Once there was a forest of hickory and beech, sprucy-pine, birch and oak. It was called the Tanglewood Forest. Starting at the edge of a farmer’s pasture, it seemed to go on forever, uphill and down. There were a few abandoned homesteads to be found in its reaches, overgrown and uninhabitable now, and deep in a hidden clearing there was a beech tree so old that only the hills themselves remembered the days when it was a sapling.
Above that grandfather tree, the forest marched up to the hilltops in ever-denser thickets of rhododendrons and brush until nothing stood between the trees and stars. Below it, a creek ran along the bottom of a dark narrow valley, no more than a trickle in some places, wider in others. Occasionally the water tumbled down rough staircases of stone and rounded rocks.
On a quiet day, when the wind was still, the creek could be heard all the way up to where the old beech stood. Under its branches cats would come to dream and be dreamed. Black cats and calicos, white cats and marmalade ones, too. Sometimes they exchanged gossip or told stories about L’il Pater, the trickster cat. More often they lay in a drowsy circle around the fat trunk of the ancient beech that spread its boughs above them. Then one of them might tell a story of the old and powerful Father of Cats, and though the sun might still be high and the day warm, they would shiver and groom themselves with nervous tongues.
But they hadn’t yet gathered the day the orphan girl fell asleep among the beech’s roots, nestling in the weeds and long grass like the gangly, tousle-haired girl she was.
Her name was Lillian Kindred.
She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but she was a bit like a cat herself, forever wandering in the woods, chasing after squirrels and rabbits as fast as her skinny legs could take her when the fancy struck, climbing trees like a possum, able to doze in the sun at a moment’s notice. And sometimes with no notice at all.
This morning she’d been hunting fairies down by the creek, where it pooled wide for a spell. The only way you could cross it here was by the stepping-stones laid out in an irregular pattern from one bank to the other.
“Fairies won’t go across the water,” the midwife Harlene Welch told her, “but they do like to gather on the stones. Creep up on them all quiet-like and you can catch them sunning there like dragonflies.”
The trouble was, dragonflies were all she ever found by the creek. She never found fairies anywhere, no matter how hard she looked, though some days she could feel them in the air around her, tiny invisible presences as quick as honeybees. The air would hum with the rapid beat of their wings, but no matter how quickly she turned and spun, they were never there when she looked.
She and Aunt lived miles from anyone, deep in the hills, halfway down the slope between their apple orchard and the creek. It seemed the perfect place to find fairies if ever there was one, and if the stories the old folks told were true. But no matter how quietly Lillian prowled through the woods, no matter how often she crept up on a mushroom fairy ring, the little people were never there.
“Don’t you go troubling the spirits,” Aunt told her on more than one occasion. “They were here before us, and they’ll still be here when we’re gone. Best you just leave them be.”
“Because they’re not partial to being bothered by some little red-haired girl who’s got nothing better to do than stick her nose in other folks’ business. When it comes to spirits, it’s best not to draw their attention. Elsewise you never know what you might be calling down on yourself.”
That was hard advice for a young girl.
“I’m not troubling anyone,” she would tell the oldest apple tree in the orchard as she lay on the ground, looking up into its leaves. “I just want to say hello hello.”
But it was hard to say hello to fairies she couldn’t find.
One afternoon Lillian and Aunt were working in the corn patch. Aunt pulled the weeds up with her hoe while Lillian followed behind and put them in a basket. Aunt was humming some old tune, the way she always did. “Get Up John,” maybe. Or that old, sad song “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake.”
“I wouldn’t hurt the fairies,” Lillian said. “I just want a look at them is all. Where’s the harm in that?”
Aunt broke off her humming and leaned on her hoe.
“Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t,” she said. “I reckon only those little spirits could tell you the one way or t’other. I just know what my pappy told me. He said, ‘You be careful ’round the spirits. Once they take an interest in you… well, sometimes they take a liking, and sometimes they don’t. They’re like the wild cats thataway.’ ”
“I like the cats.”
Aunt nodded. “And I reckon they like you, seeing’s how you’re giving them a saucer of Annabelle’s milk every morning the way you do. I don’t mind ’em coming ’round. They keep the mice away. But you got to remember with a wild cat, you could be a-petting him calm as you please one day, and the next it’s a-scratching and a-clawing at you for no good reason you could ever put a finger on. There’s no accounting for them. No, sir. That’s what the spirits are like, girl. Folks like you and me, we can’t predict what they’ll do.”
“Maybe the fairies would like me the way the cats do.”
Aunt smiled and went back to her hoeing.
“I’ve heard tell,” she said as she worked the dirt, “that they’re kin of a kind. The way a squirrel and a rat are kin, them both being rodents. Pappy said everything living in the deep woods has got a bit of magic in it, but cats have more’n most. You ask the preacher and he’ll tell you it’s because they all got a bit of the devil in ’em.”
Lillian shook dirt from the weeds and dropped them in her basket. She liked it when Aunt talked about fairies and such. Most times she only told Lillian about practical things to do with running the farm.
“Have you ever seen a spirit?” she asked Aunt.
That earned her another smile. “Live in these hills long enough and sooner or later you’ll have seen pretty much everything. Your Uncle Ulyss used to tease me something fierce, but I hold to this day that one time I saw L’il Pater crossing the bottom of the field. He was walking on his hind legs, just like a little man, with a floppy hat on his head, big black boots on his feet, and a bag hanging on a stick he had slung over his shoulder. And following on behind him was a line of cats of every size and color.”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. I just stood there with my eyes big as saucers, staring and staring until the woods swallowed ’em all up like they’d never been there.” She laughed. “Which is what Ulyss said was the case. But I’ll tell you, I didn’t see a cat around this farm for two weeks after. And when they come back, they were slinking around like they’d spent the time they were gone doing nothing but drinking moonshine and dancing, and every time they had to move, it made them ache something fierce.”
Aunt went back to humming and Lillian tried to imagine what she would have done if she’d been the one to see L’il Pater.
The next morning she did her chores, just like every morning. She fed the chickens, throwing an extra handful of grain into the grass for the sparrows and other small birds that waited for the promise of her bounty in the branches of the wild rosebushes that grew nearby. She milked Annabelle, their one cow, and set out a saucer for the stray cats that would come out of the forest while she put the cow out to pasture and brought the milk in to Aunt. After a breakfast of biscuits and honeyed tea, she weeded the vegetable patch. If Aunt didn’t have any other chores for her, and she was done with her lessons, the rest of the day was hers to do what she wanted.
She set off on a ramble, running up the hill to leave a piece of one of her breakfast biscuits under the boughs of the Apple Tree Man.
That’s what Aunt called the oldest apple tree in their orchard gone wild. He stood near the very top of the hill, overlooking the meadow dotted with wildflowers and beehives and the other apple trees.
“Why do you call him that?” Lillian had asked the first time she’d heard his name. “Is there a real man living in the tree?”
He’d be a gnarled, twisty sort of a man, she thought, to live in that old, twisty tree. She probably daydreamed as much about him as she did fairies, especially when she was lying under his branches. Sometimes when she dozed there she imagined she could hear a distant voice telling stories that she never remembered when she woke.
“I don’t know the why or where of it,” Aunt replied. “But that’s what we’ve always called the oldest apple tree. Only we didn’t leave food out for him, like you do.” She shook her head. “You’re just feeding the raccoons and squirrels.”
Lillian didn’t think so—not at all. There was an Apple Tree Man, just like there were fairies and magic cats. He was shy, that was all. Private. But one day all the spirits of the Tanglewood Forest would know that she meant them no harm, and they would come to her and they’d all be friends.