Project Purple

24 - The Herbalist

"My name is Susan Quietwind, you never hear me fart."

It was a joke. A national TV joke. But Susan knew in her guts that this was the reason the Whites never invited her back to the landscaping TV show; because she often lapsed into what the producers called 'near-catatonic silences', but would then spout something that came to mind, usually embarrassing the prim people around her.

She also had no answers, or justifications, for threatening one of the competing landscapers with a machete, because he had criticized her selection of plants for a backyard arbor.

"Of course I attacked him: He put outdoor pillows next to the planters."

Susan was straight away blackballed from cable television.

She assumed, however, that her colonial organizers were impressed by her impassioned views, and so they gave her the chance, in front of the whole world, to plead her case-one she considered quite strong.

Susan's knowledge of the flora was, after all, saving their lives. She spent a good deal of her time picking edible berries for everyone-which, more often than not, grew in the black, stagnant swamps to the west, with their long, overgrown reeds, and cane, and other moisture-loving grasses-stuffing what she could from the low-lying shrubs into a little satchel she wore like a backpack.

Susan relished the beauty of their surroundings, admiring the trees: the pine, the aspen, the cedar, the spruce, the fir, the ash. No oak, or elm, or linden, from the Pacific coast; she knew they were too far north for that.

In June the days became crackling-hot, but because of their high elevation the nights were still frequently bitter cold. Yet neither the daytime heat nor the nighttime cold was an issue for her. And in the evening, when the sun had set, and the sky flared a carroty orange, and then red, and then deepened into violet, she delighted in the ridges that surrounded their valley, and that seemed to glow contentedly, saturated in peaceful shades of russet and crimson.

Susan first sensed the pitilessness of the environment by the dark clouds of mosquitoes, which descended onto the colonists with a severity she had never known; they swarmed into eyes and ears, probing into any soft flesh like winged, ravenous cannibals.

But the Herbalist, as well as the Talleyman seemed nearly impervious to those rapacious billows, like they had reached some kind of agreement with the insects-for she strolled about that summer near-blithely and unmolested, and to the chagrin of those colonists the insects favored, who were swollen, and scratching, and bloody, and most unhappy in their distress.

Susan observed with silence what she considered the senseless stunt by the Cowleech, one that had killed him because of his ignorance of their northern environment. His condition quickly deteriorated-due to either an allergic reaction, or to the overwhelming intensity of the bites. And he was dead the next morning.

She didn't suspect foul play; people died in all sorts of manner, and she considered it a very unremarkable White thing to do-to accuse the organizers of some insidious scheme, to suspect behavior that was not only reprehensible, but liable to reprisal through litigation.

It was all very White, and she was used to it, possessing a different way of looking at things that conveyed the sentiments that people were all visitors on the Earth for a short while-some shorter than others. No crime, no injustice. It was just life.

She agreed it was coldhearted that assistance didn't come immediately for the Cowleech's misfortune; despite the pleadings to the cameras. But it didn't surprise her-The way Whites treated one another never surprised her.