Wendy shook her head. “But he doesn’t even know me.”
Jilly got up and pulled Wendy to her feet.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go look at the tree.”
“It’s just a stump.”
“Let’s go anyway.”
Wendy wasn’t sure why she felt reluctant, but just as she had this afternoon, she allowed herself to be led back to the campus.
Nothing had changed, except that this time it was dark, which gave the scene, at least to Wendy’s way of thinking, an even more desolate feeling.
Jilly was very quiet beside her. She stepped ahead of Wendy and crouched down beside the stump, running her hand along the top of it.
“I’d forgotten all about this place,” she said softly.
That’s right, Wendy thought. Jilly’d gone to Butler U. just as she had—around the same time, too, though they hadn’t known each other then.
She crouched down beside Jilly, starting slightly when Jilly took her hand and laid it on the stump.
“Listen,” Jilly said. “You can almost feel the whisper of a story … a last echo … .”
Wendy shivered, though the night was mild. Jilly turned to her. At that moment, the starlight flickering in her companion’s blue eyes reminded Wendy very much of the conjure man.
“You’ve got to do it,” Jilly said. “You’ve got to plant a new tree. It wasn’t just the conjure man choosing you—the tree chose you, too.”
Wendy wasn’t sure what was what anymore. It all seemed more than a little mad, yet as she listened to Jilly, she could almost believe in it all. But then that was one of Jilly’s gifts: she could make the oddest thing seem normal. Wendy wasn’t sure if you could call a thing like that a gift, but whatever it was, Jilly had it.
“Maybe we should get Christy to do it,” she said. “After all, he’s the story writer.”
“Christy is a lovely man,” Jilly said, “but sometimes he’s far more concerned with how he says a thing, rather than with the story itself.”
“Well, I’m not much better. I’ve been known to worry for hours over a stanza—or even just a line.”
“For the sake of being clever?” Jilly asked.
“No. So that it’s right.”
Jilly raked her fingers through the short stubble of the weeds that passed for a lawn around the base of the oak stump. She found something and pressed it into Wendy’s hand. Wendy didn’t have to look at it to know that it was an acorn.
“You have to do it,” Jilly said. “Plant a new Tree of Tales and feed it with stories. It’s really up to you.”
Wendy looked from the glow of her friend’s eyes to the stump. She remembered her conversation with the conjure man and her vision of the tree. She closed her fingers around the acorn, feeling the press of the cap’s bristles indent her skin.
Maybe it was up to her, she found herself thinking.
The poem that came to her that night after she left Jilly and got back to her little apartment in Ferryside, came all at once, fully-formed and complete. The act of putting it to paper was a mere formality.
She sat by her window for a long time afterward, her journal on her lap, the acorn in her hand. She rolled it slowly back and forth on her palm. Finally, she laid both journal and acorn on the windowsill and went into her tiny kitchen. She rummaged around in the cupboard under the sink until she came up with an old flowerpot, which she took into the backyard and filled with dirt—rich loam, as dark and mysterious as that indefinable place inside herself that was the source of the words that filled her poetry and that had risen in recognition to the conjure man’s words.
When she returned to the window, she put the pot between her knees. Tearing the new poem out of her journal, she wrapped the acorn up in it and buried it in the pot. She watered it until the surface of the dirt was slick with mud, then placed the flowerpot on her windowsill and went to bed.
That night she dreamed of Jilly’s gemmin—slender earth spirits that appeared outside the old three-story building that housed her apartment and peered in at the flowerpot on the windowsill. In the morning, she got up and told the buried acorn her dream.
Autumn turned to winter and Wendy’s life went pretty much the way it always had. She took turns working at the restaurant and on her poems; she saw her friends; she started a relationship with a fellow she met at a party in Jilly’s loft, but it floundered after a month.
Life went on.
The only change was centered around the contents of the pot on her windowsill. As though the tiny green sprig that pushed up through the dark soil was her lover, every day she told it all the things that had happened to her and around her. Sometimes she read it her favorite stories from anthologies and collections, or interesting bits from magazines and newspapers. She badgered her friends for stories, sometimes passing them on, speaking to the tiny plant in a low but animated voice, other times convincing her friends to come over and tell the stories themselves.
Except for Jilly, LaDonna and the two Riddell brothers, Geordie and Christy, most people thought she’d gone just a little daft. Nothing serious, mind you, but strange all the same.
Wendy didn’t care.
Somewhere out in the world, there were other Trees of Tales, but they were few—if the conjure man was to be believed. And she believed him now. She had no proof, only faith, but oddly enough, faith seemed enough. But since she believed, she knew it was more important than ever that her charge should flourish.
With the coming of winter, there were less and less of the street people to be found. They were indoors, if they had such an option, or perhaps they migrated to warmer climes like the swallows. But Wendy still spied the more regular ones in their usual haunts. Paperjack had gone, but the pigeon lady still fed her charges every day, the German cowboy continued his bombastic monologues—though mostly on the subway platforms now. She saw the conjure man, too, but he was never near enough for her to get a chance to talk to him.
By the springtime, the sprig of green in the flowerpot had grown into a sapling that stood almost a foot high. On warmer days, Wendy put the pot out on the backporch steps where it could taste the air and catch the growing warmth of the afternoon sun. She still wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it once it outgrew its pot.
But she had some ideas. There was a part of Fitzhenry Park called the Silenus Gardens that was dedicated to the poet Joshua Stanhold. She thought it might be appropriate to plant the sapling there.
One day in late April, she was leaning on the handlebars of her ten-speed in front of the public library in Lower Crowsea, admiring the yellow splash the daffodils made against the building’s grey stone walls, when she sensed, more than saw, a red bicycle pull up onto the sidewalk behind her. She turned around to find herself looking into the conjure man’s merry features.
“It’s spring, isn’t it just,” the conjure man said. “A time to finally forget the cold and bluster and think of summer. John can feel the leaf buds stir, the flowers blossoming. There’s a grand smile in the air for all the growing.”
Wendy gave Ginger a pat, before letting her gaze meet the blue shock of his eyes.
“What about a Tree of Tales?” she asked. “Can you feel her growing?”
The conjure man gave her a wide smile. “Especially her.” He paused to adjust the brim of his hat, then gave her a sly look. “Your man Stanhold,” he added. “Now there was a fine poet—and a fine storyteller.”
Wendy didn’t bother to ask how he knew of her plan. She just returned the conjure man’s smile and then asked, “Do you have a story to tell me?”