Project Purple

4 - The Herbalist

In the colonists' part of the world, spring lasted for two months, April and May. The snow rapidly melted, and then one saw streams and brooks. In mid May, tiny leaves shot from the buds in the trees, and the grass began to grow. Underneath, the soil endowed, even anticipated, its cultivation...

Farming awaited the American forefathers when they migrated to the new land-an enormous and uncultivated region; the hills, valleys, plains and forests, illimitable in scale, an infinity never known to them before. From this came an industrious nation of tillers.

Colonist Susan Quietwind was put in charge of the corn planting. Her family had owned a gardening business in the Las Vegas area for nearly a century, and she ran her own landscape gardening business. Susan could be seen on a cable program called Landscapers Challenge. Of those two TV appearances she had yet to win a landscaping contract, but there seemed little doubt that the herbalist was knowledgeable about her field, and the colony was relying on a healthy corn harvest to survive their hypothetical winter.

An ample supply of corn for their harvest would also be considered a big plus by their assessors, who would visit at the end of the colonists' summer. These assessors would also, in some mysterious, unshared manner, determine whether the colonists had been successful in creating a viable English colony-worth its sponsored continuation. A good crop harvest was essential.

On their first day of training, the colonists' team leader introduced Susan to the others as 'the only real American in the group'. She was a member of the Paiute band of native-Americans, who had resided in Southern Nevada for a thousand years.

True to her family name of Quietwind, the Herbalist maintained a gracious silence, and when engaged in discussion, she would reply with brief, easygoing sentences, and say the minimum of what she presumed was expected of her. Susan was not much of a conversationalist; she seemed just as happy to forego the company of humans, and would have been content to do the entire project on her own. When further conversation was elicited from her, Susan's words were ornately couched in Indian-like aphorisms.

"The sister goddesses yearn to be together," she said of the three crops they were to plant-corn, beans, and squash, "not only in the fields, but in the stomach, as well."

Some of the men rolled their eyes at the 'Injun-Speak', but there was little doubt she was in charge of the current project, and everyone assumed their tasks of planting the three sibling goddesses of corn, beans, and squash.

"They were planted, cooked and consumed so that their spirits would always remain inseparable ... Corn, beans and squash, when consumed together, form complete proteins. You could live an entire lifetime eating nothing else."

In May the colonists were making sincere attempts to speak the language of 1613, with the exception of a few: the Herbalist, the Cowleech, and the Buckskinner-a lanky, wild-eyed man in his thirties, with a grizzly brown beard and intense obsidian eyes.

"They make a one pound hamburger now," the Buckskinner said, poking in the ground with the others, digging the myriad little holes with his clumsy tool, and not bothering to conceal his subversive sentiments to the planting of The Three Sisters.

The Buckskinner loved to talk about the mountain man rendezvous he had attended. "Lots of hawk and knife throw'n," he said to the African-American, Free Man Buford, who stared back blankly.

"...As in tomahawk," the buckskinner explained, and Free Man Buford would nod, like an intimate acquaintance with the light axe.

The Buckskinner looked up after digging another little hole, "Red meat is a natural resource for the body and spirit."