riotheclown

Prompt: Sage
Word Count: 1462
Warnings: ummm, PG?
author: Urb-banal
Title: I Want to Tell You About Maggie
Genre: fiction

I Want to Tell You About Maggie

While Steven was in the town working during the week I took to going down to Henry and Maggie's place after the mucking out was done and the animals all were fed. They seemed to be a happy couple. I studied them like a book.

Maggie explained that they were not so much the ‘SalasiEye’ sort of Rasta but more the ‘Reefar’ type...” and they both chuckled. They did'nt follow all the dietary restrictions just "common sense like not eating dairy with meat", which I had never heard of. I didn't say I had always just eaten whatever I could get. They knew enough about how I lived before and were kind enough not to mention it.

They grew a crop that was illegal except that everybody, especially the police, liked to smoke it. They kept it cheap and good so they had no worries.

"These days, most time, the police just kill you you do something real bad. Police could care less about the abstract law." It was good to sell to the police she explained. She didn't have to worry about thieves coming and stealing from them. "This plant has lots of uses besides getting high." The leaves were good for making tea. She said the tea would help me when it came time to have the baby.

Over the years she had helped more and more girls giving birth to babies. So even though she never trained as a mid-wife she could help me when the time came. Henry had been a surgeon in a big fancy hospital, a long time ago, but if things got serious there was his expertise too. As for knock out drugs, Steven could get anything they might need from Guildwood Pharmaceuticals.

"You don't worry about this baby getting born."

Her kitchen always smelled good. She had lots of things hanging near the stove drying. Lavender was my favourite. She said to put it around the bed; it would help keep out the lice and bed bugs. She threw dried herbs on the floor to be ground up in the dirt to keep the bugs out of the house; the smell of their oils releasing every time you walked across it, mixing with the aromas of good things cooking on the iron stove.

She and Henry were "as old as time". They both had grey in their hair, salt and pepper and Henry's beard was white. You didn't see a lot of old people in those days, not where I came from. People didn't live that long.

Henry's skin was as tough as shoes and black as it could be. Maggie's was shiny, soft and caramel. Even old she was pretty in my eyes. She gave me a small pot of lotion and told me to start rubbing into my belly as it got bigger. "To keep you from getting all stretched out", which sounded frightening. She told me to rub it on my breasts too, "or get Steven to do it!", she said with a laugh. "It'll keep you looking young and beautiful like me!"

"She rubs it all over herself", Henry said, disgusted, "it's so she's too slippery for me to hold on to", and he winked.

Things were pretty good for a time. Friday Steven would return looking old and worn out but by Sunday he'd have some colour and a smile. I got bigger of course and he liked to lay with his head next to my belly and oh, he liked to slather the lotion all over! I think it had sage in it and maybe bees wax. I can close my eyes and smell it now even though it's gone and used up a long time ago.

Maggie once told me that the memory of aromas was the last to go when you die and that is why people took to bringing in flowers for the sick, to keep them from going, to hold them to what still could reach them: the reminder of the flowers of their youth.

A lot of time went by; winter. My baby was born. My husband was killed. I'll tell you about that later. For now I want to keep writing about Maggie.

I was busier than before because of the baby but still I should have noticed sometimes she had to steady herself. She was smoking reefer all the time from a pipe that stayed lit and hanging from the corner of her mouth.

Henry told me that she thought it was easier to bear if she didn’t have to see any worry on my face. He didn’t tell me she had cancer for that reason.

She told me a joke once. It went like this:
The old man was dying and the old woman had all his family get around and say their good-byes. Of course if you had family there you had to cook a big feast. So when the old man weakly beckoned to her to come close so he could speak what he said was,
"Is that some of your wonderful blackened chicken I can smell?"
"Yes dear" she said.
"Darling, grant me one last wish."
"Yes dear."
"Let me have one last taste of your wonderful blackened chicken."
"No dear."
"Noooo? Why would you not grant me my last wish?"
"Because it's for them AFTER dear."

She was very practical and not without irony.

Henry came over in the early morning one day and said Maggie told him that he should help me. He said she told him I was too young and stupid to know how to live on my own, "inexperienced" and “uneducated” were the words Henry used but I knew what she really said.

He said she hadn’t been eating much for a while and that earlier that night she drank some concoction from her favorite tea cup. She was sitting in front of the fire in her favourite chair with her favourite cat on her lap.

Henry said he was smoking and talking to her the whole time and she was smiling and he never even knew she was dead until he got up to go to bed...

"That was just like her, she never wanted to interrupt me when I was telling a good story, but then again, she never paid me much attention when I rambled on. She probably decided she didn't want to hang around for the whole story seeing she'd heard me tell it a thousand times already." Henry mopped a rummy eye with his handkerchief.

I just felt the blood run out of my face and a cold spin come over me. Poor old Henry had to put me to bed and look after my baby.

"Maggie told me to be prepared for you going all off. You are just going to have to accept that there is such a thing as a good death. It went against my thinking as a doctor but I learned from her years ago that she was right about everything. "

Henry sighed and then went on: "There's so much of her in this place. I'll show you. I'll show you how to see her in the spring. I’m going to miss her too.

I'm making you some soup and it's the last time I'm cooking for you. I have to get back to my house because there’s a list of things she left for me to do. Tomorrow we will make a pyre and put her 'ingredients' to rest like she would want."

That is what we did.

All that summer I kept finding proof of her, an occasional breeze would carry her scent; a corner of gnarled hedge would seem to hide her bent picking berries; I found a button from her sweater while sweeping; My baby seemed to laugh and chortle with glee sometimes just like when she would come close and scoop him up in her arms.

Maggie gave my son his name: Sage. He's gone now too and I don't know if he is even grown to be a man. She told me once: “Everything gets lost to us, sooner or later. What you thought was yours, what you thought you could hold on to and even who you thought you were. But nothing is wasted. It’s just not that personal. The earth uses everything. When it has no use for us we lie down in the dirt and become dirt, good earth if we have lived good. Bad earth if we have lived bad. When we finally lose who we are is when we find there is no sadness in it because that's when we become all of it and it is JOY, pure and simple.”

This is an adaption of a section of "The Children's War" which is a story/book I have been hauling out to tweak for ten years.