by Sandra Knauf
“Sit down, please,” Grandma Wren said.
Zera began to oblige, but just then an eerie sound, a cry otherworldly and alarming, pierced the air. She sprang up. “What’s that?”
“It’s the marmots. There.”
The noise stopped as Zera’s eyes followed Grandma Wren’s outstretched finger. Peering through a gap in the boulders, she saw a pile of rocks in a nook about twenty feet away. On top of a footstool-sized rock stood a very large marmot. He and seven others had apparently been enjoying a late afternoon outing before being so rudely interrupted. The others, like their look-out, stared at the old woman and girl, who stared right back at them. For a moment no one moved.
“We surprised them,” whispered Zera.
“They are not too frightened. It is odd that they’re up this far. There’s no food for them here.”
Grandma Wren eyed the creatures. They stared at one another, in wordless communication, and Zera could read Grandma Wren’s body language as clearly as the marmots could: “Go, now.” They began to lumber downhill. Zera sat down.
The wind blew and the cold air felt harsh on Zera’s hands and cheeks. She put her hands into the pockets of her jacket, finding a pair of gloves in one and a purple crocheted wool hat in the other. She put on the gloves, wincing a little when she put on the left one. She noticed when she crossed her legs that her left leg was sore, too.
From above came the whistle blow of the train and Cosmic Dan’s voice calling, “All aboard, all aboard!”
From what Zera could hear, most of the tourists had, by that time, sought shelter and warmth in the café. She heard them coming out, exclaiming about the cold, their voices traveling clearly through the thin air. After a few minutes of activity, Zera heard the sound of the engine whirring and the cog mechanism click-click-click-clicking like a large clock as the train began its descent down the mountain.
The sky grew dim. Zera heard the workers from the café begin to depart right after the train did — calling out their goodbyes and starting their cars. Within a few short minutes Zera knew they would be completely alone on the mountaintop. She wished she had brought something to drink as now her mouth was dry.
Grandma Wren squatted at the edge of the cliff, her back to Zera, her head bowed in contemplation.
The wind gusted, and it seemed to be the only sound left on the mountain. Even the marmots had gone home to their rocky burrows. Zera watched the bright blue sky turn pink and lavender tie-dye. She gazed at the splendor of the sunset while shivering lightly.
Grandma Wren got up, took off her hat and sweater, then her boots and baggy sweat pants. Zera caught her breath. Grandma Wren stood, facing the multi-hued sunset in brilliant red long underwear. With her white, streaming hair and dark lined face, she looked thin, ancient, and powerful. Even with her thinness, she did not shiver. Zera choked back an urge to giggle. She couldn’t help it; nerves combined with everything being so serious and somber created an anxiety in her that threatened to bubble out in crazy laughter. If the kids in Piker could see me now, sitting on top of a mountain, watching skinny ninety-year-old Grandma Wren in her red underwear! Zera cleared her throat. Stop it, she scolded herself. Don’t you dare laugh.
As if reading her thoughts, Grandma Wren looked back and said, “This is the only clothing I could find that represents the favored color, the color one should wear when addressing the Creator.”
Grandma Wren’s seriousness killed Zera’s urge to laugh. Her cheeks grew hot in embarrassment and she looked down at her red sneakers.
Grandma Wren pulled a thick, long bundle from her bag, along with a lighter. Crouching and cupping her hand over the cloth-wrapped stick, she lit it. The dried sage flamed for a moment, then died out and began to smoke. She came to Zera and slowly waved the white smoke around her, then herself, chanting as she did so.
“Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey!”
She placed the still-smoldering bundle on the gravel and turned around again. She knelt directly across from Zera on the blanket, facing the open vista. She sat motionless for at least a minute, and Zera viewed her tiny outline with admiration and respect.
Grandma Wren raised her hands to the sky. “Creator,” she said in her gravelly voice, “I ask permission to receive the vision foretold. We sit at the four points of the earth: north, south, east, west. We are open: mind, body, and spirit.
“Creator, behold us and hear our feeble voice. You lived before all, older than old, older than prayer. All belongs to you — the two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, the wings of the air, and all green things that live. Day in and day out, forever, you are the life of all.”
She paused. Zera stared at the back of the tiny, red-clothed woman, her white hair blowing against a kaleidoscope coloring the sky. I will remember this moment if I live to be a hundred years old.
Grandma Wren continued, “I send my small and weak voice, Creator, Grandfather, forgetting nothing that you have made; the stars of the universe and the grasses of the earth.
“You have shown us the goodness and the beauty and the strangeness of the greening earth, the only Mother — and there we see the spirit shapes of things.
“You have sent this young woman, Zera, a sign of the snake. Symbol of eternity, of life, rebirth. We ask you in our ignorance and humility what we should do. We have come to receive vision.”
They sat for some time, breathing in the sweet, smoldering sage, watching the sky.
Grandma Wren began to quietly chant again. “Hey-a-a-hey. Hey-a-a-hey. Hey-a-a-hey.”
Zera closed her eyes, listening to Grandma Wren’s voice. Then, silence. She opened her eyes. Grandma Wren was gone.
“Grandma Wren?” Zera looked around. Where did she go? She was on this blanket. Right here! A panic swept through her.
“Grandma Wren?” she called louder. She waited. Nothing. Only the darkening sunset. The sage bundle lay in the gravel, no longer smoldering.
Zera scrambled to her feet, her heart pounding like a tribal drum. Where was she? She ran to the edge of the cliff, looked all around. There was nowhere else for her to go. “Grandma Wren!” she yelled out to the darkening sky.
The air temperature changed. The wind now blew warm. The sky began to change, growing brighter, lighter, bluer, as the sunset disappeared. With it, Zera’s fear evaporated. An excitement and expectation in every molecule within her grew as thoughts of Grandma Wren melted away. It was day again. Clouds rolled in, just beneath the cliff. Soft, round clouds, first hundreds, then thousands, stretching out below her like an ocean. Zera’s mouth was open, watching.
Through the clouds crept a thread of green, and Zera’s heartbeat again quickened. The thread became a tangle of vines, growing larger, stronger. Leaves emerged from the rope-like vines, and the vines took form as they twisted, writhed, turned. They were forming into the shape of a man. Zera could not take her eyes away, she could not think. She could only stare, transfixed. Within seconds, a giant stood before her on the clouds, the Green Man.
Zera’s heart thudded. She wanted to run but found she could not move. The Green Man, fifty feet tall, was all leaves. Giant rolled leaves made up his enormous fingers, his fingernails, his colossal legs, his massive chest, his long, twining hair. Only his verdant face, peering through the leaves, was smooth, the texture of human skin. He walked across the clouds, and as he did the clouds thundered and the rock beneath Zera shook.
Zera’s forehead and palms beaded sweat. A gasp escaped her, yet she could not take her eyes away, not even for a second. The green titan looked at her with a fierceness that undercut the kind undertone in his deep voice.
“Everything is sacred and divine,” he said.
“You are in the land I live in always. Though I may appear to sleep in the winter, I am very much alive, growing, changing. The same is with all that live!
“We are all one. Star-stuff!” He smiled at Zera, a smile that was both friendly and menacing, and his arms and hands outstret
ched to embrace the cosmos.
“We are all related. We possess each other in our natures and in our bodies.
“We are all part of the tree of life. We are kept in place by our spinal column.”
The figure began to change. The Green Man’s legs grew together, turned darker, brown, bark-rough. Soon, they had fused into one thick trunk.
“We are anchored by the roots of our feet and legs,”
Roots curved downward from the base of the trunk, stretching along and down through the clouds.
“. . . we stretch toward and welcome the heavens in the branches of our arms.” He raised his massive arms. They turned into two thick branches that brought forth more branches, smaller and smaller, up and up and out. Buds popped out along each stem in profusion and became full, fat and pointed, before gracefully unfolding into leaves.
The tree stood thick, full, covered. The Green Man’s face appeared high now, in the center of the branches, defined amid the leafy crown. His eyes glowed.
“In our heads are the flowering and fruiting of our thoughts and emotions.”
The tree exploded into bloom with thousands of alabaster flowers. Their perfume filled the air, filled Zera’s lungs. Just as quickly, the white flower petals fell and the fruits, first tiny and green, grew large. The green faded and the full fruits blushed into luscious globes of gold. The Green Man’s face became longer, softer, fair, the lips as full and ripe as the fruit that adorned it.
The Green Man had become a Green Woman.
She whispered. Her voice was melodic, honeyed. “Yes, I am all. Male and female. One cannot exist without the other. Man and woman are borne of the earth. We are all one. We are all plants. All flesh is grass. It is our life-giver.”
Tears sprang to Zera’s eyes. She recognized the voice. It’s the voice from my dreams.
The fruits began to fall from the woman-tree, noiselessly onto the clouds. On their way down they turned fetid; worm holes and bruises appeared on their surfaces as they reached the white clouds and landed. They grew moldy and shrunken. A thick decay smell clotted in Zera’s nose. The rotten fruit disappeared. At the same time, the leaves of the tree turned gold, blazing briefly and brilliantly in the blue sky, before falling from the tree in a shower. The leaves, like the fruit, turned brown then shrank, crinkled, vanished through the clouds.
“We are all that lives and all that has lived before,” said the Green Woman, whose face now formed in the bare branches.
Zera thought of her mother and father and was not afraid.
“I am the thought of all plants.” The skeleton-branched tree turned green, the limbs becoming round and fleshy, as it metamorphosed into human form. A towering woman of green stood before her, clothed in leaves. She was voluptuous, mighty.
She began to move, walking atop the clouds, looking down where the fruit once lay, and shaking her majestic leaf-crowned head. The clouds thundered under her footfalls as they had with the Green Man’s.
Her voice grew cold, as did her gaze, and fear crept into Zera’s heart.
“Man’s greed has far surpassed his wisdom. The plants call to me in despair. They know not what they should be. They know not what they are.”
Her face twisted into a horrible mask of anger. “The timeless wisdom of nature, of life, has been defiled, again and again. Man has been given the whole world; yet it is not enough. The answers are there, simple to see, yet his eyes remain willfully closed.”
Her voice grew louder, until it boomed. “If the work that man has started does not stop, the world shall grieve as it has never grieved before! That is the message. That is our warning . . .” her voice and countenance softened once again as she paused, “. . . and our plea. Zera of the Greens — you must do whatever it takes to help set these wrongs right.”
Her blazing eyes met Zera’s. Zera forgot to breathe. The Green Woman’s lips did not move, yet Zera heard unspoken words whispered to her, as vividly and as surely as she had heard the snakes. The gentle voice she had heard in her room, both at Piker and here, was now tinged with anger and hysteria. “You will help us, Zera of the Greens. If you do not take action, the natural world will have no choice but to fight against all humanity. And humanity will lose.”
Zera’s heart raced as an icy wind returned. The Green Woman faded and disappeared. The sea of clouds parted and sped away. The azure sky darkened and a nearly full moon cast the rocks around her in an eerie, white glow.
Thunder rumbled down the mountain. Zera could see the lightning, blinding white zig-zags that brought rocks and trees far below into high relief.
The fury of the weather gripped Zera as the Green Woman’s words rang in her ears. You will help us, Zera of the Greens.
How can I do that? she thought. I’m alone in this world. The thought clutched her in icy fingers of panic. How can they ask this of me? I’m just visiting my nonny . . . I’m too young. Tears came again into her eyes and she couldn’t stop herself from screaming out into the cold night. “What do you expect me to do? I don’t even know what this is about!”
No answer, no response came. She was alone.
The moment the words left her she knew with total clarity — The Toad.
Chapter Nineteen
This all has something to do with Uncle Theodore — but how? Zera sat in the freezing darkness, her heart racing. She tugged her jacket around her, staring first up at the moonlit sky, then down at the storm raging below her on the mountain. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. As her lungs filled with cold, crisp air, she thought of her parents. I know I’m not really alone, somehow they’re with me. I’ve got to hold on to that. And to figure out what all this means.
Grandma Wren’s voice startled her. “Now we know.”
“Where were you?” Zera said to the small figure on the blanket. Grandma Wren was plainly visible as the pale boulders and gravel around them reflected the moon’s glow.
The old woman unfolded her limbs and stood. “I was here, all along,”
Zera shook her head. In light of what she had just seen, how could she say what was real anymore?
Grandma Wren moved to the edge of the cliff, peered down. “It’s a bad storm. I hope the train makes it back okay.”
Her words were calm. How can she be calm? After what just happened? Zera got to her feet, nearly stumbling. The burning feeling had returned to her palm, and her leg was stiff with soreness. She gathered up the blanket and shook off the dirt. Grandma Wren held out her hands for it, but instead of putting it into the bag, she folded it in half and wrapped it around her small shoulders. She took a flashlight from her bag and handed it to Zera. “Take this. I find myself very tired now.”
Zera insisted on carrying Grandma Wren’s bag, and this time she let her.
“Here’s the path, to the right a little,” Zera said, lighting the area. Once their eyes adjusted, moonlight helped illuminate the path as well. Grandma Wren led them, inching up the incline while Zera kept the light on the ground ahead. The dark climb, more difficult than the descent, seemed to take a long time.
The second time she slipped Zera said, “Damn it!” Grandma Wren ignored the outburst.
At the top, they paused to catch their breath. It feels good to be standing upright, Zera thought, stretching. They got to the top just in time. The clouds had rolled in again, covering the moon, and the night grew blacker, the wind bitter. Thankfully, the outside lights of the café were on. Zera moved closer to Grandma Wren as they crept along the rear of the stone building, then around the side. As they neared the front door, snow began spitting from the skies.
Grandma Wren’s voice was raspy. “I do hope they remembered to leave the door unlocked.”
Me too. Being stranded outside now would be awful.
Grandma Wren was the first to reach the door. She went in, flipped the light switch and turned to Zera. “Ah, warmth!”
The stone exterior had given no hint of the coziness inside. A gas fire in the large stone fireplace glowed, casting it
s reflection on the golden pine planks of the floor and dining tables. Thick cotton curtains of green and white checkerboard hung from the windows. Along the top of the walls a stenciled border of pine trees circled the room like a miniature painted forest.
“Nice and toasty,” said Grandma Wren, taking off the snow-dusted blanket.
“I smell coffee.” Zera made her way toward the long, chrome, ’50s-style dining counter. “A whole pot. That should warm us up.” She lifted the clear glass dome off a plate stacked with doughnuts. “They left us a plate of goodies, too.” Her stomach growled loud enough for Grandma Wren to hear.
Shaky with hunger, Zera knew Grandma Wren must be starving too. We haven’t eaten since noon. She found she was not eager to talk over what they had just seen, not yet. She got cups from the cabinet and found plates and napkins.
The door opened. Hattie and Nonny, in snow-covered jackets, entered the room.
“Sorry we’re late!” Hattie pulled down her hood, shook out her long hair. “We were waylaid at the station with electrical problems. There’s a big storm down the mountain. Dan’s outside now, making an adjustment to the engine before we can go back down. He said it’d take about twenty minutes. So, how did it go?”
“You’re late?” said Zera. “What do you mean? We just got here.”
“Zera,” said Nonny, “it’s been four and a half hours.”
Zera looked at Grandma Wren, who showed no surprise.
* * *
They sat at one of the round pine tables watching Grandma Wren eat an extraordinary amount of food for someone her age: the tuna and cheese sandwich Hattie had brought for her, potato salad from the refrigerator, a candy-sprinkled doughnut, and two cartons of milk. When Hattie commented on her appetite, Grandma Wren said she’d been fasting since she had the dream, in preparation for the vision quest. Disapproval darkened Hattie’s features but she did not comment.
Zera had just finished her sandwich when Hattie, across from her, said, “So do you want to talk about it before we get on the train? What happened?”