by Summer Wood
“I can’t wait, Melody,” Johnny said. His eyes were dark and dewy, softly beseeching. “When it’s time, it’s time.”
“Ruthie?”
Melody already knew the answer. Ruth would spend all day with Wrecker, would feed him and pick up after him and wash his clothes for him and mend his scrapes. She would do anything Melody asked her to do. She just couldn’t let Wrecker sleep up in her room with her. It was killing her to say no. “If he bugs you too much,” Ruth promised, “he can go back to the living room. I’ll sleep in the chair. It wasn’t so bad.”
Melody scowled. Together they turned to look at Willow and Wrecker. Genies, camels, sand dunes, and an elephant of the king, to whose palace Wrecker was invited for royal tea—but not a single word about who would look after him in real life. “Why bother,” Melody muttered to herself, morose. Willow was fond of the boy, but she had set her boundaries. She did everything on her own terms.
Willow continued. “The king had a beautiful daughter. He had horsemen and minions and a magnificent library with shelves that stretched four stories high. He lived in a palace surrounded by water that was greener than emeralds and warmed by springs that went deep to the center of the earth.”
“A moat?” Wrecker clung to wakefulness, shipwrecked in an ocean of sleep.
“A moat,” Willow said, hardly louder than a whisper. Melody had to strain to hear her. “Yes. And when the elephant reached the moat he knelt down. First one giant leg”—she extended her left leg—“and then the other giant leg”—now the right—“and with his lo-o-o-o-ng trunk, he reached over his head for the little boy.”
“For me,” Wrecker mumbled, his lids sinking.
“For you.” Willow’s voice was softer still, more melodious than ever, and she smoothed the hair around his ears. “And a boat was waiting.” Sleep billowed over the boy and he relaxed his neck and let the weight of his head fall into her hands. “And the boat slowly carried the boy across the emerald water.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him snug. “And into the land of sleep.” Willow glanced toward the kitchen and held Melody’s gaze. She lifted him onto the pillow and covered him with a throw.
There was a tentative knock at the door.
Willow stepped forward and opened it. Len hadn’t washed up from the afternoon’s work. He wore a stripe of pine sap across one cheekbone and clutched a full paper sack in both arms. “I forgot to give these to you.” He extended it toward her. “Your library books.”
Willow opened the door wider and motioned him forward.
He hesitated. “Is something wrong?”
Willow leaned toward him to take the books and said something softly.
Len swallowed. He looked stricken.
Willow led him into the kitchen. “Hey, Len,” Johnny Appleseed said, and Ruth and Melody nodded.
Len’s voice was gravelly. “I’ll take him tomorrow.”
Ruth gave a small cry, and her hand flew to cover her mouth.
The color drained from Melody’s face. “What?”
Len’s gaze darted from her face to Willow’s and back again. “I thought—”
“Is there a family for him?” Ruth asked.
“No, but—”
Melody shot Willow a look and turned her back to them. She shook her hands, thinking. Her shoulders rose and fell with each breath. When she turned again, her mouth was set in a resolute line. Len’s jaw dropped. Melody watched him glance quickly at Willow and the others. Was it that obvious? Panic, but she was fending that off. “Fine,” Melody said. “He’ll start sleeping in the barn.” Her voice quavered slightly. “What the hell, right? While Johnny’s gone, Wrecker can stay up there with me.” She glanced at Ruth. “You’ll help me get it ready?”
“Of course,” Ruth murmured.
“I’ll spend tomorrow with him,” Johnny said. “Give you some time to prepare.”
Melody nodded. Her right hand started flicking, but she stilled it by gripping a chair, pulling it out from the table. “Sit,” she told Len. “Eat.”
Len was in no position to argue.
“Give it up, already,” Melody said. Ruth was starting to irritate her, apologizing, trying to make amends. They were rigging a makeshift wall in the barn loft to prevent the kid from pitching over the side. They had already commandeered a mattress for him and rearranged the space to make room for it. “It’s fine for him to be here. I said so. Let’s just go over the instructions once more.”
If he choked. If he fell down the steps. If he broke a limb. If he needed to pee in the night. If he wanted a glass of water. If he spit where he shouldn’t. If he couldn’t get to sleep. If he woke up in the night and she couldn’t calm him. There were a thousand things that could go wrong, and Melody wanted to be prepared. At least he was small enough for her to throw him over her shoulder and run for help.
Everything would be okay, Ruth assured her. He was a good boy.
And if he got under her skin?
The truth was, things were getting out of hand. No one knew how long it was going to take for Len to work out some permanent arrangement for the kid, and the longer he was there—well, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the longer he stayed, the more at home he’d make himself. And the more he’d weasel his way into their affections.
Weasel? Wrong animal. This boy was a dog straight up and down, though it pained Melody to admit it, bothered her that a person—especially a kid, way too young to have figured out what kind of persona to move in through the world—a person could be so completely what they were. He had a doglike way of attaching himself to any person who fed him or made him feel good, and a way of muscling through the world that was as much like a dog as any other animal Melody could think of. He ran directly at things, stopped to smell them, tested their resistance to his enthusiastic battering, and ran directly on. He was interested in everything, fearless and physically skilled enough to engage in nearly any activity he could think up—enough so that Melody and Johnny Appleseed and certainly Ruth, who hadn’t the advantage of youth, wore themselves out worrying over his safety. He was different with Willow; quieter, better behaved. Melody understood this. She loved Willow’s arch wit and prodigious intelligence and her singular sense of style, but there was something in Willow that inspired an odd formality. Around Willow, you wanted to do your best. They all felt it. No one wanted to disappoint her.
With Wrecker, there was this other thing, too. The boy didn’t seem to need petting, but when he was tired he didn’t resist it. Even Melody had carried him around, felt his body grow heavy with sleep and slump against her. On trips to town he would keel over on the seat and sleep with his head in her lap. Melody was awkward with her body, strong but gangly and not much given to hugging, but the boy might come up beside her on a walk and without any self-consciousness slip his small hand into hers and walk that way until something caught his attention and he went sprinting off. It stung her. She could never initiate that affection—couldn’t sweep him up in a bear hug as Ruthie would do, or pat her lap for him to climb into after supper—but it surprised her, the flood of emotion that arose when, unbidden, he leaned his weight against her or wrapped his arms around her neck for a free ride to anywhere.
They were going to have to find him a home, soon. Because she was starting to wonder—just to herself, she would admit this to no one—how she could manage to let him go.
Ruth fixed a special dinner for Johnny’s last day before planting. She roasted beets, pan-fried some venison Len had brought over, opened a can of string beans, baked a blackberry cobbler with fruit she’d put up the season before. Wrecker finished most of his plate before he fell asleep at the table. Ruthie was impressed. “Where’d you take him? He didn’t even make it to dessert.”
“He’s a tough little kid.” Johnny allowed a small smile. “We went all over.”
Yeah, Melody thought, she bet they did. She’d tagged along on a couple of Johnny’s marathon routes. It was hard to keep up with h
im as he leapt over grassy hummocks, wove through stands of madrone, skidded down steep slopes, vaulted the trunks of fallen trees—her legs were longer, but he knew the territory like it was his own skin. She could picture Wrecker motoring along beside him, pumping through brush and undergrowth, his clothes dampened with sweat and the rainwater that glistened on sheltered leaves. He adored Johnny and the dogs, and would sooner tear his heart out than let himself be left behind.
The kid was amazing, physically. But for all his kinetic energy, there was a part of Wrecker that was stunned and paralyzed. No one felt this more than Johnny. He knew what it meant to yearn for something hopelessly distant. Distant and essential. Distant and so wished for, so furiously sought, it warped your dreams. Time after time he had stolen glances at the boy’s face, watched the want rise palpably into his features. The kid had been yanked without warning from his people, set adrift in paradise, when all he wanted was to be back on home ground. Whatever it was his mother had done, Johnny told them, it wasn’t bad enough to turn her son. Even at this distance his heart tracked her like a plant hungry for light.
It was six years already since Johnny Appleseed—John Chapman in those days, youngest of seven, idly loved and adequately fed and largely overlooked—had walked away from his family, his job, the tule fog of the Sacramento River delta, and the honest and earnest affection of a young woman who craved the very things that John yearned to be free of. Carpets. Bedspreads. Movie dates and backyard swings and someday kids to swing in them. John aged up from apprentice to journeyman printer at the Sacramento Bee and couldn’t shake the feeling that trees were better fit in a forest than cut for the pulp he printed on. He craved chaos, the wild disorder of duff to sleep on and acorns and morels to eat. When Johnny first heard about Humboldt it struck a bell so deep in him the vibration had not yet stopped sounding. Land so wild no human had set foot there, in some places; trees unclimbed before, unmeasured, maybe even unseen. He bought his girl a ring. The freedom ring, he called it on the note he sent along with it, and he walked out the door and headed north, didn’t stop until the trees towered so high he couldn’t see the tops of them. He took a job planting seedlings. He honed his senses. He watched the shadows, he listened to the breeze. Deeper and deeper into the woods Johnny Appleseed went in search of the wildest thickets and the world’s tallest trees.
“Best dinner ever,” Johnny said softly, and walked his dishes to the sink.
Johnny hefted the sleeping boy in his arms and carried him the long route to the barn. Melody hovered behind as he climbed the ladder to the loft. “Nice,” he said, glancing at the changes. He delivered the boy into the bed she’d made for him and straightened the blankets to cover him. Below, Sitka and her pups circled and huffed, settling into the wood chips Johnny had spread for them. “You don’t mind taking care of the dogs while I’m gone?”
“Come back soon, buddy.”
Johnny Appleseed smiled. Melody watched his face soften and grow sober as he gazed at the boy. He put a hand to Wrecker’s cheek and the boy snuffled and turned. Johnny smiled again, but his eyes were sad. Melody waited. “The dogs will be fine,” she said.
“Of course they will.” He gazed at her. “Remember that maple?”
“Up the hill? Where you can see the water?”
“I took him there.”
He’d shown her the tree the year before. The tree stretched horizontally, a broadleaf maple so old, so venerable, Johnny said, it seemed as much a part of the hillside as the rocks and soil. Venerable? She didn’t know, but it was as broad as the back of an ox, and it looked like it had poured itself down the hillside, spurning the sky above in favor of the adjacent air. Its corrugated bark was softened with moss. She’d sat up there and slowly inched her way forward for the view. The ribbon of Mattole glinted past the manzanita, and past that, so far it was no more than a hint of different blue beside the blue sky, was the sea. Melody squinted at him. “Did he get scared?”
Johnny glanced again at the sleeping boy. Not exactly, Johnny said. Melody watched him stumble for the words to describe it. He’d held on to Wrecker as the boy slid his way forward, gripping the ridges of the bark, easing his legs around limbs that branched off, feeling the fresh new leaves brush his face. Soon the ground dropped away. Johnny had hold of Wrecker by the waist, and he could feel him tremble. Why wouldn’t he? He was a little boy in the middle of the sky. It was a different world aloft, humid and softly sussurant, the air buzzing as though the tree breathed with them. A horned owl gave a low hoot, coasting from tree to tree below them in the dusk. The boy’s small back was pressed snug against Johnny Appleseed’s chest, the top of his head tucked under Johnny’s chin.
Melody shut her eyes and pictured Bow Farm the way Johnny drew it, a few roofs scattered across the patchy acreage and Ruth a small figure in the yard of the farmhouse, working the hand pump to fill a bucket. Down the path stood the barn where Melody had set up camp. Past that—they all knew how far, by foot—was Willow’s yurt, a cupcake house planted on the edge of the meadow. Farther on Len’s place with its roofs the color of rusty nails; farther still the rollicking Mattole, the river black and broad and giddy with runoff. And then the forest closed in dense and green. In every direction were miles and miles and miles of trees. And glinting fiercely with the low-slung sun, the sea.
Beyond the sea—
“ ‘Is it there?’ I asked him,” Johnny said. His voice was low and his face half in shadow as he glanced at Melody and then back at the boy. “ ‘What you’re looking for?’ ”
Melody opened her eyes and blinked at him quizzically. “Is what there?”
Johnny laughed softly. “The same sea. How far can a kid swim if he wants that badly to go home?” He turned his head to gaze at Wrecker. The boy sighed in his sleep. “Remember your mother, I told him. Remember everything. It’s bound to be a long while.” He cleared his throat and focused on Melody. “Before he gets back, I mean.”
Melody gave her head a little shake. Wrecker had escaped all that, she said.
Johnny Appleseed dipped his head and flashed an enigmatic smile. “You think it was bad, what he left behind.”
“Wasn’t it?”
He looked at her for a long time. And then Johnny bent forward to rest his cheek on Wrecker’s forehead. He straightened himself, breathed deep, and stood to leave. He had thousands of seedlings to set where a grove had been clear-cut, and he gathered his crew of wild boys about him and took to the woods.
Wrecker had cried, soundless and trembling, for an hour, Johnny said.
Was it bad? Johnny had looked at her with something close to pity in his eyes before he answered.
It was everything.
Weeks passed, and still Wrecker did not fall down the stairs, nor break a bone, nor throw a tantrum from which he couldn’t by chocolate and reasonable patience be retrieved. The nightmares came less often. Melody rummaged through the free box at the Mercantile for hand-me-downs that would fit the kid. He’d stretched out of everything he had come with and had busted through two pairs of shoes since his arrival. Five months? Six, almost. Long enough for all the relationships at Bow Farm to subtly shift to accommodate him. And according to the papers Len had on him, Wrecker was about due to turn four.
All signs pointed to a party. It was the height of summer, and everything alive was bursting its seams with the pure urgency of growth. The days were long, and the night sky, when dusk finally surrendered to dark, was filled with stars and meteor showers and the unspeakably rich odors of deep grass and damp riverbank and tree sap and the family of skunks who had taken up residence under the tumbledown shed that housed Ruth’s farm implements. Johnny Appleseed had a few days to lay low at the farm before heading back to the forest. Ruth’s garden had produced a champion watermelon. It was time to celebrate.
Johnny sent word over the green wire, and in pairs and threes his wild and unkempt treeboys trickled in from the woods. Melody’s coworkers from the Mercantile piled into pickup trucks to ge
t there; they brought children and dogs and guitars and draft-dodging cousins who’d caught wind of how easy it was to get lost in this untamed stretch of overgrown coast. Len ironed his clothes before coming. He brought six pairs of new socks and a savings bond for the boy. And Willow summoned her friend Daria, who raised white doves; she brought them to offer Wrecker the spectacle of their flight, and he laughed and clapped his hands with the others when she set them free and they circled the farm twice, a pageant of wingbeat and white fluff, before heading for home.
It was late in the afternoon on the third day, a day fat and full and green and with enough of a breeze to keep them from broiling, that the last of the guests shook off the celebratory stupor occasioned by Ruth’s extraordinary blue sheet cake and made their way home. Melody lay sprawled in the hammock, one foot trailing out to gently press the ground and keep it rocking. “Know what I think?” She proceeded, undaunted by silence. “I think we should go to the beach.”
Willow peered over her book, raised her eyebrows, and went back to reading. She turned the page. “Ruth won’t go.”
“Ruth never goes,” Melody said. Ruth had swallowed enough seawater the day they found her to sweat ocean brine for the rest of her life. “What about you?”
Johnny Appleseed came around the corner of the farmhouse. He held an elk ivory drilled for a wire loop and strung on a piece of rawhide. “Wrecker around?” When the boy crawled out from under the porch, twigs and dry leaves stuck to his scruffy hair, Johnny stepped forward and looped it around his neck. “Happy birthday, kid. May it keep you strong and free.”
Wrecker fingered the creamy tooth. He had on a pair of shorts and no shirt and the tooth was bright against his tanned chest. He grinned. Johnny Appleseed dazzled him. Wrecker said, “Want to go to the beach?”
