stopped thinking on it. But once a year, in early summer, when the black-eyed susans bloomed, she allowed herself a moment of wallowing in the ‘could of beens and the would of beens.’ Carlton’s memory walked the field just like the day he wandered into her life wearing his town suit. His eyes were green and his hair the color of Georgia clay.

His name was Carlton Parker, from the Asheville Parkers, or so he claimed. When it was all said and done, Maude tried to find his family, but not one Parker would claim him to a mountain girl with love in her eyes. So, Mama and Maude buried him under the big oak next to Daddy. Fever just ate him up from the inside out. He was the one who brought the Spanish flu up the mountain that killed off half the mountain. Carlton died before Maude could make things right and marry him. She prayed that flu would kill her—and God forgive her soul—the baby that was inside of her womb. It was Mama who took that nonsense right out of her head, told Maude to shape up and be a grownup about her actions. Maude didn’t blame Mama none. Lord knew she did what she had to do. She made the plan all by herself. Had the good Pastor Dobbins, who viewed bastard children to be equal with the devil, found out, Mama would have been ruined. She would have lost everything. It wasn’t too hard to hide because most kept to their cabins due to the flu.

The morning the soft baby boy was ripped from Maude’s arms and given to a missionary from Asheville, who was taking him to Maine, Maude doubted God’s very existence. She held out one last hope in him that he would use his mighty power to stop the separation, but the baby was taken. A lifetime went by in a blink of an eye and reduced the affair to a horrible memory that haunted Maude on nights like that one when she worked her way across that dark field to deliver a baby. It was unfair. She made her way to the Brown’s house as the tension rode the air like a lightning bolt through the heat.

As the sun rode the sky, Maude slept on her bed without clothes, drifting into a deep dreamless sleep. The Brown’s baby had finally shown his crowning glory at sunrise. It was that time of year where Maude spent most of the daylight hours inside. The heat that June seemed more like late August, dragging on and on without rain or relief. Some of the worse sickness occurred in hot weather.

Maude woke up around sunset to the sound of a knock on her door. Not another baby. She pulled on a dress.

A young man, his back to the door as he gazed at the valley, dressed in town clothes, hair so red it reminded her of carrots only a little darker, made her heart catch.

The young man turned as she opened the door. His jaw was squared as if he were full of determination. He held out his hand. “My name is Thomas Willow. Mrs. Conner, she’s in the first cabin as you start up the mountain, told me I should see you concerning the community’s health care.” When he smiled, his face transformed into a small boy, playing along a creek with his friends.

“Excuse me for staring, but she called you a granny woman. I expected an older lady.”

Maude tingled clear up her arm when she took his hand. His slow way of speaking brought a cool fall day with shadows stretching across the field to mind. His eyes were a dull blue. “Granny woman is just a name that mountain folks give their medicine women.”

“So, you’re the doctor?”

“Now, that’s a fancy town term that has nothing to do with me and what I know. Nope, I’m just a granny woman, pure and simple. I think I do a lot more than town doctors.” Maude just stared him up and down. Her heart beat in my head. “Shoot, I live with my patients. I go to church with them. I grew up with most. They’re my family. Their kids are my kids, and they came into this world with my help.” Now this very thought took her breath away. “Mr. Willow, you’re bothering me at supper time and after a all night labor and delivery.” Maude had this urge to slam the door and run.

His laughter vibrated the glass in the windows. “I’m sorry. Will you let me stay and talk. I tend to just blunder through everything.”

Maude could look at him all night, study his nose, and the wrinkles on his forehead, but it just might be too dangerous. “It seems to me, Mr. Willow, you intend to intrude on my good graces. What do you want on Black Mountain?”

“You’re straight forward.” He formed his words with a different sound like he lived in a different country, but anywhere was a different country once a soul left Black Mountain.

Maude motioned him to follow. “Where you from?”

“Maine.”

Her heart skipped a beat and then, settled instead of banging around her body like before. “What you doing here?”

He followed her to the kitchen, where she removed the smoked ham from the pie cupboard, along with bread. “I don’t heat up that stove in the summer if I can help it.”

There he sat at her round oak table, looking at her mama’s old recipe book just like he was home after a long trip. “If the pain becomes too much, place a knife or ax under the bed. This should help cut the pain. If that don’t work, give the powder, but not too much. Folks tend to grow use to it.” He looked up. “What kind of powder?”

Maude sliced strawberries. “What do you want?”

“How do you perform operations?”

“You’re full of questions. I ain’t telling my secrets.” She laughed and surprised herself again. “Here’s some strawberries I grew.”

“Thank you.”

Maude placed the ham and bread on the table. That boy ate like he’d never been fed. His hands reminded her of Daddy’s. “I’m glad you like the food.”

“It’s the best I’ve had.” He spoke around huge bites.

Maude sat down in front of him finally ready to talk. “Answer my question.”

“I’m here to study the mountain ways.”

Maude laughed. “We’re a people that sticks together. They’re ain’t nothing to study. One day all you’ll see will be gone or changed. The old ways can’t stay on forever, too many town folk finding their way up here. There’s a saying up here: Once a person leaves the mountain, they leave their soul.” She looked him in the face. “More and more souls will be lost. I won’t lose mine.”

“I’m a student at Harvard, and I want to write a book about this mountain. I want to spend a summer up here with you and learn everything.”

“You want to stay with me. It ain’t proper, and you’d run out of things to write the first week.”

“This mountain is a treasure trove of information.”

“You should go home.”

His adam’s apple moved. “You see, Miss Tuggle, my parents told me the truth when I was fourteen. How I was born here and spent a couple of days in the arms of my birth mother. They told me how much she loved me, but she just couldn’t keep me. I’ve thought about her ever since they told me that story. She’s huge in my mind. I promised the first chance I got I was coming here.”

There it was just as plain as butter spread on white bread. The baby had grown up and come home, but Maude wasn’t his real mama. Lord that good woman that told him the truth was more a mama than Maude would ever be, not by choice, but by circumstances. Life just dealt Maude some events and she had to deal with them the best way possible. “Your family is down that mountain and back in Maine. I bet you didn’t even tell them you were coming here. They love you. They know you inside and out. What your favorite color is, your best food, and what you hate. That’s a family. They know you. You don’t belong on this mountain. I didn’t go through all the pain I went through over the years to see you try and toss it out like some old garbage. I gave you a family.” A knock on the door interrupted her. “Let me see who this is.”

Charles Weehunt stood on the porch. “It’s the missus. It’s her time.” He looked at the young man. “I see he found you.”

And, in that instant, Maude knew. Her life broke open like a beautiful tulip that only lasts for a day or two before it drops its petals. The whole mountain knew. They had known all along. “Yes, and he’s headed home to his family.”

Charles looked at his intertwined fingers. “Want a ride in the wagon?”

Maude almost agreed. It was right there on the tip of her tongue, but she stopped. “No, I’m going to say goodbye to my guest. I’m right behind you.” She faced the young man and saw that young girl reflected in his face.

“You’re my mother. Mama told me who you were.”

A cracked formed in her heart that day that never has mended. “She honored you by telling the truth. Please honor her by going home. She is your mama, son.”

“I’m a grown man.”

“That’s evident. Today is your birthday. You’re a fine young man. We can now live our lives in peace, and I thank both you and your mama for that.” Maude walked right off that porch and kept on walking. And she didn’t look back, couldn’t.

The next morning she crossed that field at dawn. A shadow stood by Carlton’s grave. When she got close, it vanished. “I seen him, our baby. He’s beautiful.” She stood in the half-light of the morning and thought on life. “My life is here. It is good, better than some.”

Maude never saw Thomas Willow again, but every Christmas—if the mail was running—she got a pretty card with a twenty dollar bill. “To the granny woman. Use this for your patients.”