Free Lover's Knot by Emilie Richards Page A

and wondered if the woman who had pieced and quilted it had ever felt confused or lonely. Had Leah come to this cabin to escape someone, or to find herself? Had she accomplished either?
    Not for the first time, Kendra felt a strong kinship with Isaac’s grandmother. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine exactly what Leah would choose to say about her life.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Blackburn Farm
    Lock Hollow, Virginia October 14, 1932
    Dear Puss,
    Since you said you was feeling puny, I am sending in this envelope some of Mama’s special bitters for purifying the blood. Which is good as a tonic if you boil it in some water and drink it after a few minutes though you surely won’t like the taste. I guess now that she’s gone I’ll be the one making this and giving it out to folks hear about from this day onward. I feel the weight of that.
    If you keep feeling puny you can boil some sassafras bark and drink the tea, but better to come home and let me take care of you.
    Birdie gets up every morning and does what she has to, which is about all I can say. She is a good sister to me, but I don’t know if I can help her the way she needs. I am praying she will smile again soon.
    Jesse Spurlock has not come round.
    Always your best friend,
    Leah Blackburn
    F lossie and Dyer Blackburn were as healthy and strong as any residents of Lock Hollow. It was ironic that Flossie, who had doctored so many of her neighbors, succumbed to typhoid fever a week after her husband, when others with no healing skills were spared.
    Birdie, Leah Blackburn’s older sister, claimed she was the first to know their mother would follow their father to his grave. She had taken over Flossie’s nursing care when Leah, who had been at the bedside for a full night and day, could no longer keep her eyes open.
    “You go on now and sleep a spell. Let me watch over her,” Birdie told her sister, and Leah, who was afraid their mother would either get better or pass without anyone to note it, had let her.
    Later Birdie had recounted the events of the next hours. She had stoked the fire in the woodstove, because Mama had complained of being cold despite three layers of quilts. As she moved the logs, a spark leapt from the fire and into the room.
    “It appeared to me right then,” she said, “that Mama would be gone by morning. It surely was a sign.”
    Leah was skeptical. She had witnessed sparks showering the room before. Once a big one had set fire to a rug that Mama had plaited from strips of wool, and Mama had gone after it so furiously that Leah had been forced to remind her that both the rug and broom were suffering. No one had died that day, nor on others when the fire burned white hot.
    But Birdie needed comfort. Leah thought that, in some curious way, Birdie’s belief that she had predicted their mother’s death helped her through the aftermath. Birdie had always believed in signs and omens. They helped her make sense of the world into which she had been born, a world that had not been kind to her.
    In 1919 poliomyelitis had come calling in the mountains and hollows of Virginia, and eight-year-old Birdie had been one of the first to feel its feverish fingers. She had nearly died from the encounter, and when the worst was over, she’d been left with a crippled leg and a body that into maturity remained as frail and weak as a child’s.
    Two days before Birdie was struck down, their mother had visited a neighbor and walked through the house without sitting down before leaving by a different door. This was a certain invitation to bad luck. At Birdie’s bedside, the neighbor had reminded Mama of this foolish act, and Mama had ordered her never to set foot in the Blackburn house again. But Birdie, nearly delirious with fever, remembered that conversation. For years afterward she whispered the story, like a haunted bedtime tale, to Leah.
    In the month since they buried their parents, Birdie had said little. It was not the way in these mountains to grieve