Chapter Twelve

Blue bonnets, Indian paintbrushes, and cottony wish-makers taunted Jeremy through the glass of Mrs. Rochard’s classroom. They gloated in the sunlight, wavering on a warm wind that descended out of an impeccable blue sky. Soon, he would be free. In three weeks, another school year would be over, and the wet, hot summer days would be his and his alone. Mrs. Rochard still trashed their homework, Coach Penicillin still switched the traffic light to red at every lunch, but the prospect of summer kept Jeremy going. He had already started celebrating the lengthening days with an hour’s walk in Twin Hills after school hunting that elusive, tantalizing magic that would free him from this world. If he could get through these last weeks, he would be free to find it—and to escape.

Jeremy turned away from the window and dove into the golden woods of Lothlórien, mesmerized by the world Tolkien had created with long, unending sentences. He felt eyes on him and knew that he would soon be called back into the dreary cinderblock-walled schoolroom. Jeremy glanced up, trying to avoid Mrs. Rochard’s scrutinizing eye. She was staring in his direction, but not at him. Everyone in the room was quiet, backs still bent over the assignment Jeremy had already finished. Jeremy followed her gaze to Travis’ desk. It was empty. Jeremy tried to remember the last time he had seen Travis at school—or even home, for that matter—and found that he couldn’t. Had Travis moved away? No, he’d never get that lucky. Jeremy sighed and returned to the Elven lament for Gandalf.

At lunch, he asked Mira and Daniel, “Hey, have you seen Travis around?”

Mira shook her head.

Daniel leaned close over the table. “I heard that he got sick from swimming in the pond in Twin Hills ‘cause it’s polluted.”

Jeremy shrugged. “It’s no dirtier than the canal.”

“As if that’s an improvement,” Mira laughed. “I don’t see you swimming in the canal either. Oh, I didn’t tell y’all. Mom says we might get a swimming pool this summer. If we do, you have to come over and swim.”

Somehow, he miraculously had no homework. He dropped his backpack on the floor of his room and turned to head out to the woods. His mom stopped him in the hallway.

“Where are you going?”

“To the woods.”

“Do you swim in that pond out there?”

“No, ma’am. Never. It’s gross.”

“Don’t you ever touch it.”

He nodded.

“Do you remember Travis?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“He has leukemia.” His mom, forever the nurse, shifted into technical descriptions when talking about things she didn’t like.

“Leu… what?”

“It’s a type of cancer affecting bone marrow.”

“Oh.” Jeremy remembered his Granny Jean. She had died from cancer on a day when it snowed in southeast Texas. He was convinced the snow was God’s way of saying He was sorry. “Will he die?”

She swallowed. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. They are fighting it. I just got a call from his step-mom today. She wants everyone to know. Don’t go swimming in that pond. You stay away from it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Jeremy walked to the pond, staring at the rainbow-slicked black water covered in fluorescent green algae. What was in the pond that caused leukemia? How did they know that the pond had caused it? Both his mom and Daniel had said it. How did people fight cancer? How did they fight something they couldn’t see or touch?

He found his feet at the base of the old Tree and climbed up into the oak’s branches. Sitting on the tilted trunk, he pulled his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and stared into the green space of the other trees’ branches and the smaller tallows that grew in their shadows. Jeremy didn’t know how to feel. Travis hadn’t been a good person to him. Of course, he hadn’t been a good person to Travis either. Had that caused the cancer? If cancer was in the pond, how could he be sure no one else caught it?

The questions settled into a calm quiescence, like a pool smoothing its ripples to more accurately reflect the sky. Warmth exuded from the Tree, tickling the back of his neck as it enveloped him. His breathing slowed and then stopped, and he exchanged air through his skin, through his hair—the way a tree breathes. Golden stalks of light like ephemeral reeds grew up the trunks of the trees, along their branches, until the forest was clothed in a translucent, dancing light. He absorbed the air, then pushed it out, as though a giant hand were squeezing him like a sponge. There was no pain; only a calm, perfect peace.

A black tarry mass appeared in the center of the clearing, sucking away all the tendrils of light that it touched. The heavy stuff rolled toward him; it oozed up the bark of the tree, pushing a terrified, icy wind before it. Jeremy’s toes curled inside his shoes and he pressed against the branch at his back. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that he didn’t want to touch it.

This is what kills the brethren, said an ancient voice in his mind. This is what your kind have inflicted upon us. If you look for a way to begin, stop this. The stuff flowed around his ankles, capturing his legs with an icy grip, freezing his muscles in place. He fought for air and pulled at his feet. In a moment, he was falling. He caught the branch behind him with a white-knuckled grip as air flooded back into his lungs. He coughed, shaking his head. It felt as if one of the shadows of Helter Skelter walked behind him, but there was nothing there. The black ooze had vanished. The stalks of light had vanished. The same old clearing stared back at him, empty, as he steadied himself on the tree.

Jeremy looked around, but there was definitely no one else in the clearing. What had that been? He summoned his courage and asked, voice cracking, “What am I supposed to do? I’m just a kid.”

A savage wind swirled through the clearing. He scrambled behind the branch at his back, holding on with both arms. The Tree bowed in the wind as the harsh, God-like voice pummeled words into his mind. This is what your kind have inflicted on us. Stop this. The heavy residue of black goo clogged his veins, rolling in its amoebic flow toward his heart. Stop this.

Ice crept through his convulsing muscles and his hands slipped on the branch. “Okay! Stop it! Stop it! I’ll do it!” The wind disappeared, the frigid weight vaporized, and he clambered down the Tree in a mad rush of limbs, only to crumble onto the pine needles at the base of the upended roots. The clearing spun around him, dizzying shifts of color from green to brown to green. He vomited on the needles and collapsed.

The sapling lay at Daronwy’s roots, prone and unmoving in the fallen leaves. Was it too much, too heavy a touch? Had Daronwy misjudged the boy’s abilities when he forced his energy onto him? He lay there, not unlike the tree, staring at the blue sky above, taking refuge in that great expanse that neither of them would ever be equal to, breathing in panicked gasps. Daronwy could feel the boy’s minuscule mind racing with questions; Daronwy was alternately God and the Devil, then, even more terrifying, something else entirely. The brethren around Daronwy had awakened when he touched Jeremiah, aware of the new member in their midst; aware of a new party in the eternal conversation of the wind; aware of the tiny voice and the troubling uncertainty that it brought. On the warm wind they pondered what Daronwy had done, touching this inconsequential being.

Daronwy answered, “I do not believe this boy to be an inconsequential being. I believe he has ability, great ability even, to change his kind’s destructive ways, if only his thicketed mind would open enough to accept that fact.”

“Pollution: The contamination of soil, water, or the atmosphere by the discharge of noxious substances.” Pictures of pipes vomiting brown sludge into surly red rivers vied with spewing smokestacks for space on the page. In the last weeks of school, encyclopedias replaced the Fellowship of the Ring. How bad was pollution? The canal and Twin Hills overflowed with ancient tires, barrels, washing machines, and dishwashers, all in varying states of decay. The marshes and bayous oozed black, rainbow-slicked water. Refineries billowed steam and hydrogen sulfide. So, if everything was already polluted, it became a question of time. How fast was it happening? How long would it be until there was no turning back? Jeremy needed to know if he had enough time to grow up or if he had to act now.

He dedicated a new section of his spiral notebook to the figures he would need. The number of tons of sulfur dioxide released in a year, the number of gallons of sewage leached into waterways, the estimated pesticide runoff in the rivers. But staring at the numbers, he couldn’t put it together. Regardless of how he added, subtracted, multiplied, or divided, the numbers would not tell him the number of years he had to stop pollution. The encyclopedias taught him about types of pollution, about remedies like recycling, but did not have any information on how fast things were happening. Jeremy scoured the school’s library, but there was even less there than in the encyclopedia. He would have to go to the Port Arthur Library. They had more books there than he had ever seen. The answer would be there, if anywhere.

When Mrs. Rochard forced him to close the encyclopedia and pay attention to her science lesson on convection—how a spoon left in soup gets hot because heat travels through the metal of the spoon—Jeremy started doodling. He drew a flag and wrote a motto for a pollution club. That would be a start at least, until he could figure out what else to do. He wondered if he could convince Daniel and Mira to join.