Chapter 1

1: 1

Delia Finch, my neighbor and a medical school graduate, reported my mother for practicing without a license.

The county health department finished its inspection and, given that my mother had never charged a fee and had never once caused a medical dispute,

let her off with a verbal warning. Then they burned decades of proper, honestly gathered herbs my family had built up, and they sealed our herbal shop.

My mother cried until her eyes swelled shut.

"Back when her mother nearly died in labor, if I hadn't used an old remedy to save her, neither mother nor daughter would be alive today."

When Delia's mother heard that, she cleared her throat, all righteous conviction.

"Brooklyn Ellison, don't blame the girl for being strict about it. It's a new age now. Treating illness and saving lives follows a whole new set of standards."

My mother clenched her fists and said nothing.

Then Delia's newborn son, barely a month old, ran a fever and went into convulsions, and they came begging my mother to save him. She kept the door shut.

"By the new-age standards for seeking treatment, call 911 and wait for the ambulance. The nearest hospital is fifty miles from the village. You'll just have to wait."

...

The day the inspectors came happened to be the day of Delia's son's one-month celebration.

Her mother, Winifred Whitney, had laid out twenty tables of open feasting, and all of Whitney Hollow had turned up.

Right in the middle of the noise, three people in uniform climbed out of a car at the mouth of the lane,

faces hard as stones left out to freeze, and walked straight toward our house.

My mother's brow drew tight. The tiger-hat she'd knitted with her own hands still hadn't made it to Delia. She grabbed my hand and we ran for home.

At the banquet, people dropped their bowls and chopsticks and came surging after us in a crowd.

Before we even reached the door, I saw my father come out of the house, one hand on the frame, his leg still lame.

"Here for treatment, comrades? Brooklyn's off at the feast. The sun's brutal out here. Come in and sit, I'll go bring her back."

The man in front frowned faintly and, face grim, flipped open the document in his hand.

"We've received a signed complaint. Your household is suspected of unlicensed medical practice. You'll need to suspend operations for inspection."

My father's hand went still on the water kettle. Boiling water soaked half his trouser leg, and he didn't seem to feel the burn.

My mother had just reached the door, hadn't even caught her breath,

when she swayed and knocked into the herb rack beside her, sending half-dried yarrow root scattering across the ground.

She'd practiced medicine for decades. From one end of the village to the other, who hadn't drunk a bowl of her bitter herbal brew?

The feverish, the injured, the women hemorrhaging after childbirth...

One reading of the pulse, a few herbs measured out, and the person got better.

She never took money.

When she truly couldn't refuse, the most she'd accept was a handful of greens and a few eggs.

A ring of people quickly closed in at the door.

My voice came out tight as I asked, "Who?"

The official said nothing. He turned the page with the complainant's information around and held it out.

Black ink on white paper.

Delia Finch.

Her ID number.

Her thumbprint pressed on, neat and square.

My mother stared at that page as if she'd been struck with a club, and the tiger-hat fell from her hand, rolling to Delia's feet and picking up dust.

I stared at those two words for three seconds, then followed the tiger-hat on the ground with disbelieving eyes up to Delia's face, the child still cradled in her arms.

"Delia. You reported us?"

Delia soothed the baby without lifting her head. Winifred yanked mother and child behind her.

"Felicia Ellison, Delia went to medical school. She understands the rules, she knows what's proper and what isn't. This is for your own good too, to keep you from going down the wrong road."

"For our own good?" My mother's lips trembled. Her voice broke as she said,

"Winifred, the year you nearly bled to death in labor, the barefoot doctor in town wouldn't touch you. I stayed with you the whole night with my medicine box, and when the reviving tonic was short one ingredient, I ran to five different herbal shops through the night to gather it. When you held Delia and wept, you took my hand and said that from then on I was your own sister—"

Winifred waved a hand and cut my mother off.

"Oh, please! It's exactly because you're like a sister to me that our Delia was kind enough to help you out. Brooklyn, it's a new age now. Treating illness and saving lives follows new standards!"

Delia raised her head and looked at my mother, her voice flat, without a single bend in it.

"Auntie, what I studied tells me that practicing medicine without a license is against the law. It's nothing personal against you."

My mother didn't look at her.

She stared at Winifred, the rims of her eyes going redder and redder, her lips bitten white.

The day Winifred's labor went wrong, my father was up on the slope gathering herbs and broke his leg.

Caught in an impossible choice, my father was the one who stepped forward,

saying a life came first, telling my mother to save Winifred and her baby before anything else.

My father's broken leg went untended a whole night, and he was left crippled for life.

Never once did we imagine that in the end,

my mother had saved two ingrates.

The officials inspected quickly.

They went into the shop, went through the herb cabinets, examined the consulting table, checked the prescriptions, photographing each item as evidence as they turned it over.

My mother crouched in the yard without moving, the yarrow root heaped by her hand like a little grave mound she'd spent half her life building.

Half an hour later, the man in charge came out, his face not quite so hard anymore.

"Auntie, we've looked at the records. All these years you've treated people and saved lives without charging a fee, and there's never been a medical dispute. But unlicensed practice is a fact, and by policy... the herbs are to be destroyed on the spot, and the shop sealed."