The chief difficulty in being a garden witch is that the cabbage patches occasionally sprout babies. Odelia didn’t know this when she started garden witchery, only that cabbage, in parts or whole, is required for approximately eighty-seven percent of spells (including all the really good ones).
But at least on the crisp mornings when she mists the cabbages’ bright green leaves and discovers a bald head amongst them, there’s always a mother waiting at her garden gate to take it.
Admittedly, Odelia doesn’t understand the mothers. The babies are . . . unpleasant. The woman who stands at the gate, eager and thrilled, is inevitably spotted weeks later at the village washing well, transformed: haggard, stringy-haired, covered in god-knows-what. Unbelievably, if approached and asked after, she will usually say, “It’s wonderful.”
Cabbage magic, Odelia reasons. How else could you explain it, other than some vegetal spell that convinces these poor women they aren’t miserable?
* * *
The baby that unfurls from row twelve has a surprisingly full head of hair and a butt already tarry with poop. Odelia brushes the leaves off his impressively furred crown of appalling softness and then, with a smile of practiced sincerity, carries him at arms-length to the mother standing at the gate.
And then she turns and sets him nearby, in a wheelbarrow full of less enchanted vegetables.
“Sorry,” Odelia says awkwardly. “I . . . Come back tomorrow?”
The mother, puzzled, walks away.
Odelia stares at the wheelbarrow.
Strange.
This has never happened before.
He looks like every other baby she’s tilled up. Scrunched face. Appalling color. Like an eggplant, but less attractive.
As if sensing something has gone awry, the universe sends another mother. Odelia again tries to give him away.
She can’t quite bring herself to.
Strange.
Maybe he’s an imp. No, those come from kale. She doesn’t grow kale.
Staring at him, she has the odd thought: is he mine?
Silly. She doesn’t have time, for one. She’s in the middle of cultivating a vegetable marrow that will bring a 70% chance of rain if eaten on a Friday. Not to mention she’s not tender, like the mothers at the gate, or insane, like the mothers at the well. And who would want a baby now, in this current kingdom?
Cabbage magic. It must be.
But she doesn’t feel bewitched. She feels, instead, like she’s stumbled upon a mysterious seed that the seller can’t place or name, a seed that might be arugula or zinnia or a baobab tree.
She shakes her head and unhexes herself three times.
* * *
Possum arrives for tea, and Odelia greets her with relief. Here’s a proper mother! Hauling around her litter of bright-eyed burdens uncomplainingly, giving herself arthritis and probably dyspepsia. Odelia asks her to watch the wheelbarrow for just one minute, maybe two.
“Is he yours?” Possum asks.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Odelia says as she mounts her broom. She flies up to see the pale afternoon moon, whom she goes to often for counsel. He speaks prophetically, in stories of rivers shaped like a snakes, or snakes shaped like scepters, or dogs who laugh but whose reflections remain somber.
But before she can ask, the moon says, his pale, pitted face turned to regard the infant sleeping far below, “Oh, adorable! See the perfect roundness of his skull? He must be mine. Give him to me, and I will make of him a new planet, or a Southern guiding star!”
Odelia says clumsily, “Well, but — no, but — thanks,” and turns her broom away.
Well, his advice is usually terrible anyways, she thinks as she flies away.
But she doesn’t go home, where Possum and the wheelbarrow baby wait. She circles the forest, and then, with nowhere else to go, the village. To her dismay, the earlier women from the gate have gathered with the wash mothers. They are all smiling, whispering. When she flies overhead, they wave and call up what they must think is good advice:
“It’s not so bad!”
“You’ll sleep again someday!”
She unhexes the crowd of them, but their exhausted lunatic expressions don’t change.
* * *
When she returns, the moon is bright with yearning, and Possum has nursed the baby. He sleeps wetly against her breast.
“It’s just that I have this complicated project involving vegetable marrows,” Odelia explains as she steps down from her broom. “Which I won’t have time for, if—”
“No, of course,” Possum agrees kindly. “I can take him.”
“And I’m not like you,” Odelia continues, sitting down to tea long cold. “Babies need holding and their hair brushed. A mother’s touch.”
“It’s a skill,” Possum agrees. “I can take him.”
“Not to mention the state of the kingdom.”
“Such a state.” Possum shows the bare place on her back amongst her weans, where a child might cling and be nurtured.
“And he’s not a cabbage!” Odelia cries. “He might be an orange tree, or mountain rose, or butterfly orchid, and I don’t even have the shape of a seed to guide me. And what will nurture an orange tree will kill a rose, and if he’s something like calathea there’s a regiment necessary from the beginning and I’ve probably already ruined him.” She stops herself, smooths her skirt, and drinks her cold tea. “He has used his magic against me,” she finishes.
Possum says, “It’s all right to be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” Odelia blusters, “I’m . . . cautious! Realistic. Practical. I’m—”
“And it’s hard, in more ways than can be counted,” Possum says. “But wonderful, too, to discover them. That’s why we’re still here, isn’t it?”
Possum holds the little thing out. Odelia, despite her practicality and her marrow project and the state of the kingdom, takes him. He’s warm, and he breathes so softly.
“Will it be wonderful?” Odelia whispers, touching her fingertips to his closed eyes. “Can you promise me?”
“I can’t,” Possum says. “But my dear, fear is a famine, and hope is a feast.”
* * *
Ⓒ Ashlee Lhamon
