A. Tree's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

A. Tree had just handed an apple to the next person in line when a sound carried across the gap. It was high and panicked, a chorus of voices all at once. He turned. On the far side, the crowd had broken apart and clustered around something on the ground. A man stood at the front of the group waving a tall red beacon over his head, its light flashing hard against the gray sky. The man swung it back and forth and pointed down at his feet. A. Tree moved to the edge of the mud. He squinted across the fifty feet of soft earth. A child lay on the ground beside a fallen log, the kind with moss along its back and dark roots torn loose from the soil. The child was small and still. People had set down lanterns around the body in a rough circle, some tipped over with broken glass, candles guttering in the wind. They had emptied their hands of everything they carried so he would see. A woman knelt by the child's head and looked across the gap at him. Her face was the face he had spent a year trying to forget. A. Tree could not cross. He knew that. He had stopped them from crossing for the same reason. But the child needed something now, and an apple was the only thing he had. He reached up to his chest and snapped a branch free. The bark tore wide and sap ran down his trunk. He shaped the branch fast, stripping leaves until only a straight shaft remained, and pushed the reddest apple from his shoulder down onto its sharpened end. He stepped back, planted his roots, and threw. The branch arced over the mud. It came down hard in the soft earth two feet from the child. The apple held. The man with the beacon dropped it and lunged for the branch. He yanked the apple free and pressed it to the child's mouth. For a long moment nothing happened. A. Tree's bark ached where the branch had torn loose, and he could not breathe. Then the child's hand moved. The child bit. The crowd on the far side made a sound A. Tree felt in his roots. The woman lifted her daughter against her chest and looked across at him and nodded once. A. Tree nodded back. He turned to his line. They had all stopped to watch. He picked up the next apple from the basket and held it out to the next waiting hand. His shoulder was bleeding sap, and the gap was still there, and the child was breathing. That would have to be enough for today.