Eight knots. Anna Efimenko
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the blackberry wife, stood behind the counter, busily counting coins and filling tight leather pokes. She was all in flatland gear, a tightly buttoned black dress, and her face, ash gray with fatigue and hard work with enormous dark shadows under her eyes.
When a bell jingled over the door being opened, the druggist’s wife immediately raised her dark-haired head and saw Hom, then dryly uttered more to herself than to him,
“There you are.”
Hom shrugged his shoulders,
“I just came from the red witch over the birches. She makes me sick.”
One of the young blackberry daughters, who had been cleaning the shelves, decided to have a nice conversation with him,
“I like the herb-woman. I remember, she once gave me cuttings of a tree, and they instantly rooted in the garden.”
The blackberry wife interrupted her daughter.
“Could you leave us alone with young Mr. Kelly?”
She didn’t like gossip, and knew how difficult it was for customers to give the reason why they went to the store in front of strangers, so she waited until the girl went out of the outbuilding and decided to get straight to the point, “Well?! What was it you couldn’t get from the herb-woman that you came here?”
“What does she have that you don’t?” the blond answered a question with a question.
The woman in black took thought,
“A rejuvenating potion, for example. We certainly don’t keep that. And the herb-woman is good at it, you can’t take it away from her.”
Hom shook his head in disapproval,
“That’s pathetic. No, there is no need for any rejuvenating potion. Neither to your shop nor to yourself.”
The hostess of the blackberry house suspiciously squinted,
“Don’t tempt me, Hom Kelly. I’m twenty years older than you, and considering my intelligence, even thirty.”
“Others would argue with you about my wit.”
“Picking on me?”
Hom leaned forward and putting his elbows on the counter, he uttered blandly,
“I just want to say that you don’t need a rejuvenating potion because each time I am tempted to kiss such a poetic cutie.”
“Poetic cutie?” Angie was amazed, taking a step back. “Even my husband has never said that.”
“Your husband sees nothing but profit, which takes up all of his thoughts.”
But the blackberry wife did not like this statement,
“There you’re wrong about the bearded man. He’s a good man after all. He and the kids don’t let me fall apart in the middle of all this glorious stuff good, which I’ve been fed up long ago.”
“I still believe you deserve better.”
However, Angie wasn’t easy to talk to.
“You’re not going to get anything out of me with that sweet talk, so, you either tack about or empty your pockets and buy the product. Why have you come here, Hom?”
After a pause, the blond man dared to look straight into the woman’s eyes,
“Three drops of opium.”
“Are you crazy?!” the drugstore’s owner was outraged. “Your old man will make a fuss through the entire village.”
“He wouldn’t know. No one will know. Just be a good girl and do it for me. I know that you’re really kind and you’ll do it for me. I’d get you back for that.” With these words, Hom poured out a generous handful of golden coins onto the counter.
Seeing the money, the blackberry wife moved away from the counter annoyed. There was a small box on the highest shelf, next to the goat’s skull. That’s what Angie was trying to grab. Getting a tiny bottle out the velvet-covered box, she placed it on Hom’s open palm and knapped,
“And I do not see your face around here.”
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Hom assured her, and left the outbuilding, carrying a portion of the laudanum in his pocket along with the lavender and mint he had obtained from the herb-woman.
He didn’t turn around, he pretended not to hear the blackberry wife screaming after him, “Hom, you forgot your book! Come back!”
“If that rugged lady, with tired eyes and hair as black as all her outfits, starts reading what I have left under pretense of an accident, the matter is settled,” rejoiced young Kelly.
When he got to the apiary, Pagey had already finished his plate of lumpy porridge for dinner (Neither Lekki nor his adopted child didn’t have any culinary skills) and was getting ready for bed. Hom pretended to be surprised,
“Why are you going to bed so early?”
“We’re leaving to go to the fair together with Vita tomorrow morning.”
“Is that a date?” Hom was pulling a face. Naturally, no one could believe that the news was already known to him.
Pagey smiled mysteriously,
“It’s possible.”
“Great! Good luck tomorrow, then. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a drink tonight, does it?”
How could Pagey say no to his senior companion? He didn’t want to. Having a couple of sips of wine with a strange taste appeared as if from nowhere, he tried to understand what Hom was saying and calmed down due to his friend’s voice getting into one monotonous sound. Half an hour later, Pagey slept like a dog on a blanket by the fire, snoring peacefully over the crackling of logs. When Lekki returned home and put his fosterling to bed, Hom was ready to leave and told the beekeeper in an apologetic way,
“Looks like he had a little bit too much.”
* * *
The December sun rose high and made the snow dazzling when the beekeeper who had finished collecting new hives in the shed came to wake Pagey up. The hated curtain-fence opened with a sharp movement,
“Hey, man, weren’t you going out today?”
Hardly awake, Pagey realized that the first train they were going to take to the fair had left a long time ago.
“Damn, damn,” the young man babbled, tossing and turning on the old mattress and trying to figure out what was going on.
His head ached as if it was clamped in a leaden band that tightened with every movement. Getting dressed on the go, shivering with cold, he grabbed a handful of coins that he kept in a broken clay cup, and, hastily saying goodbye to Lekki ran to the wasteland.
Vita was sitting on the same fallen tree smoking a long pipe. She laughed when she saw Pagey coming,
“Wasn’t expecting to see you here at this hour.”
“I overslept! For the first time in my life! I missed the train because I overslept. I’m so sorry, forgive me!”
The Gever girl shrugged,
“It’s okay. We’ll stay in the village.”
“What do you mean? We’ll catch the noon train. Will be at the fair within a few hours.”
“You sure?”
“You bet! Of course, I’m sure.”
He gave her his hand to help her to get down from the tree, but she waved him away impatiently. However, as they walked along the drifts towards the boat crossing site, Vita put Pagey’s hand into her glove, finely crafted of calfskin.
Squinting