Free Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill Page A

brute labor, the flowers waited with their sweet surcease. On Sunday afternoons, she would go with us to the woodland or over into the meadows and find the wild flowers, in their season, full in bloom. In earliest spring, we found the arbutus hiding under the leaves and last snowfall. Then the white bloodrootopened, and we found Jack-in-the-Pulpit on the edge of the wood. In June we went to the Indian graves to find the pink moccasin flowers; and in autumn we found the bluebottle gentians by the swamp. On the mossy cliff up in the Little Woodland were the lavender and blue hepaticas that bloomed in April; and all around them, on the moss of the rock, the trailing long-hearted leaves of the walking fern, the frail ebony stems of maidenhair.

    Sometimes, I went with Granny Fanny to gather her medicine tea in the run-out field over near old Tommy's cabin where the sedge grass and the briers and thistles grew harshly from their worn-out earth. But growing there, all winter, were the dry austere blooms of the pearly everlasting, the “life everlasting” that Granny took home to boil for a fragrant, half-bitter tea. From Aunt Malindy, what I kept was her fireball screaming above the Buckley Mountain the night her brother Potts was killed. But it was the name of Granny Fanny's flower that I loved and remembered and kept with me; the “life everlasting,” living there above the winter, beyond the storms.

Over Bonnie
    O nce fifteen million acres of virgin forest stretched from the top of the Allegheny range to the Ohio River shore; and, when I was a child, G.D.'s and Uncle Dock's part of it ran for sixty unbroken miles beyond our Pinnacle Mountain: a quarter million acres of hardwood forest. For over a hundred years, our menfolks and all the other Swago hunters walked it as though it belonged to them.

    Every spring and every fall, G.D., Uncle Dock, Cousin Rush, and my brother Ward took off Over the Mountain for their fishing trip to Cranberry River, to Williams, and Gauley, and Black Mountain Run. It was a fifteen-mile trip into the wilderness, and the day before Mama would make up eight or ten bread flat cakes, while we children dug several hundred slithery fishing worms and packed them into Prince Albert tobacco tins. Among the doubtful prophecies of weather, G.D. and Ward would packup their old haversacks, Mama's big tin frying pan, the red snuff boxes for farmer matches, the blackened tin bucket for boiling coffee, and two or three big cloth sugar sacks to carry the fish home in. At the very last, they strapped the fish rods on, and the pocketknives, hooks, and leaders. They took no map, and no compass. Though they were forever getting lost in some alder thicket, they must find their direction by the lay of the land, the flow of the waters, the shadows, or the star.

    It would be just before dawn as Mama, Elizabeth, Granny Fanny, and I draped on the yard fence to watch their four misty shadows humping one after another up our pasture slope. They disappeared northwest into the forest. I knew I could never go with them, but I followed them still in my mind. Down in my heart, I knew every trail and wood sign from learning them by the fireplace in winter, and on the porch at harvest noon. I knew I could walk it blindfolded: the steep open trail up to Beech Spring; then into the forest again; north past the overhang of High Rocks; down onto the wild headwaters with the forest around me, darkness at midday, the great oaks and the deep pavilions of shade. If the men went by way of the Gallegly, I could look down and see the rolling savannahs of bluegrass, mileupon rolling mile of open grassland sweeping down to the forest and river shore. As I had learned it, I had learned it deep: the farthest place, the ultimate passage.

    All morning long, as I helped Mama with the milking and the hogs and chickens, I followed the men northwest. I could see them clearly, sitting by their campfires in the evening, their beds of moss