I wonder if Jolene gave her hairpins too?

Jolene . . . now there was a subject she longed to know more about. She wasn’t a “proper woman,” although she looked like one. She had a lot of magical power, enough to be able to change her appearance in a heartbeat. And she didn’t talk like anyone Anna had ever heard speaking before. In fact—she talked like Great-Granpappy Pavel wrote.

She heard her aunt stirring at last, and came down the ladder. “Aunt Jinny, why did Jolene talk so funny?”

“Because she ain’t from ’round here. An’ it’s rude t’ say some’un talks funny when they don’t talk like y’all.” Her aunt shot her a look from where she was dishing out mush. “Don’t talk trash ’bout someone ’lessen y’all wants someone talkin’ trash ’bout y’all. An’ don’t never talk trash ’bout Jolene. She gots ways of findin’ thet sort of thang out.”

Anna flushed, feeling as if she was five and had had her fingers slapped. “Sorry,” she muttered, as much to the absent Jolene as to her aunt.

“I want y’all to trot down to th’ Holcrofts arter mornin’ chores an’ find out when young Josh reckons t’ take thet baby angel statchoo t’Ducktown, an’ iffen Matt minds us comin’ along an’ doin’ a mite of shoppin’,” Jinny continued, pouring out the tea, then settling onto her seat. “Since Josh’ll be gettin’ paid his own self, I reckon Matt’ll hev some shoppin’ t’do too, an’ won’t mind us.”

“Yes’m!” Anna agreed eagerly, any thoughts of Jolene, or even the question of whether or not she had learned Cherokee overnight, driven right out of her head by the prospect of seeing Josh again.

She didn’t scant on the chores, but to Jinny’s open amusement, she certainly went through them at a brisk pace. With sets of underthings drying nicely on the line, she found herself in the lane down to the Holcrofts’ farm by late morning.

Without Jinny’s lessons on plants and herbs going on, and since the slope led slightly downhill, she made good time, and it was certainly much less than an hour later when she emerged from the trees and onto the crossroads where the lane met the road and the Holcrofts’ farm appeared on the left.

Maddie Holcroft and her eldest daughter were out hanging wash on the line. Sue spotted her first, and said something to her mother, who looked around a sheet and waved to her. She waved back and skipped the rest of the way to them.

“I’d arst if there was somethin’ wrong with Jinny, but y’all don’t look like a gal with a ’mergency on her mind,” said Maddie Holcroft with a smile. “What brung y’all down here this mornin’?”

“Aunt Jinny wants ter know, iffen when Joshua finishes thet there baby angel an’ y’all take it t’ Ducktown, iffen we c’n beg a ride fer shoppin’, please, Missus Holcroft,” she replied, as the freshly washed laundry flapped in the breeze, mingling the pleasant scent of clean linen with green grass, and the varied scents from the garden.