WHEN MRS. CLANCY comes home from work the next day, she says, “I stopped at your school this afternoon and talked to Mrs. Funkhauser. She told me she had no choice but to fail you.”
She waves a copy of my report card. “While I was there, I enrolled you in summer school. You better pass so you can go on to seventh grade with your classmates.”
Tossing my report card on the table, she adds, “Classes start next week at nine a.m. I’ll drive you there myself.”
During dinner, she goes on and on about how disappointed in me she is. “F’s in everything except an A in art,” she says. “Where do you think that will get you in life?”
She loves asking the big questions about Life. Which of course is her concept of the real world. Life is the place you go to die before you die. Life turns you into a boring person who has a job he hates. Life dries up your brain. Life makes you think money and success are important. Life is for grownups. I don’t plan to go there. So I sit at the table slowly chewing my way through lumpy mashed potatoes and gray string beans, and cover the pork chop with my napkin when she’s not looking. I’ve heard the Life spiel so often, I don’t need to listen.
“Don’t you have anything to say, Brendan?”
I shake my head.
“I’m talking about your Future. Don’t you care what happens to you?”
Future—just another word for Life.
I shrug. What happens happens, I think. No sense worrying or planning or expecting things. One speeding dump truck can wipe you off the earth.
I pick up my plate and scrape my pork chop into the garbage can, making sure my napkin still covers it. If only I had a dog. I could sneak the pork chop to him and he’d destroy the evidence. Maybe if I make it to real life, I’ll get myself a dog as a reward. A big one to protect me, maybe a German shepherd or, even better, a tame wolf.
Mrs. Clancy follows me out of the kitchen. She’s relentless.
“Can’t I talk any sense into your head? Won’t you even listen to what I’m telling you? It’s for your own good, Brendan. Your own good.”
Funny how for my own good is always for her own good.
I don’t say anything, I don’t look at her. I go to my room and shut the door and start drawing.
The next morning I’m up at six a.m. and heading for the woods before Mrs. Clancy is awake. It’s Saturday. Three joggers run past me on the trail along the train tracks, red-faced, huffing, sweating, their faces all screwed up. Maybe when you’re grown up, running hurts. From the looks of the men, it’s certainly not fun for them.
Last night I waited until Mrs. Clancy went to bed—she was on Facebook later than usual, probably posting messages about the ungrateful, difficult, moody foster kid she’s stuck with. But sometime after midnight I raided the spotless refrigerator for bread, fruit, and cheese. I now have plenty for myself and someone else if he should choose to join me.
I cross the tracks and head into the cool, damp woods. Quietly. Calmly. Breathing in the smells of moss and rotting leaves and dirt, listening to birdcalls of all sorts coming from every direction. One of the books I keep in my tree house is a copy of the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America.
I bought it for a quarter at the library’s used book sale. It’s an old edition, and mildew spots the yellowing pages, but birds don’t change. A jay’s a jay, a crow’s a crow, a red-tailed hawk’s a red-tailed hawk. I’ve learned to identify almost every bird in the woods, not only by its song but also by its appearance. I hear wrens in the thickets and mockingbirds and cardinals in the trees. A hawk cries sweetly overhead. And the crows are making a racket near my tree. Something’s disturbing them, something’s not right.
Taking care to make no noise, I sneak through the woods until I’m in sight of my tree. A dozen or more crows populate its branches. At first I’m puzzled. Why are they there? Why are they cawing?
Then I see him. A man is asleep on the ground under my tree. His clothes are so faded, they have no color and blend in with the earth. His skin is brown, and his beard is long and bushy. He’s weathered and worn and probably as old as the forest.
I stay where I am, holding my breath. It’s him. It must be. The Green Man has come at last.
But I hesitate at the edge of the clearing, still hidden in the undergrowth, just in case it’s not him after all. He has a few leaves in his hair and his beard. They aren’t growing from his face or sprouting from his mouth, yet I sense a sort of wildness about him. He’s no ordinary man. He belongs here in the forest.
I tiptoe closer as silently as I can. I don’t want to frighten him. When I’m about a foot from him, I sit down on the ground and watch him sleep. His chest rises and falls—he snores softly, sighs. Once in a while he twitches like a dog when it’s dreaming.
Above my head, the crows hop back and forth on the branches and flap their wings. They caw loudly—Wake up, wake up. There’s a stranger nearby.
The man opens his eyes. I draw back, suddenly afraid.
“Where did you come from?” His voice is deep and rumbly.
I hesitate. Does he mean literally or figuratively? I take a guess. “That’s my tree house up there.” I point at the platform even though it’s almost invisible at this time of year.
“You live in a tree?”
I shake my head. “I wish I did.”
He studies me. His eyes are kind but puzzled. Laugh lines make deep wrinkles in his cheeks. “Most boys run away when they see me,” he says.
“I’m not scared,” I tell him. “I know who you are.”
“Is that so?”
I lean closer and whisper, “You’re the Green Man. I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”
He smiles and his eyes almost disappear into the network of lines surrounding them.
“This is your forest,” I go on. “You protect it and all that dwell within it. Birds, rabbits, foxes, deer, squirrels. Maybe even unicorns.”
“Especially unicorns,” he says solemnly. “But they’re rare these days. Very rare. It’s been years since I’ve seen one.”
We sit quietly for a moment. The woods are so still, I can hear the creek running over stones. A squirrel chirrs in the tree above us. The crows fly away, dark shapes in the green light of the forest. A deer bounds across a clear space near us, white tail up.
“Are you hungry?” I ask. “I brought enough food to share with you—just in case I finally met you.”
He nods and I spread out Mrs. Clancy’s food.
We eat together, the Green Man and I. A few sparrows appear and peck at crumbs. The Green Man tosses a chunk of bread toward a squirrel, who wastes no time grabbing it and retreating to a branch to eat it.
“Greedy little bugger,” he says. Wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, he turns his attention to me. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Brendan Doyle,” I tell him. Even though he didn’t ask, I add, “I live with Mrs. Clancy. She’s my foster so-called mother.”
His sky blue eyes study me. “Where are your real parents?”
I tell him the truth, even though it hurts me to say it. “My mother left me at the hospital after I was born. Nobody knows who she was or where she went. Same with my father. Nobody knows who he was either.”
I pause and clear my throat. I look down at the ground. I keep my voice steady. “Neither one of them wanted me. And neither did anyone else.”
He starts to say something, but I clear my throat again and tell him things I’ve never told anyone. “So the hospital sent me to Social Services. They put me with a family specially trained to care for infants, but when I was two, they moved me to another family. I stayed with them until I was five. Then the mother had triplets, and the agency had to find a new foster parent.”
What I don’t tell him are the things I used to think about my mother—she had amnesia after I was born and forgot who she was, she forgot she had a baby, she might remember someday and come looking for me.
I certainly don’t tell him what the social worker said, what she thought I didn’t hear, that my mother used drugs and I was a crack baby.
The Green Man’s voice breaks into my thoughts. “So that’s when Mrs. Clancy entered the picture?”
“No,” I say, “the Baileys were before her. They had a bunch of kids, some their own, others fosters like me. I didn’t get along with them and I didn’t try to fit in and I ran away once or twice. I didn’t go far, but after the third time, they decided I was too much trouble and they didn’t want me anymore.”
I don’t tell him the two older boys beat me up every day, that I wet my bed, that Mrs. Bailey made me wash the sheets and made sure all the other kids knew I was a baby-wet-the-bed. I didn’t tell him the other foster kids told everybody at school and they made fun of me and called me names.
“So Social Services put you with Mrs. Clancy.”
“Yes. I’ve been with her for two years.”
“And what do you think of her?” The Green Man regards me with sad eyes. “Are you happy with her? Does she treat you well?”
No one has ever asked me this. I chew my bottom lip and think about my answer. “She feeds me and all that, but she has a whole different way of seeing things and she thinks her way is the only way and I’m never going to amount to much because I don’t see the same thing she sees. She’s trying to make me see things her way and I don’t want to so she thinks I’m stupid or something and gets mad at me. Sometimes I think she hates me.”
Most people would have said something like No, no, she doesn’t hate you, she’s just trying to help you, but the Green Man doesn’t say anything. He sits there watching me, waiting for me to go on.
I want him to understand what I mean, so I lean toward him and stare into his eyes. “You know how people talk about the real world, and Life with a capital L and all that?”
He nods as if he knows more about “all that” than I ever will.
“Well, Mrs. Clancy lives in the real world, but I live in a place inside my head most of the time. I draw and I read and I daydream. Stuff like school and good grades and being popular aren’t important to me, but they’re super important to her. I want to be an artist, pure and simple. That’s all.”
I pick up a stick and draw a line in the dirt. “I’m on one side of this line and Mrs. Clancy is on the other side.”
The Green Man studies the line and nods. “You and I are on the same side of the line.”
“I know,” I whisper. “You’re the spirit of the woods. You’re in the real real world, not the fake real world.”
“There are many more people on Mrs. Clancy’s side of the line,” he says. “You and I are a minority.”
“Yes.” The word comes out in a long sigh—yessssss.
“You spend a lot of time in the woods,” the Green Man says. “I’ve seen you up in the tree—”
“Your tree—it’s your tree, I know it is. Is it all right for me to have built a house in it?”
“It’s absolutely splendid.”
“I hoped you’d say that. Would you like to come up and see what it’s like?”
The Green Man peers up into the leaves, his brow wrinkled with thought. “Even creatures such as I get old,” he says reluctantly. “When I was a lad, I could scramble up a tree just like you, as nimble as a squirrel. But living in the wild stiffens a man’s joints and slows him down.”
I nod. I guess I’d been mistaken about the spirits of the wild, and I was sad to think they didn’t stay young forever. “You are immortal, though.”
He shakes his head. “Yes and no,” he says. “When my time here ends, someone young and strong will take my place and carry on my work. So even if I die, I’m immortal. It’s the work that’s important, not the man who does it.”
I draw my knees close to my chest and know in my heart of hearts he’s telling the truth. But I wish it were not the truth.
“Tell me something, Brendan.” The Green Man stares into my eyes as if he can see my thoughts swimming like fish beneath the surface. “Whenever I see you in the woods, you’re alone. Do you have any friends? Someone to talk to, to share things with?”
I lower my head to hide the tears welling up. “Nobody wants to be friends with a foster kid. They hate me at school.”
“That’s very troubling.” The Green Man sighs and tosses an apple core to the squirrel. “Very troubling indeed.”
“I don’t care,” I say fiercely, not wanting him to feel sorry for me. “They’re mean and stupid and all they care about is things you buy. And what kind of house you live in and what kind of car your parents drive. They all live on Mrs. Clancy’s side of the line. Real boys, the kind who join Little League, the kind of boy Mrs. Clancy wants me to be.”
“So you don’t want to hit home runs and catch the ball and strike out the batter?”
“I hate Little League. Not just because I’m rotten at baseball but because Little League has all sorts of rules and everybody takes it seriously, even parents, and no one plays for fun.”
The Green Man laughs. “Little League is for little minds.”
I laugh too. He’s the first person who has ever understood me.
“There must be a few kids who care about what you care about.”
“I sure haven’t met any.” I’m angry now. He doesn’t understand after all, he doesn’t believe me. “They laugh at me and tease me and chase me and beat me up. They hate me, I tell you! And I hate them!”
I cover my mouth with my hands and wish I could take back what I just said. I’ve been rude to the Green Man. He must be disappointed, maybe even angry at me. At any moment, he’ll get to his feet and vanish into the woods, and I’ll never see him again.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I didn’t mean to shout at you. Don’t be angry.”
“Why would I be angry?” He looks puzzled.
I realize I’m acting as if he’s an ordinary adult who gets mad at disrespectful kids. “I don’t know,” I mumble. “I guess I forgot who you are.”
“Sometimes I forget who I am too.” He laughs, a big, jolly laugh that rolls through the trees. The kind of laugh that makes other people laugh too.
I climb the tree and come back with my drawing stuff and some of my weapons and carvings. He looks at each one carefully. He really sees my drawings. Doesn’t say Oh, this is good, you have talent and then flip to the next one. He sighs and mumbles and takes in every detail. He turns the wooden swords and staffs over and looks at them from every angle, squinting to see if they’re straight and true.
The last one I show him is the Green Man’s face I carved yesterday. “It’s not finished yet,” I tell him, “but can you tell who it is?”
He smiles and sighs and turns the face this way and that way. “Is it me?” he asks at last.
I nod. “I found your face and beard in the grain of the wood.”
“But you hadn’t even seen me then.”
“No, but I’ve glimpsed your face in the leaves and I’ve seen pictures in books and that made it easy.”
“Easy? Work like this is never easy.”
I smile. He does understand. “It was easy because the face was already there. All I had to do was let it out.”
He chuckles. “All you had to do was let it out.”
“Yes, sir.” I sit back and feel the sun warm my back. I don’t need to ask if the Green Man thinks art is a waste of time. Like me, he knows it’s the most important thing in the world, in both the real world and the unreal world.
The Green Man gets to his feet and stretches. “Thanks for the breakfast, Brendan.”
I jump up, suddenly anxious. “You’re not leaving, are you?”
“I’m always leafing,” he jokes.
I smile so he’ll know I understood the joke, but it’s a fake smile. “No, really, are you going somewhere?”
He waves an arm at the trees all around us. “I have a whole forest to tend to,” he says.
“Can I go with you?”
“Not today, Brendan. Maybe another time.”
“You’ll come back?”
“Of course I will.”
“When? When will I see you?”
“Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week—it all depends on how much work I need to do.”
“I’ll be here every day,” I tell him, but he’s already turning away, fading into the greenery as quietly as a deer. “Every day,” I call after him.
But he’s gone, and the woods are silent as if every bird and animal is quiet in honor of his passing.
I climb up to my platform and work on my carving. Now that I’ve met the Green Man, I have this strange feeling things might get better. I’m afraid to count on it, though. As soon as you let yourself believe something, you’re bound to be disappointed.