Maple Jack's Arc

Chapter 6 of 14

The corridor closed behind the grain elevator with a soft sigh, and the weathervane swung full west. Nine sparks were gone. One remained. Maple Jack felt the Yellowknife mitten story on his lowest branch, deep red, almost black, pressing into the groove it had worn over seven winters. He turned his attention inward to look at it properly for the first time in years. He had been carrying it so long he had forgotten to check what it had become. Around the spark, inside his wood, a small structure had grown up. Stones, river-smoothed, fitted together without mortar. A low door. Two dark windows. He recognized it without being told: the house the girl had walked from, two miles into a January that did not end, mitten in her bare hand. The story had built itself a shelter inside him. A thin river curled past the doorstep in his memory, clear water moving under ice. The spark sat on the threshold like a coal in a hearth that had gone cold around it. Something else was in the house. Maple Jack saw it crouched beside the spark, robed in dark rags, hunched over a black book. Smoke rose from the open pages in slow curls. The creature was reading his story to itself, and where its fingers touched the paper, the edges browned and crumbled. He understood then what the smoke was. The story was beginning to rot. He had held it so long that the holding itself had started to eat it. If he waited another winter, there would be nothing left to send. He looked again at the spark on the threshold. It was heavy, yes. Ripe, yes. But the weight was not only the weight of the kindness. It was the weight of his shame for keeping it. The girl had walked two miles in the cold for a stranger. He had sat on his corner for seven winters and not walked the story two blocks. He saw, finally, what the spark still needed. Not more time. A small companion. He pulled from higher in his bark a lighter spark, pale pink and mint, barely formed — the soft shape of a child's own small kindness, the kind the waiting children had shown him when they made up stories and said he was coming tomorrow. He set it against the red one. The two touched. The red spark drank the pale light and steadied. The rotten figure in the stone house closed its book and faded into the smoke it had been making. Maple Jack lifted the Yellowknife spark off the branch. The groove in his bark stayed, pale and bare, but the weight was gone from it. The corridor was closed. He could not send the spark today. He held it now in his upper branches, ready, clean, no longer rotting. He would wait for the next quiet wind. For the first time in seven winters, waiting did not feel like failure.