Free Lover's Knot by Emilie Richards Page B

loudly. Quietly she had turned the mirror to the wall and made certain the bodies of their parents were carried out of the house feet first, traditions that were important to her if not to Leah.
    Twice, neighbors—some who had also lost loved ones—had filed silently past the coffins a neighbor had brought by wagon team to the Blackburn farm. Their parents had died within a week of each other, but there had been separate funerals, with the lumberjack preacher who lived down near Dark Hollow coming each time to assure those in attendance that the Blackburns were in a better place.
    Since that time, Birdie had mourned in silence. She had been Mama’s pet. Flossie Blackburn had been known for many miles as a fine seamstress, and she had carefully taught those skills to her oldest daughter. “Sewing is something it don’t take strong legs to learn,” she told Birdie. “And up close, you can see right smart, Birdie girl.”
    Birdie learned the finer points of making a home, their mother’s closely guarded recipe for green tomato pickles, the proper distance to mark and stitch a quilt so the batting stayed smooth. After butchering in the fall, Birdie always received the choicest cuts of meat. After harvest, she was given the tenderest vegetables. Every night Mama brushed Birdie’s hair more than the customary one hundred strokes. She embroidered the collars and cuffs of Birdie’s nightdresses with daisies and roses.
    Birdie lost more than a mother; she lost the person who tried hardest to shield her from the reality of her life. At her mother’s graveside, Leah had silently sworn to Flossie that she would never abandon her sister.
    Even without that graveside promise, Leah was certain her mother had known this. Birdie had been Mama’s pet, but Leah had been her confidante and helper. Flossie had tucked Birdie under her wing, but she set Leah free to fly as far as she desired. She taught her younger daughter to read and read often, to observe the world around her, to make friends with chores she was required to do so she always had something to look forward to. She insisted that Leah get the few years of formal education available to her in their remote hollow and performed her daughter’s chores herself, so that Leah could walk the necessary miles.
    But best of all, Flossie passed to Leah the secrets of how to heal and give comfort.
    Flossie herself had been the seventh daughter in a large West Virginia family, a position that nearly guaranteed she would have the healing touch. As if fate had wanted to make certain of it, two weeks before she was born, her father died in a logging accident. The granny midwife who presided over the birth told the neighbor women that Flossie, having never looked into her father’s eyes, was destined to heal folks far and wide.
    Perhaps the granny really believed this, or perhaps she simply gauged the deep exhaustion and melancholy of the baby’s mother and knew that if she did not find a way to set this child apart from her many brothers and sisters, Flossie would not survive her childhood.
    Whichever it was, the pronouncement that Flossie was special served her well. As soon as she was weaned, she was sent to live with a widowed neighbor known for her healing skills. And five years later, when the widow moved to Virginia’s mountains to be closer to her son, Flossie went along.
    In the years that followed, Flossie took her role seriously. She served as an apprentice, learning the medicinal roles of plants, how and when to collect them, or grow them or nurture them so they increased in their forest habitats. She learned to dry and powder roots, to make tinctures, liniments and salves. Once she married Dyer Blackburn and moved to Lock Hollow, she read whatever literature she had access to, poring over the Watkins products almanacs, and Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man’s Friend, in the Hours of Affliction, Pain and Sickness by Dr. John C. Gunn of Knoxville, Tennessee. From observation