She’d stopped looking into the magic mirror several months before. She just couldn’t stand it anymore, though the figure carrying the glowing circle had seemed to be getting nearer—but then again, the hideous moonlike face with its drifting, monstrous features had looked to be drawing closer as well.
“Come on!” Sly Moody was urging from the front of the house. “Hurry!”
“What does he want us to see?” Swan asked Josh in her mangled voice.
“I don’t know. Why don’t we go find out?”
Rusty put on his cowboy hat and followed Josh and Swan out of the barn. Swan walked slowly, her shoulders stooped by the weight of her head.
And then, abruptly, Josh stopped. “My God,” he said softly, wonderingly.
“You see it?” Sly Moody crowed. “Look at it! Just look!”
Swan angled her head in a different direction so she could see in front of her. She wasn’t sure what she was seeing at first, because of the blowing snow, but her heart had begun pounding as she walked toward Sly Moody. Behind her, Rusty had stopped as well; he couldn’t believe what he was looking at, thought he must surely still be asleep and dreaming. His mouth opened to release a small, awed whisper.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Moody shouted, and he began laughing. Carla stood near him, bundled up in a coat and white woolen cap, her expression stunned. “I told you!” And then Moody started dancing a jig, kicking up whorls of snow as he cavorted amid the stumps where apple trees had been.
The single remaining apple tree was no longer bare. Hundreds of white blossoms had burst open on the scraggly limbs, and as the wind carried them spinning away like tiny ivory umbrellas small, bright green leaves were exposed underneath.
“It’s alive!” Sly Moody shouted joyously, kicking his heels, stumbling and falling and getting up again with snow all over his face. “My tree’s come back to life!”
“Oh,” Swan whispered. Apple blossoms blew past her. She could smell their fragrance in the wind—the sweet perfume of life. She tilted her head forward, looking at the trunk of the apple tree. And there, as if burned into the wood, were the marks of her palm, and the finger-drawn letters S ... W ... A ... N.
A hand touched her shoulder. It was Carla, and the woman stepped back when Swan finally got her deformed face and head turned. Through the narrow field of her vision, Swan saw the horror in Carla’s eyes—but there were tears in them, too, and Carla was trying to speak but was unable to summon the words. Carla’s fingers clutched at Swan’s shoulders, and at last the woman said, “You did this. You put life back into that tree, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Swan said. “I think I just ... woke it up.”
“It’s blossomed overnight!” Sly Moody danced around the tree as if it were a maypole festooned with bright streamers. He stopped, reached up and grabbed a lower limb, pulling it down for all to see. “It’s got buds on it already! Lord God, we’re gonna have a bucket full of apples by the first of May! I never seen a tree go so wild before!” He shook the limb and laughed like a child as the white blossoms whirled off. And then his gaze fell upon Swan, and his grin faded. He released the limb and stared at her for a silent moment as the snowflakes and apple blossoms blew between them and the air was filled with the fragrant promise of fruit and cider.
“If I hadn’t seen this with my own eyes,” Sly Moody said, his voice choked with emotion, “I never would’ve believed it. There ain’t no natural way a tree can be bare one day and covered with blossoms the next. Hell, that tree’s got new leaves on it! It’s growing like it used to, back when April was a warm month and you could hear summer knockin’ at the door!” His voice cracked, and he had to wait before he spoke again. “I know that’s your name on that tree. I don’t know how it got there, or why this tree’s blossomed all of a sudden—but if this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up. Smell the air! Just smell it!” And suddenly he walked forward and took Swan’s hand, pressing it against his cheek. He gave a muffled sob and sank down to his knees in the snow. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, thank you so much.”
Josh recalled the green shoots that had been growing through the dirt in the shape of Swan’s body, back in the basement of PawPaw’s grocery. He remembered what she’d told him about the hurting sound, about the earth being alive and everything alive having its own language and way of understanding. Swan had spoken often of the flowers and plants she’d once grown in trailer lots and behind motel rooms, and both Josh and Rusty knew that she couldn’t stand looking at dead trees where a forest used to stand. But nothing had prepared them for this. Josh walked to the tree and ran his fingers over the letters of Swan’s name; they were burned into the wood as if by a blowtorch. Whatever power or energy or force Swan had summoned last night, here was the physical evidence of it. “How did you do this?” he asked her, not knowing any other way to put it.
“I just touched it,” she answered. “I felt like it wasn’t dead, and I touched it because I wanted it to keep living.” She was embarrassed that the old man was down on his knees beside her, and she wished he’d get up and stop crying. His wife was looking at Swan with a mixture of revulsion and wonder, as one might regard a toadfrog with golden wings. All this attention was making Swan more nervous than when she’d frightened the old man and woman last night. “Please,” she said, tugging at his coat. “Please get up, mister.”
“It’s a miracle,” Carla murmured, watching the blossoms blow. Nearby, Killer ran through the snow trying to catch them between his teeth. “She’s made a miracle happen!” Two tears crept down her cheeks, freezing like diamonds before they reached her jawline.
Swan was jittery and cold, afraid that her misshapen head might tilt over too far to one side and break her neck. She could endure the stinging wind no longer, and she pulled away from Sly Moody’s grip; she turned and walked toward the barn, probing in the snow before her with Crybaby as the old man and the others watched her go. Killer ran circles around her with an apple blossom in his mouth.
It was Rusty who got his tongue unstuck first. “What’s the nearest town from here?” he asked Sly Moody, who was still on his knees. “We’re heading north.”
The old man blinked heavily and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Richland,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No, no; Richland’s dead. Everybody either left Richland or died from the typhoid fever last year.” He struggled to his feet. “Mary’s Rest,” he said finally. “That would be the next settlement of any size. It’s about sixty miles north of here, across I-44. I’ve never been there, but I hear Mary’s Rest is a real city.”
“I guess it’s Mary’s Rest, then,” Josh said to Rusty. “Sounds like as good a place as any.”
Moody suddenly snapped out of his daze. “You don’t have to leave here! You can stay with us! We’ve got plenty of food, and we’ll find room in the house for you! Lord, I wouldn’t have that girl sleepin’ in the barn another night for anything!”
“Thank you,” Josh said, “but we’ve got to go on. You need your food for yourself. And like Rusty said, we’re entertainers. That’s how we get by.”
Sly Moody gripped Josh’s arm. “Listen, you don’t know what you’ve got, mister! That girl’s a miracle worker! Look at that tree! It was dead yesterday, and now you can smell the blossoms! Mister, that girl’s special. You don’t know what she could do, if she was to set her mind to it!”
“What could she do?” Rusty was puzzled by the whole thing and feeling definitely out of his depth, the same as he had whenever he’d picked up Fabrioso’s mirror and seen nothing but murk in the glass.
“Look at that tree and think of an orchard!” Sly Moody said excitedly. “Think of a cornfield, or a field of beans or squash or anything else! I don’t know what’s inside that girl, but she’s got the power of life! Don’t you see that? She touched that tree and brought it back! Mister, that Swan could wake the whole land up again!”
“It’s just one tree,” Josh reminded him. “How do you kn
ow she could do the same thing to a whole orchard?”
“You dumb fool, what’s an orchard but one tree after another?” he growled. “I don’t know how she did it or anything about her, but if she can start apples growin’ again, she can start orchards and crop fields, too! You’re crazy to take somebody with a God’s gift like that out on the road! The country out there’s full of killers, highwaymen, lunatics and only the Devil knows what all! If you stay here, she can start workin’ on the fields, doin’ whatever she has to do to wake ‘em up again!”
Josh glanced at Rusty, who shook his head, then gently pulled free of Sly Moody. “We’ve got to go on.”
“Why? Where to? What are you lookin’ for that’s worth findin’?”
“I don’t know,” Josh admitted. In seven years of wandering from settlement to settlement, the point of life had become wandering instead of settling. Still, Josh hoped that someday they’d find a place that would be suitable to live in for more than a few months at a time—and possibly he might someday make his way south to Mobile in search of Rose and his sons. “We’ll know it when we find it, I guess.”
Moody started to protest again, but his wife said, “Sylvester? It’s getting very cold out here. I think they’ve made up their minds, and I think they should do what they feel is best.”
The old man hesitated, then looked at his tree again and finally nodded. “All right,” he muttered. “You have to go your own way, I reckon.” He fixed a hard gaze on Josh, who stood at least four inches taller than himself. “Now you listen to me, mister,” he warned. “You protect that girl, you hear me? Maybe someday she’ll see her way clear to do what I’ve said she can do. You protect her, hear?”
“Yes,” Josh said. “I hear.”
“Then go on,” Sly Moody said. Josh and Rusty started walking toward the barn, and Moody said, “God go with you!” He picked up a handful of blossoms from the snow, held them to his nose and inhaled.
An hour or so after the Travelin’ Show wagon had rumbled off northward along the road, Sly Moody put his heaviest coat and boots on and told Carla that he couldn’t stand to sit still a minute longer. He was going to walk through the woods to Bill McHenry’s place and tell him the story of the girl who could put life back into a tree with her touch, he said. Bill McHenry had a pickup truck and some gasoline, and Sly Moody said that he was going to tell everybody within shouting distance about that girl, because he had witnessed a miracle and all hope was not yet dead in the world. He was going to find a hilltop to stand on and shout that girl’s name, and when those apples came he was going to cook an apple stew and invite everybody who lived on the desolate farms for miles around to come partake of a miracle.
And then he put his arms around the woman he had taken as his wife and kissed her, and her eyes sparkled like stars.
NINE
The Fountain and the Fire
Signs and symbols
The surgeon’s task
Bones of a thousand candles
The seamstress
55
THE JEEP RUMBLED OVER a rutted, snow-covered road, passing wrecks and derelict vehicles that had been pulled to both sides. Here and there a frozen corpse lay in a gray snowdrift, and Sister saw one whose arms were lifted as if in a final appeal for mercy.
They came to an unmarked crossroads, and Paul slowed down. He looked over his shoulder at Hugh Ryan, who had jammed himself into the rear compartment with the luggage. Hugh was gripping his crutch with both hands and snoring. “Hey!” Paul said, and he nudged the sleeping man. “Wake up!”
Hugh snorted, finally opened his heavy-lidded eyes. “What is it? Are we there yet?”
“Hell, no! I think we must’ve taken the wrong road about five miles back! There’s not a sign of life out here!” He glanced up through the windshield and saw the threat of new snow in the clouds. The light was just beginning to fade, and Paul didn’t want to look at the gas gauge because he knew they were traveling on fumes. “I thought you knew the way!”
“I do,” Hugh assured him. “But it’s been a while since I’ve ventured very far from Moberly.” He gazed around at the bleak landscape. “We’re at a crossroads,” he announced.
“We know that. Now which road do we take?”
“There should be a sign. Maybe the wind’s blown it down.” He shifted position, trying to find a familiar landmark. The truth—which he had not told Paul and Sister—was that he’d never been this way before, but he’d wanted to get out of Moberly because he feared he’d be murdered in the night for his cache of blankets. “Let’s see, now: I think I remember a big grove of old oak trees that we turned right at.”
Paul rolled his eyes. On both sides of the narrow road stood thick forests. “Look,” he said. “Read my lips: We’re out in the middle of nowhere, and we’re running out of gasoline—and this time there are no fuel tanks around for me to siphon. It’s going to be dark soon, and I think we’re on the wrong road. Now tell me why I shouldn’t wring your damned skinny neck!”
Hugh looked wounded. “Because,” he said with great dignity, “you’re a decent human being.” He glanced quickly at Sister, who had turned to deliver a scathing gaze. “I do know the way. I really do. I got us around that broken bridge, didn’t I?”
“Which way?” Sister asked pointedly. “Left or right?”
“Left,” Hugh said—and immediately wished that he’d said “right,” but now it was too late and he didn’t want to appear a fool.
“Mary’s Rest better be around the next bend,” Paul told them grimly, “or we’re going to be walking real soon.” He put the Jeep into gear and turned left. The road wound through a corridor of dead trees with branches that interlocked and closed off the sky.
Hugh settled back to await judgment, and Sister reached down to the floorboard for her satchel. She unzipped it, felt inside for the glass ring and drew it out. Then she held it in her lap as the trapped jewels sparkled, and she stared into its shimmering depths.
“What do you see?” Paul asked. “Anything?”
Sister shook her head. The colors pulsed, but they had not yet formed pictures. How the glass ring worked, and exactly what it was, had remained a puzzle. Paul had said that he thought the radiation had melded the glass, jewels and precious metals into some kind of supersensitive antenna, but what it was tuned to neither of them could say. But they had come to the agreement that the glass circle was leading them to someone, and that to follow it meant giving up that part of yourself that refused to believe in miracles. Using the glass ring was like a leap in the dark, a surrendering of doubt, fear and all other impurities that clouded the mind; using it was the ultimate act of faith.
Are we closer to the answer, or further away? Sister asked mentally as she peered into the ring. Who are we searching for, and why? Her questions, she knew, would be answered with symbols and pictures, sights and shadows and sounds that might have been distant human voices, the creaking of wheels, or the barking of a dog.
A diamond flared like a meteor, and light sizzled along threads of silver and platinum. More diamonds burst with light, like a chain reaction. Sister felt the power of the glass circle reaching for her, drawing her inward, deeper, deeper still, and all her being was fixed on the bursts of light as they flared in a hypnotic rhythm.
She was no longer in the Jeep with Paul Thorson and the one-legged doctor from Amarillo. She was standing in what looked to be a snow-covered field stubbled with the stumps of trees. But there was one tree remaining, and that one was covered with diamond-white blossoms blowing before the wind. On the tree’s trunk were palm prints, as if seared into the wood—slim long fingers, the hands of a young person.
And across the trunk were letters, as if fingerpainted in fire: S ... W ... A ... N.
Sister tried to turn her head, to see more of where she was standing, but the dreamwalk scene began to fade; she was aware of shadowy figures, distant voices, a moment perhaps trapped in time and somehow transmitted to Sister like a photograph th
rough spectral wires. And then, abruptly, the dreamwalk was over, and she was back in the Jeep again with the glass ring between her hands.
She released the breath she’d been holding. “It was there again,” she told Paul. “I saw it again—the single tree in a field of stumps, the palm prints and the word ‘swan’ burned on the trunk. But it was clearer than last night, and this time ... I think I could smell apples.” They’d traveled all day yesterday, heading for Mary’s Rest, and had spent last night in the ruins of a farmhouse; it was there that Sister had looked into the glass ring and first seen that tree with the blowing blossoms. The vision was clearer than it had been; she’d been able to see every detail of the tree, every scraggly branch and even the tiny green buds that peeked out from under the blossoms. “I think we’re getting closer,” she said, and her heart was racing. “The image was stronger. We must be getting closer!”
“But all the trees are dead,” Paul reminded her. “Just look around. Nothing’s in bloom—and nothing’s going to be. Why should that thing show you the image of a tree in bloom?”
“I don’t know. If I did, I’d tell you.” She concentrated on the glass ring again; it pulsated with her quickened heartbeat but did not invite her to go dreamwalking. The message had been delivered and, at least for now, would not be repeated.
“Swan.” Paul shook his head. “That doesn’t make a damned bit of sense.”
“Yes, it does. Somehow it does. We’ve just got to put the pieces together.”
Paul’s hands gripped the steering wheel. “Sister,” he said, with a trace of pity, “you’ve been saying the same thing for a long time. You’ve been looking into that glass ring like you were a gypsy trying to read tea leaves. And here we are, going back and forth, following signs and symbols that might not mean a damned thing.” He glanced sharply at her. “Have you ever thought about that possibility?”
Swan Song Page 54