Once he 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.
“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 gotten 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 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 thornbush 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 doesn’t particularly 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.