She sat away from him, gazing into the low fire, her long crusty bottom lip hanging. She was not married. Was not pretty. Was not anybody much. And he was all she had. “Lawd, why don’t that doctor come on here?” she moaned, tears sliding from her sticky eyes. She had not washed since Snooks took sick five days ago and a long row of whitish snail tracks laced her ashen face. “What you ought to try is some of the old home remedies,” Sarah urged. She was an old neighboring lady who wore magic leaves round her neck sewed up in possumskin next to a dried lizard’s foot. She knew how magic came about, and could do magic herself, people said. “We going to have us a doctor,” Rannie Toomer said fiercely, walking over to shoo a fat winter fly from her child’s forehead. “I don’t believe in none of that swamp magic. All the old home remedies I took when I was a child come just short of killing me.” Snooks, under a pile of faded quilts, made a small gravelike mound in the bed.
