The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (good books for 8th graders .TXT) 📗

“What do I call your mother?”

“Her name is María Rosa.”

“Ms. Rosa?”

“Just call her María. That’s what everyone else does.” He ran the pickup through another wash, over a hill, and into a little hollow. He stopped the truck. The tape deck switched off, and the desert seemed suddenly very quiet. He could hear many birds and the steady hum of traffic, although the rise of the land hid the Interstate from view.

There wasn’t much to his mother’s place. A small trailer, with a porch that he’d built for her out of lengths of Rincon mesquite. An outdoor oven. And the remains of a corral that hadn’t seen a horse in years. The trailer was parked in a semicircle of tall saguaro cactus, nestled beneath their protective arms. At their base was a scattering of wildflowers, tall, slender stems of pink penstemon and the smaller, fluffy fairy dusters.

“There are so many saguaro here,” said Maggie with wonder as she stepped from the truck. “Do you suppose this is where Cooper got the inspiration for the name The Saguaro Forest? It’s an odd name, don’t you think?”

“That’s what this is called, a saguaro forest.”

“Really? I thought he’d made that up. I thought a forest had to have trees.”

“When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me that at night the saguaro all dance together. That’s why they look the way they do—with all their arms raised high. They won’t move while you’re watching them, they wait until you fall asleep. And then at dawn they all have to rush to get back into place again. She used to say to me, ‘Close your eyes, mijo; the saguraro are waiting for you to sleep so they can run off to dance…’ ”

Maggie looked enchanted, holding her arms up like a saguaro ready for a waltz. “I can almost see it. Aren’t they wonderful? Almost like they’re human too.”

“That’s what the Tohono O’odom say. They call them ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle.’ ”

He stepped up to the little trailer and called out to his mother, but no one answered him. Fox opened the unlocked door and stepped inside. The air was sour with old cigarette smoke, the place dusty, abandoned-looking. It often looked that way when he came to visit—as though his mother had decided she’d cleaned up houses for too many years and simply wasn’t going to do it again. He usually spent time with a bucket and mop before he left.

He stepped outside and said to Maggie, “She’s either out in the desert, as usual, or she’s gone over to the Hernandez place.”

“Did she know we were coming?”

“I told her last week. But she’s a forgetful old woman. She likes to keep the phone unplugged so I have no way to remind her. Come on. Let’s take a walk.”

He led Maggie on the narrow path that skirted the hills to the Hernandez spread. They could see the Hernandez house in the distance, a low wooden building, a couple of stables, and several empty horse corrals. The land here was dotted with ironwood trees, growing hand in hand with the saguaro. They were small trees, but strong, and tough—like his mother. Halfway down the trail they found her. She was gathering wild desert plants in a flat-bottomed basket hung over one brown arm. She was a tiny old lady, small as Dora, her face covered with a fine network of wrinkles. She wore a shapeless, faded cotton dress that looked exactly like every other dress she’d ever worn. A red bandana tied back silver-grey hair, and on her feet were dusty socks and sandals. Fox couldn’t even imagine what Maggie Black was going to make of his mother.

A smile lit up the wrinkled face when María Rosa saw them. She waved her hand at them like a child, and then waited in an ironwood’s meager shade while Maggie and Fox approached. Fox leaned down and kissed her cheek. He introduced Maggie, glad that he had warned her that his mother was the shyest old woman on God’s green earth.

But now María was beaming at Maggie, and the two women were soon chatting up a storm as his mother took them on a circular path, pointing out the desert flora. Fox scratched his head as he trailed along behind. There was just no predicting his mama, he reckoned.

“Creosote,” María was instructing Maggie. “A little branch under your pillow every night, you’ll never have trouble with arthritis. Or in a salve, it’s good if you cut yourself. Now this, this agave. A tincture of this, very good for colic or indigestion. This sage here, dry it out, make a tea—you have a sore throat? You gargle with it. White sage, that you smudge with, you know? Good for purification. This here, sagebrush—not sage. Good for diaper rash. Ocotillo here, you make a tincture of the bark, put in the bath, good for fatigue.”

This lecture continued all the way back to the trailer, but Maggie seemed completely fascinated. Fox had heard all this many times before, and he wasn’t sure why Maggie needed to hear it now, but he knew better than to question his mother. He’d never get a straight answer anyway.

The women sat down at a picnic table in the small bit of shade provided by the porch. His mama pulled out her tobacco pouch and rolled herself a cigarette—a habit she knew Fox worried about as her voice grew raspier with each passing year. She gave him a little smile as she lit up, half guilty and half devil-may-care. He rolled his eyes and he went inside to brew a pot of tea.

Outside, the lecture continued. “Now these prickly pear cactus, you must carefully cut off the spines and the skin, and then you have a poultice for bad burns. Leave it right on for several hours; it will draw the fluid out.”

“What about the saguaro?” he heard Maggie ask as he put three