He almost cried when she told him to go on back home and sleep his misery off. Poor Daddy Cudjoe! He swore he had not thought on a woman for twenty years, but that root medicine he took for his shortness of breath was so awful strong. One dose had made him too restless to stay home. He had come all this way to ask her to do him a favor.
She told the joke on him the next day, but Daddy did not seem to mind. Some men would have got vexed, but not Daddy Cudjoe. He laughed about it himself, and said he thought he would have to get himself a wife, he was getting so young and spry. Didn’t apple trees bloom in the fall sometimes? And didn’t the Book tell about an old woman named Sarah who bloomed in her old age? Maybe such things were not so uncommon after all.
Charms and roots and teas are dangerous things if people don’t use them exactly right. Mary would have to be careful when she got a charm or it might do herself harm too.
Mary’s heart was so heavy she could hardly get up to go. If Cinder had July conjured what good could any charm do?
Sadness filled the world. The sunlight was pale. The trees sighed as the soft wind fluttered their leaves and stirred the hot grass-blades. A rabbit peeped out from a briar patch with his scared eyes staring, and his nostrils twitching. He must not cross the road in front of her now. Mary clapped her hands and shouted, “Git back,” as loud as she could. Everything was against her; even the field rabbit which hurried across the path, added more bad luck to what she already had.
XII
The road leaving the Quarters ran straight to the river which was the plantation’s main highway out into the world, the faithful carrier which took away its bales of cotton and brought back all its luxuries. The road’s deep ruts cut by slow-moving wagon-wheels ran side by side past cotton-fields, through woods where last year’s fallen leaves and brown pine-needles made them dim and where every grass-blade or leaf budding up above the ground was crushed back into the earth by the cloven feet of patient oxen or small, round, quicker-stepping mule hoofs.
As the road reached the brow of the hill, it slackened its gait and sent a small fork off to one side. Mary followed this as it crept cautiously and with painstaking curves through thickets, under low-hanging trees whose roots clutched the earth, until the cabin where Old Daddy Cudjoe lived came in sight. Small, dilapidated, paintless, lonely, it squatted low on the ground in the midst of a confusion of little rickety outbuildings. A crape-myrtle tree beside it was gorgeous with leaves that the heat had dyed in every shade of crimson and yellow. Frosty blueberries filled the tall cedar that rose behind it and a giant hickory scattered golden leaves over the cabin’s sagging roof every time a breeze came up from the river and stirred the air.
Daddy Cudjoe’s cabin sat on a hill just above the river bank, its weathered roof green with moss, its old cracked sides the color of the deep shadows cast around it by the twisted live-oak trees. Chickens scratched around the door. A mother hog lying under a tree fed her babies and, when Mary passed, she blinked and grunted but did not move. An old horse munched eagerly at a dry grass patch, and one of his eyes was white with blindness.
Daddy Cudjoe, shriveled, old, crooked-legged, white-bearded man, came hobbling up from the spring with a bucket of water, and his face beamed as he spied Mary. His stumbling old feet hurried faster until he reached her, then putting his bucket on the ground, he took off his tattered old hat, and plucking at a white forelock with his crumpled fingers, he pulled a foot back and made a fine bow.
His words were broken into bits by stammering, but Mary understood them; he was glad to see her; she looked as sweet and pretty as a flower garden in the springtime; she must come in and sit down and have a cup of newly steeped life-elastic tea that he had just finished brewing; it would do her good. Nothing is better in the fall than life-elastic tea.
Daddy Cudjoe was used to having people come to him for advice, and he knew how to make them feel at home. Mary had never been here before, but when she was a child, whenever she saw the old, white-haired, bent man passing the house, or in the woods digging roots, she always ran from him, and he would stop and laugh and shake his fist and cackle out, “You better run! If I catch you, I’ll conjure you!” and he looked so strange, with his black eyes shining under thick, white, bushy brows, she believed he would.
His cabin’s two rooms ran the length of the house with a low board wall between them, one for Daddy Cudjoe to sleep in and the other for him to work in. Mary sat down by the fireplace, whose hearth was filled with steaming pots. Strange smells rose. Medicine, charms, love and hate-potions all mixed their breaths together as they brewed side by side on the red coals.
“De sight o you face makes my eyeballs feel pure rich,” Daddy Cudjoe greeted Mary.
He poured her the drink, then he rubbed his knotted hands together, and with a kind smile asked, “What you want, daughter?”
There was no use to hesitate, she might as well talk right out.
“I want a charm for July, Daddy Cudjoe. July’s got a side-gal.”
Daddy looked grave.
“How long you been married, honey?”
“Me an’ him ain’ been married a year yet.”
“Who is de side-gal, daughter?”
“Cinder.”
At this answer he puckered up his lips and puffed out his cheeks. “Cinder? Why, Cinder’s de very one what come here last month
