“What are they?” I asked.
“Deep bass ramblers. Children of what you call blue light but, like Alacrity, born here. They are orphans and I tend them. They rumble like bullfrogs and tickle Earth’s soul.”
“And we’re here to tend them?” I asked.
“No,” he said. The tone of his voice would have knocked me down if I wasn’t already seated. “The puppy trees, the deep ramblers, might mistake you for dinner and suck the life from your bones. Stay away from them. You were summoned here to tend the special white firs, the high singers, the maskers of blue. The ones that called you. They called and you came.”
“We did,” I said. “But you didn’t want the children. You wanted Addy, but you wanted her to leave Alacrity behind.”
I wanted Addy to see him for what he was.
“I never expected that those of such power, even so young, would follow those so weak. I didn’t know if I could protect them and the puppy trees too. The thing out there, the one you call Gray Man. He wants only to kill. I thought that all of us together here would make too much noise, would bring him here.”
“And so he could be on the way here right now?” I said, happy that I now had a way to get my friends to leave.
“He might be. He might.” Juan cocked his ear upward. “But I don’t hear him coming. No, I don’t.”
“But he could be coming,” I said. “He could be, and you just don’t hear it yet. He could come on us in our sleep up here. He could kill us in our sleep. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of here now.”
I looked around at my companions and friends. The children had stopped their dancing to listen. They were all looking to Juan Thrombone. It was he who they turned to for answers now. It was he whom they trusted.
“You can leave if you want to,” Juan said to me. “You are welcome if you care to stay. The Gray Man may not know where we are; he may have changed also. This could well be true.”
“I’m staying,” Reggie said. “It’s nice here. It’s the safest place in the whole world.”
“Me too,” Wanita said.
“Please stay, Chance,” Alacrity whined. “Please stay with us here. Please.”
I looked at Addy. Her fingers were laced with Juan Thrombone’s. She held my eyes a moment and then looked away.
“I’m staying for a while at least, Chance. I’m tired and sick still. And I can’t think of anywhere else to go.”
“And there will be others,” Juan said. “More people will come to us over the weeks and days. The song you heard goes like a ribbon on the wind, blowing here and there. Some will hear it. A few will come. And when they get here, there’s an old town down by the stream. It’s a ghost town now, but soon they will come and we can be happy, Last Chance, for a while more.”
Addy snuggled down and put her head against Juan’s shoulder. That’s what broke my will. He had taken everything that I had left with his funny way of talking and his eyes like forever.
“Okay,” I said. “All right, I’ll stay for a few days more. At least until Addy is better. Then we can talk about it again.”
And with that, something eased in me. A pressure, a weight. I gave in to the spell of Juan Thrombone and his magical wood. Reggie began playing his drum again and we all danced. Somewhere in the early hours of the morning Juan and Addy disappeared. I found them the next day naked and wrapped in each other’s arms under the hanging shingles of Number One. They were together from that day on.
Twenty-five
At first I stayed because of the children. But within the first month I knew that they were safe with Addy and her man. After that I just didn’t know where to go. Juan offered to walk me out of the wood if I wanted to leave. But the truth was, I wanted him to leave. Sometimes he’d go away for days at a time. I’d begin to hope that he’d hurt himself or maybe just decided to go elsewhere. I’d try to comfort Addy at those times, telling her that she didn’t have to worry.
I wanted Addy then. It had never crossed my mind before. She was Ordé’s woman to begin with, and later, while we fled the threat of Gray Man, I was too worried even to think about love. But once we were settled in Treaty, I wanted her to choose me over Juan. I wanted her to see that he was unstable but that I was constant.
But she never worried when Juan was gone.
“He’ll be back, Chance,” she’d say with a dreamy look on her face. “He’ll come back to me and he’ll have great stories to tell.”
Not only had her wound healed but her skin had softened, the little red veins in her eyes had cleared. She started singing songs and working with strange leaves, tree needles actually, and barks that Juan brought for her to cook in a huge stone tub that appeared one day next to Number Nine.
“My friends brought it in the night,” he told me when I asked how the big hollow rock got there.
Juan taught Addy how to cook the leaves and wood and how to pound the mixture with a pestle the size of a baseball bat. She worked at it for days until the resulting green paste was thick. Then she spread out the mixture on a big stone that lay in the field separating the cathedral of Treaty from the surrounding woods. The paste dried into an extremely thin and seemingly delicate blue-green material. It was like rice paper, only it wouldn’t tear or decompose. From this cloth Addy made our clothes. She didn’t sew the seams but used wooden buttons with bearhair ties that Juan collected for her.
“There’s what you call blue light in those leafies,” Thrombone said to me when I marveled at the fabric Addy made. “I harvest them from the puppy trees when they’re rumbling content. They have power in them plenty.”
He also made tea from those leaves. He would let them steep over a low flame in a stone pot for weeks at a time. Then he’d pour the liquid into one of his few precious glass bottles and let it cool in a stream. The brew was strong-tasting, sweet and pungent. Whenever I drank that tea I felt a momentary elation followed by an hour of unutterable calm.
One day I awoke to deep drumbeats playing somewhere out in the woods. I remembered something and went looking for Alacrity. She and I were going to look for straight branches from which she could make arrows for the bow Juan and Reggie had made. I couldn’t find her, so I went to Addy, who was naked next to Number One, making pants for either Reggie or me.
“She left with Juan this morning,” Addy said.
“When are they coming back?”
“Not for a few days.”
“A few days? You let your daughter go off into the woods with a man like that overnight? What’s wrong with you, Addy?”
“It’s okay, Chance. He’s going to help her. You know how restless she’s been. He found her hacking away at tree bark, and Reggie had to stop her from tormenting Wanita. Juan said that he’s going to take her on a walk to discover her true nature.”
“How could you just let her go like that?”
Addy looked up at me, putting down her work. Like I said, she was naked. She was a very beautiful woman, and I was especially aware of that when she peered into my eyes.
“Sit down, Chance,” she said.
I did so.
“You have to stop this now. You have to accept Juan and his life out here. I know that you love us and that you want to protect us, but fighting him isn’t going to help. This is his home and we’re his guests. I don’t know what he’s doing with Julia out there, but whatever it is, I know it’s for the best.” Her green eyes held on to the light like dusky quartz.
“But how can you say that?” I said. “You don’t know him. You just met him. He can get in your head. Maybe he’s hypnotized you.”
The way she shook her head crushed any hope I had left.