“Miranda!” I hear my mother’s voice through a thick fog.
“Open your eyes.”
I hadn’t realized they were closed. When I open them, I see Mom and Granny on their knees, hovering over me. I’m flat on my back on the cool ground, but there’s something soft under my head—Mom’s velvet jacket, I think. I’m relieved to feel that I didn’t loosen my grip on Abigail’s mirror, which is still safely in my hands.
“Hey,” Mom says, “are you hurt? You went down pretty hard.”
“I...I don’t think so. I’ve never felt a force like that.” Mom and Granny help me sit up. “It was intense.”
“It was,” Abigail says. “I could feel it even inside the mirror.”
“It didn’t make me pass out,” Mom says, “but I did stumble backward.”
“I steadied her,” Granny says. “I didn’t feel nothing but a little flutter myself.” Granny enjoys being the most powerful of us.
“Don’t rub it in,” Mom says. “It’s unladylike.”
“I want to do something before you try to go in there again,” Granny says, ignoring Mom. “I want to make an offering so the spirits know we don’t mean no harm.” She reaches in her black bag and for a second I’m fearful of what kind of offering she’s brought. Surely if she had a live chicken in there, it would’ve made noise in the car. But what she pulls out is a cluster of bound-together dried herbs. “
You’uns
stay back there,” Granny says.
Mom and I watch as she approaches the cabin and lights the herb cluster on fire. She shakes it until it’s just smoldering and then does a slow, solemn procession around the cabin, waving the smoking herbs and muttering something under her breath. She ends by setting the herbs in the cabin’s doorway, then dousing them with a bottle of water. She turns toward Mom and me and says, “You can come in now.”
The inside of the cabin is so dark that at first I see nothing. I can just smell the smoky perfume of Granny’s herbs—sage and something else. But once my eyes have had a minute to adjust, I make out a shape in the far corner, an enormous shape that practically fills that end of the cabin. It’s a woman—a woman who in life must have weighed at least four hundred pounds. Most of the noticeable things about her are black: her piercing eyes, her curly hair, which is escaping its bun, and her high-necked, floor-length dress. On her lap is a little boy, or the ghost of one. His eyes are black and deep like pits and he’s staring at me as if to dare me to fall into them. His black hair is almost shoulder-length, and he has on the kind of sailor outfit with short pants that you see on little boys in old pictures. He’s cute, but he’s also creepy, sitting on Miss Minnie’s lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy. And ventriloquist dummies creep me out. I look away from the little boy’s face to Miss Minnie’s and am surprised to see her grinning at me,
“I made you fall flat on your hind end, didn’t I, girl?” she says, then laughs. Her voice is deep, her laughter booming.
“Yes, ma’am, you sure did,” I say.
“Can you see her? Did she say something?” Mom asks.
Since the woman who has to be Miss Minnie is sitting right in front of me and talking like a regular person, it’s easy for me to forget that Mom and Granny can’t see or hear her. I take a second to orient them.
“It was a test,” Minnie says. “Kids come around this place from time to time, cutting up, trying to scare their selves. I figure I’ll save ’
em
the trouble by giving ’
em
a good scare my own self.” As she talks, she absentmindedly strokes the little ghost boy’s hair the same way you might pet a cat. “Besides, I don’t want ’
em
round here, the disrespectful little brats.” She looks at me. “But you
ain’t
like that. And one of us is with you. A spirit.”
I realize that for the past couple of minutes, I’ve forgotten about Abigail even though I’m holding her mirror in my hand. “Yes,” I say. I hold up the mirror. “This is Abigail.”
“Come closer. Let me see her.”
Nervous, I take a couple of shaky steps toward Minnie and hold out the mirror. Minnie takes it, looks at it, and says, “Well, howdy do, Abigail! You look like you could come from back in my day! When did you die?”
“In 1892,” Abigail says.
“Well, I was born in 1890, but I died in nineteen and forty-two,” Miss Minnie says.
Ghost small talk never ceases to amaze me.
“Abigail, why don’t you come
outta
there and stretch your legs a little?” Miss Minnie says. “You can meet my boy here. I’ll bet he’ll think you’re pretty as a picture.” She pronounces
picture pitcher
.
“Thank you, but I can’t,” Abigail says. “I can only travel in this mirror when I’m not in Miranda’s room.”
“Oh, you can get out of the mirror as long as you’re in the cabin, honey,” Miss Minnie says. “The spirits roam free here.”
I take the mirror and set it down on the floor. Abigail’s head and shoulders rise from the mirror frame, and soon she climbs all the way out of it. “Well,” she says, “this is surprising!”
“What’s happening?” Granny whispers.
“Abigail’s out of the mirror,” I say.
“Miss Abigail, this here’s my boy John Henry. Him and me, we’ve been together since I wasn’t no bigger than a minute.”
“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, John Henry,” Abigail says.
John Henry smiles. His teeth are tiny with sharp little canines. He’s even creepier when he smiles, I decide.
“He don’t talk,” Miss Minnie says. “Never learned to when he was alive. But that don’t mean he
ain’t
good company.”
“How old was John Henry when he died?” Abigail asks, and I’m glad she did because I was wondering the same thing. He’s so tiny.
“He was ten year old, but he don’t look it,” Miss Minnie says, giving his head a little pat. “He had some things wrong with him so he didn’t grow good, and then he never talked neither so a lot of folks said he was a fool, but it
ain’t
so. He can read and write as good as the next person, and there
ain’t
nobody who could’ve helped me with my business better than he done.” She grins and looks at Miranda and me. “You girls know about my line of work, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “You were a moonshiner. The most famous one in Tennessee.”
“That’s right,” she says, grinning wider. “Never served a day’s jail time neither. Course, I had most of the law paid off, some of them in money and some of them in moonshine. And nobody ever got sick off my ’shine neither. It was the best product in the tri-state area...Belcher’s Best, I called it. Made out of the apples from them trees out yonder. Sweet as a bee’s honey but with a mighty big sting!” She cackled. “Having the Sight helped my business, too. I could tell who my best customers was. I could tell who I could trust and who was likely to turn against me. You’ve got it too,
ain’t
you? You and your mama and granny there?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“And that explains Abigail here, too,” Minnie says.
“I was wondering, ma’am,” Abigail says, “how John Henry helped you in your business.”
I know Abigail’s mother was active in the temperance movement and so was opposed to alcohol of all kinds, and I can tell Abigail has a hard time hiding her distaste for Minnie’s line of work.
“John Henry was probably the number-one reason for my success,” Minnie says, and John Henry flashes his creepy, tiny-toothed grin. “It helps to have a delivery boy nobody can see. And if anybody’s fixing to get you in trouble, it helps to have that same invisible delivery boy let folks know that you
ain’t
gonna take it laying down. Oh, John Henry never killed nobody or
nothin
like that, but he sure scared the
tarnation
out of some folks!” She smiles for a minute, then turns serious. “Listen, I appreciate the company, but I know you girls didn’t come to interview me for no school newspaper. So what did you come for?”
I swallow hard. The businesswoman is clearly getting down to business, and I’m nervous about making my case. “My granny said you were the only person she ever heard of who managed to keep her ghostly companion after she came into her womanhood.”
“I
ain’t
the only one, but I’m one of the few,” Minnie says. Her tone is still guarded. “Met him on the other side too, just as soon as I passed over.”
I nod. “Well, I’m thirteen now, and of course, I could come into my womanhood any time. Abigail and I”—I reach over and take Abigail’s cold little hand— “we don’t want to lose each other, and we were wondering if you could tell us what we need to do to stay together.”
“Please, ma’am,” Abigail adds, topping my pleading with extra politeness.
“Hmm,” Ms. Minnie says. She takes a corncob pipe from her pocket and puffs away without needing to light it. She’s quiet for what feels like a long time. “What you’re asking for...it’s a hard, hard thing to go through. Getting sealed to the spirit, it’s called. I run away from home to do it when I was around your age. Got sealed by a conjure woman down in New Orleans.”
“Do you know how to do it?” I ask.
Minnie nods. “Oh, I know how to do it. I’m just trying to figure out if I would do it. It’s risky. Real risky.”
“What do I have to lose?” Abigail says. “I’m already dead.”
“All you have to lose is Miranda if the spell don’t take,” Minnie says. “But Miranda, you could lose a lot more. You’ll lose some blood in the spell and it’ll hurt some, but it’s
nothin
’ you won’t get over right quick. But if the spell don’t take”—she stops and looks at me hard— “you could lose the Sight forever.”
“You mean I’d just be a regular girl?”
“That’s right.”
There have been times—maybe hundreds of times—when I’ve wished the Sight to go away, when I’ve found it too much of a burden. But the truth is, the Sight is so much a part of me that I can’t imagine who I’d be without it. And how would I relate to Mom and Granny without our special psychic shorthand? In my house, being normal would make me abnormal.
“I can see by the look on your face that you need some time to study on this,” Miss Minnie says.
“I...I guess so. Could I have a few minutes?”
“You need more time than that. I couldn’t do the spell tonight
nohow
. The signs
ain’t
right. You study on it, and I’ll figure out if I’m willing to do it. If you decide you’re willing, come back here the next full moon.”
A prickle of fear hits the back of my neck. “What if I come into my
womanhod
before that?”
Miss Minnie shrugs. “Well then, I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.” She puffs on her pipe. “Now
you’uns
get on out of here. You’ve about wore me out. You know why John Henry’s the best company there is? He don’t talk too much.”
Once the pipe’s back in her mouth, she produces a cloud of smoke so huge it makes her and her ghost friend invisible.
It turns out to be a good thing that Granny packed that basket of food. We haven’t driven a mile past Miss Minnie’s cabin when Mom says, “I’m starving.”
As soon as she says it, I realize that the gnawing emptiness I’m feeling is hunger.
“It’s the power in that place,” Granny says. “I
knowed
it would drain us.”
We pull over for a midnight picnic. At first we don’t talk. We just tear off hunks of bread, slather them with soft cheese, and cram them in our mouths. I crunch into an apple, then remember Abigail, back in her mirror, who can’t eat anything. “You must think we have appalling table manners, Abigail,” I say.
She laughs. “On the contrary. It’s nice to see people eat with good appetite without having to fuss over which fork to use. I don’t miss table manners, but I do miss eating.”
“Would you like to smell my apple? It’s a Granny Smith.” I hold the bitten part close to the mirror.
Abigail sniffs and says, “Lovely.”
Once our eating has slowed, Mom says, “So tell us what Miss Minnie said.”
I run back through it all, and when I’m done, Mom sighs. “You realize, girls, that you need to do some serious thinking about whether or not you want to come back here. And even then, if you want to come back, I still might say no. This talk of blood and pain makes me nervous, and as your mother, Miranda, surely it’s my job to protect you from blood and pain.”
“Blood and pain is part of life,” Granny says, touching Mom on the arm. “She’s gonna run into blood and pain sooner or later no matter what you do. And in the ritual Minnie’s talking about, the blood and pain stand for the blood and pain that’s part of womanhood. Miranda would just need to nick herself—just enough to bleed a little.”