Blue Willow (5 page)

The long black car brought him to the MacKenzie farm on the last day. He was dressed in a black jacket, linen shirt, tie, knee-length gray shorts, white socks, and stiff black shoes. His black hair had been brushed by the nanny until his head hurt. He had promised himself he would not cry. He was important now. He had to be strong.

The farm sat in a big hollow surrounded by forested hills. If he had been allowed, he would have climbed them one more time to look at Victory Mountain, miles away His ancestors had owned the land all the way to that mountain, but Grandmother had to sell that part to the state, for a park. Now, instead of enclosing a kingdom, the Blue Willow estate enclosed only thirty square miles. It was still more land than Artemas could imagine.

The driver opened the car door, and Artemas got out slowly. The MacKenzies were waiting for him on the porch of their farmhouse—Mr. MacKenzie, tall and strong, one arm ending in a nifty metal hook, his tanned face and brown hair making him the same color as a long stretch of earth. Grandfather and Grandmother MacKenzie, both old and hunched but full of great stories about bears and wildcats and Colebrooks, and Mrs. Mackenzie, holding Lily

Artemas measured his step across the sandy yard, stepping with dignity past the flower beds and under the big oaks, ignoring the fat yellow dog licking his hand and the purring cats coming out to meet him. Inside he was an empty ache.

The thick grove of willows along the creek moved gracefully, waving good-bye to him. Their history was tied up in the mysterious circle of MacKenzies and Colebrooks. There was even a huge willow in the park at the estates entrance, given to his family by the MacKenzies. That was
his
tree. He thought he’d die if he never got to climb it again.

“How do, Artie,” Mr. MacKenzie said kindly, then came down the porch steps and scooped Artemas up in his good arm. Startled, Artemas choked up, hating the way his lower lip trembled. Drew MacKenzie was the opposite of his own father. Without the least embarrassment he gave Artemas a deep hug and kissed him on the forehead. “You be good now, you hear? You grow up to be the kind of man your grandmother wants you to be, all right?”

The store of confusion and heartbreak and shame inside his chest burst up through Artemass throat and couldn’t be contained any longer. He said brokenly, “Grandmother says it’s all up to me. But I try to make things better, and I never can. I try and try until it hurts so much I can’t breathe. I
know
I can fix things some way. But how can I figure it out by myself?”

He heard Mrs. MacKenzie make a soft sound, like a cat searching for its kittens. “You helped bring Lily into the world. You caught her and kept her from fallin’. If you care that way for everybody who needs you, you won’t go far wrong.”

Artemas pondered that clear-cut idea and clung to it. “Catch people and keep them from falling. I can do that.”

Mr. MacKenzie patted his leg approvingly. “Always do what’s right, not just what’s easiest. Listen to the wise voice inside you. Don’t ever stop listenin’, and it’ll tell you exactly.”

Artemas nodded, gripping one of the suspenders that kept the old brown trousers from sliding down Mr. MacKenzie’s long legs. “I’ll miss you,” he finally managed.

Mr. MacKenzie nodded, swallowed again, and carried him up to the porch. He set him down in front of the grandfolks. Their warm, gnarled hands patted Artemas as if he were a beloved puppy, and Grandmother MacKenzie said a prayer for his future. Then he went to Zea MacKenzie and Lily.

His chest was tight with memories—all the days and nights he’d spent here with Mrs. MacKenzie, wearing soft
overalls and going barefoot, eating fresh peaches and homemade ice cream, working in the fields, playing with the animals. She knelt down in front of him, her big blue eyes full of tears, and swept him to her while she cradled Lily in her other arm. The baby, dressed in a diaper and tiny white T-shirt, seemed to look straight at him.

“We’ll take care of Blue Willow for you,” Mrs. MacKenzie whispered.

Tears crept down Artemas’s cheeks then, and he couldn’t stop them. “I’ll come back. I promise.” He looked at the baby, cleared his throat, and said what he wanted to say most. “I’ll come back and marry Lily, and then you’ll really be my family.”

Mrs. MacKenzie hugged him tighter and made a soft chuckling sound. “You come back when you’re grown and talk to Lily about it.”

“I will. Promise you won’t move away.”

“I can’t picture this farm without a MacKenzie on it,” she said vaguely. “We’ll see.”

“I’ll come back.”

Mrs. MacKenzie searched his firm, tear-streaked face silently. She looked sad. “Good-bye, Artie. Stay this sweet, and you’ll do fine.”

“I will come back, I swear.” He bent over and kissed Lily’s red hair. “I caught you,” he whispered to her. “You’re mine.”

Before he got into the car, he turned and looked at them all one last time. Confusion, love, and grief hollowed him. They didn’t believe he’d never forget them. But they didn’t know how stubborn he was, or how possessive of the people he loved. Lily was his. They had a covenant.

Three

Mama said the Old Brook Prince had helped her get born and named her and promised to come back and marry her someday, and that he’d left his home in her keeping, and that made Lily the only bona fide princess-in-waiting in the town of MacKenzie.

Not that Lily cared about boys or getting married, but she supposed that after she got rich and important and old she might want a boy as strong and sweet as Daddy around to help do the farm chores. She’d heard the only way a girl could get a boy for good was to marry him.

The girls in her Sunday school class said nobody else would want to marry her anyway, because her daddy had a hook for a hand and her mama came from white trash, and even if the MacKenzies had a town named after them, she was too big and ugly and mean. The Old Brook Prince wouldn’t mind though. He’d promised.

So there it was. When she needed to get a boy, she’d marry the Old Brook Prince.

Flat on her stomach, Lily hugged the thick willow limb and stared, wide-eyed and fascinated, through the drooping blue-gray leaves.
A stranger was coming
. Sassafras, mired in the weedy grass far below her, her shaggy yellow coat dotted in runny brown splotches from the rotten crab
apples Lily had dropped on her, sucked her dripping pink tongue in and woofed softly, watching him too.

Didn’t he know this was the main driveway through Blue Willow? How had he gotten past the giant old gate? Only MacKenzies could walk on this road or play in this big tree.

The tall, unsmiling boy sidestepped cracks in the pavement, where weeds jutted up. He wore a green uniform like the soldiers on TV, and it looked just as dirty and rumpled. Maybe he’d been fighting Vietcong too.

Lily crept like an inchworm farther along the limb, her bare toes digging into the crevices of the rough bark, her overalls snagging on a twig. It was hard to move; she had the last of the mushy crab apples in her hands. She’d gotten them from the bottom of the barrel stored in the barn since last fall. Their slimy juice squeezed between her fingers.

Who was he? His hair was black and short as a scrub brush. He had a pack on his back. Below one eye was a big, ugly bruise.

The hackles rose on Sassafras’s ruff. Her good ear—the one that the bobcat hadn’t chewed on—flattened against her head. She ran out from under the tree,
roo-roo-rooing
at him. He stopped and frowned at her. He didn’t know that Sassafras hadn’t ever bitten anything but fleas.

“Nice dog,” he said. “I remember you. Big, dumb, nice dog.” He had a voice like the boys in high school. It cracked from up to down in two words. But it wasn’t like their voices, or Lily’s. It was fast even when it was slow.

But Sassafras wagged at him and sat down, convinced. He walked past, his near eye squinting at her over the bruise. Then he looked at the huge willow, and Lily bunched up, hoping he wouldn’t see her. He walked into the weedy old park around it, sighed, took off his backpack, then dropped it on the ground. He patted the rusty sign on the stone post there, the one that had a lot of words she was just beginning to learn on it. MacKenzie. Colebrook. Blue Willow. One-nine-oh-oh. Rubbing a long,
skinny arm across his forehead, he ducked under the low-hanging limbs.

Directly under her bomb path.

Because he was trespassing on the land the Old Brook Prince had put in her keeping, and because a bad little girl had taken over her hand, she dropped one of the apples on him. It burst right on the top of his head.

“Christ almighty goddamn!” He jumped to one side, all arms and legs, like Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
, dragging his hands over his head and staring up into the tree. “You little shit!”

She was five-and-a-half, but she knew the hottest brand of hellfire when she heard it. The blast of shock made her toes let go and her knees turn weak. She slid sideways, screamed, clawed at the limb, and fell.

Lily landed in his outstretched arms. What was left of her breath exploded out of her in a whump that caved her chest into her backbone, and stars shot across her eyes.

She moaned and gulped. The stars turned into fireflies. He laid her on the soft earth. His sweaty, bruised, openmouthed face appeared in the middle of the stars, and his bony knees settled against her side. Syrupy brown apple juice slid down one side of his face like blood.

Halfman
. He could be Halfman, the haint who kept watch over MacKenzies and might float down from the mountains to eat little girls who’d been bad. He was staring at her with big gray eyes like a wolf’s.

“Breathe, for God’s sake!” he said.

She inhaled raggedly. “Don’t eat me!”

“I’m not going to eat you!” He moved his hands over her face. They smelled like jonquils and gasoline. He was pulling aside one of the long red braids that was draped across her chin. He patted her head. Halfman probably wouldn’t have done that.

A little reassured, her air coming back, she dug her elbows and heels into the ground, scooted away, and sat up. Sassafras licked her cheek. Lily’s eyes burned from staring at the stranger without a blink. “What were you doing up there?” he demanded.

“Playing.”

“Where’d you get apples in my willow tree?”

“I brought ’em with me.”

“Where do you live?”

She jerked her shivering head toward the woods. “Way over yonder.”

“How’d you get here?”

“My daddy left me while he went to the big house to fix a window.”

“Whose house?”

“Down yonder. The prince’s house.” She pointed a trembling finger over her shoulder, toward the cracked road disappearing into the forest.

His mouth was beginning to turn up at the corners. “What prince?”

“The Old Brook Prince. He named me.”

“You mean the Colebrook … prince?”

She nodded. “But he went away when I was born.”

“And you live way across the woods over there?” He lifted a long, wolfish arm and pointed.

“Yeah. On a farm.”

Now, he was staring at
her
without blinking. He took the end of one of her braids between his fingers and tugged it gently. “Lily? Is your name Lily MacKenzie?”

She nodded, stunned.

His wild gray eyes became tame, his horrible-looking face smiled, and he suddenly became the handsomest boy she’d ever seen. “Well, I’m the Old Brook Prince.”

Artemas had a mission. He’d told Mrs. MacKenzie he’d come back, and this might be his only chance. He was thirteen, old enough to see that he couldn’t control much about his life. But he listened to the voice inside him, the one that always had a MacKenzie drawl to it. It said keep your promises and do what was right.

Before the future closed in on him, he’d say his goodbyes.

So he’d run away from the military school in Connecticut, taken a bus as far as his money held out, which was
Memphis, then started hitchhiking. On a lonely country road south of the city a pair of black boys with arms like stone posts had climbed out of their pickup truck and jumped him. His face throbbed and one side ached as if their fists were still in it.

But he was here, finally. With the MacKenzies. When Mrs. MacKenzie came out on the porch and saw him riding behind Mr. MacKenzie and Lily on the tractor, she screamed and laughed and ran to him with her arms out. He jumped down and hugged her like a kid, but he didn’t cry. He was thirteen years old, after all. And he felt even older. The farm looked run-down, paint peeling, fences leaning like toothpicks. Only the willows along the creek were as wonderful as his memories. They, and the love he felt around him.

“Grandmother knows where I am,” he told them, when they were all sitting on the porch. “I sent her a letter. My parents are somewhere in Europe.”
Sponging off their friends
.

“My Lord, my Lord,” Mrs. Mackenzie said, sinking into a chair and pulling at the apron over her jeans. “Artie, what were you thinking?”

He shrugged, embarrassed. “I hate school.”
I hate everything
, he added to himself.

“Me too,” Lily chirped. “I’m in kindergarten, and I’m bigger than everybody else. Even the boys.”

He looked down at her in wonder. She sat by his feet at the base of a rocking chair and watched him with wide blue eyes. She was plump and freckled, missing a front tooth, and fuzzy bits of red hair stuck out of her braids. Apple slime was smeared on the white T-shirt inside her overalls.

It would be a long time before she’d turn into anything he might want to marry. She was only three years older than his youngest sister, Julia. Besides, he’d decided a long time ago that he wouldn’t get married. Not if it made him act like his parents.

Yet he reached over and pretended to thump her head,
and a feeling of protectiveness stole over him. “I’m sorry I scared you out of my tree.”

“It’s
my
tree. I take care of it.”

“You’ll have to be the Old Brook Princess’ to own my tree.”

Her face became solemn. She looked up at him the way she had under the willow, when he’d smiled at her. Mrs. MacKenzie grinned down at her. “Lily doesn’t want to be a princess, she wants to be a farmer.”