On the seventh day of every month, Lucille’s Ma hands her a watering can—the one with the peeling blue paint and half-shattered spout and the pastel eggs she coloured on it when she was half the age she is now.
Lucille’s body sags with the weight of it, but she bears it with resolve, even with the uncomfortable pull between her shoulders and the ache in her thin arms. Now is not the time for fragility.
“Don’t you come back until that damn thing is empty. You hear me, girl?” there’s a tight set to Ma’s expression, the kind she gets only at this time of month. But Lucille is no longer upset by the cold slits that were once her Ma’s eyes or the harsh curl of her mouth that was once a smile.
Lucille nods. Words usually don’t get her very far when Ma’s like this, questions even less so.
“Good,” Ma says, already slinging her dirtied apron on and marching into the kitchen. “Remember that water’s not for you, all of it goes to the tree. Now get goin’.”
Lucille retreats through the front door that rattles when it shuts behind her, and down the creaking porch steps and into the birchwoods. She knows the way to the tree like she does the freckles on the back of her hand, stepping over peeled bark and on the boot impressions of someone’s morning walk.
The tree—an ugly, little thing—sits on a mound of dirt and decay too small to be called a hill, with gray roots and spindly, knotted branches that only bear seven leaves, no matter the season and no matter the year.
The leaves are sad, too, Lucille thinks, barely clinging to the tree. Tethered by some unseen force, even in the most cruel conditions.
(When she was little, Lucille had asked about the tree once, wide-eyed as she watched Ma knit in her favourite chair out on the porch.
“Why do I water it when it rains every other day?” was what she’d said, hands curled
around the hem of her dress, a nervous hitch to her voice.
But Ma didn’t tar and feather her, instead just tapped her on the nose with a knitting needle and smiled with too many teeth. “There are just some things little girls don’t need to know, pumpkin.”)
Lucille sprinkles the water onto the roots first, slowly circling around the tree as she hums absently. She’s only ever wasted a few drops, once. She’d been young and clumsy and too eager for common sense, and some of it had splashed over the lip of the watering can and onto her leg. It had ached and tingled for days in a way that rainwater hadn’t before.
She never told Ma about the incident, because mistakes aren’t made twice if it hurts enough the first time.
Not a lick of it had made sense for the longest time—the watering can, the other girls who did this every seventh day, the way the boys would snicker about the village boogeyman—and so she viewed it all as simply another menial chore,
Now? She knows better.
She’s read the newspaper clipping herself, dated when her mother had been young, about Mister Yewing, and the way he’d made more than a handful of little girls disappear. Their bodies had been found some months later, buried on top of each other in the birchwoods.
Mister Yewing disappeared overnight, and Lucille’s heard the whisperings that one of the elderly village ladies had dragged him into the trees and cursed him.
Cursed him to be unmoving and sentient and aware.
Lucille’s not a cruel girl, but she can’t stay the smile that pinches her cheeks as she sprinkles out the last of the contents from the watering can.