“I don’t want nothin’ t’do with him,” Anna protested. “He makes my skin crawl. When I seed him in Ducktown, what I seed make me purt near sick.”

“He should make y’all sick. But I need y’all t’ shield ’gainst him too. An’ don’ lissen t’anythin’ he says. He’s got some hoodoo I ain’t niver seen afore, what beguiles folks. Even them as should know better.” Aunt Jinny shook her head. “Even me fer a liddle bit, afore I woke m’self outen it. It works without potions, an’ he don’t seem t’call on nothin’, he jest does it with his voice. Might be part’a thet there twisted sorta Glory he got. I’ll swear thet’s how he got the Mine Foreman job, an’ how he keeps it, given thet he don’t spend half th’ time at the mine thet he should.”

Then she laughed sardonically and added, “An’ I guess I should be grateful, seein’ as how the less ore comes outa thet mine, the better off everybody in th’ Basin is.”

They did the few dishes there were, then went off to the garden for harvesting, and following the harvesting, some preparation and preserving. Aunt Jinny did a lot of drying of her vegetables and fruits, especially things like corn, which she took off the cob, dried, and “parched,” and beans. But she had other ways of preserving things too—potatoes and sweet potatoes and winter squash were still holding from last year’s harvest in the root cellar, and onions stayed sweet and sound for quite a long time—so Aunt Jinny said—when you braided the leaves and hung them up in the shadow.

That would not have been enough to distract Anna from the terrible things her aunt had told her—except that the afternoon turned out to be another lesson in magic. First, though, she partly disrobed and took off her corset, with a guilty look at her aunt, who had paid so much for it.

But Aunt Jinny just chuckled. “I druther y’all kept thet for Sunday best, an’ even then, not till y’all sew a cover fer it,” she said. “Abby’s a good woman, but she got no notion what farm work’s like. It ain’t like standin’ behind a store counter all day, which is all she does, on account of I know she’s got a maid a-doin’ th’ heavy housework.”

Anna carefully folded her treasure in a bit of leftover petticoat and put it with the unsewn pieces of her winter skirts and coat. She was looking forward to sewing a cover for it, though.

They had an overabundance of tomatoes, and Anna didn’t see nearly enough jars to preserve them all. But Aunt Jinny instructed her to quarter enough to fill the sieve and leave the pieces to drain into a bucket. When enough juice had been drained, her aunt poured the juice into a pitcher, replaced the bucket, and sat down next to the bucket on one of the stools.

“Watch,” she said, and sketched two signs in the air over the sieve full of quartered fruits, and let Glory drift down onto the sieve. And the quartered tomatoes began to shrivel.