“What’s it for?” I said.

“It’s to heal us.”

“But my fever’s gone,” I said. “I’m not sick.”

“Yes you are,” she said.

Frick knelt in front of the tree with the four flags, and he was mumbling words in skeejin. It was strange hearing another person use skeejin besides Mom and Paige and Grammy, when Grammy would come to visit. But I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I still couldn’t make out the words when smoke rose around him and he stood holding a giant seashell the size of a baseball glove filled with tobacco and this long, thick, bushy thing I’d later learn was sage that burned and smelled calm, like salt water.

In his hand he held a giant feather—eagle, Mom said—that was beaded at the quill. He moved toward us, still mumbling, and Mom said he was praying. “He’s smudging us. It’s good medicine. Watch how I do it, gwus.”

Frick stepped forward and tripped over a hard root and he dropped the smoking sage.

“Shit,” he said.

I laughed, and Mom let out a sharp shush and I shut up.

Frick picked up the sage among the soft mud and melting snow and he walked and stood in front of her. He had to relight the sage. The smoke rolled up and around him, and with the feather he brushed the smoke over my mother. He started on her head, pushed the smoke with the feather over her and through her short hair, and then he moved the smoke to her chest. She turned around, and he did her back. She turned around, facing him, and she lifted her arms. His face looked serious. He smudged under her arms and in her armpits. Then down her legs. Mom lifted her feet and Frick pushed the smoke under her. He stepped away from her, and he mumbled a few more words, returned to the tree with the four flags, which blew in a slight breeze, and then he knelt again and spoke more words louder. He stood and then smudged me over in the same way he had my mother.

When he finished, he smudged my toys, too, and the steps and the back door. Then in the house he smudged everything, and I watched our home fill with a burning fog. I coughed once. He finally finished and returned to the tree out back while Mom and I sat at the kitchen table.

In time, Frick came through the door, and in his hand he held something red. At first I thought he’d gone behind the steps and got my plastic alien figure, but then I realized it wasn’t my toy. It was thin yellow straw, wrapped in a red cloth bound in twine.

“Can you get me a wall tack?” he said to Mom, who got up and dug through a kitchen drawer yet could not find one. She went to the empty bedroom that I hoped Paige would soon fill and came out and handed a tiny green tack to Frick. He pinned the yellow straw in red cloth above our door. “It’ll keep bad medicine out,” he said to Mom and me. “Also, I have this.”