“So that’s it, then,” he said.
“Yes,” Mama said. “I believe it is.”
She turned to me, still crying, her voice deadly level. “Libertie, please make up Mr. Ben’s cot for him. Make sure it’s comfortable for his last night here with us. I will be working in the examination room. Be quick, girl. We have a long day tomorrow.”
And then she gathered up her ledger in her arms and walked out of the room. Mr. Ben watched her go.
He would not look at me, only at the fire, as I made his bed for him.
“Why did you go and do that?” I said as I pulled the cot closer to the fire for him.
“Leave it alone, girl.”
When the bed was done, I stood beside it. I did not know exactly what I was waiting for, what I hoped I or he would say. I knew I should say something in defense of Mama. If Lenore was here, she would have loudly cursed Mr. Ben the whole time. But he looked at me with a sadness so deep it startled me. I could not say anything to reprimand him. Instead, I stepped forward and hugged him fiercely.
He smelled of fresh-cut grass, up close. I had not expected that. He was still in my arms for a moment, and then he put his own arms around me once, a quick, tight squeeze, the tightest I’d ever known, the air squeezed out of my lungs. And then he let me go.
“I’ll be all right, girl,” he said. “You go on now.”
I was of an age then when I had just left Mama’s bed for one of my own, and even though I wished to comfort her, I did not wish to give up my hard-won independence of a cot to myself, under the eaves. I stood by her examination room door while she sat with her back toward me, bent over her books.
“Mama,” I began.
“Go to bed, Libertie.”
So I did.
I did not see Mr. Ben to Culver’s back room. Mama decided to take him there herself after Lenore came. She said, “You stay here, Libertie. You asked for your education to begin, and so it begins today.”
As Mama walked down the road with Mr. Ben, neither of them speaking or looking at each other, I imagined what secrets I was about to be initiated into. What big-woman ways I was about to learn. What I would be able to chart about hearts and spleens and tongues. But Lenore only turned to me and said, “You can start with the cats in the barn.”
We had a band of stray cats that had lived in the hay there since Mama was a girl. Big nature-raised hooligans with gnarled and matted fur, and sometimes sores on their sides. Whole generations that Mama and Lenore took care of, nursing their battle scars and birthing their litters. They terrified me. Even from far away, I knew them as too rough to be pets.
“Not them,” I said.
Lenore smirked. “Your mama said it’s how you’ll learn to care.”
So I took the bucket that Lenore usually did, and filled it with what she fed the cats—guts and bits from the kitchen, ground up for them. In the dim light of the barn, I could hear them all around me, and soon a few came closer and rubbed up against me. I felt panicked. Not because of their sharp teeth or their hissing, but because of their need. They wanted so much from me. The smell of their food made me ill, not because it was putrefying but because of how much it made them want me, made them mimic the action of love to get it, swirling around me, their softness hiding a deep, yawning hunger inside of them, just below their skin. I could feel it humming when they got too close. Their need was monstrous.
I fed them quick and ran from the barn, and when Mama came back, I wanted to tell her all of that, that their need was too much of a burden to carry. How could she do it? How could she see them so naked and yearning, and not want to turn away?
But Mama looked so tired, her face was so worn, that all I could say when I saw it was, “I don’t like the cats, Mama.”
Lenore sucked her teeth. “You bother her with that?”
But Mama was too tired, even, to hold my silliness against me. She did look disappointed, though.
But now that the idea of my taking on her work had gripped her, had become something she favored, Mama would not let me give up.
“You have to learn,” she told me. “Care does not come natural to me, either.”
What a lie, I thought. I could still see her, in my mind’s eye, walking slow and steady beside Mr. Ben, who had picked up her dead sister’s braids and tossed them aside, but who, I could tell, she understood had not meant it.
“But care, it is our lot now,” Mama was saying. “It is our service to others that defines us. We are doers of the Word.”
She sighed. “If you cannot keep the cats, you’ll learn how to keep the garden.”
The garden is no small thing to a homeopath. Mama kept a huge one to grow the most common things she needed: elderflower, ginger, mint, aloe. She was so orderly in everything, and the garden was no exception. The herbs were close by the door, and everything else was in neat rows, labeled clearly on posts made from scraps of wood. Up until now, the garden had been mostly Lenore’s domain. But Lenore was so busy with everything else she’d been paying it less attention, and the garden had begun to be unruly. When they needed something from it, Mama would question Lenore, and Lenore would think for a minute, and
