William alexander's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

William woke to a clearing changed by wind. The storm had come through in the small hours and left the ground scattered with broken branches. He climbed down from the platform and walked the path he had cleared to the forest edge. Halfway there he stopped. A great oak had come down across the trail, its roots torn up in a wall of soil, its trunk thick with moss. Somewhere under it lay his signal marker. He found the sign twenty feet on, bent double against the ground. The white board was streaked with mud. The arrow that had pointed her way in now pointed sideways into the dirt. The flowers he had tied to it were stripped and gone. If she came to the edge this morning, she would see a broken pole and a fallen tree and read it as a door pulled shut. He had until she looked to fix it. He carried the sign back through the wet ferns to the small work cabin behind the cottage. Inside he set the pole across two sawhorses. He straightened the metal with a mallet, working slowly so the rust would not flake. He cut a fresh length of cedar for the post. He painted the arrow clean and re-hung the board. From a jar on the shelf he took dried tulips and dragonflies he had pressed weeks before and fixed them along the frame. The sign had to look tended, not just repaired. He went back to the fallen oak with an axe and a saw. The trunk was too wide to move whole. He cut a doorway through it instead, a clean gap wide enough for a person to step through without stooping. He left the rest of the tree where it lay. A path that went around the wound would have told her the storm had won. A path that went through it told her he had answered the storm. He was setting the mended sign back in its post-hole when he felt someone watching. A small figure stood at the far edge of the cut, no taller than his knee, wings folded, a crown of pale blossoms in her hair. Petal Willowbloom did not step closer. She looked at the doorway in the oak, then at the sign, then at him. "She saw it fall," she said. "I came to tell you before she decided what it meant." William set the post straight and tamped the soil around it. "Will you tell her it's open again?" Petal Willowbloom nodded once. "I'll tell her you cut a door." She turned and went back through the gap in the trunk. William stayed by the sign until he could no longer hear her wings. The clearing was quiet. The marker stood. The path was open. He had not lost the day. He had only spent it holding the door.