CHAPTER FIVE

he sun had set by the time we left the house and went out into the orchard.

“No point us going out until after dark,” Aunt Lillian had said earlier. “Folks like the Apple Tree Man aren’t particularly partial to us seeing them in the daylight, don’t ask me why. So we might as well have us a bite to eat.”

There was a half-moon coming up over the hill behind the house as we walked through the apple trees to the oldest one in the orchard. According to Aunt Lillian, this was the Apple Tree Man’s home. Unlike the other trees, she never trimmed this one. It grew in a rough tangle of gnarly limbs, surrounded by a thornbush that was half the height of the tree. I’d wondered about it choking the Apple Tree Man’s tree but Aunt Lillian assured me that while we might not be able to tell the difference, he kept its growth in check.

I always like being out at night. There’s a quality to moon- and starlight that makes the commonplace bigger than life, like you’re seeing everything for the first time, never mind how often you’ve seen it before. It was no different tonight, except for the added excitement of finally having me a look at this mysterious Apple Tree Man.

We’d brought a blanket with us and I spread it on the ground while Aunt Lillian had a one-sided conversation with the tree. Anybody watching us would have thought she was just as crazy as some folks already figured she was. I guess I might have had my own questions concerning the matter if I hadn’t found that little man in the ’sang patch earlier in the day.

After a while Aunt Lillian sat down on the blanket beside me, slowly easing herself down.

“I guess he’s not coming,” I said when we’d been sitting there a time. I didn’t know if I was disappointed or relieved.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Aunt Lillian said. “It’s been a while since we spoke. Could be he’s just mulling over what I told him.”

I wanted to ask if he really lived in the tree, if she’d really ever talked to him, but I’d always taken her stories the way she told them to me—matter-of-fact and true—and didn’t want to start in on questioning her now. ’Sides, it wasn’t like I could pretend this kind of thing might not be real. Not after my own adventure.

“What are you going to do when you can’t stay here by yourself anymore?” I asked when we’d been sitting there awhile longer. “Where will you go?”

I was thinking of the coming winter. Looking back, I realized I’d been doing more and more work around the homestead this past summer. Not just the heavy work, but easy tasks as well. What was Aunt Lillian going to do now that I had to go back to school during the week and couldn’t come out here as often?

“I ’spect I’ll go live with the Apple Tree Man—unless he’s moved away. Is that what’s happened?” she asked in a louder voice, directed at the tree. “Did you move away? Or do you just not have the time for an old friend anymore?”

“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, his 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 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 are 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. 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.