“Milkweed. It’s a just a weed, we have to go around and tear it out of the garden and the crops, but I think the smell of its flowers is prettier than my aunt’s climbing roses that she works on and babies all the time. Sweeter than lilacs. Nobody else thinks the flower heads are pretty, but they are, if you look at them closely enough. Pink and complicated. Like wild carrot lace gone plump and shy, like a handful of bitty stars. And the smell, I could breathe it in…’’ She uncurled a little more, unlocking from her pain, pursuing the vision. “In the fall it grows pods, all wrinkled and ugly, but if you tear them open, beautiful silk flies out. The milkweed bugs make houses and pantries of them. Milkweed bugs, now, they aren’t pests. They don’t bite, they don’t eat anything else. Bright burnt-orange wings with black bands, and shiny black legs and feet…they just tickle, when they crawl on your hand. I kept some in a box for a while. Gathered them milkweed seeds, and let them drink out of a bit of wet cloth.” Her lips, which had softened, tightened again. “Till one of my brothers upset the box, and Mama made me throw them out. It was winter by then.”

“Mm.” Well, that had worked, till she’d reached the tailpiece. But nonetheless her body was relaxing, the lingering shudders tamping out.

Unexpectedly, she said, “Your turn.”

“Uh?”

She poked his chest with a suddenly determined finger. “I told you my useless thing, now you have to tell me one.”

“Well, that seems fair,” he had to allow. “But I can’t think of…’’ And then he did. Oh. He was silent for a little. “I haven’t thought of this in years. There’s a place we went—still go—every summer and fall, a gathering camp, at a place called Hickory Lake, maybe a hundred and fifty miles northwest of here. Hickory nuts, elderberries, and a kind of water lily root, which is a staple of ours—harvesting and planting in one operation. Lakewalkers farm too, in our way, Spark. A lot of wet work, but fun, if you’re a child who likes to swim. Maybe I can show…anyway. I was, oh, maybe eight or nine, and I’d been sent out in a pole-boat to collect elderberries in the margins, around behind the islands. Forget why I was by myself that day. Hickory Lake sits on clay soil and tends to be muddy and brown most of the time, but in the undisturbed back channels, the water is wonderfully clear.