poked a stick in ’em.” Caldonia leaned in, studying Eliza. “You and Martin have a tussle?”
She gave a reluctant nod. “It was terrible. I’m afraid he may never come back.”
Caldonia squatted down beside her and hugged her shoulders. “Why in the world would you think—”
“He as much as said so.” Lowering her face into her hands, Eliza started to sob. “I love Martin, but what he wants is impossible. He’s asking me to choose between him and this baby. I would do almost anything for him but not…this.”
She stood and took the paper bag from the shelf, her hand trembling as she showed it to Caldonia, and explained it was a brew meant to rid a woman of the child inside of her. Caldonia lifted the bag to her nose, sniffed it, and looked up as if she’d seen a ghost.
“This here’s devil weed.”
“Martin said it was a tea that wouldn’t harm me. Supposedly it causes a woman to lose a baby, same as if it came about naturally.”
“Call it what you will, but that don’t change nothing. This here’s devil weed. It will for sure kill the baby and maybe you too.”
“But Martin said—”
“Makes no difference what he said. This is the same stuff that killed that pretty little Walker girl.”
“Bernice Walker? She died of influenza didn’t—”
Caldonia was already shaking her head. “Devil weed, that’s what killed her. Poor girl got herself in a family way. When her beau ran off, she took this stuff figuring she’d get rid of the baby and nobody’d be the wiser. She lost the baby that same night, then up and died two days later.”
Eliza sat down, her mouth hanging open.
“Devil weed’s poison as poison can be,” Caldonia said. “You need to get rid of it.”
The two women had been friends for many years, but Eliza had never before spoken of her darkest secrets. She’d never told of the times she could catch the scent of another woman’s perfume on Martin’s skin or how he’d been so adamant about them not moving to Charleston. She’d spoken of the good nights when they walked by the creek or sat side by side on the front porch but never of the nights when he came to her with the smell of whiskey souring his breath and ridden her like a horse.
Now Caldonia listened and remained silent until Eliza had finished. Taking her friend’s hand in hers, she said, “Get rid of that stuff, right now. A man like him will see you take it one way or another. If he can’t get you to take it willingly, he’ll trick you into it—hide it in your food, drop it into a bucket of well water, or God knows what. If you die, what do you reckon will happen to these babies?”
Eliza’s heart stopped for a second. She didn’t have to wonder what would happen to the children; she knew. Martin didn’t love them as she did. He barely tolerated them. Before she was cold in her grave, they’d be abandoned. Left behind to starve or dropped off at an orphanage. As that thought rose into her throat, it took away whatever words she might have spoken and left only tears.
Caldonia pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and handed it to Eliza. “Crying ain’t gonna fix nothing. What you got to do is get rid of that stuff.”
“I’ve already asked Martin to take it back to wherever it came from, but he refused. He said he expected me to take it.”
“You can’t trust him to do it. You have to do it yourself. Take that bag out into the woods and burn it. Once the devil weed is nothing but ashes, it can’t hurt nobody.”
Later that morning while the younger children napped and the older ones had not yet returned from school, the two women carried the bag deep into the woods and took a match to it. They stood downwind of the fire, waiting and watching until the smoldering embers died away and the only thing that remained was a tiny pile of ash. Before they started for home, Eliza stomped on the ash and ground it into the dirt. As the toe of her boot burrowed into that last bit of ash, she knew she’d buried something more than the devil weed. She’d buried the last remaining bit of love she’d had for Martin.
The Onset of Winter
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Eliza began to accept that Martin might not return for a very long time.