Upon reaching the source of the wail, I found Bones and Reed hunkered down over two butterfly-encrusted bodies in a clearing. Juan was picking off the deadly fliers by their wings. He tossed each insect into the air and blew on it. That was enough to make the creature float away.
When I came out from the cover of trees to approach my friends, a woman’s voice called out in wordless surprise. I realized that there was a third person there, a young woman who had also been on her knees and hidden from my view by the two men.
“It’s all right, little one,” Thrombone crooned, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He’s our friend.”
By then I had reached them. The two bodies looked to me like corpses. The man had white skin with straggly long dirty blond hair and only one arm. The woman, the taller of the two, was lean, strong, and very black. Her coarse hair was straw blond. She opened her eyes as I gazed upon her beauty. I don’t know if I was more surprised by the fact that she was alive or that her eyes were the color of blood and gold.
“Nesta!” the hysterical young woman cried. “Nesta!”
“She’s alive, little one. And full of stories, if I’m not mistaken,” Bones assured the skinny girl.
“Nesta knows everything,” the girl I came to know as Trini said. She was a sixteen-year-old runaway whom Nesta had saved from Claudia Heart’s dying commune.
“Everything.” Bones’s eyes lit up in mock surprise. “Then it is good to have her here. You see, I know nothing — at least nothing important. Maybe we can share secrets and seed trees together.”
Trini seemed to enjoy the little madman’s words. She giggled and ducked her head in a conspiratorial gesture. That’s when the one-armed hippie sprang to life. “Whoa ho!” he shouted and sat straight up.
He aimed a fist straight for Gerin’s head. At the time I wouldn’t have believed that that fist could have dented a cardboard box. Later I realized that Winch Fargo’s fist could kill any mortal man. But Bones blocked the blow and pushed Fargo down with what seemed to be a gentle shove.
“You are safe now,” Thrombone said while looking into Winch’s eyes. “No more darkness. No more running in the night. You are home now. You are free to stay and lie around all day long.”
I don’t know what I expected to issue from that wild-eyed and depraved visage, but the tears surprised me. In the months and years to come, I had little love and less concern for Fargo but I never hated him. I didn’t because of his sad and total abandon at Bones’s promise of sanctuary.
“The children will be happy to be among others like them,” Bones said.
“But you are like us?” Nesta’s statement was more a question man anything else.
“No,” the tiny woodsman replied. “Everything you believe I have forgotten. All you’ll see in me is heart and bone on stone in wood. I am free of your destiny.”
The beautiful black woman frowned and then stood straight up as if she were rising from a nap rather than from near death. She wore a blue-checked work shirt over a black T-shirt with cutoff jeans and heavy hiking boots. Fargo was wearing soiled and torn hospital pajamas that were light green. He was barefoot and smelled strongly of himself.
“I released him because he was in pain,” Nesta Vine said to Miles Barber under the shelter of Number One in the cathedral of trees. It was raining, but we were dry under the man-made shingles of leaves and warm from our fire.
Miles had accepted Mackie Allitar, even helped him to escape police custody, but he took an instant dislike to Winch Fargo, challenging the amazon’s right to help such a man.
“He’s a mass murderer. With him here no one will be safe.”
“You better watch it, prick pig,” Fargo said. “Or I’ll put out that other eye.”
“You see,” Miles turned to me for support.
But before I could think of anything to say, Juan Thrombone spoke up.
“You will respect life and limb in my domain,” Bones said to Fargo. “And in return I will show you how to make your own light. But if you harm anyone here, I will put you where you will never know peace again.”
It was the only threat that I ever heard Bones make. Fargo alternately cowered and glared, but Juan wouldn’t look away.
Finally Fargo said, “Okay. All right. I was just jokin’ anyway.” And then, “Can you really help me keep the shakes down on my own?”
“We are all family here,” Thrombone answered. He stood up and looked at each of us in turn. “Yes, you will receive what you need. You will sleep with the stars and moon and the sun so bright that never again will you cry or need to put out eyes.”
Somehow it seemed that we all came to a solemn agreement to put aside all differences for a time. It was not that we would like or even trust one another but more that we had agreed to become a small nation committed to our little turf.
Twenty-nine
For a long time no one new came to the town of Treaty or to the cathedral of trees. Preeta and GR (that’s what everybody but Bones called Gerin Reed) pretty much stayed to themselves, but they were friendly.
Reggie was over the moon for Trini. She was hungry for a young man to love her. He no longer had to go behind Number Seven. They spent long hours in the woods running naked and making love. Reggie adored her. He even learned how to make clothes and jewelry to give her.
Trini wasn’t a loud kind of person. She didn’t want to lead and never complained unless something was really wrong. She knew that Nesta and Winch had brought her to a magical place with powers as great as Claudia Heart’s. And so Trini was more deeply moved by Reggie’s protestations of love. She told me that every morning she had to find our Pathfinder and look at him a long time to believe that it wasn’t all just a dream.
Nesta wanted to educate them and the rest of the “children.” She insisted, with varying degrees of success, that they all spend three days a week learning how to read. Reggie and Wanita, Trini, and Alacrity all had to go.
“The written word is where we can all come together,” Nesta said before each class. “Words are thoughts, and thoughts are dreams, and dreams are the dawn of change.”
I asked Bones how two more Blues had gotten to hear his special call.
“Winch Fargo is more like you, Last Chance. A crooked light, a dim light. A creature between here and not. He heard my call and came running like a dog on Teacher’s leash.” Teacher is what he called Nesta Vine. “But now I have changed the call. Now all that the singing trees hide is the blue spoor of the puppy trees and the ones you call Blues.”
“So, no more will come?”
“No. Not so many, I think.”
“So now that we’re here, what do we do?”
“Eat and sleep,” the little brown man said. “Drink and dream, tell stories and kiss. Tend the gardens that we need.”
“What gardens?”
“The puppy trees are growing now. They dream of devouring the sun and tickling the tonsils of Earth. They’re not yet grown-up, but they’ll be loud enough to hear unless we can grow a whole chorus of singing firs to drown out the sounds of hunger.”
“How many trees do we need?”
“Hundreds and then thousands should do.”
“All that? We can’t do all that.”
“Then we’ll do what we can and hope for the rest. I can make you stronger, make you work longer. I have ways to make you a tree farmer.” Bones smiled at me but didn’t share his secret plans. And I didn’t mind waiting to see what he meant.
While I waited, a society had begun to form among the citizens of Treaty. Alacrity fell in love with Nesta Vine. She followed the black amazon around, hanging on her every word and gesture. They ran in the forest together, executing great and small projects, like building a raft or making exotic clothes from the wings of the killer butterflies. They’d often disappear for days at a time. Whether they were lovers in the physical sense I never knew. But next to the looks they had for each other, any passion I’d ever felt was pale and insignificant.