The Water and the Wild

To Lindell and Susan Ormsbee.
You taught me my first and best lessons.
You taught me to love words.
This bundle of words is for you.

References to poems are marked with a
.
Find a complete list of the poems referenced on
page 431
.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,

for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

—W. B. YEATS, “THE STOLEN CHILD”

A GREEN APPLE TREE
grew in the heart of Thirsby Square. Its leaves were a sad emerald and its apples a cheery peridot, and the passersby all agreed amongst themselves that it was the strangest sight in an otherwise respectable neighborhood. None of the neighbors knew why the late Mr. Dedalus Yates III had planted the tree in his garden or why his son, the late Mr. Dedalus Yates IV, had kept it alive. It was decidedly out of place on their posh street.

Perhaps the tree would be more forgivable if Mrs. Hester Yates were a kindly old widow who used the apples
to bake strudel that she delivered to orphans, vagabonds, and other persons in the direst of circumstances. But Mrs. Yates did not make any such strudel and, in fact, was not a kindly widow at all. The word “dour” is very apt here. Mrs. Hester Yates was a dour widow. Appropriately for a dour widow, she had the squinched face of a crow that had rammed its beak into one too many windowpanes. Inappropriately, she also had a little girl.

If Mrs. Yates could have had her druthers instead of a girl, there would have been no children whatsoever in her neighborhood and certainly none in her boardinghouse. In her opinion, children belonged to a noxious class of furless, yippy house pets that did nothing but make noise at inconvenient times and crash into her potted gardenias. She had, in fact, been instrumental in placing a notice in the square common that read:

NO PETS, NO FOOTBALL, NO NOISY BEHAVIOR
.

Unlike his wife, the late Mr. Dedalus Yates IV had a tremendous knack for doing nice things, and one of those nice things had been to insist on taking an orphaned, lemony-haired baby into his home. The late Mr. Yates
had also insisted on doing a lot of other nice but highly impractical things that had put the Yateses, a rich and respectable family, into a very unrespectable amount of debt. On the day that five angry creditors came calling at Thirsby Square, Mr. Yates inconveniently fell nose-first into his porridge and died, leaving Mrs. Yates to clean up the mess in the kitchen and at the bank.

Mrs. Yates discovered that creditors don't get any less angry just because the man who owes them money has died before so much as taking his morning Darjeeling.

She decided that the best way to repay the creditors was to let out her home as a boardinghouse. It was a good plan. In two years, Mrs. Yates had paid off her husband's debts. Then, since she had gotten so used to the setup, she went right on putting up respectable boarders with no pets, no footballs, and no noisy behaviors.

At first, Mrs. Yates thought that the otherwise good-for-nothing orphan might finally turn out to be useful. She decided to assign the girl simple tasks like cooking and cleaning. A week later, Mrs. Yates found the boardinghouse kitchen in a billowing swirl of blue smoke while the girl frolicked in the back garden, shaking pepper and paprika out of their shakers and shouting, “Begone!”
to imaginary goblins, oblivious to the burnt goose in the oven. That night, Mrs. Yates resigned herself to the fact that Dedalus Yates IV had only ever brought misery into her life and that the orphan girl was no exception. Then she hired a cook.

“Maddening,” Mrs. Yates would say at least twice a day. “That child is positively maddening. Mind like a sieve.”

The respectful residents of Thirsby Square all agreed with Mrs. Yates. The girl was maddening, or quite possibly just
mad
. She was very likely the maddest girl not just in Thirsby Square but in the entire town of New Kemble and very likely in all of Kemble Isle. She did not belong in town any more than that ridiculous green apple tree did; in fact, suggested some neighbors, it would be best if the girl were simply shipped off the island altogether, where the Bostonians would know what to do with her. Mrs. Yates, however, had made a promise to her husband to care for the girl, and so the girl had to stay.

The girl had a name. The teachers who read roll at Kemble School called off Charlotte G. Fiske, though she preferred to be called Lottie and, out of respect for her wishes, that is what the author will call her, too. Unlike Mrs. Yates, who had prematurely wrinkled and stooped
like wilted spinach, Lottie looked much younger than her twelve years. She had grown up to have a tangled mess of lemony hair, a face smattered with freckles, and gray eyes that frightened the locals.

Of all the things that made Lottie Fiske's gray eyes brighten, there was only one that did so every morning, when she would open the curtains of her window looking onto Thirsby Square: it was the green apple tree.

From the first feathery recollections of her life in the boardinghouse, Lottie could remember her apple tree. It was constant, sure, and always peeking into the panes of her window. It grew tall with her, though she could never quite catch up with it; it lost branches as she lost baby teeth; it tapped her window throughout the day to say hello. It was alive and odd, and so was Lottie Fiske. Camaraderie was inevitable.

The green apple tree was also where Lottie had chosen to hide her copper keepsake box. At the tree's base, just where the knotty nub of a root peeked out, there was a small, copper-box-shaped hollow, and it was here that Lottie kept every scrap of paper and every trinket that she held dear. Papers and trinkets were the only things Lottie could hold dear, because they were the only clues she had
ever gotten about her past. On the subject of Lottie's parents, Mrs. Yates had remained, as on most matters, silent. There were dim rumors in Thirsby Square, however, that Mrs. Fiske had been a foreigner and responsible for passing on her bright gray eyes to her daughter.

Everything that Lottie knew about her parents could be found in an envelope that she had received on her sixth birthday. Inside the envelope was a letter written in very poor handwriting. It informed Lottie of her parents' names, deaths, and undying love for her. Also enclosed in the envelope was a picture, now faded and folded from years of Lottie's incessant gazing, of a man and a woman, both freckled and laughing. On the back of the picture there was a note, scrawled in the same bad handwriting as the letter's:

If you should ever need anything, write back.

Six-year-old Lottie took the note seriously. She wrote back right away to the mysterious letter-writer, asking for a new set of hair bows, please and thank you. Then she asked Mrs. Yates to mail her note, at which point
Mrs. Yates sat Lottie down and explained that it is impossible to send correspondence without a name or an address. Since Lottie's mysterious letter did not provide either, a reply was impossible, and Lottie could forget about those silly hair bows. So Lottie, saddened and rather confused about postal matters, took back her unaddressed letter, folded it up with her mystery letter, and went to have a pity party underneath the green apple tree. That was when she found the copper box in the copper-box-shaped hollow, and that was when she first placed her treasured letters inside.

A year later, on Lottie's seventh birthday, a letter appeared in the mailbox of the boardinghouse at Thirsby Square. It was much lumpier than the first one, but it was addressed to Lottie in that same terrible handwriting. Inside were the most marvelous white taffeta hair bows that Lottie had ever seen. Attached was the same note as before:

If you should ever need anything, write back.

Mrs. Yates was dumbfounded. She decided to teach Lottie that day what the word “coincidence” meant. But
Lottie didn't need a big word to explain what had happened. She knew a far simpler, far better one:
magic
. Her apple tree was
magic
. Lottie wrote back every year without fail and received a present on her birthday each following year. She stored her letters and her trinkets in the copper box. It was only on Lottie's ninth birthday that she decided to really push her luck and ask for a parakeet. (Penelope Bloomfield, the most popular girl at school, had gotten a parakeet for
her
birthday.) Instead, on her next birthday, all she got was an old, frayed book by a man named Edmund Spenser with a note attached to the cover that read: