by Jane Langton
door? They’ll see her!”
“I’ll close and lock the shutters.”
“Well, but”—Mrs. Moon thought it over—
“what if she turns the light on and off? You
know, like a signal?”
“My dear, do you think I’m a fool? I’ll
remove the light bulb.”
“Oh, good for you, Mortimer, dear. You’ve
thought of everything. But, oh, what a bore.
Now I’ll have to carry her meals up two
flights of stairs.”
“Not for long, my dear. Not for very long.”
28
HUMPTY DUMPTY
HUGO’S PRINTOUT OF Frieda’s schedule was taped to the refrigerator. “Your turn again, Georgie dear,” said Aunt Alex, consulting it. “This afternoon from one to three. Will you be all right? If you need me, give me a shout.”
The day was hot. Now that the tree house was finished, there was nothing for the gallant Knights of the Fellowship to do but take turns keeping watch, so today all of them were somewhere else. Then Eddy untangled his bike from the bushes and rode away to goof off somewhere with Oliver Winslow. The only knight left was Georgie.
Slowly she began the long climb to the tree house, moving up from the first ladder to the stout branches that spiraled up and around the massive trunk, reaching all the way to Cissie’s mother’s step stool, the grand approach to the trapdoor in the floor of the tree house.
Nimbly Georgie crawled through the opening, then made her way across the floor to the sunlit square of the window. Below her through gaps in the leaves she could see Cissie’s horse drowsing on the grass with lowered head. Mr. Moon was not marching out of his house with a chain saw, although if Georgie had looked higher, she might have seen a flicker of movement in the attic window. But she didn’t.
Turning around, she settled down on the soft pillows that Rachel had brought from home. Rachel had wanted to bring the velvet cushions from her mother’s sofa, but her mother had cried, “Rachel Adzarian, you bring those back!” So Rachel had brought pillows instead, along with a cute picture of kittens to hang on the wall, a low stool for a table, and a pink bath mat for a rug.
The pillows were comfortable, but Georgie was bored. She should have brought a book. Turning back to the window, she rested her elbows on the rough edge of the sill and looked out at the great branch that supported the tree house on that side. The branch was round and solid like a powerful arm. All the apples within reach had been picked and turned into pie, but there were the usual sprays of bright green leaves. Idly Georgie reached out, picked a leaf, and turned it over to look at the insect trail on the other side, the scribble that looked almost like writing.
Then she sucked in her breath. It was writing. The scribble was words, real words. Joyfully Georgie held the leaf to the light and read the scribble again.
Uncle Fred had said that the whole earth was covered with alphabets, but the chickens had not known their ABCs, and neither had the moss nor the rock nor the cat. But the tree was different.
On the underside of the leaf, distinct and clear, were the words
HUMPTY DUMPTY.
“We can’t just keep her locked up forever.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
29
THE DRAGON TREE
IT WAS NO LONGER a game. Uncle Freddy understood it at last. The silly schedule of tree-guarding, the crazy routine of getting up in the middle of the night, the general bedlam and hubbub and the takeover of No. 40 Walden Street by an army of holy terrors—everything had turned out to be important.
The growing tree that spread its broad crown high and wide over the house was not just a tree, it was an enchanted library.
He threw himself into the task of guardianship. “I’ll stand watch all night,” he told Georgie stoutly.
Aunt Alex volunteered to do double duty, and Eddy forgot to be heroic. “Me too, Georgie,” he said humbly.
And when Georgie called Frieda to tell her the news, Frieda whipped her phone out of her pocket and passed the information along to everybody else. At once they all came running, and soon all the Knights of the Fellowship were clambering into the tree.
Sidney was first on the ladder. He raced to the top and snatched at a leaf.
“I don’t see anything,” he said. “This leaf is blank.” He picked a whole handful and said loudly, “They’re all blank.” He looked accusingly at Georgie as she scrambled past him. “You’re out of your mind, Georgie Hall.”
Georgie was undaunted. She stepped off the ladder and took a firm hold on a thick spray of twigs over her head. “Higher, we have to climb higher.”
“Okay.” Eddy lunged past her and disappeared in a tangle of foliage. “Higher it is.”
Oliver was right behind him, swinging up like a chimpanzee. He caught up with Eddy so quickly that Eddy stepped on his hand by mistake. Oliver howled, fell, caught himself, laughed, and vaulted still higher.
Now they were swarming all over the tree: Cissie and Otis, Rachel and Hugo, Sidney and Frieda, Oliver and Eddy. All of them surged past Georgie, but she was the first to find a scribbled leaf. Tracing the scribbles with her finger, she mumbled them to herself, “‘Two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark.’” And then she shouted, “The ark, it’s Noah’s ark!”
At once everybody began snatching the scribbled leaves and screaming them out loud.
“‘The wolf in sheep’s clothing!’” hollered Hugo. “That’s Aesop! Remember the wolf in sheep’s clothing?”
“‘A fresh west wind singing over the wine-dark sea,’” crowed Cissie, but then she whispered, “I don’t get it.”
Oliver couldn’t figure out his scribbles either. “There’s this monster moving through the night,” he bellowed. “What monster is that?”
“It’s Beowulf, stupid,” cried Frieda. “Everybody knows that.” But then she was puzzled too. “‘Sweet showers of April,’ what’s that all about?”
“Good gracious me,” said Hugo, smirking down at Frieda. “It’s Canterbury Tales. I thought everybody knew that. Hey, listen, this one is really gruesome. ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ What’s that?”
Nobody knew, but then Eddy whooped. “I know this one: ‘Tilting at windmills,’ it’s Don Quixote.”
“Hey!” screamed Cissie. “This one’s no good. It’s some crazy language. Eskimo? Zulu? This whole branch is no good.” Leaves showered down from Cissie’s fingers, fluttering through the sunlit spaces below, turning end over end and floating to the ground.
“These are no good either,” complained Otis. “Oh, wait, here’s one.” He stood up, hanging on to a twig with two fingers, and read in a funny snarling voice, ‘Bah, humbug, said Scrooge.’ Okay, you guys, what’s that?” And everybody shouted, “A Christmas Carol.”
Then Eddy yelled joyfully from his perch high overhead, “Uncle Fred will like this one. It’s Henry Thoreau. ‘Old shoes will serve a hero.’ Remember that from last summer?”
Now they were all climbing higher and higher, swaying in the top of the tree. “‘A white-headed whale with a crooked jaw,’” bawled Oliver. “What’s that?”
“Moby-Dick, stupid,” shrieked Rachel. “But, okay, I don’t get this one. ‘You feel mighty free on a raft.’ What’s that?”
“Don’t be dumb,” said Frieda. “Everybody knows that. It’s Huckleberry Finn.” But then Frieda too was bewildered. “What’s this about an apple barrel? ‘I hid in the apple barrel.’ What’s that?”
At once a chorus of voices shouted, “Treasure Island,” and Oliver said in a squeaky Frieda voice, “Oh, everybody knows that.”
By now they had had enough. Their pockets were stuffed with scribbled leaves. They were hungry, and the air was misty with rain. Blundering down the tree, dropping from branch to branch, they climbed down and around, around and down, all the way to the lowest ladder, and stepped off at last on the ground. Then, patting their bulging pockets and grinning at one another, they a
bandoned the tree and hurried indoors, expecting praise and hoping for lunch.
Behind them dangled a hundred thousand other stories, epics of gods and heroes told beside Greek campfires, sagas unfolded in Danish royal halls, ballads sung by traveling minstrels, sacred stories from Hindu temples and Buddhist shrines, animal fables passed down through generations of children in the African bush, holy parables inscribed by monks in faraway lonely places, fairy tales read to children in London nurseries and frontier cabins in the American wilderness.
The tree that had appeared only last May as a twig in the ground and had grown to such a gigantic height, the tree that had borne sweet-smelling flowers and shining apples, the tree that was now a legend in the neighborhood, had turned out to be something more than a freakish giant. It was the tree of myth and fable. It was Thoreau’s great dragon tree of the Western Isles.
30
UGGA-UGGA
SPREAD OUT ON the kitchen table, the leaves refused to lie still. They lifted at the edges and tumbled over one another. Noah drifted sideways and changed places with Scrooge. Huck Finn jumped over Aesop, Henry Thoreau skipped across Dante’s Divine Comedy and settled down between Moby-Dick and Little Women, Mother Goose sailed around the kitchen and landed on the teakettle before fluttering back to the table and floating gently down beside Don Quixote.
“Look at that,” whispered Aunt Alex. “They’re rearranging themselves.”
“In time,” said Uncle Fred. “They’re rearranging themselves in time.”
The nine members of the Fellowship crowded around the table to look at their harvest of scribbled leaves. “What I don’t get,” said Sidney, “is why some of them are blank. You know, way down at the bottom of the tree.”
“Me neither,” said Hugo.
“Wait a sec,” said Eddy. He struck a dramatic pose. “The mighty brain of your hero has plumbed the depths of this mystery.” He looked around, grinning. “How sad that the rest of you are such nitwits.”
“Mercy me,” said Hugo. “How disgusting that our hero is such a twit.”
“Such a jerk,” agreed Rachel.
“Such an asshole,” said Sidney. “Excuse me, Miz Hall.”
Aunt Alex smiled and then, very carefully, she began picking up the leaves while Uncle Fred found a paper bag and Eddy said, “Hey, listen, you guys, do you want to hear it or not?”
“Oh, please tell us, darling Eddy,” said Frieda.
“Well, okay then.” Eddy threw open the screen door. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
“Hey,” said Cissie, “it’s raining out there.”
“Our hero,” began Eddy, but Cissie said, “Oh, never mind,” and they all ran outdoors and huddled under the vast umbrella of the tree. Eddy reached up to a low branch and pulled off a leaf. “See?” he said, turning it over in his hand. “It’s blank because at first nobody knew how to write. For thousands and thousands of years they could say ‘ugga-ugga,’ but they couldn’t write it down.”
For a minute they stared back at him in silence. Then Rachel said, “Oh, I get it,” and repeated it softly, “Ugga-ugga.”
“Ugga-ugga,” whispered Georgie.
“Ugga-ugga,” gabbled Hugo, laughing and beating his chest.
“Ugga-ugga,” bawled Oliver. He sprang to his feet and bounded around in the rain like a caveman, whooping, “UGGA-UGGA, UGGA-UGGA.”
Then they all danced out from under the tree and began hopping up and down and shrieking, “UGGA-UGGA, UGGA-UGGA,” while the rain drenched their hair and ran down their faces and soaked their shirts and sneakers, and high overhead, peering down through a crack in the locked shutters of her attic window, Emerald murmured softly to herself, “Ugga-ugga, ugga-ugga.”
31
THE FIRST NOTE
EMERALD’S ATTIC PRISON was a bare room furnished with little more than a chair and a narrow bed, and under the bed a chamber pot. Emerald leaned against the chicken wire over her window and peered through a crack in the shutter at the crazy kids next door, until the rain at last drove them indoors. Then she sat down on the cot and tried to think.
If only she had a candle, she could light it with one of her precious matches. She could wave it back and forth like a signal. But there was no candle. Stretching out on the cot, Emerald wondered what they were thinking about downstairs, and began to be afraid.
When she woke up next morning, she knew what to do. At once she jumped up and went to the window. Perhaps she could slip a piece of paper through a crack. Reaching her fingers through the chicken wire, she tried to rattle the lower sash, but it was too closely jammed in its frame.
But there must be a hole. There had to be a hole. Emerald moved the chair to the window, climbed up, and looked through the broken slat. The morning was bright. She could see green leaves, a bird in a nest, a flash of butterfly wings. Below the tree she could just make out a wisp of the sandy hair of the professor next door.
For a moment she stood quietly looking down at Professor Hall. Then she poked a finger through the barrier of chicken wire and ran it along the crack between the upper and lower sash. This time she found a flaw. The two halves of the window were not a close fit. Perhaps a scrap of paper could be pushed between them.
Emerald had no scrap of paper. But there were peeling fragments of wallpaper around the window. She had no pen or pencil, but there was another kind of ink. Bravely she set to work.
Finished, her message was sloppy, but bright and clear. She flapped the scrap of wallpaper to dry the wet red word. Then she climbed on the chair and looked down.
Good. The professor was still there. Quickly Emerald folded the note and thrust it through the chicken wire. Then she worked it between the two parts of the window. To her delight it dropped between them, slipped neatly through the gap in the shutter, and fluttered down and out of sight.
But from the window of her Nature Center on the first floor, Margery Moon was also looking out, staring from behind her purple drapes at the man in the lawn chair under the tree, the stubborn neighbor who had caused them so much trouble. She watched him yawn and stretch. The fool had been guarding that dreadful tree all night.
His yawn was catching. Mrs. Moon yawned too, and began to turn away. But then out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of something drifting past the window, a scrap of paper.
At once she darted out-of-doors and peeked around the corner of the house. Professor Hall was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. On tiptoe she made her way to the bushes and groped among the twigs until her fingers closed on the scrap of wallpaper, the note that had been dropped by the crafty girl in the attic.
There was only a single word on the note—
HELP
—but it had been written in blood.
32
THE SECOND NOTE
AFTER THAT MRS. MOON kept her eyes peeled. Often she bustled around under Emerald’s attic window with a trowel in her hand, pretending to be gardening. What if the girl were to write another note? What if it fell into the wrong hands?
Then there really was another note, but this time Mrs. Moon missed it. When Emerald dropped her second scrap of wallpaper through the broken slat of shutter, it was plucked out of the air by a robin, carried away to her nest high in the tree, and tucked among her greenish blue eggs. Before long three infant birds were sitting on Emerald’s desperate call for help. Unfortunately none of them could read.
“But, Mortimer, we can’t keep her locked
up forever. You’ll have to deal with it somehow.”
“I intend to. Trust me.”
“You mean—like before?”
“Exactly.”
33
THE WILD WIND
THE STORM CAME without warning in the middle of the night. A wild wind began to blow, pelting the rain sideways, sucking the curtains in Eddy’s bedroom flat against the screen. When his alarm clock buzzed he got out of bed sleepily and banged down the sash.
From the rest of the house there were sho
uts of “Quick, quick,” and sharp crashes as Uncle Fred and Aunt Alex ran from room to room, slamming down windows on the west side of the house.
Then Georgie shouted, “It’s coming in here too,” because the wind was blowing from the north. Eddy ran across the hall and helped her close her windows, and then he plunged downstairs to slam the window in the front hall and two more in the study.
When the whole house was safe from the downpour, there were puddles to be mopped up. Aunt Alex and Uncle Fred got down on their knees with sponges in the front hall. Then Aunt Alex looked up and saw Eddy reach into the closet for his parka. Stumbling to her feet, she said, “Oh, Eddy, it’s not your turn again? Surely no one’s going to chop down that tree in all this rain.”
“Don’t be too sure,” said Uncle Fred grimly. He stood up and poked in the closet for an umbrella. “It’s just when he might decide to do it.”
“Sidney’s out there,” said Eddy, popping open the umbrella. “It’s my turn now. I’ll be okay, Aunt Alex. I’ll be nice and dry in the tree house.” He threw open the door, slammed it shut behind him, and plunged down the porch steps into the rain.
Now the wind was blustering from the east, sending a lawn chair tumbling along Walden Street and hurling a wall of water against the house next door. A gust wrenched the umbrella out of Eddy’s hand and catapulted him across the sodden grass. In the dark he collided with the ladder at the foot of the tree, wrapped his arms around it, and slowly began to climb.
By now he knew the ascent by heart. From the top of the ladder his hands and feet felt their way from one thick branch to the next. The wind battered against him, but once again the broad spread of leaves over his head was like a giant umbrella.
Halfway up he met a drowned rat. “What’s it like up there?” shouted Eddy as Sidney scrambled down past him.
“Peachy keen,” bawled Sidney. For a moment Eddy watched Sidney’s huddled shape drop through the tossing leaves and disappear. Then he looked up and went on climbing, gripping one branch after another, while the tree wallowed and swayed around him. When he fumbled for the stepladder below the trapdoor, he had to hang on, because the tree was reeling and throwing him dizzily left and right. The branches plunged and lifted and plunged again. Holding fast, Eddy looked up and saw the massive crown lash crazily back and forth. He caught his breath. Would the thousands of storytelling leaves be torn away and lost? Would the tree itself survive? Would it last the night?
