The Wish Giver

by Bill Brittain

  “This is stuff to make trees grow,” he said.

  Sam worked the ground up with the spade. Finally he poured the water over Henry’s shoes.

  “Ohhh,” Henry moaned with contentment. “That feels real good, Sam. See, Rowena? Sam knows how to treat me properly.”

  “Sam, did you hear what Henry was saying? He didn’t mean a single one of all those fine things he used to tell me.”

  “I never figured he did,” Sam replied. “But if I’d said so, you wouldn’t have listened. You had to learn for yourself. Here’s something else to keep in mind now that you know what Henry’s really like. The sooner you think of a way to wish the spell off him, the sooner he’ll be out of your life for good. So put your whole mind to it, Rowena. Me, I’ve got farm work to do. I’ll leave you two alone.”

  Rowena stayed with her unwelcome guest until late that evening, taking only time for supper. In spite of Sam’s confidence that she’d find a way to free Henry, she kept thinking about how he might never get loose. She’d have to spend the rest of her life caring for that…that ignoramus who’d become rooted in her backyard. Two days ago she’d wanted more than anything for Henry to remain in Coven Tree. Now she couldn’t stand the sight of him.

  The next morning at breakfast, Rowena’s mother had a question. “What’s so all-fired interesting about that clump of trees out in back?” she asked. “You’re spending a lot of time there, child.”

  “It’s a fine place to study, Mama,” she said. “This week we have to get ready for tests at school.”

  “Just don’t get studying so hard you forget about the Haskills’ party tonight. Everybody in your class will be there.”

  The party! With all the trouble Henry’d given her, Rowena had forgotten all about it. But how could she go? Henry needed caring for, and she had to…

  “I just wish he’d dry up and blow away!” she cried. Then Rowena stomped out of the kitchen, leaving her mother to wonder what in tarnation she was talking about.

  Rowena just had to talk to somebody. She found Sam in the barn and poured out to him her disappointment at missing the Haskills’ party.

  Much to her surprise, Sam seemed to understand. “You go along to your party,” he told her. “I’ll stay with Henry this evening. Though I warn you, Rowena, if he gets to complaining too much, I intend to stuff a rag in his mouth and stomp it home with my foot.”

  That evening, the Haskill house was all decorated with Japanese lanterns and paper streamers. Everybody seemed to be having fun—everybody but Rowena. She had on her prettiest dress, and all her friends from school were there, but it was impossible for her to enjoy the party. She still felt guilty about leaving Sam to take her proper place in the grove of trees.

  She was sitting in a corner and staring at her shoes when Ruth Higgens and Minnie Baldwin walked by. Minnie was talking a mile a minute, and Rowena heard her mention Adam Fiske. Rowena remembered Adam sitting on the far end of the bench in Thaddeus Blinn’s tent. Leaning forward, she cupped her hand behind her ear.

  “…All spraying way up into the air, right there at the corner of Adam’s house,” Minnie was saying. “Ruth, I don’t care what folks say about there being no water on the Fiske farm. My daddy saw it, I tell you.”

  “Underground springs sometimes do that,” Ruth replied.

  “Not like this. Daddy says it was…was magic!”

  Magic? Then Adam must have been wishing too, Rowena thought. But water? On that dried-out Fiske farm? If that’s what Adam wished for, he was lucky. At least he’d gotten something useful from his wish.

  After the party Mr. Haskill took Rowena and several of the others home in his big wagon. “It’s all dark at your place,” he told Rowena when they reached the Jervis house. “D’you want me to see you to the door?”

  “No thanks, I’ll be fine.” Rowena hopped down from the wagon and made her way across the lawn to the front porch.

  She grasped the knob of the front door. Suddenly the old rocking chair at the far end of the porch creaked loudly. “Who’s there?” she called, scared stiff.

  “Only me—Sam.” She heard footsteps coming across the porch, and then he was standing beside her.

  “I reckon you’d better take a look at Henry,” Sam said. “It’s a lot worse than we ever figured on. It’s happening faster now.”

  “What’s worse?” she asked as they walked through the darkness toward the grove of trees. “What’s happening faster?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Once inside the grove, Sam lit the lantern and held it up. There was Henry. But it was a Henry that Rowena hardly recognized.

  The rough bark that had been around his ankles now covered his whole body, clear up to the chin. But that wasn’t all. Now his arms were thrust stiffly upward and outward, for all the world like gnarled limbs of wood. As Sam held the lantern closer, Rowena was horrified.

  “Sam,” she said in a scared whisper, “he’s almost like a real tree!”

  Only Henry’s face showed that the thing growing there was—or had once been—human. And even that was twisted into a shape like weatherworn wood. The expression on it was one of pure horror. The lips moved, but only a soft sighing came from them.

  Rowena leaned closer. There was the merest whisper of breath from the open mouth. There were words, too—words that made Rowena shiver in the warm spring night.

  “Help me! Help me!”

  By Wednesday afternoon, everything that was human in Henry Piper had disappeared. All that was left was tree

  Oh, a person looking close at the big knob near the top of the trunk might make out two eyes and a mouth amid the grain of the wood. But for all intents and purposes, Henry was just a runty sycamore standing in the midst of the grove of trees.

  Rowena was at her wits’ end. Somehow she had to get Henry back to being human. She turned the problem over in her mind for hours on end without coming up with a single idea of how to go about it. She had to keep Pa and Ma from finding out, too. They’d never understand, especially since Henry didn’t look anything like Henry anymore. They’d probably think she’d gone soft in the head.

  Rowena knew she couldn’t have stood it without Sam’s being there to help. That night she lay in her bed, imagining how things might have been if it had been Sam who’d changed into a tree and she’d sought help from Henry. She decided Henry’d have been worse than no help at all.

  She was sure Sam would have accepted his fate with a dignity that Henry Piper would never know. And Sam wouldn’t have become any puny softwood sycamore, either. Sam would have been a mighty oak.

  Sam. For three days Rowena’d been so wrapped up in her own problems that she’d never once said a word to him about how grateful she was for…for his just being there. Sometimes she’d get so worried about Henry’s plight that she’d go all sick inside and want to scream and scream, or else run off somewhere and hide. Then Sam would give her a wink or a nod or a few whispered words, and she’d find the strength to go on. She’d tell Sam in the morning how much that meant to her.

  But in the morning, Sam was gone.

  “He asked me for some time to go into town,” Pa explained. “He didn’t say what for.”

  Sam barely made it back in time for supper, and afterward there were chores to be done. It wasn’t until nearly eight o’clock that Rowena found him alone.

  “Where have you been all day?” she asked.

  “Reading, mostly—in the school library. I got to thinking that if magic can turn a person into a tree, maybe there’s a spell of some kind that’ll turn him back into a man again.”

  “Did you find one?” Rowena asked hopefully.

  “Nope. Only legends and such. People worshiping trees on account of gods were supposed to be inside, or they were the souls of dead people.”

  “But nothing about a person changing…”

  “I did find some old stories,” Sam replied, “where folks got changed into plants of different kinds. The closest I could get to Henry’s p
roblem was one about a gal called Daphne who got turned into a laurel tree to escape from the god Apollo. But those yarns are more fanciful than real, I expect.

  “Still, it can’t all be superstition. Anybody thinking that would have a real eye-opener just by looking into that grove out yonder. Though Henry’s so much tree now, probably nobody’d even notice him.”

  “I’m grateful for what you tried to do, anyway,” Rowena told him. “But sooner or later somebody’s going to come looking for Henry. What’ll I say? ‘Knock on the trunk of that sycamore and see if anybody’s home’?”

  “We’ve got a few days before anybody comes searching,” Sam said. “Y’see, I called the Neverfail Company from Stew Meat’s store. I said Henry’d been taken sick. The lady on the phone was ever so nice. She said Henry was only to think about getting better, and somebody else would handle his selling until he was up and about.”

  “Oh, Sam, I’ve been such a dunce,” said Rowena. “If I hadn’t made a fool of myself over Henry, none of this would have happened. But when he talked of all those fine places he’d been to, it was like I was right there with him. New York…St. Louis…even Paris. I’ll never get to any of those cities, Sam. But just talking to somebody who’d been there was…was…”

  “Rowena,” said Sam suddenly, “I ain’t ever been outside this county. But I’ve got a few things I want to say to you.”

  “All right, Sam,” she said, looking oddly at him. “But what…?”

  “I want you to pretend I’m Henry Piper,” Sam told her. “The old Henry, before he changed. Can you do that?”

  “It’ll be hard,” she replied. “But I’ll try.”

  “Rowena, my dear,” Sam began, taking her hand. “Let me tell you about London.”

  “Sam Waxman, London’s way across the ocean in England. You haven’t ever been near there.”

  “Come on, Rowena. You never stopped Henry in the middle of a story. I’m supposed to be him, remember?”

  “All right, Sam…I mean Henry. Go ahead.”

  “In London is a cathedral called St. Paul’s, with a big round dome at the top. I recollect standing on the balcony that runs around the underside of that dome and—”

  “Sam, you’re being silly.”

  “Shhh, Rowena. This ain’t Sam talking. It’s Henry. So I whispered against the dome, and the whisper was heard only by the person way across on the other side. Nobody else heard a sound because the words followed the curve of the dome. Someday, Rowena, you and I will stand on opposite sides of that dome, and I’ll whisper—”

  “This is nonsense, Sam.”

  “No, it ain’t. It’s true. And for now, my name’s Henry. In China there’s a wall clear across the whole country. It’s so big you could be on the moon and still see it. And there’s islands where bugs build homes higher’n your pa’s barn, and people shinny up coconut trees by tying their feet together. If we was to walk along the beach of one of those islands, Rowena, we’d see fish in the water that are every color of the rainbow. Away out in San Francisco they’ve got trolley cars without motors, and they’re pulled by a cable buried in the street and—”

  “Sam Waxman, you stop this instant!” cried Rowena. “None of that stuff you told me is real.”

  “Oh, it’s real, right enough.”

  “How do you know? You’ve never been to any of those places.”

  “Nope,” said Sam. “I ain’t. And neither has Henry Piper!”

  “Sam, you don’t have to start lying about Henry just so I’ll feel better—”

  “It’s the truth, Rowena. The lady at Neverfail said Henry has an Aunt Bertha down in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who’d want to know about his being sick. So I called her, too. She told me a few things about Henry that were real interesting.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “It seems Henry works for the Neverfail Company fifty weeks a year, selling in the state of Maine and a little part of New Hampshire. On his two-week vacation, he stays with Aunt Bertha, painting and fixing her place up to earn a little extra money. So he never had the time to visit all those fancy places he talks about.”

  “Then how’d he find out so much about them?” asked Rowena in astonishment.

  “Same way I did. Wait here a minute. I want to get something from the barn.”

  Sam returned a few moments later carrying the leather case he’d found at Henry’s feet.

  “I looked inside,” Sam said. “There’s more than catalogs and order blanks in here.”

  He opened the case and pulled out…

  “Magazines!” Rowena exclaimed.

  “Yep. Here’s Travel Topics, and an old copy of Our Country in Pictures. I read in Travel Topics about London and China and all those other places I told you about. The story about New York City is the humdinger. It tells all about the night life and how everything’s as bright as day, and all the fine restaurants, and…”

  “You mean Henry’d just read about all those places he said he’d been to? He was never really in any of them?”

  “Looks that way, Rowena.”

  “Why, that no-good, sweet-talking…mule!” she sputtered. “To think I mooned about, making calf eyes at him, and all the time he was lying through his teeth. Oh, Sam, I feel so…so stupid.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” said Sam. “Henry’s paying a high price for his foolishness as it is. I just thought knowing the trick he pulled might make you feel easier, seeing as there doesn’t seem to be any way of changing him back right soon.”

  For a moment Rowena just sat quietly. Then suddenly she pounded her fist hard against the arm of her chair. “No!” she exclaimed. “No! No! No! I’ll not have Henry Piper cluttering up that grove of trees for all the years to come and reminding me always of my own foolishness. There’s a way out of this fix. There must be!”

  “But Rowena, you said Thaddeus Blinn only gave you one wish.”

  “You don’t have to remind me, Sam. I remember it like I was sitting on that bench in his tent right now. Him in his white suit and red vest, handing out those red-spotted cards. One to Polly…one to me…one to…to…”

  Rowena lapsed into silence. For several moments she stared long and hard at Sam.

  “I know how,” she said finally.

  “How? How what?” Sam asked.

  “I know how to get Henry Piper back to being a man again,” she replied, growing more and more excited. “What time is it?”

  “About eight thirty. But how are you going to—”

  “No time now for explaining. I’ll have to hurry. Come with me, Sam.”

  Sam shook his head. “Wherever you’re off to, Rowena, you must do this thing alone. You got Henry into this fix by yourself, and if you know how, you must free him from the spell the same way.”

  “Then will you at least wait up for me until I come back?”

  He looked down at her and smiled. It seemed to Rowena that something about Sam had changed. His face wasn’t that of a boy anymore, but that of a man. And when he spoke, it was in a man’s voice, strong and sure, yet soft and comforting.

  “Rowena Jervis, I’ve already been waiting for you a long. time. But until now, you only had eyes for Henry Piper. Yes, Rowena, I’ll wait. Take all the time you need. And when you’re ready for me, you’ll find me waiting still.”

  Water, Water, Everywhere

  “No rain for three weeks. Well’s gone dry, and the cistern’s near empty. Tomorrow after school, you’d best haul the tubs down to Spider Crick and fill ’em up.”

  Those were the first words Adam Fiske’s pa said to him on Sunday morning. They made Adam angry.

  Yesterday’s Church Social had been fun, and Adam had stayed late. When he’d gotten home, he’d hung his pants in the closet, with the red-spotted card still in the pocket, and gotten right into bed. He had woken on Sunday morning with all the fun still fresh in his mind.

  Now Pa had to ruin it all.

  “Do I have to?” Adam complained. “Everybody la
ughs at me when I drive the wagon through town. And filling all those tubs from the crick takes forever. They sure do hold a lot of water.”

  “Well, doesn’t seem like much by the time you get home,” Adam’s ma put in. “What with drinking and cooking and washing and water for the animals and trying to keep the crops from burning, it’s gone in no time. Until it rains, you’ll probably be hauling every day, Adam. Get used to it.”

  “It don’t seem fair,” Adam grumbled. “This is the only farm in Coven Tree where the well goes dry if it doesn’t rain regular every three days. Besides, what would be the harm in getting water from the spring on Mr. Jenks’s farm? What he doesn’t use just soaks back underground. That way I wouldn’t have to go through town and—”

  “That’s enough, Adam!” Pa snapped. “This is our farm, and we’ll run it without asking charity from anybody. We’ll take our water from Spider Crick, and you’ll haul all that’s necessary.”

  Well, there it was. Pa’d saved for a Long time to buy this land, and he’d built the house and barn with his own hands. His stubborn pride refused to allow him to become beholden to any man.

  “Oh, cheer up, Adam,” Pa went on. “Tomorrow Uncle Poot will be here. We’ll find water yet.”

  “Uncle Poot?” said Adam. “The dowser man?”

  “Yep. He doesn’t get down to this end of the valley much, but I asked him special, and he agreed. That forked stick of his never makes a mistake. Dig a well where a dowser man’s stick points, and you’ll soon strike water.”

  “Maybe,” said Adam doubtfully. He couldn’t believe that dowsing really worked. Most likely he’d be hauling water from Spider Crick for the rest of his life.

  After breakfast the next morning Adam set out for school. On the way he met Polly Kemp on the road. “Good morning, Polly,” he called as he caught up to her. “After today I’ve got a few days off before final tests start. What do you think of that?”

  “JUG-A-RUM!”