places full of dangerous men, as it served our mother the night she was named Long Kate by the island.
This is that spell: If you have a need of distraction and fear, make use of the toadstool with the yellow globe cap all covered in white blisters. The same one we steep in milk and set out to snuff the life from the deer flies that would otherwise plague us through midsummer. This is the fly agaric, happiest when spreading threads through the dirt of a pine grove. Dry it over the stove or with the laver on the line, and cook no more than one cap for each man’s plate of food where you will hide it. If you cannot get to their food, it will also work steeped in liquor and strained away. Be warned, having eaten of it some men will fall away into an easy delirium but others will burst with frenzy, so you must still prepare to face them in other ways that make use of their minds’ suggestibility.
I, Long Kate’s second, will also have daughters who know this spell, though they will know it as a story—a fable. I am the one who will remember these stories in place of her spells, and, anyway, in a mere two generations the agarics and the pines that sustain them will be gone from Louisa when the clear-cutting for ship’s timber and more farmland covers the island from tip to tail. My daughters, and there will be many for me and many more of their own, will be the ones who direct the dragging of stones to build walls when new land is cleared and plowed. Soon enough, they will walk out their back doors and through their kitchen gardens to gossip with one another over these waist-high walls. They will look less and less like their ancestor, taking some of their fathers’ traits, and in time some will even forget that they came from Long Kate through me. With my own six daughters, I will take time for education. The difference between my sisters and I, though, is I will recognize when the spells and their ingredients go the way of the peat bogs, and I will adapt. It is not the spells that are important, but the purposes they served—what they warded or cursed or eased along like a midwife.
Mike Petrik | 31