The Test of the Holler
The bus coughed her out like it was glad to be rid of her.
Elizabeth stood on the gravel where the blacktop should’ve been, one hand on a suitcase that used to be her mother’s. The station wasn’t a station, just a Coke machine that took quarters personally and a bench listing to one side. Wind jittered a gum wrapper. A crow watched from the telephone wire like it had thoughts.
A rust-colored pickup rolled in slow. The woman who got out wore a man’s flannel and a braid the color of dishwater left too long. Her eyes were the pale of winter sky and sharper than any blade.
“You Ida Mae?” Elizabeth asked, hating the crack in her voice.
The woman didn’t smile. She looked Elizabeth over head to heel, as if measuring lumber. “Well,” she said. “Set that down. Let me see your face.”
Elizabeth set the suitcase hard, which was the same as not wanting to set it at all. Ida Mae stepped close. When their eyes met, the breath went tight in Elizabeth’s ears like it does right before weather.
“I know that look,” Ida Mae said, softer than her jaw. “Alice Jean had it. Your mama did too when she was small, before she learned to run. Get in.”
They drove with the windows cracked and the radio muttering hellfire until Ida Mae snapped it off with two fingers. Trees shouldered up on both sides—tall, close, whispering to themselves.
“What’s that?” Elizabeth asked, because silence made matches strike inside her chest.
“What’s what?”
“The woods. Sound like talking.”
“That’s just the pines,” Ida Mae said. “They mind everybody’s business. You don’t have to answer unless you want to.”
Elizabeth folded the letter in her palm smaller and harder—Give her to Ida Mae. I can’t.—until it felt like a square stone. She put it in her pocket like a dare.
The house came up sudden as a truth you can’t unknow—four rooms, porch swing, a neat line of jars catching light in the kitchen window. Ida Mae parked and didn’t look at her when she said, “Supper’s beans and cornbread. You can wash. We’ll talk after.”
Inside smelled like soap, cedar, and something green. On a shelf: Bible, ball of twine, a row of brown bottles with hand-written labels—yarrow, black cohosh, mullein. The sink was deep enough to baptize a cat. On the table sat a chipped mug with a spray of dried white flowers.
“Yarrow,” Ida Mae said when she caught Elizabeth staring. “Keeps what needs kept in.”
They ate with their sleeves pushed up. The beans were humble and perfect; the cornbread steamed when it split. Elizabeth held herself still like a dog holding a biscuit on its nose, waiting for permission.
After, Ida Mae poured dishwater and said, as if it mattered and didn’t, “You’ll sleep on the daybed ’til you prove you don’t kick. Chores start with light. You’ll walk to school if the bus driver’s in a mood, which he often is. And if anybody asks ’bout your people, you say, ‘I’m Weaver kin,’ and leave it at that.”
“Granny woman,” the cashier whispered two days later at the store, almost admiring, almost afraid. “You her kin?” Elizabeth, with a sack of flour in her arms, said, “Yes, ma’am,” and the woman’s eyes slid off like oil on rain.
Days found their pattern. Wood split. Eggs collected. Ida Mae’s hands moved like old prayer over herbs, teaching names by use instead of lecture. “This one stops bleeding.” “This one turns a cough.” “This one soothes a stomach when a man’s done something stupid to it.” Elizabeth learned quick because it was safer than being slow.
She dreamed too—vivid, noisy things. A woman’s hand reaching from creek water. A crow hopping three hops and looking back to be sure she followed. Sometimes she woke with the taste of metal in her mouth and the sense that someone had just left the room.
When the bleeding came, it was during wood-hauling. She set the split log down and felt the warm slip between her legs, sudden as a secret told wrong. She went very still. She didn’t call out.
Ida Mae knew anyway. Women like her always do.
They didn’t make a church of it and they didn’t make a shame. Ida Mae warmed water, set a basin on the porch step, and added salt until it looked like a pale sea. She handed Elizabeth a clean rag, turned her back, and looked out at the line of pines.
“Childhood’s a coat,” she said. “Tonight you hang it up.”
Elizabeth’s cheeks went hot and then cold. She wanted to say she wasn’t ready, that she hadn’t even worn that coat through one good winter. Instead she watched moths bump dumbly at the porch light, and the ache behind her eyes didn’t spill.
Ida Mae brought out three things wrapped in a faded towel and laid them on the table like offerings.
“Three gifts,” she said. “Not from me. From the line.”
The first was a small bag sewn from blue calico, drawstring tight, heavy with the crinkle of dry leaves. “Yarrow, sage, cedar, mugwort,” Ida Mae said. “For protection. For seeing true.”
The second was a lantern with clean glass and a new wick, its brass rubbed until the day caught a dull shine. “For carrying light where you’ll need it.”
The third was a knife with a deer-horn handle worn smooth by other hands. The blade was honest steel, not fancy, held its own moon. “Your great-granddaddy made it when he still believed all the way. It’s not for foolishness. It’s for reminding.”
“Reminding what?” Elizabeth asked, because you ask when you’re thirteen and the world opens like a mouth.
“That your life is yours,” Ida Mae said, and the words set somewhere under Elizabeth’s ribs with a sound like a nail catching home.
“After supper, you go to the hollow oak and sit the night. You talk to what comes. You use your name correct. If you run, run toward truth.”
Elizabeth wanted to laugh and she wanted to throw up. She did neither. She put the herb bag over her head, tucked the knife into her jacket pocket, took up the lantern. On the porch, she looked at Ida Mae because she couldn’t look at the woods yet.
Ida Mae reached out and, with the briefest touch, tucked a stray hair behind Elizabeth’s ear. Her hand shook once and then didn’t. “You’ll do,” she said.
The path to the creek took fewer steps than it had when Elizabeth first arrived. Nights shrink the distance between things. The lantern threw a patient circle she tried to stand inside. The pines leaned in and reconsidered her. Somewhere a dog barked and didn’t insist.
The hollow oak wasn’t hard. The creek turned, thinking better of it, and there the tree was—split long ago by lightning or some other decision, big enough for a girl to kneel inside like the world’s dry ribcage. Elizabeth set the lantern on a root. She held the herb bag in both hands the way you hold breath.
She waited. Waiting is work if you’re not used to it.
The first voice came thin as radio from a neighbor’s trailer. I don’t want her no more. The words were a recording; you could hear the fluorescent buzz behind them, the clerk calling, Next.
Elizabeth’s jaw ached with how hard she didn’t cry. The herb bag warmed in her palm, and cedar rose in the air like a door shut soft between rooms that shouldn’t share breath. “That’s not a spell,” she said to the dark, surprised at how steady she sounded. “That’s a tired woman at a bus counter.” The lantern fluttered like it understood and then stood up straight.
Leaves scuffed and became a man, or the idea of one made of shadow and old beer. Mistake, he said, and the word landed in her chest like she’d fallen on a stump as a little kid, breath gone, stars popping in the corners of her eyes.
Her hand found the knife. The deer horn fit the notch of her palm like it had been made for her small hand, not some great-grandfather’s, and maybe it had, in the way time folds when it needs to. She didn’t lift it to threaten. She set the blade against the root and pulled three short, sure cuts. Crow’s foot. I was here. I did not run.
The figure thinned like fog when the sun takes it away. Not banished. Just uninvited.
Hours turned in place. Moths tapped the lantern like tiny fists asking to be let in. The creek kept telling the story it tells—a stone, a leaf, a snake asleep under a ledge. Somewhere, owls negotiated.
The third voice wore her own face. Seven years old, shirt with pilled kittens, knees geography-mapped with old bruises. We’re the leftover, the little her said, and it punched harder than any of the rest because Elizabeth could smell the bleach that never quite got the stains out.
She took off her coat and wrapped the smaller self tight and gentle. She knew exactly how the small ears felt like thin shells under her hands, how the hair always came loose right there. “Listen,” Elizabeth said, and her voice had a kindness she hadn’t met before. “Leftover makes stew better. We keep. We get richer overnight.” The mugwort sighed sweet in the herb bag, and the lantern flame drew taller like it wanted to hear the end.
The small her breathed different. The whole holler did, like everybody let go a held breath at once. The pines quit talking and started listening. Elizabeth leaned into the oak and realized she wasn’t bracing. She was simply there.
Sometime near dawn she slept ten minutes that felt like a full winter. When her eyes opened, the world had the ash-blue edge of a bruise fading. Birdsong tuned itself. Elizabeth touched the knife to the bark one more time, not for daring but for thanks. “I’ll listen,” she said to the tree, to the creek, to whatever was listening back. “But you won’t own me.”
The lantern didn’t answer. It just shone, which was answer enough.
Ida Mae was waiting on the porch with two mugs when Elizabeth came up the steps, dirty at the knees, eyes salt-stung, a different weight in her limbs. Steam curled from the cups into the cold like white lace.
No praise was spoken. Ida Mae glanced once at Elizabeth’s face and then away like you do with something too honest to stare at. She tucked a sprig of yarrow behind Elizabeth’s ear with that same brief touch from before—permission and pride without ceremony.
They had time for two swallows before a truck rattled the road like a loose tooth and stopped hard in the yard. A man got out wide-eyed and hat-crushed in his hands.
“Miss Ida Mae,” he said, breathless. “It’s Ellie—she’s early and the baby’s turned. I— I don’t know what to—”
Ida Mae was already up, already tying her apron. “You ready to hold a leg and pray right?” she asked, not looking to see if Elizabeth would say yes.
Elizabeth wiped her palms on her jeans, slid the knife into her pocket, and picked up the herb bag and lantern. “I’m ready,” she said, and heard truth ring in it.
The house they hurried into smelled like fear and laundry soap. The young mother’s hair stuck to her temples; her eyes were wild and then grabbed onto Ida Mae like a thrown rope. The room filled with the work of women: water warmed and poured, sheets folded and replaced, words shaped to fit a body that needed them. The lantern burned beside the bed steady as a drumbeat.
“Breathe with me,” Ida Mae said to the mother. To Elizabeth: “Hand.” To the man: “Out. Then in. Then hush.”
Time narrowed until all it could hold was a head turned with the right pressure, a shoulder coaxed free, a wet cry that sounded like somebody apologizing and somebody arriving at the same time. The baby slid into the world furious and then not, purple and then pink, held in palms that did not shake. Ida Mae tied and cut. Elizabeth steadied a leg and then a life and then her own breath.
After, the room went quiet in that holy way messy rooms do. The mother laughed a little with no air behind it and fell asleep smiling with her mouth open. The man cried like a boy and pretended he wasn’t. Elizabeth washed her wrists until the crescents of blood were only pale moons.
Back on the porch, December had put small teeth in the air. Ida Mae lowered herself into the rocker and closed her eyes like a woman listening for rain.
“You done good,” she said, which in her mouth was a hymn and a parade.
Elizabeth hung the knife on the nail by the door where Ida Mae’s had always hung. The lantern, cleaned and fed new oil, sat full on the shelf. The herb bag felt lighter not because it held less, but because it knew where it belonged.
Down in the yard the pines kept their own counsel. When the wind went through, it said her name plain like neighbors do when they finally decide you’re staying.
“Elizabeth Jean,” the wind said.
Not leftover. Kept.
She sat on the step and let the cold burn her ears to calm. Somewhere a crow put a period on the morning. Inside, dishes argued softly in the rack. Behind her, Ida Mae’s rocker kept time.
There would be more nights and more tests. The holler would still mind her business and ask for her hands. But the door was different now. She could feel it even with her eyes closed—the way it opened both ways.
She smiled, and the smile went all the way up.
Offer whatever name you wish to be known by at the hearth today — real or imagined — we look forward to welcoming your words into the circle.
