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does wear one pair of stinking socks from September to June. Stupidness.”
    “Yes, Mami.”
    “What you does put on a cut to heal it?”
    Damn. One of Mami’s spot tests. “Ah, aloe?”
    “And if we can’t get aloe no more? Tell me a Canadian plant.”
    Shit. It was the one with the name like a tropical plant, but it was something different. What, what? Oh, yes: “Plantain leaf.”
    Her grandmother grunted. Ti-Jeanne had given the correct answer, but that grunt was the only acknowledgment she would get. She swallowed her resentment.
    “And for headache?” Mami continued.
    That one was easy. “Willow bark.”
    Tony had once teased Ti-Jeanne almost to tears about her grandmother: “What’s that crazy old woman doing over there in Riverdale Farm, eh, Ti-Jeanne? Obeah? Nobody believes in that duppy business any more!”
    “Is not obeah, Tony! Mami is a healer, a seer woman! She does do good, not wickedness!” But Ti-Jeanne herself wasn’t so sure. There was the drumming that went on in the crematorium chapel, late into the night. The wails and screams that came from the worshippers. The clotted blood on the crematorium floor in the mornings, mixed with cornmeal. Obviously, other people than Mami still believed in “that duppy business.”
    Ti-Jeanne didn’t place too much stock in Mami’s bush doctor remedies. Sometimes herbs lost their potency, stored through Toronto’s long, bitter winters. And they had to guess at dosages. For instance, willow bark made a good painkiller, but too much of it caused internal bleeding. Ti-Jeanne would have preferred to rely on commercial drugs. They could still get them, and Mami’s nursing training had taught her how to dispense them. People brought stuff to her nearly every day, loot hoarded from drugstores during the Riots that had happened after the bankrupt city had disbanded its police force. People often had no idea what the Latin names on the packages meant; they just hoped it would be something Mami would consider to be fair payment to treat whatever ailed them. She had built up quite a stockpile of antibiotics and painkillers, so Ti-Jeanne didn’t understand why Mami insisted on trying to teach her all that old-time nonsense. If Mami didn’t know how to cure something, she could look it up in one of the growing piles of medical books lining the walls of the cottage.
    Only half listening to the old lady’s muttering, Ti-Jeanne fretted silently about Tony. Suppose the posse boss realised that he was trying to make a break for it?
    • • • •
    When horse dead, cow get fat.
    —Traditional saying
    Fretfully, Uttley shifted a little under the thin blue sheets, glancing over at the telemetry readout beside her bed as she did so. Even that slight movement sent the three green lines of the readout careening into a crazy S-curve before it settled back down into the irregular, thready rhythm of her failing heart. Catherine Uttley lay back in her hospital bed and brooded. Anything more strenuous than that exhausted her alarmingly quickly. Cool it, girl, she told herself. Stick this one out, and you’ll sail right into another five-year term.
    The Ontario premier had never been physically strong, but she’d always kept in the best shape that she could: healthy diet, as much exercise as her work and her body, weakened by meningitis as a child, would allow. She’d refused to accept the fact that her health would eventually fail her. But of course it had. When the doctors first confirmed that she was going into heart failure, she’d been furious, so much so that they’d hospitalized her immediately, fearing that her soaring blood pressure would bring on a full-blown heart attack. She’d been livid. Damn it, there were senators twenty years her senior still hale and hearty!
    It was Constantine’s visit that had put her on an even keel again. Good man. A lot of people underestimated her soft-spoken policy advisor with his smooth, nothing features and his smooth,