Maple Jack's Arc

Chapter 14 of 14

By evening the wind had quieted, and Maple Jack stood empty of red. His branches felt strange without the weight he had carried for seven winters. He listened toward the south and heard the children's voices change. They were not repeating his stories back anymore. They were telling them forward, to each other, the way children pass a song from mouth to mouth. A woman's voice joined them, steady and warm, reading aloud. She was reading his words. He understood then that the sparks had not only landed at the bus shelter. Someone had gathered them up and carried them inside, to a place built for stories to be heard. The place was a small building near the day care, painted bright, with rows of books along the walls and a soft rug where the children sat. He could not see it, but he could feel the shape of it through the spark-trail that still hummed faintly in the air. One of the older children held a round glass orb in her lap, a thing the library kept for story hour. When she tipped it, pages turned inside the glass and a soft light moved across her face. His story about the girl in Yellowknife and the lost mitten was inside it now, glowing where she could reach it whenever she wanted. She would not have to wait for him again. None of them would. Outside the library the older children had hung a red and white banner across two posts, the maple leaf bright in the last of the sun. They had set out blankets on the grass and stacked small books beside them. Tomorrow was Canada Day. They would read his stories to each other in the morning, and again at bedtime, and again whenever they wanted, because the stories belonged to them now. Dorothy Sullivan stood at the edge of the grass in her crossing vest, watching the children settle. She looked once toward his corner, two blocks north, and lifted a hand. He could not lift one back. He let his lowest branch dip instead, and she nodded as if she had seen it. Inside his trunk the yellow spark stirred, still small, still unripe. It would take its own time. He understood now that he did not have to push it. The hard stories were gone. The held one was gone. The groove the mitten story had worn in him was empty, and the emptiness did not hurt the way he had feared. It felt like a cleared shelf. When the yellow spark was ready, in a season or in seven, there would be children to receive it, and a woman to read it, and a glass orb to hold it. He had built that road by walking it. Maple Jack settled into his bark as the sun dropped behind the grain elevator. The children's voices carried up the corridor one last time, softer now, a story about kindness he had carried so long he had almost forgotten its ending. A child finished the last line for him. He had not known anyone else remembered it. He let his leaves go still. The waiting was over. The stories were where they belonged, and so was he.