by Pete Hautman
“So nothing is real?” Stuey asked.
“Everything is real. And not real,” Grandpa Zach said. “The weatherman says there’s a big storm coming tomorrow from the west. Chances are it’ll knock down some trees in the woods. If a tree falls and you don’t see it or hear it, did that tree really fall? In your reality, the tree still stands until one day you find it lying on the ground. In that moment the known and the unknown become one reality. The tree fell.” He chuckled. “That would be a good name for my book: The Tree Fell.”
Grandpa Zach had been working on his book ever since Stuey could remember, filling sheet after sheet of lined yellow pages.
“It’s our history,” he had once told Stuey. “Things nobody knows. Things nobody would believe. My Book of Secrets.”
Stuey and his mom recovered hundreds of those yellow pages after the storm, peeling them off the side of the house, pulling them from apple tree branches, picking them out of bushes and off the grass as far away as the meadow. They dried the pages, but the ink had run and smeared. Most of it was illegible.
“I don’t know why we bothered,” she said with a sigh. “Daddy always said nobody would want to read it anyway.”
“I’d read it,” Stuey said.
“Maybe someday.”
That meant never. She put the dried pages in a large cardboard box, taped it shut, and carried it upstairs, her clogs going clunk-ka-clunk on the steps. She always wore clogs around the house.
Stuey followed her up to Grandpa Zach’s bedroom. The room was crowded with mementos of a long life: a sword he had brought back from Morocco, a baseball trophy from high school, and an ancient leather bag of golf clubs that had belonged to his father. The tall bookcase held lots of travel books. Gramps had liked to read about northern Africa, where he’d spent time in the navy. There were also several books with quantum in the title. Gramps had been fascinated by quantum physics. He had tried to explain it to Stuey — something about atoms and time and space and how two opposite things could be true at the same time.
We live in different worlds, different realities, Gramps had said.
Was Gramps in a different world now? Was he someplace where he was not dead?
The thought made the back of Stuey’s neck prickle.
Next to the bookcase was a stand with Gramps’s collection of briar pipes. Stuey could still smell the faint aroma of pipe tobacco. There were framed photos on the walls: Gramps’s parents in front of the clubhouse, Gramps in his navy uniform, Gramps with his wife, Lois, the grandmother Stuey never knew. She had died when he was two. Everything in the room had a story. Stuey had heard a lot of them. He wished he could hear more.
When Grandpa Zach had been alive, the room had felt alive. Now it felt dead and brittle, as if an earth tremor or a sudden breeze might collapse it all into dust.
“I don’t get why he had to die,” Stuey said.
“He was old, Stuey,” his mom said. “He had a bad heart, and I guess the storm was too much for it. It was his time.”
She set the box of papers on the bed.
“Maybe I’ll go through these sometime,” she said. “Right now I just can’t.”
“Me neither,” Stuey said as they left the room — but he thought one day he might.
His mom must have heard something in his voice. She gave him a sharp look and said, “I don’t want you messing around with your grandfather’s things, Stuey.” She closed the door and added, “This room is off-limits.”
The following summer, on the day before his ninth birthday, Stuey packed a peanut butter sandwich, a box of cranberry juice, and an apple into his backpack. He looked out his bedroom window at the orchard, where Grandpa Zach was buried. He could see the granite headstone poking up through the tall grass. None of the other houses in the neighborhood had a grave in the backyard, but his mom said it was what Gramps would have wanted.
Stuey had never hiked all the way to the other side of the woods. Today, he decided, he would do it. One last adventure before he turned nine. He wished he had someone to go with him, but after Jack had moved away, he didn’t have any friends in the neighborhood. He was on his own.
He shrugged on his backpack and went to check on his mom. She was in her painting studio lying on the tattered old sofa staring up at the ceiling. She’d been doing that a lot lately.
Stuey backed out of the room and went outside. The sun was shining above, but it was cloudy to the west.
He circled the crumbling stone foundation of Grandpa Zach’s writing cottage. At the gravestone he stopped and remembered Gramps as he had been, smoking his pipe and telling stories about the distant past.
“I’m going all the way to the other side of the woods,” Stuey said. He didn’t really think Gramps could hear him, but it seemed like a good idea to tell some adult where he was going. His mom would say it was too far, but Gramps would understand.
He headed through the orchard and across the meadow to the poplar grove. He hadn’t visited the fairy circle since the time he was there with Gramps.
The circle of green felt smaller. The poplars were moving in. The woods are devouring the past, as Gramps had said. Stuey imagined his grandfather as a young man with a putter, trying to knock a ball into a hole. What had happened to the hole? He got down on his hands and knees and crawled around, searching. The grass, still slightly moist with morning dew, felt nice and cool. He soon found a hand-size dimple near the center of the circle. Had this been the hole? If so, it had filled in and the grass had grown over it.
He sat back on his heels and looked around. If there were such things as ghosts or fairies, he thought, this is where they would come.
It was easy to imagine fairies dancing on this circle of green. Of course there were no such things as fairies. He still hadn’t made his mind up about ghosts.
A chipmunk appeared from the hollow of a fallen tree at the edge of the green.
Stuey said, “Hello.”
The chipmunk darted back into its hollow.
There were no such things as talking animals either.
“See you later,” Stuey said.
From far above came the scolding chatter of a red squirrel. Stuey smiled. He liked animals. He had seen deer, raccoons, foxes, and skunks in the woods. Nothing to be afraid of, although he knew to be careful around skunks.
A cloud crossed the sun. He looked up at the sky. It was still mostly blue, but the clouds were moving in from the west. It looked like rain. He thought about going home, but he’d only just started.
He left the grove and headed deeper into the woods, up a low ridge and onto the oak knoll that marked the eastern edge of their ten acres.
By the time he came down the far side of the knoll, the clouds had completely covered the sky. He heard the faint patter of raindrops hitting the leaves and branches above. He pushed through a chest-high snarl of gooseberry. The prickly stems tugged at his jeans and T-shirt and scratched his arms. He ran to a grove of larger trees and huddled against the trunk of a basswood.
Raindrops struck the dry leaves and soil with a barely audible hiss, the sort of fine, gentle rain that could last for hours. A faint fog, barely visible, gathered in the low areas. He would be soaked no matter what, so he decided to keep going.
Once he gave himself up to the rain, walking was a pleasure. The wet leaves were silent beneath his feet. Rich, earthy smells rose up from the forest floor.
He came to a large fallen tree and turned right to go around it, but ran into a thick copse of buckthorn and had to go around that too. It was as if the woods was directing him, turning him right and left. He followed a winding deer trail up a rise, then down into a low area where the fog had gathered in a chest-high layer.
Cool mist beaded on his face and arms; it was like walking through a cloud. Tall grasses tugged at his sodden jeans. He had gone only a short distance when a massive, dark shape appeared before him. He stopped, not sure what he was seeing.
He took a few more steps and saw that it was a
n enormous deadfall. Five trees had fallen against one another to form a teepee shape more than thirty feet high, crowned with a tangle of dead limbs and branches. Their twisted, snarly root-balls were packed with earth and chunks of rock. Ranks of mushrooms sprouted from the trunks.
Stuey circled the deadfall. Something must have happened to make all those trees fall at the same time. He thought about the big storm last summer. The downburst that had ripped the roof off the cottage and killed his grandfather — had the same thing happened here?
He remembered what Gramps had told him:
If a tree falls and you don’t see it or hear it, did that tree really fall? In your reality, the tree still stands until one day you find it lying on the ground. In that moment the known and the unknown become one reality. The tree fell.
Were these the trees he had been talking about?
Stuey spotted a gap between two of the trunks. He took off his backpack and, dragging it behind him, wriggled through.
Inside the deadfall was an open space, quiet and dry, about twelve feet across. Above his head the dead branches formed a crude lattice, letting in just enough light to see. In the center of the space was a rectangular slab of rock the size of a mattress, partially buried in the earth. Stuey stepped onto the slab and turned slowly in a circle. He raised his arms over his head and touched the tangled branches above him.
It felt like a church shrunk down to kid size. The stone slab was like an altar, but there were no pews and no people. His own private domain. He sat down on the slab and stretched out on his back. The stone was deliciously cool. Slivers and speckles of gray sky showed through gaps in the branches. The sound of rain felt distant and unreal. He closed his eyes.
The stone beneath him felt alive. He imagined he was in a vessel, a ship made of trees, rising and falling on a gentle sea, driven by wind and magic. He heard distant music playing over faint voices. What were they saying? He listened closely. It sounded like men arguing, but the words were muffled and blurry:
Abblesabbleabblegabblesabbada . . .
Gramps had said that there were ghosts in the woods. Was that what he was hearing?
Abblesabblegabblesa . . .
For a moment he thought he heard Gramps’s voice among them.
He opened his eyes and sat up. The voices became the hiss of rain on leaves.
“Grandpa?” he said. There was no echo; the dead branches swallowed his voice. He turned his head to the side. Wisps of mist had gathered around the stone.
“Grandpa?” He said it louder.
Nothing. Stuey could feel his heart beating. He looked out the opening at the wet, gray woods, then back at the dry stone slab. The mist was gone. He laughed at himself.
“Fairy tales,” he said. “You got me again, Gramps.”
Stuey stayed in the deadfall and waited out the rain. There were three small nooks that looked like places to sit. Two fit him perfectly, one was too tight. He sat in the largest nook and ate his apple and drank his cranberry juice, imagining he was a bootlegger being shipped to Alcatraz. He stood on the stone slab and rode it like a surfboard. One of the branches moved up and down like a lever: up for forward, down for reverse. Eventually the rain stopped. Shards of sunlight sprinkled the stone slab, and the birds began to sing.
It took a while to find his way home. He finally came out of the woods behind the Charlestons’, their nearest neighbor. His mom was calling from the orchard. He ran toward her voice.
“I’m here,” he yelled back.
She spun and clapped a hand to her heart. “Stuey! Where have you been! Look at you! You’re drenched!”
“I was in the woods,” Stuey told her.
“I’ve been calling you!”
“I got kind of lost.”
“You’ve been gone for hours!”
“I’m sorry,” Stuey said, even though he wasn’t sorry at all.
She looked at him and sighed. “Come on. Let’s get you a bath and into some dry clothes. The Frankels have invited us to a barbecue.”
“Who are they?”
“Hiram and Maddy Frankel. They moved to Westdale last May. Mr. Frankel is on the preservation society with me.”
Stuey’s mom had joined the Westdale Preservation Society a few months earlier when the county announced that they were considering selling Westdale Wood to a shopping mall developer.
“The Frankels live on the other side of the woods in the Westdale Hills neighborhood.”
“Will there be any other kids there?”
“They have a girl about your age. Her name is Elly Rose.”
The Frankels’ house backed right up against the opposite side of Westdale Wood, only a mile from Stuey’s house, but two miles away by car. There were about twenty people gathered in the fenced backyard, mostly adults: the Charlestons, the Dunphies, the Kimballs, and some people he didn’t know. The only kids he saw were the Kimballs’ teenage daughter, Teresa, the five-year-old Charleston twins, and a couple of babies.
Mr. Frankel, tending the grill, had incredibly hairy legs. He was wearing an apron with pictures of hot dogs printed on it. Mrs. Frankel wore bright-red lipstick and a black-and-white dress that made her look like a zebra. She talked really loud. Stuey hung back during the greetings, but Mrs. Frankel caught sight of him and let out a squeal.
“This must be Stuart!” She loomed over him, streaming waves of perfume. “Look at that hair! It looks like he’s got a haystack on his head.”
She reached for him; Stuey ducked back behind his mother. Mrs. Frankel emitted a braying laugh.
“Elly Rose, come meet the Becker boy!”
A girl with curly black hair came over to examine Stuey, peering into his face with enormous eyes so dark brown they appeared to be all pupil. She was the opposite of his husky, pale, haystack-haired self. Her thin body was all angles and points, and she moved in quick jerks. Stuey thought she looked like an elf.
“Elly Rose, this is Stuart Becker.”
“It’s just Stuey,” Stuey said in a near whisper.
“You can call me Elly,” the girl said, “unless it’s a formal occasion.”
Mrs. Frankel moved on to her next victim. Elly Rose’s eyes bored into him. She stepped closer. He felt as if she was looking right through his skin. He looked away.
“You’re shy,” she said. “But I like your nose.”
Stuey had never thought about his nose before. “My nose?”
“It’s a button,” Elly Rose said. She reached out and touched the tip of his nose. Her mouth twitched to the side in a half smile. “There. Now you’re frozen.”
“No I’m not,” Stuey said, waving his arms to prove it.
“You’re boring,” Elly said, sticking out her bottom lip.
Stuey saw that he had disappointed her, so he pretended to be frozen. “Can’t . . . move,” he said in a strangled voice.
“That’s better.” Elly grinned and touched his nose again. “I have unfrozen you. You are free.”
“Thank you,” said Stuey.
“My birthday is tomorrow,” Elly said. “If you promise not to be boring you can come to my party. I’m going to be nine.”
Stuey stared at her in shock.
“My birthday is tomorrow,” Stuey said.
“I just said that.”
“No, I mean my birthday is tomorrow!”
Since they had the same birthday, Elly declared that they should be best friends.
Stuey was startled by the offer.
“Unless you already have a best friend,” she said after a moment.
“I used to,” he said.
Jack Kopishke had moved away to Des Moines two summers ago. Stuey had friends at school, but they were just school friends, and school was out for the summer. Grandpa Zach had been his best friend after Jack left. Now Gramps was gone.
“But not anymore,” he added.
“Then you need a new one,” she said.
“Okay.” He didn’t exactly feel like they were best friends yet, but
he was willing to give it a try.
“Maybe we were born at the exact same minute.” Elly’s eyes widened. “We could be twins! I always wanted to be a twin.”
“Where were you born?” he asked.
“In New York.”
“We’re probably not twins then, because I was born here. Besides, we look really different.”
Elly frowned, then brightened. “We could be soul mates!”
“What’s a soul mate?” he asked.
“It means we have a special connection and we can’t have any secrets from each other,” Elly said.
Stuey thought about the deadfall. “I only have one secret,” he said.
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s secret. A secret place.”
“Where is it?”
Stuey felt himself getting stubborn. “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret,” he said.
Elly stared at him fiercely. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “We can still be best friends. But we only get one secret each.”
“What’s your secret?” he asked.
“I can’t tell you.”
“If I ever tell you my secret you have to tell me yours.”
“Okay, deal. So . . . do you have a dad?”
“I did, but he died in a car accident when I was a baby. Mom and me moved in with my grandpa, but Gramps died too. Just last year. Now it’s just me and my mom.”
“That’s tragic,” Elly said.
“It’s okay. I never really knew my dad. And Gramps was really old. My mom says it was his time.”
Elly was silent for a few seconds, then she said, “I have a cat. His name is Grimpus. He only has one eye.”
Stuey looked around. “Where is he?”
“Hiding. He doesn’t like people. Except me.”
“What color is he?”