by Ellen Datlow
Charlie stared at her, something lighting up a long forgotten corner of his mind. He knew her. Knew her face, the tilt of her chin when she looked up, the keen gaze of her green eyes, and the bossy way she grabbed his hand and pulled him after her.
“Come away, Charlie. Let me show you our world. You know our foothills, the lower reaches where man and bird can find their rest. But travel now with me across the broad green road and I will show you our domain. This is the Greenwood, Charlie, born of the first seeds, erected from the first root of the Tree of Life. From here all things are joined. Like you and me.”
“Wait,” he said, slipping his hand free from the girl’s grasp. He sat down on an arched branch and wrenched off his sneakers, suddenly wanting to feel the green path beneath his naked soles. The coolness of the matted leaves sighed against the skin of his feet. He felt strange, like something slowly unraveling. He realized he was unafraid standing in the liquid gold sunlight, the girl waiting for him, her figure supple as a stalk. He relaxed feeling his hips balance over the gentle swells of the rolling green path. “What’s your name?” he asked the girl.
“Like the Greenwoman, I have many. But you can call me Dunia.”
“Dunia,” he repeated. “Do you know why I’m here?”
“You desired it,” she replied, with a little shrug. “To come away from the world. From the sorrow that weighs you down like stones in a seal’s pocket.”
“Am I free from that then?”
“For a while.” She added, “whether you stay or not depends on you.” She held out her hand again and Charlie grasped it and followed. With every step he took, he felt himself grow lighter, until he imagined himself weightless, his feet thin sheets of paper floating over the green path.
That day and the next and the next until he lost track of time altogether, Charlie walked with Dunia down the green path of matted leaves, sometimes beneath the open sky, sometimes crossing beneath a shelter of arched limbs. They slid down the rain-wet slopes of ironwood and ash, fanned themselves with switches of maple, and drank the dew that collected along the veined ribs of oak leaves. Around him, Charlie heard the voice of the Greenwood come alive with birdsong, the scrabbling claws of small animals, the rasp of insects, and the whispered incantations as bodies slipped from the skin of tree trunks, joined them on their journey and then faded back into the green light of the woods. He slept beneath the open sky, the wheeling stars needles of light, his bed a web of branches padded with moss. Dunia talked, sang, teased, and dragged him running at times over the greensward. When hunger took them, they descended to low branches that dangled out over ice-cold springs. With a hand to steady himself, Charlie squatted beside Dunia on the branch and lowered his head into the bubbling water. He ate tart watercress, his chin stained green from the juice, and handfuls of withered blueberries stolen from lumbering bears. Their hunger satisfied, they returned to the green road, their arms reaching deftly for the branches that guided them upward through the trees to the high canopy.
It was easy here. He never thought of his family. Every step he took, he drifted farther from the anchor of his parents. He understood now how heavy those stones had been, how he had carried them unknowingly bent by the weight. He had never looked up or forward, only down. But now the yoke of grief, of unspoken guilt and shame fell away, abandoned and forgotten in the everlasting green of his journey. He found the open sky, and watched the hawks soar over the edge of the green horizon.
Charlie borrowed feathered wings from a thrush and darted through the trees. In the shinning black armor of a beetle he nestled in the hollows of rotting logs. And in the brightness of the day, Dunia beside him, his feet skimmed effortlessly over the canopy of leaves high above the world below.
Then one day Dunia, dashing ahead of him, stopped, a hand to her mouth. Charlie ran to her and saw the tears like quicksilver on her flushed cheeks.
“What is it?” Charlie asked.
“Look,” she pointed.
And Charlie saw where the Greenwood fell away into a ravine of gray slag, heaps of coal and rutted crevasses of black mud, littered with rusting trucks, the skeletal remains of an old car, a bent bicycle, a broken toilet. Small mountains of lumpy garbage bags split their seams and children were rifling through the contents, hunting for cans. Crows cawed defiantly, their talons tearing open the bags, sharp beaks scavenging the contents. A woman in a long black sweater with a ragged hem trudged across the slag, a clear plastic bag full of smashed cans slung over her shoulder. Behind her, a filthy child dragged a heavy pail of pilfered coal.
“What is this place?”
“The end of the Greenwood. Every season there is less of our domain. Come away, Charlie. This is too painful to look on.”
Charlie watched the child struggling to keep up with his mother. She stopped and waited for him, her body all angles like the rusted metal hulls of the abandoned trucks. The child set the pail down and, fists to his eyes, he started to cry. The woman waited, shifted the bag of cans higher on her shoulder, silently contemplating the bawling child. Charlie wanted to leave, to turn away but his eyes remained fixed on the gaunt woman. He inhaled and held his breath, a stirring of hope in his breast as she set down the bag and tenderly bent toward the child. She knelt and held him close. The child’s cries quieted, the small arms circling her neck.
Dunia pulled on his hand and Charlie followed, back the way they had come along the green road. But for the first time in many days, Charlie remembered who he was. He looked at his hands, the fingers stained green. He thought of that mother and her child, of what he had seen. Touch. A gesture of love, a reprieve even in that grim, dark place. It was all Charlie had wanted ten years ago. But he had hid his tears, silenced his cries, too ashamed to ask for comfort. A dagger of fresh pain lanced Charlie’s chest and he felt the weight suddenly return to his bones. His legs crashed beneath the surface of the leafing path and he fell feet first, arms thrashing, snapping the thin branches along the way. Dunia plunged in after him and nimble as a squirrel, she bolted down the tree trunks, reaching out to snatch at Charlie’s flailing hands. His feet kicked wildly like a swimmer in the foaming leaves.
“Charlie,” Dunia screamed and reached for him, over and over again, missing him, grasping only the tattered leaves.
Charlie stared wide-eyed as he fell and the square blue patch of sky directly overhead disappeared as the green path closed over the tear in the road. He was falling fast, his skin scoured by the broken twigs as he crashed through their feeble embrace. Dunia darted between the branches, fierce as a cat trying to stop him from falling.
The leaves thinned and suddenly the branches grew dense and broad. He landed on one, was hit hard in the pit of his outstretched arm and ribs. For a moment he stopped falling, lay balanced over its beam, stars exploding violently in his head, nausea roiling in his stomach. He started to slide off its surface and his hand scrabbled along the coarse and brittle bark trying to find a handhold. Then Dunia was at his side, grabbing him by the shoulders and pulling him safely into the crook of the tree.
Feeling a solid branch beneath him again, Charlie hunched in her arms, panting in terror, aware of the thousand cuts and bruises he had experienced in the rush of his descent. He could feel Dunia’s heart beating furiously as she held him pressed to her chest.
“What happened?” he asked, dazed.
“You remembered,” she said.
“I have to go home,” Charlie answered weakly.
“Yes.”
And then tears trickled from his eyes, the salt stinging the cuts on his cheeks. Sobs rolled up from the hollow of his empty stomach, and he felt his heart crack, sheared like the branches breaking with his fall. He had been free and now he feared the weight again, dreaded the responsibility, the years of his own muffled, silenced grief. How would he explain all this to his parents?
“I can’t,” he said, his head held between his hands.
“Come, Charlie. The Greenwoman will help you,” the girl answered a
nd with a hand to steady him, they moved slowly and carefully downward through the layers of tree branch.
It was dusk in the world below when Charlie, weary and aching, laid his hand to a familiar branch. He looked below him and saw the long, outstretched arm of the oak blasted by lightning resting against the ground.
“Wait here,” Dunia said. “I’ll be back.”
Charlie closed his eyes and laid his head on his drawn-up knees. His skin burned, raw from the thrashing leaves, but exhaustion released him to sleep.
He woke, much later in the night, someone calling his name from far below. He didn’t answer but listened in the darkness to the voice that spoke to him. It was his mother, her voice insistent, sad, and yearning like the cry of doves.
“Charlie, Charlie, are you there? I know you’re there. She told us we would find you here. She told us it was time to talk. You don’t have to answer, son. All I ask is that you listen.”
Charlie sat up and looked down through the dark webbing of branches. His parents were there, his mother sitting on the low branch and his father standing beside her, a hand resting on her shoulder.
“Before you were born,” she started, “your father and I used to walk often in these woods. We always knew this was a special place. So when the house came up for sale, it could have been a shack for all we cared, just so we could live here, close to the woods. Perhaps you can understand that now. How special it is.”
She waited as if hoping for a word from him. But Charlie kept silent.
She continued. “When you were about three, a terrible spring storm blew in, pitching lightning everywhere. A lot of trees were struck, including this one, this branch nearly torn from the trunk. We saw the smoke from our windows and then thought no more of it as the pouring rain seem to douse the fires. But later that night as the rain lashed the windows, an injured woman came to our back door.” In the dark Charlie heard his mother’s voice falter for a moment. “She was certainly strange looking. But worse, she was badly burned, the skin seared and blistered down one side of her body.”
Charlie straightened his back with interest, remembering the Greenwoman and the scarred flesh that knotted her skin.
“Your father and I let her into the kitchen. But we were at a loss as to how to help her. She sat down at the table and insisted she didn’t want doctors or hospitals. She’d heal herself she said. But she needed one thing from us. She had watched us living here on the edge of her world and she knew we could be trusted to help her. The blast had nearly killed her and it would take time, too much time to heal. She had a seedling, not yet ready for the soil, that needed growing. Would I help her?”
Charlie moved down closer, listening intently to his mother’s tale. He could see her now in the faint moonlight, her rounded shoulders hunched, her hands folded in her lap.
“I said yes, not imagining what she asked of me. Hold out your hands she said and I did. She cracked open a green acorn between her fingers and shook the nut into my palms.” His mother’s voice trembled again in the dark. “It was full of light, a sliver of a green star. She told me to swallow it and I did. I didn’t hesitate. Not for one second.”
“Then she took my hands, looked deep into my eyes and said, ‘I’ll come back when the time is right to claim my own. For this act of generosity, may you always know the Greenwood and may you and yours be as kin to us.’ Nine months later, your sister Celia was born.”
Charlie clutched a twigging branch so tightly it snapped.
“It was my fault really. When the time came I couldn’t let her go. By then I loved her as though she was my own daughter. But the call of the Greenwood was too strong and she began to wander, fighting to go back. I should have told you Charlie,” she whispered fiercely. “But I didn’t know how. Not until now, that is. I’m sorry, son.”
“Charlie, I need to tell you how it was,” his father broke in.
Charlie saw his father standing, his hands in his pockets, head craned upwards.
“When your sister was born, just after New Year’s, a man came to the door.” Then his father gave a dry laugh. “Well, a sort of man. There were deer horns, here,” he motioned to his forehead, “and he wore a cape made from deer hide, tied on with vines. He came to see the baby and to ask a favor. Celia was healthy, a great set of lungs and a big eater. You remember?”
Charlie nodded. At least that part had been true.
“Well, the horned man was satisfied at what he saw. Then he gave me a sapling and told me in the first thaw to plant it and see that the child spent time there. So I did. It’s that oak, over in the corner of the yard, where she always played. It was her tree, in more ways than one, I guess. It’s her life rooted there. She grows as it grows. Do you understand?”
Charlie nodded silently, hearing again the murmured words as the bodies slipped from trunks and traveled in the Greenwood.
“We were to let her go back to the woods when she was ready. But when that happened, your mother couldn’t let go. And I’ll admit, I had trouble too. We held on, and every night your sister, driven by instinct tried to go home. It was wrong of us, I know. But we loved her and we feared for you. That you would be lonely when she left.”
“I was,” Charlie said softly to himself.
“One night I got up to check on Celia and I saw the horned man waiting out in the deep snow in the yard. He was just standing there, staring up at me, his face as lost as mine would probably be if I knew I had lost you to someone else. I went to your mother. We had no right to keep her, I said. And after a lot of tears, she finally agreed. So that night, I unlocked the door and went back to bed. I let her go home. I know you blamed yourself when it happened and I tried to let you know it wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault. She just needed to go home.” He paused, and Charlie saw the moonlight spilling over his father’s worried face, eyes searching the trees. “And what about you, son? What about you, Charlie? Are you ready to come home?”
“Not yet,” Charlie answered aloud. He scrambled up the rough bark of the tree, across the wide-swept branches and jumped into a second, taller tree. He climbed, reaching hand over hand, his mind racing back to all the years he’d spent carrying the responsibility of Celia’s death. He was angry and confused. For ten years he had watched over his parents, for ten years he had shaped every waking moment of his life to their needs. He thought about his parents’ confession and it shocked him that their lives, which he believed he had shaped and sculpted, were not his creation. He didn’t really know them and that surprised him.
Pausing to catch his breath high in the arms of an old maple, Charlie closed his eyes and remembered his little sister sitting beneath the slender oak, smiling at him as she brushed the auburn curls out her eyes. “Dunia,” he said, recognizing her face now. His sister was here in the Greenwood. “Dunia!” he called aloud. Then, “Celia! Where are you?”
“Not far away,” she answered close by him in the dark. “I’ve never been far away, Charlie. As close as the shade of the oaks.” Her face appeared between the branches, her hands white in the moonlight where they circled the limbs.
“I thought you had died. I saw your body,” Charlie said. “There was funeral, a casket.”
“It was a husk; the shell of the acorn. I had already returned to the sleeping heart of my tree. The homed man, my father, left the husk for you and your parents that they might know of my passing into the Greenwood. Without that, he feared you would grieve my disappearance. It was to console you, Charlie.”
Charlie leaned his back against the trunk, the bark scratching his neck. “Why didn’t anyone tell me sooner?”
“I tried, Charlie. The Greenwoman tried. Every time you climbed into her arms she tried. But you wouldn’t listen. You spelled yourself into a knot so tangled that none of us could find the loose end to pull apart again. That is until a month ago,” she added, “when you wished at last to join us.”
Charlie startled in shocked surprise. “A month? I’ve been in the Greenwood a
month?”
“Yes. It’s almost the start of summer.”
“But my parents! They must have freaked,” Charlie said, his stomach turning. “How could I do that to them?”
“They knew you were here. They worried. But they weren’t afraid,” Celia answered. She angled her way through the branches and joined Charlie on a higher branch.
“How did they manage without me?” he asked, puzzled. “Come and I will show you.” Celia took Charlie’s hand and once more led him high into the trees, tripping softly over the branches, weaving her way through the dense clutter of twigs. And then she pulled Charlie close beside her and parted a heavy curtain of leaves. Charlie leaned forward and looked in the living room window. They were sitting together in his father’s large, overstuffed chair, his mother curled up on his father’s lap, his arm sheltering her. They looked at each other tenderly, resigned. Charlie saw his father brush away his mother’s graying hair, tuck it behind her ear, and then kiss her softly. Seeing them face to face, their arms a closed circle around each other, Charlie sensed for the first time in his life that his parents had a life without him. He had always believed that he rested on their shoulders, their eyes focused on him, their hands reaching out to steady him. And now in this lamplight circle of intimacy, he realized there was a place between them where he did not exist.
“Do you see it, Charlie?” Celia asked.
“I do,” Charlie answered and sighed deeply. They didn’t need him as much as he thought, as much as he feared. They had each other. He wasn’t hurt or angry, just relieved. His shoulders sagged wearily as though the weight had slipped from them once and for all.
“Charlie, you will always be my brother,” Celia said, holding his hand. “But it’s time you were away. The seed must drop from its tree, must split the husk and find new soil.”
“I hear you, Celia.” He smiled at her in the dark. “You always were a bossy sister.”
Celia laughed and Charlie’s heart ached to hear the low guffaw rumbling up from the depths of her stomach.
