The Wishing Tree
Page 4
“Wishing is not good for George,” the good Saint Francis replied. “The first wish he made, he was punished for, the second wish he made, he frightened you all for no reason whatever, and the third wish he made, he deserted you while you were in trouble.”
“But Mr. Egbert,” Dulcie said. “He deserves one, doesn’t he?”
“Ah,” answered the good Saint Francis, “he already has more than I can give him: he is old, and he no longer has any wishes at all. What became of him, by the way?”
“His wife come and got him,” Alice answered.
“Then,” the good Saint Francis said, “he doesn’t even need anything else.”
He ceased to speak and the birds settled down again about his head and shoulders.
“Goodbye, Father Francis,” they said. “And thank you.” But the good Saint Francis only smiled at them from amid his birds, and they went on.
They came to the bank of the river. But the funniest thing was, it wasn’t a flat river, but it stood up on its edge, like a gray wall.
“If that isn’t the funniest thing!” Dulcie said, because the river was like the mist had been, and in it they could see a dim thing like a street stretching on between houses, straight in front of them, and the water smelled like wistaria.
“We’ll have to go through it,” the redheaded boy said.
“Oh, I’m afraid to,” Dulcie said. “Wait.” But the redheaded boy had already stepped into it, and Alice and Dicky and Alice’s husband followed him. “Wait!” called Dulcie again, but they were only dim shapes, and the redheaded boy turned his thin ugly face and his queer goldflecked eyes, while his hair made a little glow about him, and beckoned to her. “Wait,” called Dulcie again, and she stepped into the mist too, and felt with her hands before her. But the others had disappeared ahead of her, and she could see only the faint glow of the redheaded boy’s hair in the mist, and it was like she was in a round bowl of sleep, rising and rising through the warm waters of sleep, to the top. And then she would be awake.
And she was awake, and it was like there was another little balloon inside her, getting bigger and bigger, making her body and arms and legs tingle as though she had just eaten a piece of peppermint. What is it? she thought. What can it be?
“Birthday, birthday!” cried a voice near her, and her eyes flew open and there was Dicky jumping up and down on the bed beside her, and leaning over her was her mother. Dulcie’s mother was beautiful, so slim and tall, with her grave unhappy eyes changeable as seawater and her slender hands that came so softly about you when you were sick.
“Look,” her mother said, and she held out a wicker cage with a bluebird in it, and Dulcie squealed with delight.
“I wants a bird, mamma,” Dicky said, “I wants a bird, mamma.”
“You can have half of mine, darling,” Dulcie said, and she let Dicky hold the cage, and she closed her eyes again and her mother’s hand came on her forehead, and Dulcie remembered the good Saint Francis, and Maurice, with his queer eyes and his flaming hair. Well, she had her bluebird, even if it had been just a dream, and the good Saint Francis had said that if you are kind to helpless things, you don’t need a Wishing Tree to make things come true. And next year she would have another birthday, and if she just remembered to get into bed left foot first and to turn the pillow over before she went to sleep, who knows what might happen?
Publisher’s Note
Until the appearance of this edition, only a single copy of this book existed. It is a small book (5¼ × 6¼ inches), typed and bound by the author in varicolored paper. On the left-hand page facing the dedicatory verse is typed:
single mss. impression
oxford-mississippi-
5-february-i927
There is another slightly longer version of the story, apparently an earlier draft, and several typed copies of it exist. This Random House edition follows the unique copy, which the author completed almost a year after the publication of his first novel, and just before the appearance of his second. Where the spellings of dialect speech are not consistent within the typed book, they have been edited in favor of the simpler or normal spellings—a process that undoubtedly would have been much extended by the author, as was his practice in later works, if he had been present to prepare the script for 1967 publication.
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