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sleeping in his master’s barn, leaving her to raise the three alone. So she taught the girls they had a choice between becoming a wife or a healer, and that the bond among them was stronger than anything. When one misbehaved, she beat all three with a hickory switch. When one fell ill, she forced the other two to stay up late tending the sick one. Three rows of plaits, three pairs of shoes, three dresses of homespun cloth. Only their looks differed: Polly Ann more like her father, short, round, with a belly that stuck out like a melon from a young age and never left; Berta Mae and Sarah Lou built up like the mother—tall, long-limbed, broad-shouldered, except Berta Mae got her father’s dark-like-soil coloring, and Sarah Lou the red-tinged brown of her mother. When the mother died suddenly, the three sisters cut the wood for the coffin themselves and buried her beneath a dogwood tree, white blossoms shedding over the fresh hump of earth. They were all late into their teen years when they stood over the grave holding hands, the prospect of survival withouttheir mother looking up their noses. Up until that time, the mother had led, directing the mixing, receiving the messages, carving out the morning’s path through the woods while the girls acted as her capable assistants.
    â€œWe got to let ’em know she dead,” said the oldest, Berta Mae.
    What Berta meant was that now they would have to let folks know their mother was dead of something serious enough the daughters could not cure it, and that, despite that failing, they would be stepping into her healing shoes.
    The first thing they did was take stock of all they had—what had already been picked and what was still shooting out of the ground. What could be eaten now and what could be eaten later, how much meat was salted, how much milk they could reliably draw from the goat, how many eggs the three hens marching around the yard might yield. None of the sisters could read, but they had been taught when they were young how to figure numbers in their heads. So they set about accounting with the desperation of orphans, and when they were done, they agreed that their mother’s foresight had been considerable.
    They could survive a year without healing a lick.
    For months they floated lazily for the first time in their young lives, eating berries and steeping teas that were delightful just because they were delightful. Rather than sell the goat’s milk as their mother had done, they drank it themselves, made cheese and sat on the porch eating it with fresh bread. Although they had calculated a year’s store, they disregarded their numbers, and after six months, the youngest—Baby Sister—peered into an empty cabinet. In the meantime, the middle girl—Sarah Lou—chased the goat who, still thinking of her as a playmate, hid in a thicket of blueberry bushes. Nearby, the oldest, Berta Mae, cast two eyes upon a bug-ridden patch of cabbage.
    The community had left them alone, partly because they did not fully believe the girls could do what their mother had done. But on thevery day the sisters realized, one by one, that it was time to step into their mother’s shoes, someone knocked at the door. A woman named Thea who lived on a farm just two miles west reported that the white woman who owned her had taken ill. Thea’s wet hair brought news of a storm that had not yet reached the sisters’ house.
    â€œShe ain’t getting no better. She look near ’bout to die.”
    â€œWhere her husband at?” asked Baby Sister.
    â€œHe gone off to see about his folks down near Somerville. I reckon when he get back he liable to say I done kilt her.”
    â€œYou got something to pay us?” Berta Mae asked.
    â€œHe ain’t leave nothing!”
    â€œLord strike you.”
    â€œYou gone help or not?”
    Berta studied the woman. “She don’t even know you here, do she.”
    â€œHer husband