We're Here, page 12
Her latest visitors had left that morning, scurrying into their car at the first light of dawn on their migration south to Los Angeles and a new beginning. They always arrived late in the night, bodies tensed and scared and aching with exhaustion. She gave them discretion and a safe harbor in a country filled with sundown laws and hatred, knowing it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.
Edith leaned her head against the steering wheel, trying to find some sense of equilibrium, not wanting to bring her foul mood into her home. The engine of her Studebaker ticked in time to the rain pattering against the metal roof of the car. The rain turned from drizzle to downpour, droplets tinking harder, and the tan driveway transformed into mud.
It was time to go inside.
Edith scrounged about the passenger side for an old newspaper to cover her head as she scrambled the several steps across the dirt driveway and onto her porch.
There was a new sign shoved into the doorjamb; the paper crinkled as though it knew it was not welcome. It fluttered to the ground when she opened the door, joining a sad pile of wrinkled notices, all stamped with officious seals ranging from the Army Corps of Engineers to Lane County government to the mayor of Cottage Grove.
She took a deep breath. She would deal with that mess later. Tomorrow. Maybe the day after. Within a week, certainly. The eviction notices were a minor insult twirling within the greater swarm of anger brewing in her chest.
Another deep breath and she was through the tiny house, kicking off her shoes as she entered her true domain—her garden.
Tension melted, but resolve remained, along with bittersweet memories of two girls kissing on a field of purple flowers. A secret promise transformed into permanent silence and rejection.
Until now.
So Dolores-turned-Alice wanted a war, did she?
Edith’s lips curved as she gathered her supplies, half-chuckling under her breath. Never enter a flower war with an earth witch, especially not when pride was on the line.
She’d send her own declaration of war.
There was only room for one witch in town, and that witch was her.
Alice sent her reply a month later, on September twenty-third.
The blue box sat at Bisbee’s front step, and Edith would have stepped on it save she’d been watching her storefront for hexes for the past month. The box was decorated with purple and pink ribbons. Inside, wrapped in pink tissue paper, lay a corsage.
Edith retrieved her faded copy of Interpreting Flowers from its hiding place under the loose floorboard below the front counter.
Pink carnations. I’ll never forget. Clearly, Alice remembered Edith’s boldness so many years ago and wasn’t going to let her forget it either.
A lavender rose. Capriciousness. There was no need to interpret that one. Pulsing intent roiled off that magically imbued flower, so thick Edith practically tasted it.
Blue hibiscus, grown out of season. I agree. Alice had accepted Edith’s challenge and would go to extremes to win.
The message was all twisted into a corsage to wear the curse at the wrist and sent on a Sunday for extra insult.
Edith returned fire October eighth with a boutonniere hex of orange and yellow carnations for disdain, garnished with reversed red chrysanthemums for hatred, the stems wrapped with aloe to showcase her deep bitterness of Alice’s long-past silent rejection. Pink ribbons dangled in pretty twists, because Edith might be engaged in a battle for the fate of her business and her life, but she wasn’t a monster.
On October eleventh, Alice stepped out into a town hall meeting discussing the upcoming Christmas Bazaar wearing Edith’s boutonniere on her lapel and bright red lipstick underneath her black veil. Subtly embroidered flowers matching the colors of the boutonniere lined the brim of her black pillbox. Her amethyst ring was nowhere in sight.
“Where’d you get those gorgeous flowers, Mrs. LaVelle?” was the question of the night, asked over and over as Alice smugly patted the flowers on her chest and invited everyone to a soiree at the Cottage Grove Hotel after the meeting. She’d arranged a private room, no doubt to further bind the gullible townspeople into doing whatever it was she had planned. Already the tendrils of a spell stretched and wove about them. A thin green vine reached toward Edith, and she slapped it away, garnering looks and whispers as the people she’d supported murmured over poor, odd Edith.
“Oh, just somewhere.” Alice’s glaze flicked to Edith as she continued to stroke those damn flowers like she had won something. And she had—she’d effectively stolen all business away from Bisbee’s with her hocus pocus and scientifically mutated flowers and fancy citified self. She wore Edith’s hex like it was a victory banner.
Edith could no longer take the insult lying down. “This town is not big enough for two florists, Dolores.” Her voice echoed across the room, rebounding and bounding.
The mayor stopped preening over Alice’s boutonniere. “What did you call our dear Mrs. LaVelle, Miss Bisbee?”
Mrs. Smith, the baker’s wife, put a hand to her mouth at Edith’s rudeness. Two other women—old classmates, but who wasn’t—tittered in delight at a possible scandal. A couple soldiers wearing Army Engineer insignia paused mid-drink by the punchbowl, and honestly who had even invited them to a town hall meeting?
“Dolores,” Edith repeated. Two spots of red burned on her cheeks. “That’s her name. Not Alice LaVelle. You should remember her, Billy. She went to elementary school with us and moved the summer before sixth grade.”
Eyes swiveled between Alice and Edith, trying to reconcile fashionable Alice LaVelle with vague memories of a skinned-kneed girl child who flitted like a ghost along the riverbank near her grandmother’s house, catching frogs and playing in the mud instead of acting a lady. The girl Edith remembered, because she had been in the mud beside her.
Dolores laughed. “You misremember.”
“I do not.”
Unspoken between them, the accusation of foul spellcraft. Because it had to be a casting. Surely everyone remembered Dolores Hartley, even if they’d forgotten her long-deceased grandmother.
“So this town isn’t big enough for the both of us?” There was something in Dolores’ eyes, something in her expression Edith couldn’t decipher beyond a fierce hunger.
Edith’s chin lifted. She would not back down. “You heard me.”
The entire town—and the entire green-clad complement of 2-162’s headquarters and headquarters company—seemed to have packed into the high school gymnasium for this meeting, and they were now silent, hanging on each word. The vines of Alice’s spell continued to stretch and bind, weave and coax.
Whispers rose between the tendrils of magic as the two women faced off.
Whispers Edith had heard her entire life but ignored because that’s what it took to survive in this town—just as her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother had endured, stretching all the way back to the first white settlers in this small pocket of the Willamette Valley. Her hands clenched into fists.
“Well, we’ll have no bickering among hens here,” the mayor said. He eyed Edith up and down, warning her into silence. “This is a triumphant autumn. A return to normalcy and a chance to let our town grow. A time to welcome our heroes back from the war!”
“I don’t know what normalcy we want to fall back to,” Dolores murmured. Somehow, they’d drifted until they were an arms-length apart. The cloying scent of Tabu by Dana tickled Edith’s nose with top notes of orange and coriander, while the middle notes of ylang-ylang and jasmine reminded her of the dangers of getting close to Dolores Hartley turned Alice LaVelle.
“The one where you stay gone,” Edith snapped.
“Now, now, ladies.” The mayor waved his hands to lower their antagonism. “How about a contest to settle this little spat?”
“What kind of contest?” Edith locked eyes with Alice, daring her to mention their other history, to reveal her deepest, darkest secret.
“Why, a friendly flower contest.” The mayor flushed, clearly warming to the idea. “It’ll be held during our Christmas Bazaar—see our talented florists and celebrate the birth of Christ and American might. We won the war, and we’ll beat that rival Christmas celebration in Eugene. Exercise your creativity, ladies.”
Dolores pursed her lips. “All contests have stakes.”
Just like the one she’d shoved into Edith’s heart, and now, her livelihood. The woman could not stop hurting her.
“I win, you leave town.” Edith crossed her arms.
“Now, Edith, I’m sure Mrs. LaVelle didn’t come to our fair town to push you out of it,” the mayor said. “There’s room for two.”
Dolores ignored the mayor, her focus on her enemy. “And if I win?”
Edith grit out, “Then I leave.”
“Ladies, this is just a friendly competition,” the mayor said. “No one actually has to go anywhere. Edith, I’m sure people still love your little bouquets.”
Something glittered in Dolores’ eyes. Her smile faltered and she batted her lashes quickly before turning toward the mayor, her smile set once again in demure pleasantry. “It’s a deal. I win, she leaves. She wins, I leave.”
“Perfect.” Edith spun on her heel and stormed out of the hall. Townspeople, folks she’d grown up with, gone to school with, sweated through the Depression and the War and made sacrifices alongside, healed and birthed and laid to rest and everything in between, stepped out of her way, their noses upturned in disgust.
She didn’t need them.
She had never needed them.
But they had always needed her, even if they hated to admit it—even if they could never admit it bound as they were by the vines of Dolores’ spell.
“Edith...” The word wafted after her, whispered from Dolores’ lips and swallowed by the clouds breaking over Edith’s shoulders.
Edith would show them just how much she was a part of this town, how deep her roots grew.
Dolores left them all and came back with her big city ideas and fashionable notions and pretty dresses and exotic flowers and a new name, just like her wild great-aunt Opal. She’d traveled the world and returned to town with a score to settle.
Edith was the town.
She was Oregon and Cottage Grove and Lane County. Her family had been there from the beginning of the pioneers colonizing the land of the Winefelly peoples. Her family had spoken Chinook jargon, married magics among the Douglas Firs, sung for gold in the Cascades, battled the rising winter floods along the Coast Fork, healed where they could even as the peoples native to this land were driven from it—hidden folk caught in the middle of a sundown county at dusk.
Her mother and her mother before and her mother before that and on and on had sunk their lives into this part of the Willamette Valley, had stood strong despite the rumors and the side-eyed glances at the long line of unmarried women of sin who refused to step into a church on Sunday. They had survived flood and famine and sickness and ignorance and heartbreak.
She would not be the one who ended that legacy.
But as the leaves on the deciduous trees changed color and fell, leaving the great firs standing tall and green and alone against a gray sky, business shifted almost entirely to The Flower Shoppe. Townsfolk gasped over tropical ice blue calathea, tittered over the scandalous orchids resembling women’s secrets, and oohed over the marvelous widow’s tragically fashionable self. Dolores ate up the attention, wearing a rotating display of black suits nipped in at the waist and black veils to mourn the husband lost at Iwo Jima.
After two weeks of no sales and no visitors, Edith rotated Bisbee’s sign to closed—not for the first time in recent years—with a note of her grand reopening on New Year’s Day, and focused on her plan.
She gathered cow parsnip and cat tail from the Row River.
She snuck into the Army Corps of Engineer’s construction site under a full moon and stole mud from the base of Cottage Drove Dam.
In the middle of November, she received a simple pot of white, blue, and pink flowering cacti from her enemy. The thorns were prominent. One pricked her, sending three droplets of blood into the sandy soil.
She sent back a tin of chamomile to show her patience in the face of adversity.
She found trilliums blooming months ahead of season by following a deer trail to a hidden grove deep among the Douglas Firs along the Coast Fork.
She stole warped boards from Dr. Pierce’s Pleasant Pellets barn.
She drove south, along the Umpqua River in rain so heavy she could hardly see out the windshield, walked through miles of old growth and wet ferns, and scrambled down boulders and over fallen logs to gather water from the base of Toketee.
A single poppy on her doorstep marked December first.
Edith did not respond.
She continued her trek, driving along winding switchbacks until she arrived at the vast blue of Crater Lake. She dug through the accumulating snow two miles from the lodge and collected five orange-red rocks. In between two boulders facing Wizard Island, she found a lone white skyrocket. She left it there. It was just the one, after all.
She went north, collecting moss from an old-growth forest in the foothills of the Coastal Range near Lorane, ferns from the old Bohemian Mining site, and lichen from the Oregon white oak behind the elementary school playground.
By the Christmas Bazaar, she had assembled her creation and bartered her prized blackberry pies for the use of her neighbor Henry’s truck to transport it through the drizzling rain into the Armory, newly converted into a winter wonderland by eager high schoolers and young soldiers fresh from Europe.
Two seniors in varsity sweaters helped maneuver her triumph into place. They stayed, curious, as she gently peeled away the protective covering. Their jaws dropped, and she smiled. She dared Dolores try to beat this.
The mayor had opened up the contest to whoever wanted to participate, but only one other booth in this corner of the gym was occupied, its offering covered with a battered military canvas, a single cream card tucked into its folds.
Slowly, the gym filled with revelers. Edith waited behind her booth, fingers tapping. The judging would end at seven, the prize a ten-dollar check donated by the grocery store.
She ignored the townsfolk oohing and aahing, their appreciative nods.
Edith wanted their respect, but she hadn’t made this for them.
She had poured her heart and soul, her anger and bitterness, her love and everything else she possessed, into her floral arrangement. Her flowers and findings woven into her most powerful hex of binding and warding and banishing all twisted into the shape of a covered bridge—just like the many dotting the landscape of her town.
Her finger tapping increased to leg bouncing as the night drew on, as the clock on the wall ticked toward seven and the official judgment of the contest.
Dolores didn’t show.
Her booth remained bare, with just that canvas covered lump and that blank card crying for attention. Edith knew it meant her spell had worked, but dammit the woman was a witch and the spell didn’t go into effect until moonrise anyways.
At 6:55 p.m. Edith could take it no longer.
She pushed past the admirers, strode over to Dolores’ booth and whipped away the canvas.
A simple heart formed from blue roses lay on the wooden surface.
Soft gasps of disappointment came from the crowd, who obviously thought the impossible petals had been dyed instead of perfected over time, crafted with science and magic and patience. At a distance it was so simple compared to the complex masterpiece of Edith’s perfectly created covered bridge pulled from natural elements. But up close, the edges of the petals darkened to a brilliant purple.
Edith stared, shaking her head. Before the heart lay a parchment-covered square bound in twine. Her name was written in the upper left corner. She unwrapped the twine and removed the parchment, revealing a book titled, The Language of Flowers. Many of the pages were folded over.
There was no accompanying note.
Edith’s jaw worked. What could it mean?
Outside of her daze, the mayor announced Edith’s win and wondered aloud where Mrs. LaVelle was. Edith ignored him, scrambling about for the note that had fluttered to the floor when she’d removed the canvas.
There had to be something. There had to be an answer, a key, something.
She found the note, fallen into a corner and half hidden. Her hands shook as she unfolded the card.
You win.
No. Not like this.
She needed a battle, a dramatic showdown, a great triumph to show Dolores that she belonged here, that she was in the right, that she should never have been abandoned like that, not after revealing her most secret self to the person she loved over all others and continued to love even with her heart broken into a million lost promises.
She flipped through the book, searching for answers, and turned to the first dog-eared page.
Rosemary: a sign of memory and remembrance. Can be used for tinctures and potions to pull away the memory of pain and induce healing. In floral arrangements, indicates remembrance of happier times.
Handwritten in the margins, next to the accompanying illustration of the herb: You might not remember the field of crocuses where we kissed before I left for Seattle that summer, but I did. I never forgot you.
Edith shook her head. She flipped to the next folded corner.
Purple Columbine: resolution of intent.
“No, no, no,” she whispered, heart sinking as she scanned the note.
I came back to show you all I had learned. That I was worthy of you, my beloved witchling. My resolve is so strong I grew these out of season. They bloomed from yearning.
Her world was ending.
All preconceptions shattered.
History was overwritten.
The next page was a blank buffer separating chapters and covered in handwritten annotations. Unlike the other three pages, this one had been written long before, the pen strokes faded. Alice’s notes to herself as she planned the second arrangement, the corsage sent on September twenty-third.
