I fed them quick and ran from the barn, and when Mama came back, I wanted to tell her all of that, that their need was too much of a burden to carry. How could she do it? How could she see them so naked and yearning, and not want to turn away?

But Mama looked so tired, her face was so worn, that all I could say when I saw it was, “I don’t like the cats, Mama.”

Lenore sucked her teeth. “You bother her with that?”

But Mama was too tired, even, to hold my silliness against me. She did look disappointed, though.

But now that the idea of my taking on her work had gripped her, had become something she favored, Mama would not let me give up.

“You have to learn,” she told me. “Care does not come natural to me, either.”

What a lie, I thought. I could still see her, in my mind’s eye, walking slow and steady beside Mr. Ben, who had picked up her dead sister’s braids and tossed them aside, but who, I could tell, she understood had not meant it.

“But care, it is our lot now,” Mama was saying. “It is our service to others that defines us. We are doers of the Word.”

She sighed. “If you cannot keep the cats, you’ll learn how to keep the garden.”

The garden is no small thing to a homeopath. Mama kept a huge one to grow the most common things she needed: elderflower, ginger, mint, aloe. She was so orderly in everything, and the garden was no exception. The herbs were close by the door, and everything else was in neat rows, labeled clearly on posts made from scraps of wood. Up until now, the garden had been mostly Lenore’s domain. But Lenore was so busy with everything else she’d been paying it less attention, and the garden had begun to be unruly. When they needed something from it, Mama would question Lenore, and Lenore would think for a minute, and they would argue back and forth about where it should be.

“You will keep it in the correct order, Libertie,” Mama said. By which she meant the order of her imagination.

How was I to learn her mind? Before I could take over the garden, I would have to make a more diligent study of homeopathy, Mama’s discipline of medicine. “The guiding principle,” Mama had told me, many times as I grew, “is that like cures like.” But it was, as all things Mama insisted were straightforward, more complicated than that.

I was allowed a rest from my regular chores, and Mama had me sit in her examination room with her materia medica, the big black leather-bound book that listed every remedy and the diseases they belonged to.