Will bush's Arc

Chapter 37 of 41

The knot held. Kate's palm stayed on it until the sun crossed the porch, and Will stayed one small thing under her hand. When she went inside, he did not scatter. He stayed pressed into that fist of dark wood above the step. The rest of the tree kept being tree. He tried to speak. He pushed his name toward her through the bark and the bark took it and gave nothing back. No thread now. No jar. Just wood and a knot and a sister who came out each morning with her cup. Elspeth found him from outside the wood. Her voice came in thin, the way it came when she stood beside the trunk. "You can't send words through a tree. Not this kind." "Then what do I do," Will said into the grain. "You listen. She'll talk. You'll hear." "She doesn't know I'm in here." "She put her hand on the knot and left it there till the sun moved," Elspeth said. "She knows." Elspeth did not stay. She had her own broken promise to sit with, and a child she still had to answer for. Will felt her go. Kate came out the next morning with two sugars in her coffee and sat on the step under the low branch. She did not speak at first. She drank. Then she reached up without looking and set her fingers on the knot. "I know it's you," she said. He pressed against her fingers from inside. She felt the wood warm and laughed once, quiet. After that she talked to him every day. She told him about the collie's bad leg. She told him when she planted new things by the step — chamomile, nasturtium, catnip for the cat, a scatter of wild blooms that pulled butterflies to the porch. She told him when a neighbor died. She told him when she forgot and set out two cups. He could not answer. But he heard. He held every word in the knot and did not trade a single one away. The years went by like that. Her hair went gray at the part first. Her hand on the knot got thinner. The garden by the step thickened into a small wild bed she tended sitting down. She stopped climbing the porch steps quickly. She stopped climbing them at all. One morning she came out slow, with a blanket, and sat under the branch a long time without her cup. She put her hand on the knot and left it there. "I'm tired, Will," she said. "I'm coming." He felt her hand go cool against the bark. He felt it stay. He felt the weight of her lean into the trunk and settle. Then he felt her stand up beside him, outside the wood, not old anymore. He let go of the knot. The bark closed smooth. He took her hand, and they went.