Will bush's Arc

Chapter 35 of 41

Morning came thin and gray over the daisy patch. Will knelt in the flowers with the thread still humming under his palms. Down the hill, Kate sat on her porch with the sealed jar in her lap. She had not moved since dawn. Elspeth stood at the edge of the patch, arms folded, waiting for him to decide. "She won't set it down," Will said. "No," Elspeth said. "And the pale one is already circling wide of the ridge. It will find the glass by dusk." Will watched his sister below. Kate turned the jar in her hands the way she used to turn a mug of coffee, thumb tracing the seam. He knew that motion. He had lost the memory of the kitchen where she learned it, traded weeks ago, but he still knew the motion. "She'll open it," he said. "Tonight. Tomorrow. She'll want to hear me again and she'll lift the lid and the pale one will be inside her yard before she gets the first word out." Elspeth said nothing. She had already said it. Will looked at the cherry tree by Kate's porch. Its blossoms were still turned toward the jar in her lap, pink faces pointed like small compasses. He thought about the tree. He thought about what a tree could hold that a jar could not. "I can't take the jar from her," he said. "She'd break before she let it go." "Then don't take it." "I have to put me somewhere else." Elspeth's eyes came up. She waited. "The tree," Will said. "The cherry by her porch. She sees it every morning. She sits under it. If I'm in the wood, the jar goes quiet. The pale one hunts the jar and finds seeds." "You'd fold the thread into the tree," Elspeth said. "You'd close the mouth of it. No voice through. No opening." "No opening ever," Will said. Elspeth was quiet a long moment. "You understand what that costs. She won't hear you again. Not through the jar. Not through anything you shaped this year." "She'll have the tree," Will said. "She'll sit under it and I'll be there." He called Hoot down from the pines. The owl came with the guitar slung across his back, feathers dulled by dew. "One chord," Will said. "Hold it while I move." Hoot looked at the daisies, then at the cherry tree far below. "Long chord." "Long as you can." Hoot set his fingers. The note opened, steady and low. Will pressed his hands into the soil and pushed everything he was down the thread, through the sealed jar, into the trunk of the cherry tree. The daisies went white and still. The jar in Kate's lap dimmed. The blossoms on the tree turned once, slow, and settled. Will was inside the wood. The thread was closed. Kate would never open it again.