Granny Frank lay dying. The gathering in her breast had oozed and pained and finally the skin had fallen away to leave a terrible crater in the soft pillow of flesh that had nurtured nine children and cradled countless other wailing newborns. Granny Frank felt no pain, or rather had so inured herself to the constant agony of her fate, that the pain had become its own cure leaving her consciousness on a heightened level that explored the possibilities of continued life and the inevitability of her own death.
She came to awareness, and the realization her granddaughter wept beside the bed Old Tom had built for her.
What was to become of the girl? A knotted brown hand crept out from beneath the "Rose of Sharon" quilt Granny Frank had crafted with minuscule stitches for her wedding bed and inched toward that of her granddaughter, Peaches, more properly and very rarely known as Cheryl Mae Frank; the girl a product of the late marriage of her favorite son Tom to the outlander woman who had fled the hidden mountain community of their home some days after the birth of her daughter who had the pink and cream skin of the white-fleshed peaches that grew on the twisted tree outside Granny Frank's kitchen window.
Cheryl Mae clutched the dying woman's hand and wailed. "Don't die, Granny. I love you so."
The girl refused to understand that death was in the natural order of things.
Granny Frank drew breath, causing the ruined flesh of her breast to ooze and pain again. Her voice, low and rusty, seemed to come from the very depths of her ancient soul. "Stop that cryin' gal."
"I can't. I love you so much and I ain't ready for you to die yet." Cheryl Mae sniffled and tried to get hold of herself and sit still and ready, the way Granny Frank had taught her to do when waiting for help from the angels who surrounded every living soul. "Oh Gran," she squeezed the hand she held far too tightly. "What will I do without you to show me the way?"
"You know all you need, Child." Weariness overtook the old woman and she rested, silent, poised on the threshold. After a long moment, she sighed. "It's up to you, gal. Take care of them for me."
Take care of them. Granny Frank meant Cheryl Mae's older sister, Darcy, and Young Tom, Cheryl Mae's father who had suffered an derangement of the mind from a bad run of moonshine and who sat drooling in the sunshine of a summer day. Taking care of them meant the town as well, the women who labored in the throes of childbirth, the men who cut themselves with hoes and axes, the snot-nosed kids who picked up worms through the soles of their bare feet in the barnyards and pigsties of the hardscrabble farms of Potter's Run.
"I ain't old enough yet," Cheryl Mae complained smoothing back the thin white floss of her grandmother's hair. "You said yourself I wouldn't be ready until I was nineteen or twenty and married, and I'm only fifteen. I ain't old enough for you to die yet, Granny Frank."
"That is as it may be." The breath wheezed from the old woman's mouth, growing weaker with each passing moment. "But the Lord wants me and I'm goin' home. You're ready enough."
The room's silence was punctuated by the ticking of the humpbacked mantle clock Granny Frank's great-great-grandmother Mary had brought to Potter's Run in eighteen hundred and nine. The polished walnut case, rubbed to a sheen from the hands and rags of successive young wives, the cogs and wheels within, relentlessly marked off the moments of their years.
The seconds of Granny Frank's life were running out as well and with the ebbing of her strength, she passed her healing skills, love, and duty to the neighbors and kin of Potter's Run to her granddaughter care.
It was fit and right the gal take up the work. Who else was there, after all?
Outside, the kin were grouped around the horse trough, sitting on stumps, the women perched on broken chairs. Each waited for a sign from the house, for the covering of mirrors. One small boy, Cheryl Mae's cousin, Pete Tom Handy, stood at ready to run to the far field to tell the bees of the matriarch's passing. The heat of the day was oppressive and a pint mason jar of corn liquor passed quietly from hand to hand as the males in the gathering drank to the passing of a great woman.
"She had the power to stop blood." Rae Ellen Short, as red-haired and freckled as every other woman at the assembly sighed. She'd near lost her son to the slip of a butchering blade, but Granny Frank had preserved the lad's life with a hasty application of spider webs to seal the wound and a spell that set the boy's hand healing within an hour of the mishap.
Granny Frank had laughed with her granddaughter at the time, saying anyone with half a mind knew to put spider webs on a cut. Cheryl Mae's stomach had turned at the sight of the gushing blood, but she had kept her hands tight on the young man's forearm while her grandmother had stitched his fingers back to their bloody stumps. The hand had healed clean, although the patient never really had good use of it again.
Everyone agreed Granny Frank was a healer, a woman with the power of the angels in her hands. The good men and women of Potter's Run knew it would have been a sorry place without the likes of her to tend to their miseries.
And now the crown of power was to fall to a young woman named Peaches, Cheryl Mae Frank, a gal untried and young.
"It ain't right," the whisper passed through the crowded yard like the wind through naked boughs.
"Who else is there?" A rustle of gingham skirts voiced sighing doubt.
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