“There’s no quit in you, is there, Lily Kindred?” a strange raspy voice suddenly asked and I pretty near jumped out of my skin.
Aunt Lillian’s teeth flashed in the moonlight.
“Just doing my neighborly duty,” she said. “Sharing news and all.”
He came out from the far side of the tree and if it hadn’t been for the ‘sangman I’d found, I’d have said he was the strangest man I’d ever seen. He was as gnarled and twisty as the limbs of his tree, long and lanky, a raggedy man with tattered clothes, bird’s-nest hair and a stooped walk. It was hard to make out his features in the moonlight, but I got the sense that there wasn’t a mean bone in his body—don’t ask me why. I guess he just radiated a kind of goodness and charm. He acted like it was a chore, having to come out and talk to us, but I could tell he liked Aunt Lillian. Maybe missed her as much as she surely did him.
He sat down near the edge of the blanket and looked back and forth between us, gaze finally holding on Aunt Lillian.
“So is it true?” he asked. “You’ve found a ‘sangman?”
“I wouldn’t trouble you if it wasn’t true. I know how you feel about your kind and mine mixing with each other.”
He looked at me. “I don’t know what she might have told you, miss, but—”
“My name’s Sarah Jane,” I told him. “Sarah Jane Dillard.”
He sighed. “But the first thing should have been not to share your name with any stranger you might happen to meet in the woods.”
“He’s right about that,” Aunt Lillian said.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” I said, “I didn’t think you were a stranger.”
“No, he’s a stranger, all right,” Aunt Lillian corrected me. “That’s what you call folks you never see.”
“The point Lily and I keep circling around like two old dogs,” he said, “is that it’s dangerous for humans to be with fairies. It wakes things in you that can’t be satisfied, leaving you with a hunger that lasts until the end of your days, a hunger for things you can’t have, or be, that only grows stronger as the years pass. It wasn’t always so, but our worlds have drifted apart since the long ago when magic was simply something that filled the air instead of what it’s become now: a thing that’s secret and rare.”
“How he goes on,” Aunt Lillian said.
There was no real anger in her voice. I couldn’t recall a time when she’d ever seemed really angry about anything. But I knew this old argument that lay between the two of them was something that vexed her.
The Apple Tree Man ignored her.
“How do you feel, Sarah Jane?” he asked me.
I thought it an odd sort of a question until I started to consider it. How did I feel? Strange, for sure. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, to find out that things you really only half-believed in turn out to be real. It starts this whole domino effect in your head where you end up questioning everything. If men can step out of trees, how do I know they won’t come popping out of my salad bowl when I sit down to eat? I glanced up at the moon. For all I knew, it really was made of cheese with some round-faced old fellow living in the hollowed-out center.
Who was to say where the real world stopped and fairy tales began? Maybe anything was possible.
Just thinking that made the world feel too big, the smallest thing too complicated. The ground under the blanket seemed spongy, like we could slip right into the dirt, or maybe sideways, to some fairy place and we’d never return.
“I guess I feel different,” I managed to say. “But I can’t explain exactly how. It’s like everything’s changed and nothing has, all at the same time. Like I’m seeing two things at the same time, one on top of the other.”
He nodded, but before he could say anything, Aunt Lillian spoke up.
“What do we do with the ‘sangman?” she asked.
The Apple Tree Man turned in her direction.
“The night’s full of listening ears,” the Apple Tree Man said. “Perhaps we could take this indoors.”
Aunt Lillian shrugged.
“You’ve always been welcome in my house,” she said.
4
If it was odd just seeing the Apple Tree Man and knowing he existed, it was odder still to have him in Aunt Lillian’s house. Inside, he seemed taller than he had in the orchard. Taller, thinner. And wilder. His bird’s-nest hair looked twice the size it had been, with leaves and twigs and burrs and who knew what all caught up in it. He brought with him a strange feral scent. Mostly it was of apples, but underneath was a strong musk that made me feel twitchy. His knees were too tall to go under the kitchen table we all sat around, so he had to sit to the side, those long, twisty legs stretching out along the floor.
I went and got the ‘sangman in his basket and set it on the table in front of the Apple Tree Man. The little man was still unconscious, but Aunt Lillian said he seemed to be sleeping now. The Apple Tree Man agreed with her.
“They’re tough little fellows, no question,” he said. “Have to be to survive—how many stings was it?”
I was about to answer when we heard a low, mournful howl from outside. That was Root, I thought. He really didn’t appreciate being locked up in the barn with nothing but Aunt Lillian’s cow Henny and a handful of half-wild cats for company.
“A hundred and thirty-seven,” I said.
The Apple Tree Man nodded. “So I’m thinking he must have really ticked somebody off. Usually it’s no more than a sting or two, just as a reminder that they’re not friends, not no way, not no how.”
“Why are they feuding?” I asked.
“It’s like in the song.”
“Aunt Lillian said there was a song but she couldn’t remember it.”
“A ‘sangman fell for one of the bee fairies and took her away from her hive. Everybody used to know the chorus.”
He began to sing softly:
Once be took her in his arms
and kissed her long and true
Once he took her in his arms
wasn’t nothing nobody could do
Halfway through Aunt Lillian began to sing with him. I liked the way their voices blended. It was a natural sound, like when Laurel and Bess sing together.
“That does sound a lot like ‘Shady Grove,’“ I said.
The Apple Tree Man smiled. “The old tunes go around and around,” he said. “You can’t give any of them just the one name, or the one set of words.”
“So why did ‘sang and bee fairies get mad at each other?” I asked. “Falling in love’s supposed to be a happy thing.”
The Apple Tree Man glanced at Aunt Lillian, then looked back at me.
“The bee fairy that the ‘sangman in the song stole away was a princess,” he said, “and the bee folk didn’t much cotton to one of their highborn ladies living in the dark woods, in a hole in the ground. They’ve been fighting about it ever since.”
“Sounds like pretty much any feud in these hills,” I said. “It starts with something small and then goes on until hardly anybody remembers the whyfor. They just know they don’t like each other.”
The Apple Tree Man nodded. “I suppose we’re not so different from you in a lot of ways.”
“You can certainly be as stubborn,” Aunt Lillian said.
He gave her this look again, kind of sad, kind of moony, and it got me to wondering about the two of them. Aunt Lillian never made out like there was much of anything between them ‘cept friendship, but they sounded a bit like the way it could get when Adie’d run into one of her old boyfriends.
If they’d ever been a couple, I guess he’d been the one to end it. I already knew that Aunt Lillian wasn’t too happy about it, but now I got the sense that maybe he wasn’t either. I thought about some of the things he’d been saying, then looked at the pair of them.
Old as she was with her own wrinkles and all, Aunt Lillian was probably more like an apple tree fairy now than she’d probably ever been in all the time he’d known her. Maybe the reason he??
?d been seeing less of her now than he used to wasn’t so much because of what fairies can wake in a human, but because year by year she grew more attractive to him and he didn’t trust himself around her. Figured they’d be happy for a time, but then she’d be gone, seeing’s how our lives are so fleeting, while theirs go on forever. Maybe he just knew he couldn’t bear the heartbreak.
And maybe I was just being a hopeless romantic and there wasn’t any such thing going on between the pair of them.
“Can you take him with you?” Aunt Lillian was asking. “Let him finish his mending in your tree?”
“It’s not him I’m worried about. It’s you and Sarah Jane.”
“Because of the bee fairies?”
The Apple Tree Man nodded. “There’s no telling what they might do when they find out you’ve helped him. And they will find out. Not much goes on in the meadows or the woods that they don’t know about.”
I didn’t like to hear that. I’d always found it a little creepy in Sunday school when we were told that God was always watching us. Then I decided I didn’t believe in God—or at least not the way they talked about him—and I felt like I’d got my privacy back. Now I had fairies to think about.
“What can we do?” Aunt Lillian asked.
“We need to find you a safe place to stay for the next couple of days—just until we can see how the land lies. We need to find a way to tell the both the ‘sangmen and the bee fairies that you weren’t taking sides. You were just being neighborly, helping someone in their need.”
“It’s the truth,” Aunt Lillian said.
The Apple Tree Man nodded. “But you know as well as I that sometimes the truth isn’t enough.”
I liked the sound of this even less.
“I can’t just be going off without telling Mama where I’ll be,” I told them. “She’s going to be mad enough I didn’t come home tonight.”
“I don’t know what else to do,” the Apple Tree Man said. “It’s too dangerous for either of you to go anywhere right now and I doubt your mama would listen to the likes of me.”
Just saying she believed her eyes in the first place, I thought.
The Apple Tree Man stood and picked up the basket with the ‘sangman in it.
“Come with me,” he said. “And don’t bother bringing anything. You’ll find whatever you need where we’re going.”
Aunt Lillian and I exchanged glances. When she finally shrugged and stood up, I joined her. I know the Apple Tree Man said I needn’t bring anything with me, but I grabbed my knapsack by its strap and brought it along all the same.
We walked back through the garden, out into the orchard. The moon was all the way on the other side of the sky now, but still shining bright enough to light our way. I couldn’t tell what Aunt Lillian was feeling, but I admit I was somewhat scared my own self. Right about then she took my hand and I felt a lot better.
I gave the thorn bush a dubious look when we reached the Apple Tree Man’s tree.
“Just walk through with me,” he said.
All Aunt Lillian and I could do was stare at him, the way you do when someone says something that particularly doesn’t make sense.
“Don’t worry,” he added. “What you see as barriers are only there if you think they are. It might help to shut your eyes.”
I couldn’t decide which would be worse, seeing where I was going or not, but in the end I did close my eyes. I counted the steps and right about where I’d reckoned the bush would be I felt something feathery tickle every inch of my skin. I guess I could have been concerned about any number of things right then, from the danger we were in to what Mama was going to say when and if I ever got myself home, but the last thing I thought about as we passed out of this world and into some other was that we’d left Root in the barn. Who was going to look after him and Henny? Who was going to feed Aunt Lillian’s chickens?
And then that got swallowed up by an even bigger question, one I hadn’t even considered until now, when it was too late. I started thinking in on too many of Aunt Lillian’s stories and the fear rose sharp and jittery inside me. How much time was going to pass in the world outside while we were hidden away in fairyland? I didn’t want to spend a day or two here and come back to find Mama and my sisters twenty years older, or worse, all long dead and gone, like that artist Aunt Lillian had met once who’d spent a couple of days in fairyland only to find twenty years had passed back here in the world he’d left behind.
But it was too late for that now.
We’d already stepped outside the world, Aunt Lillian and me both, following a smooth-talking Apple Tree Man into his tree.
5
I opened my eyes to a buttery yellow light that seemed too bright after the dark night we’d left behind. I’d figured we’d end up right inside the tree and hadn’t quite worked my mind around what it would be like, but instead of anything I might have imagined, we looked to be in somebody’s house—a house that was a whole lot bigger than anything that could fit inside the trunk of any apple tree I’d ever seen. Back in the world we’d left behind, I could easily wrap my arms around its trunk, if I could get past the thorn tree protecting it. But here … here …
I was still holding hands with Aunt Lillian and we had us a look at each other, neither of us quite ready to believe what we were seeing, though there it was all the same, right in front of our noses.
“Welcome to my home,” the Apple Tree Man said as he set the ‘sangman’s basket down by a stone hearth.
There wasn’t any fire burning in it, but the big room we were in was cozy warm all the same. I looked around, trying to see where the light was coming from, but couldn’t tell. It smelled like the Apple Tree Man in here, of apples and wood, with that faint underlying shiver of musk.
I guess we were in the living area of his house. The floor was polished wood with a thick, hooked rug in the center. There were a pair of battered armchairs in front of the hearth with a table between them. One wall was floor-to-ceiling books, like in a library, big, fat books, all bound in leather. Later I found out they were the annals of these here hills, written by the Apple Tree Man himself, some of them.
There were a couple of paintings and a handful of framed drawings on the other walls—familiar landscapes, I realized, as I recognized some of the subjects. Aunt Lillian got a funny look on her face when she spied them. She let go of my hand and walked over to give the nearest one a closer study.
Across from the hearth was a kitchen area that had a long wooden table running most of the length of the wall and all sorts of herbs and such hanging down from the rafters above it. Shelves held jars with dried mushrooms and tomatoes and I didn’t know what all. There was a smaller wooden kitchen table set out a little from the longer one with a couple of ringback chairs around it. Over against another wall was a chest with clothes hooks above it. A coat as raggedy as the clothes the Apple Tree Man wore was tossed on top of the chest.
I saw two doors, but they were both closed, so I couldn’t tell where they led.
“Where does the light come from?” I asked.
“Making light is one of the first things we learn,” the Apple Tree Man said.
“And these paintings and drawings?” Aunt Lillian asked.
“They were gifts from a friend.”
“Did you ever thank her for them?”
“I thought I did.”
Aunt Lillian just made a kind of hrumphing sound.
I looked back and forth between them, sensing that undercurrent of old history again. I decided it was none of my business.
“When we get back,” I asked. “How much time’s going to have passed?”
Nobody answered for a long moment. Those two old folks, Aunt Lillian and the Apple Tree Man, just keep on looking at each other, a conversation happening in their eyes that only they could hear. The Apple Tree Man finally shifted his gaze to me.
“The same as passes here,” he said. “Time runs at different speeds throughout the otherworld, but in t
his place you’ll notice no difference.”
That was a relief.
“What about Root?” I went on. “We left him in the barn. And Henny’s going to need her milking.”
“We’ll worry about that in the morning. For now, have a seat by the hearth. I’ll make us some tea.”
“Aunt Lillian?” I said.
Maybe he was calm as all get out, but I had a hundred worries and questions running through my head, and sitting around drinking tea and not talking about any of them wasn’t going to be the least help at all, so far as I could see.
“Not much else we can do right now,” she said, moving away from the picture she’d been studying to take a seat in one of the two armchairs. “We might as well make ourselves comfortable.”
I sighed and started to walk over to where she was sitting when a weird buzzing sound filled the air. I thought it was something of the Apple Tree Man’s doing, but when I looked at him, he appeared as confused as Aunt Lillian and I were. The buzzing grew louder, turning into a deep rumbling drone. We all looked around, searching for its source.
“It’s the ‘sangman,” Aunt Lillian said.
I glanced in his direction. The little man was still lying in his basket, his mouth open. I remember thinking, Is this what a ‘sang-man’s snores sound like?, and then they came streaming out of his mouth, a yellow and black cloud of bees, thick as smoke, pouring out from between his lips like steam from a kettle.
“Down!” the Apple Tree Man cried. “Get down and lie still.”
I knew what he meant. Elsie had told me about this before, how if you lay still on the ground, didn’t so much as blink, bees that had been disturbed might just ignore you. So I did as the Apple Tree Man said and dropped to the floor. Aunt Lillian was already lying down—I never even saw her move, she must have done it so fast. The Apple Tree Man opened one of the two doors I’d seen earlier, then stretched out on the floor himself.
I tried not to even breathe as the buzzing cloud of bees circled the room at about the height of my head if I’d still been standing. They made a circuit of the room, once, twice, a third time, then they finally went streaming out of the door.