Cedar means love, never forget that. I made the rockers from cedar.

Aunt Suzie died before the fire, and Uncle Henry’s heart with her. I was glad of the burning, since it hid what I had done.

Black walnut boughs blown down in the forest with stripped bark and green moss, they did well for the arms.

The stomach cancer ate her up, the docs cut her open and stitched in a steel mesh for half her belly but that didn’t stop anything. Uncle Henry wasn’t gonna tell her but how could she not know? She faded from busy farm wife to bedridden frailty in the course of months, unable to keep down but a little this and a little that. Henry went from farmer to nurse, or rather both at once, out of his mind with worry over his wife and panic about his herd of milch cows and neglected fields of corn, not yet waist-high and still needing care. He called me in to help, which must have made him crazy after years of disparaging my living, wildcrafting the woods, harvesting the roots and herbs and berries, living in my own cozy place deeper in the hollow. Their house stood on a hill and I climbed it to sit by Suzie as she died.

Her weathered old rocking chair sat idle in a corner and her bed was stacked with a pile of quilts twice as thick or more than her own body. She’d never been a beauty, plain and tall and proud and with ivory colored hair that hung to her knees. Illness didn’t lend a deathbed glow, just carved her away from her own bones. I saw her with love and she was beautiful for being familiar, my aunt who’d sat me on her lap when she rocked in that rocker and read me Bible stories and sung me choir songs. No more songs, not even words through those ragged lips. I touched her hand so she knew she wasn’t alone.

She passed along a note. She must have written it long before, the writing was steady and measured. A recipe for soup. And a little something extra.

I pressed it back to her.

She didn’t have the strength of illness so often mentioned in stories but she had the persistence of a successful farm wife, used to running a house and a farm and hired help and a husband. Four or five times later I bowed my head and accepted the chore. “Tomorrow,” I said.

She couldn’t reply. She couldn’t nod. But she opened her eyes at me and I swear I saw relief.

The seat was a stone, flecked granite from the hill, carved deep with blue and gray lichen.

I poured the soup, herbs, marrow, mushroom, into a fat blue coffee cup sitting unused in the kitchen. I held the mug to her lips and she sipped, slow and steady, the first meal in ages. The last. I closed her eyes with a penny each and settled her hair and clothes and quilts then sat and rocked. Henry would return from the fields soon enough, no reason to bother him now.

The back was a tangle of morning glory vines. In time they’d take over if they got ahold.

Henry knew what I’d done, of course he did, why else ask me there? He beat me and drug me from the house. He followed a few minutes later, leaving behind flickers of flame. We stood and watched the house light up and burn down, the shingles smelling rich of cedar. Henry stood thin in his cotton shirt and overalls and boots and said, “Nothing left.” I think he went to sleep in the barn.

I waited the flames out. Morning dew damped the embers though the ruin was still hot. Heat never bothered me none. I found her room, her bed, her body under the quilts, and I gathered her up. I’m neither big nor strong but I was sufficient to the task. Henry had prepared the plot and I set her down in it. And got to work on that rocker.

A body needs a place to rest and so does a soul. Suzie’s rocker was her headstone, now.

He raged his way across the field yelling how dare I and too soon and leave her be and when he saw the rocker he stopped cold. He raced up the knock it over and stopped cold again.

“What are those?”

“Dunno.” He meant the crystals lighting up like fireflies but I meant the new-sprung flowers and herbs I’d never met before.

There was no breeze and yet the rocker rocked. No breeze yet the wind of its passage riffled my hair and dried the cold sweat on the nape of my neck. The scent of her perfume grew large, overflowing the rocker, engulfing me. I believe it was her silent voice that said thank you.

Springer the dog howled like a wolf when the ambulance arrived. I clapped my hands to my ears but her sorrow broke through to my heart. She was an old dog, Roberto’s dog, and followed him around the grounds of the former church and theater auditorium and kitchen like a piece of his own self. When she barked, not a rare thing, Roberto laughed a bit and shushed the dog, which almost never worked. She didn’t shush this time either, since Roberto was on the kitchen floor, unconscious. The ambulance was for him.

The gang of three alley Chihuahuas echoed Springer’s howls. They were always yowling about something, lonely, I believed, that they weren’t invited into the circus. The ambulance plowed into the back lot, scattering the suddenly-voiceless Chihuahuas and raising a dust devil that picked up bits of raked leaves and discarded plastic. The ambulance’s brakes squealed, competing with Springer’s howls. Half a dozen men poured out of the wagon and I thought about clown cars but did not grin. Some went around to the back of the wagon and removed the gurney. The others carried heavy briefcases that I identified from television shows: heart defibrillator, scan monitors, cases with saline and needles and bandages.

A destructively-handsome man – curly dark hair, blue eyes, Adonis-sculpted muscles – asked where the victim was. Victim. He meant Roberto. I jerked my chin towards the kitchen. The bunch of them flooded into the kitchen. They were quiet and deliberate and quick.

Springer stood over Roberto and howled again. She did not have an aggressive bone in her body but she was not going to budge.

“Can you move the dog, please, miss? And what happened? Can you describe the event?”

I clipped a leash onto Springer’s collar and pulled her away. Roberto, conscious but not alert, followed the dog with his eyes. Men bent over him, cutting his tee-shirt and placing monitors, wrapping a cuff around his upper arm. I was not sure he noticed them. He did not say anything. No one else spoke up, either.

“He fell down,” I said. “Apoplexy.”

The paramedic threw me an odd glance. I remembered that ‘apoplexy’ was an old word. I shrugged.

Roberto’s wandering gaze accused me every time his eyes met mine. Even as the ambulance guys and the circus people and Vicky, his wife, pushed me and Springer further away from Roberto I could not stop staring at him as though I had never left his side. I swallowed the excuses and apologies that wanted to flow from my mouth, my throat, my heart. Nothing here was my fault. He had made a deal with the devil and the deal fell through. He needed someone to blame. I was convenient.

But I was not at fault.

Roberto whispered instructions while the ambulance guys – medics – stuck needles into his arms and placed monitor leads and inflated the blood pressure cuff.

“Alice,” he gasped. “Take care of Vicky.” He pushed aside the oxygen mask.

“I will,” I promised from across the room. Roberto could not have heard me.

The ambulance guy, Adonis with the cold blue eyes, pushed him flat again. So gentle, yet implacable. Roberto did not resist. From across the breadth of the kitchen commons, I saw him give up. Stop. Lay back and accept help against whatever came next.

In the blink of an eye, or so it seemed to me, the room emptied. Roberto on a gurney, the hilarious number of medics, the circus performers, herded along by Vicky, all uncommonly quiet, all fled the room. Chasing off to the hospital.

Springer curled around my feet. Her hurt and puzzlement washed over me. I bent down and rubbed her ears. What I had to give, I gave to her. Some peace and some love, some reassurance. Nothing miraculous.

Just a few days ago I had smelled my brother’s miracles and followed his stench to this place. A church, unconsecrated. A circus, dedicated to performance art. A sign in the front window heralding miracles with every show. Another sign, smaller, advertising rooms for rent. A tall wooden door, brown paint peeling off in strips, represented my choice: enter and fight again, or walk away.

I’m tired, I cried wordlessly. I am not ready. I glanced at the tar road behind me. Then I faced forward and knocked.

Roberto had opened the door, but Springer let me stay. I sat at the big wooden table while Roberto had discussed ifs and maybes and possibilities. We don’t usually rent to women, he said. The dog had walked into the room. Springer. She held her human-given name in the first layer of her soul. I plumbed it easily enough. She stopped in mid-step, her left paw raised, and gazed at me with her caramel eyes. When her inspection ended she padded over to me and licked my bare ankle. Then she sauntered over to Roberto and laid out flat next to his chair.

“Good enough for me!” Roberto exclaimed. “Any friend of Springer’s can’t be all bad. You’re in.”

He assumed I was one of the desperate homeless and I didn’t disillusion him. I did offer him money. He took half. He told me where to get free food and medical attention, gave me a sheet of paper listing the rules. ‘Don’t hang out in the theater’ was number one with a bullet.

“I can’t go into the theater?” I said. I was here because of the theater, or rather because of what my brother had done with the theater. Because of the miracles.

“It’s for the performers only, the artists.” His assessment that I was no performance artist was accurate and instant, though it hurt a bit. Who doesn’t want to be a circus performer, somewhere in their soul? I nodded dumbly.

“You can join the audience during the shows, though. Free. There’s a show tomorrow.”

He walked me through the dirt-packed compound to my trailer, a cold metal bullet every bit as unpleasant as I had expected it to be. I had a small sack of possessions: a change of clothes, a book. Roberto loaned me a blanket, well-worn and multiply-mended, but clean.

I wrapped myself in the blanket and sat cross-legged on the floor, waiting through the night. But my brother didn’t show himself then. He was far too wily.

I’d find him, my brother, my adversary. I’d find out about these miracles of his. He was the devil to my angel and I’d fight him if I had to. I hoped I wouldn’t have to fight. I was tired. Winning would not be a certain thing.

I closed my eyes to listen to the world around me.

The muezzin at the mosque across the black tar road sang his final night call to prayer. His mind strayed from God and into his creature comforts, dinner, soft clothes, where he was happy. Content. His content flowed around me like a sweet breeze.

The theater was louder than his song, discordant.

Someone played a honky tonk piano riff.

Someone else strummed a nylon string guitar through a few cowboy chords.

Someone, no: two people, a man and a woman, threw pins at each other, meaty thuds each time a hand caught one, shouted ‘Ha’s as they tossed them again.

Someone sang breathlessly while balancing on a skateboard balanced on a box on a chair on a bucket. He juggled tennis balls above his head. All those sounds, song click roll thump, mixed in a rhythm. Ah! That was how he did it, synchronizing all those rhythms.

But I heard nothing of my brother.