Otherwise (48 page)

THIRD FACET

I
n the morning, Sewn Up ferried us across That River on his contraption, laughing and making jokes: I’ve never seen anyone as happy to be up in the morning as he, except maybe myself on this morning, off to meet a real saint. Budding and Blooming wore thick shirts against the morning chill and the mist that lay thickly over the river and its fragrant tributaries, and I shivered. No Moon had given me more bread, and a nice plastic bottle full of grape soda she’d put up in the winter, and a kiss.

“I’ll go to the warren in the fall,” she said. “I’ll tell them I saw you, and that you were well.”

I thought of a thousand messages she might bring for me—gone only a day!?but I kept quiet and only nodded, an adventurer’s uncaring nod, and climbed behind Sewn Up.

The twins and I followed a rushing tributary of the river for some time till it ran quietly between its wooded banks; when the sun was high and hot and the mist gone, we came to an inlet where a little dish of a boat was tied up among the saplings at the water’s edge. It was something angel-made of white plastic, and (like so many things in the world) put to a use the angels surely never intended; certainly, with its odd ridges and projections and strange shape, it had not been made for a boat. So hot and still it had become that Budding and Blooming threw their warm shirts into the bottom of the dish, and I sat on them and watched the twins pole along. Some white water-flowers came away with the boat from the inlet, and the twins pulled them out of the water to wear for hats; naked, they poled upstream, the leaf shadows flowing over them, wearing flowers in their hair.

When the stream became shallow and poured fast over shadowed rocks, we tied up the boat and followed the stream up its narrowing rocky bed. The breath of it was cold in the warming woods, still fed by snow melting in far-off mountains. When we had tramped through the new ferns at its side for a long way, Budding and Blooming signaled me to be quiet, and we climbed the bank. Past the trees that bordered the stream was a small sunny pasture full of small white flowers; and on a slope amid them lay the saint.

He was fast asleep. His hands were crossed over his bosom, and he snored; his feet, clad in big boots, stuck up. His white hair lay all around him on the ground, and his beard spread out around his small brown face so that he looked like a milkweed seed. We crept up on him, and Budding whispered something in Blooming’s ear that made him laugh. That woke up the saint, who sat up suddenly, looking around confused. Seeing us, he sneezed loudly, got up grumbling, and stumbled off toward the woods across the pasture. Budding cried out and started chasing him as though he were a bird we’d raised; Blooming followed after, and I hung behind, embarrassed at how they approached him.

When they had been some time crashing around in the woods into which the saint had gone, they came back to me panting.

“He’s in a tree,” said Blooming.

“We’ll never find him now,” said Budding, licking his finger and wiping a long scratch on his thigh.

“Why didn’t you just leave him alone?” I asked. “He would have waked up, we could have waited.”

“Blooming laughed,” said Budding, “and he woke up …”

“Budding made me laugh,” said Blooming, “and he ran off.”

“He saw you, is why,” said Budding. “He’s not scared of us.”

I wished I could have approached him alone; now I could never get into his good graces. The twins didn’t really care about saints; they chased a grasshopper now with the same enthusiasm they had chased the little old man. They sat for a while poking each other and whispering together, and then came to the log I was sitting on.

“We’re sorry about the saint running off,” said Blooming. “But you saw him anyway, and now you know what one looks like. Let’s go home.”

He spoke kindly, because he could see I was disappointed; but he said too that even if we left now it would be long after dark when we got back, day was going.

“I’m going to stay,” I said.

They looked at me blankly.

“Maybe he’ll come down from his tree in the morning,” I said, “and I can talk to him, and apologize for waking him and all. I’ll do that.”

“Well,” said one of them, “I suppose, if you want to. But we brought you here. Do you know how to get back?”

With a sudden decision that startled me as much as I hoped it would startle them, I said: “I’m not coming back.” I’m not coming back, twins, so go chase your grasshoppers. “I guess I’ll just stay here, and wait for him, and stay and live with him, and I guess be a saint.”

The twins thought about that for a while, sitting down again and looking from me into the woods and at each other. Then Budding came and gravely kissed my cheek; and Blooming took the cue and kissed the other cheek. They brought my pack to me from where I had left it at the pasture’s edge and put it by me. And without another word they turned back to the brook and disappeared in the aspens at its edge.

One thing about Leaf cord, they’re very down to earth, but if an occasion comes up, they’ll rise to it.

Evening gathered as I sat, and a stack of new midges danced in the still air of the little pasture. The more I thought about my decision the more sensible it seemed to me; but the more I thought how sensible it was, the less I felt like getting up and going into the woods that breathed at the edge of the pasture to look for the saint.

I practiced what I would say in apology to him—no more than “Hello there” or the like, but I practiced till I felt it had enough weight to be convincing. (You practice just by meaning it harder.) But in the end, what got me into the woods were the twins’ kisses burning on my cheeks, and the thought of how I would feel if I went back—if, that is, I could find my way back at all. Of course they’re Leaf cord, it wouldn’t matter to them, they’d just be glad to see me—and somehow that made it worse.

So I got up in the growing gloom and went into the woods, quietly so as not to disturb him should he be around. It was almost dark already in the woods, and grew darker as I went deeper in, and a breeze whispered and creaked in it warningly, and soon it was impossible to take steps without tripping. I had come on an enormous old oak as wide as a wall, which it seemed the woods must have started with, and sat down amid its sheltering roots.

Too dark now to string my hammock, but there was a star caught in the web of leaves, and the air was still; I could spend this night here. It was no good thinking of the water house, or of Belaire, if I wanted to be a saint as much as I said, but it was hard not to think of them as I sat with knees drawn up. I rolled some smoke, carefully picking up the crumbs I dropped. I had enough for several days, and there were always roots and berries that Seven Hands had taught me about, though there would be no berries ripe yet; and if I really got hungry I could kill some little animal and toast it over a fire and eat the meat, as they did in ancient times. And, I thought, if he’s a real saint, he won’t let me starve to death, right in his own woods.

And if I did starve: perhaps something like that was what was in store for me. It would be sad, but maybe in future times people would learn from it; perhaps I would become a part of this saint’s story, and so never die—was that what Painted Red had meant? I thought of Once a Day, and how she might someday come to hear the story; she would know, then—know something. I sat and looked at the blue glimpses of heaven revealed by the moving leaves and thought about being dead.

“If you’re going to sit there all night,” said a small voice over my head, “you might go and get me some water.” I jumped back from the dead and looked upward into the darkness. I could just make out the whiteness of his beard in the dark leaves of the oak I had been leaning on. I couldn’t remember what it was I had planned to say. The beard disappeared, and a dark object was thrown at me, and I ducked as it clattered near me. It was a plastic bucket. I stood holding it and staring up at the tree.

“Well?” said the small voice.

I picked my way out of the woods and down the hill, and filled the bucket from the black water of the brook, and came back with it, stumbling through the woods. When I stood again at the foot of the oak, a rope fell from its branches with a hook on the end. I attached the bucket and watched it hauled up into the darkness.

“You’ve gone and spilled most of it.”

“It’s dark.”

“Well. You’ll have to go again.”

The bucket came down again and I went to refill it, trying to be careful. The face didn’t reappear. I stood looking up into the oak till my neck hurt; I heard some splashing and knocking but the saint didn’t speak again.

In the first light of morning, when I woke stiff and chilled, and looked upward, it was all clear: what had been a massy darkness in the tree was a little house built in the broad arms of the oak with great care, of woven branches and pieces of angel-made this and that, with small windows and a smokestack that leaned out away from the branches. A rope ran from a window to a convenient branch, and from it hung two long shirts.

It hadn’t once occurred to me, you know, that perhaps the twins were mistaken, and their little old man wasn’t a saint at all; I had just assumed that somehow they knew. And looking up now at his tree house, I had no need for doubt. It was just such houses that the saints lived in so many lives ago, when we wandered; St. Gary’s great beech and the oak of St. Maureen, and the tree whose stump is still marked in Little Belaire’s woods, where St. Andy went to live after St. Bea died. “Saints in the trees!” I said aloud, as old people do when something astonishes them.

Should I call out to him? I didn’t know his name; and now in the daylight, despite the errand I had run for him, it was clear to me that he didn’t want me there, squatting at the foot of his tree. No doubt he was sitting in his little house waiting for me to go away. In my excitement at having so soon in my journey come upon a real saint from whom I could learn, I hadn’t considered his feelings in the matter at all—and I Palm cord, too! I felt a hot flush of shame, and went quietly away from his oak, though not so far that I couldn’t observe him. I sat on a patch of moss there, and smoked some, and waited.

In not too long a time I saw his door open, and from it fell a rope ladder ingeniously made, and slowly but confidently the saint climbed down. He seemed to be speaking to someone not present, agreeing, disagreeing with gestures; he carried a brush and a ragged towel.

Gone for a bath. And there was the rope ladder to his house, still moving from the last step he had taken from it.

Did I dare? I would only take a brief peek while he was gone; I would go only to the top of the ladder and look in. But when I got to the doorway and looked in, I forgot that resolve and climbed inside.

And where to begin to describe what I saw once I had got myself inside! The walls of wattle were chinked with mud and moss, and a big limb of the oak, running up through the house at an angle, made a low arch that divided the house in two; the floor was uneven, and stepped up and down to fit itself to the branches it was built into. The ceiling was low, and peaked at odd angles, and everywhere, hung from the ceiling, on shelves built into the wall, in cubbyholes in the corners, on tables and chests, were things I knew nothing about but knew were treasures: things angel-made, by skills long gone from the world, their purposes still potent in them if only you knew enough to discover them. There were more old mysteries and angel-stuff crammed into that little house, it seemed, than in all of Belaire itself.

So absorbed was I in all this that I failed to hear the saint returning till the house creaked and moved with his climbing up the ladder. There was nowhere to hide; I picked up my pack quickly and slung it over my shoulder, just leaving, and stood fearful and embarrassed as his head—at first astonished, then displeased—appeared in the doorway.

He gave his attention to getting in the door, and when he stood inside—shorter than I was—he considered me. I was too embarrassed to speak. He caught a thought then, and came to me smiling, holding out his hand to me.

“Good-by,” he said politely, and I shook his brown hand. He turned away then and stood in the low arch made by the limb with his back to me, waiting for me to be gone. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave. His hands behind his back clasped and unclasped impatiently. Inspired, I reached into my pack and pulled out the bottle of grape soda that No Moon had given me; and when he peeked around to see if I had gone, I showed it to him, smiling, still afraid to speak. His gaze stopped on the bottle for a moment, and when he looked away he began to rock back and forth on his big boots. I waited. At last he edged away from the arch, ducked down beneath a cluttered table, and drew out an old glass, lumpy and full of bubbles. Without looking at me, he put the glass on the table, and I brought the bottle to him. He looked up then suddenly, smiling as broadly as his small face could. “My name is Blink,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“My name is Rush that Speaks.” I put the bottle on the table, and we both watched a bit of sun from the window stab through its purple heart. St. Blink broke the seal and the bubbles crowded to the top. He poured out a foaming, hissing glassful, recapping it tight quickly to keep the bubbles in. He picked up the glass and drank two long noisy gulps. A moment later a small musical belch escaped him, and he smiled at me fondly. “Did you know,” he said, sitting down slowly in a creaking chair of bent wood and rushes and turning the glass in the sun, “that in very ancient times, to keep summer fruits, they would boil them down into a thick paste, like honey, very sweet, and eat them that way?”