Blue Willow

by Deborah Smith

  “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.”

  Lily blushed red from the hair down. “And a princess,” she whispered, then got up and ran into the house.

  Mr. MacKenzie drove him to Aunt Maude’s house, in town. Drew MacKenzie couldn’t work the farm very well with one good hand and only Mrs. MacKenzie to help him. Artemas was shocked to realize Mr. MacKenzie had brought him to Aunt Maude’s because the farm had no phone. Then he remembered it hadn’t ever had one. That merely curious fact from Artemas’s childhood now became a grim one as he understood: The MacKenzies couldn’t afford a phone.

  During the ride to town he cast pensive glances at Mr. MacKenzie, who was still a strong giant with a smile for everyone. But he looked grim and tired, and his brown hair had thinned so much that Artemas could glimpse the freckled tan scalp of his crown. He wasn’t old, but his shoulders were stooped. He’d lost his left hand in a hunting accident as a boy, and the metal hook he wore had fascinated Artemas. Now, he saw that the hook was tarnished and dented, ugly, pitiful.

  Artemas called his grandmother in New York. She lectured him about his responsibilities and said she’d arrange a plane ticket for him. She’d negotiate with the school about his punishment.

  Grandmother said he’d only end up bitter and small, like Uncle Charles, if he didn’t stay at school. A military career was her dream for him; a Colebrook could redeem the family’s name with discipline and service. She’d use her connections to have him nominated to West Point after he graduated from prep school.

  After all, he was a top student, a leader, and a Colebrook. That might not mean much to the rest of the world anymore, but it meant everything to her. The whole world sat on Artemas’s shoulders.

  Humbled and depressed, Artemas barely touched his dinner of peas and corn bread with the MacKenzies that night. Grandpa MacKenzie had died a year ago. Grandma MacKenzie had heart trouble and stayed in bed all day, knitting and reading her Bible. They helped her to the table. As she gummed corn bread and buttermilk, she watched him with bright little eyes.

  “You’ve got to go back, boy,” she said. “You’re too old to run off from responsibility.”

  Responsibility. Artemas hung his head. All grandmothers had that word welded to their dentures. They didn’t know just how much responsibility he had. His parents had lost Port’s Heart to the bank. They’d moved the family to Uncle Charles’s shabby but still respectable estate, where Charles disdainfully refused to share the main house. Instead, he gave them an old ten-room cottage that had served as the estate manager’s home in the glory years long before Artemas’s birth. Dismayed by the ignominy, Artemas’s parents cultivated their far-flung friends and were always visiting somewhere, often for weeks or even months at a time. They left Artemas’s brother and sisters in the care of governesses.

  Grandmother, who lived in the main house, was constantly fighting and scheming to evade Uncle Charles’s control. Charles’s wife snubbed the entire Colebrook clan and paraded their college-age daughters in society, telling everyone that she’d get them safely married to money and a better name.

  Grandmother told Artemas that neither Uncle Charles nor Father were the men she would have raised them to be, if she’d had the power to keep them with her at Blue Willow, but at least Uncle Charles was bright enough to keep Colebrook China out of bankruptcy. She put up with him.

  Artemas tried to set an example for his brothers and sisters and make certain they were treated decently. He tried to live up to Grandmothers expectations. He tried manfully to ignore his uncle’s nasty comments and petty humiliations.

  He was filled up to the throat with trying, and he knew how it felt to strangle.

  Mrs. MacKenzie clucked at his lack of appetite, then rose and came to him. “I’ll put some more liniment on you after I’ve washed the dishes,” she said, smoothing her warm, callused hands over his throbbing face. “You rest now, you hear? You have to go back to New York, but you sure don’t have to worry about it until tomorrow.”

  He was shocked at how her touch embarrassed him. He wanted to stare at the large breasts making mounds under her short-sleeved flannel shirt. He’d never thought of her that way, almost six years ago. He flushed from the inside out, filling with strange, discomforting sensations he’d begun suffering lately around the opposite sex. Guilty and confused, he looked away. Nothing was the same.

  But Mrs. MacKenzie ruffled his crew cut as if he were still a child. “I think it’s time Lily heard the bear story. I bet you don’t even remember me tellin’ it to you when you were little, do you, Artie?”

  “I remember.” He shot a grateful look at her, warming to the memory. Cutting his eyes across the table at Lily, he added, “But I bet it’s too scary for a little girl.”

  “Is not,” she chirped. “I saw a baby bear in the back pasture last year. And I didn’t run.”

  “I bet it ran,” he countered, arching a brow. “I bet it said, There’s that monkey with the rotten apples.’ ”

  “I’m not a monkey!”

  Mrs. MacKenzie put her hands up. “Hush, both of you. Do you want me to tell the story, or not?”

  “Yes!” they answered in unison.

  After the dishes were washed and put away, and they’d helped Grandma MacKenzie back to bed, and Mr. MacKenzie had gone out to check on the livestock for the night, Mrs. MacKenzie took Artemas and Lily to the plain little front parlor, switched on a small ceramic lamp on a claw-footed table in one corner, and told them to sit on the couch. Lily curled up beside Artemas, cheerfully elbowing him in the ribs. He thumbed his nose at her, and her mouth popped open in shock. “Mama, he—”

  “Tattletale,” he interjected.

  She clamped her mouth shut and gave him a slit-eyed stare, but said no more.

  Su
ddenly Mrs. MacKenzie crouched and growled, capturing their attention. The lamp cast spooky shadows on her. She crooked her hands into ferocious bear paws and growled again. “This is the story of how the MacKenzies and the Colebrooks met. It’s about Old Artemas”—she pointed to Artemas—“who was your great-great-great-grandpa, and Elspeth MacKenzie”—she pointed to Lily—“who was your great-great-great-grandma.”

  Lily couldn’t figure out why people who weren’t even around anymore were called great, but as long as her relatives were as great as Artemas’s, she wouldn’t protest.

  “Old Artemas came straight off a ship from England and traveled through these woods looking for a place to settle. Elspeth had come here a few years before that, from Scotland. She lived right here, in a cabin where this very house stands today. Her husband died, and she had two half-grown sons to raise.”

  Mama growled and clawed the air. “Old Artemas was young and strong, but he didn’t know these woods. There came a bear!” Lily jumped, then slid closer to Artemas. Her mother leaned over them, her hands hooked, glaring at Artemas, who smiled in anticipation.

  “The bear, he rose up over your great-great-great-grandpa, with his fangs dripping slobber—the bear, not your grandpa—and then, then, that big black bear, he drew back one big paw and ripped your grandpa’s arm right to the bone!”

  Her arms waved wildly as she pawed the air inches from their faces. Lily was breathless with excitement. “What happened then?”

  “Old Artemas whipped out his hunting knife with his good hand, and he quick-like cut that bear’s heart out!” She snatched a piece of kindling from the hearth and carved an imaginary bear. “And he ate it!”

  “Agh! Neat!”

  “Then he staggered off through the woods, dripping blood—Old Artemas, not the bear—with his arm hanging half off.” She let her right arm dangle as she staggered dramatically. “And finally he fell down, and he crawled, and he crawled, and he crawled, because he was a big, tough Englishman, and he wasn’t about to give up and die when he’d only been in America a few months.”