For them, Amy was what their grandparents would have called a witch, and they imagined invisible tendrils of control, a delicate understanding of human desire and the torrid expectations of jealousy, a look which could pass information that language could no longer tell, and all of that manipulated by a woman who’d lived long enough to gather the information to her chest like a miser with a hoard. She’d lived beyond the understanding of a typical person, they would say, and so she’s learned the secrets that compel, the gentle touch that applied at the right time can turn a man from a dark past to the light of duty and responsibility. Some said they’d gone to her with help for a carbuncle that had grown beyond what the town doctors could manage, and she’d drained it with a few words and a cup of tea. Still others claimed she’d oriented a baby who sat uneasy in the womb, and set his feet on a path that would lead him to the life of a farmer, or, more darkly, a life of crime.
As their fears grew, as the century collapsed into the warfare of the next, their need for someone to stand at the helm became more desperate. The telephone, international news from the papers, rumours of radio and signals sent by cracking the air itself, shook the granite foundations of the valley people, and they turned to their ideas of Amy’s abilities as their ancestors had turned to Meme and Wilhelm’s vision. Amy’s influence came to be both malign, as it expressed the fears of the timid, and joyous, as those more optimistic looked forward to a century of peace and communal cooperation. Two Amys came from this union of fear and optimism, and when the stories travelled the valley they would sometimes meet and hurry on, so different in demeanour and bearing that they appeared as strangers on a windy night, far from the home of their own hospitality and nowhere near offering a hand to another.
