repairs nearly broke us,” Tim recalled, but now their home was such a showplace that it was featured on an episode of This Old House. There were azaleas and daylilies in the front beds, and dogwoods lined the drive.
Maggie and Tim’s only child, Kendall, was two years older than Helen, although Helen was taller. They looked almost like twins, both lefthanded, both redheads, and both with blue eyes, a pair of genetic rarities with so many recessive traits. As soon as Helen arrived, the two of them disappeared, spending hours together in Kendall’s room or in the barn. Kendall was in the Williamson County 4-H Club, and her room was full of trophies and ribbons and photographs of her prize animals.
One day, Tim took Kendall and Helen to a livestock auction in Franklin, where Kendall was shopping for a piglet to raise. “I’ve had two Berkshires already,” she told Helen. “This year, I’m going to get a Hampshire. They’re really common, but the judges sorta favor them.”
Helen couldn’t keep herself from cooing over the little black-and-white piglets with their floppy ears, sticking their snouts forward just begging to be petted. “They are soooo cute!” she exclaimed. But Kendall was looking for other qualities. “Shoulder angle, that’s important,” she said. “Size of the chest, the muscles of the loin. It’s basically all about meat.” She finally picked out a fifty-pound gilt. The girls rode home in the back of Tim’s pickup and Helen got to cradle the pig in her lap. All the way back she and her cousin talked about names, which Kendall said was important from a judging perspective. She finally settled on Queen Margaret, because that was her father’s pet name for her mother. The girls laughed about that. When they got home, Tim made them change their clothes and shoes to keep from tracking any diseases from the auction tent onto their farm.
While the girls were at the auction, Maggie took Jill on a tractor ride around the property, towing Teddy behind them on a cart piled high with mulch, while Peepers raced behind, barking ecstatically. The sisters had a lot to catch up on. Maggie had had breast cancer the year before, and she was still recovering from the ordeal. Still, she insisted on going back to work on the farm. “Every day, I think how fortunate I am to still be here,” Maggie said. “To still be with Tim and Kendall, and to have all we have together. I’m so happy to be alive.”
Jill looked out at the rows of corn that were already two feet high. Maggie’s life was so distant from her own. She reflected on the things that Maggie had that she never would—an intimacy with nature, for instance. Maggie didn’t vote, she didn’t even have a television, but she could recognize birds by their calls. Her kitchen garden was filled with herbs that Jill had never tasted before and varieties of tomatoes you couldn’t find in a store.
On the other hand, Jill missed being home—their house, the neighborhood, running in Lullwater Park, listening to the voices of her students facing the quandaries that life posed for them. It seemed so isolated out here. Of course, that was what she and the kids had come for —refuge. And yet, the influenza still hadn’t gotten to Atlanta, so it seemed pointless and indulgent to have left her job and taken the kids out of school as a precaution.
“Being sick had a weird upside,” Maggie was saying. “We took a huge financial hit because of it. And I was in a lot of pain. What helped me through it was this…” She parked the tractor in front of a drying shed. “When we first bought the farm, they were using this place for tobacco,” she said, as they walked inside. Leafy bundles were suspended from racks.
“What is it?” Jill asked.
“You really don’t know? Can’t you smell it?”
Jill sniffed. “Oh, my God, is this legal?”
“Kinda.”
Jill stared a hole in her sister as Teddy and Peepers came into the shed. “Ooh, what’s that stinky smell?” Teddy asked.
“It’s just the smell of these weeds,” Maggie said, giving Jill an ironic glance. Peepers ran around in confusion, jangled by the odor.
“Wait outside, honey,” Jill suggested to Teddy.
Maggie broke off the head of one of the drying stalks. “When I was in so much pain, a friend of mine brought me some marijuana. It really helped. And then we found out you could grow it for the CBD oil,