Speck made it, I am sure, from here to there, and lived on a rocky shore, the bright Pacific her daily companion as she gathered mussels and clams and crabs from tidal pools, slept on the sand. She would be brown as a berry, her hair a tangle of knots, her arms and legs strong as ropes from swimming in the sea. In one long breath, she would exhale the story of her journey across the country, the pines of Pennsylvania, the cornfields and wheatfields and soybeans of the Midwest, sunflowers of Kansas, up the steep pitch of the Divide, summer snow in the Rockies, Painted Desert beyond, and finally ocean in view, oh joy! And then: What took you so long? And I would give her my story, this story and Henry Day’s, until in her arms again I slept. Only through imagining could I bear the pain. Such a dream drew me homeward step by tortured step.
The other faeries took kind care of me upon my return to camp next morning. Onions and Béka scoured the woods for balm to soothe my blistered feet. Chavisory limped off to the cistern and drew a jug of cool water to quench my thirst and wash the ash from my skin and hair. My old friends sat beside me to hear the adventure and to help me salvage my literary remains. Only a few scraps from the past survived to prove that it had once existed. I told them all I could remember about Speck’s map on the ceiling and the art she had left behind, hoping to store it in the collective consciousness of the tribe.
“You’ll simply have to remember,” said Luchóg.
“Rely upon the mind, for it is a complicated machine inside your skull,” Smaolach said. “I can still recall exactly how I felt when I first saw you.”
“What the memory loses, imagination re-creates.” Chavisory had been spending far too much time with my old friend.
“Sometimes I don’t know whether life’s strange turns happened or I dreamed them, or if my memory remembers what is real or the dream.”
“A mind often makes its own world,” said Luchóg, “to help pass the time.”
“I’ll need paper. Do you remember when you first got me some paper, Luchóg? That kindness I’ll never forget.”
From memory, I transferred Speck’s map on the ceiling to the back of her letter, and in the weeks that followed, I asked Smaolach to find me a detailed map of the country and any book he could about California and the Pacific Ocean. She might be anyplace along the northern coast. There was no certainty that I would find her in the large, wide land, but the possibility sustained me as I began again. My feet healed as I sat quietly in our camp, writing every day outdoors while the heat of August gave way to the cool weeks of early autumn.
As the maples flamed to yellow and red, and the oaks to crispy brown, a strange sound drifted now and again from the town and over the hills to our camp. Emanating from the church on still nights, the music arrived in starts and fits, broken now and again by other sounds—traffic on the highway, crowds roaring at Friday night football games, and the chatter of noise that intrudes upon modern life. Running like a river, the music forked through the forest and spilled down from the ridge into our glen. Entranced by the sudden sound, we would stop to listen, and mad with curiosity, Luchóg and Smaolach set out to find its source. They came back breathless with news one late October night.
“Stay just a short while, a stoirín, and it will be ready.”
By the light of the fire, I was lashing a leather strap to my travel pouch. “And what will be ready, my friend?”
He cleared his throat, and when he still did not get my attention, he coughed again, but louder. I looked up to see him grinning and Luchóg holding an unrolled poster almost as big as himself. All but his hands and feet had disappeared behind the broadside.
“You have it upside down, Luch.”
“Surely you can read it any which way,” he complained, and then he righted the poster. The concert at the church was scheduled for two days hence, and I was struck by not only the title but, underneath it, a small woodcut engraving of two figures in flight and pursuit.
“Which one is the faery, and which is the child?”
Smaolach considered the artwork. “No matter what you think, you’re just as likely to be right as wrong. But you’ll stay for the symphony? Composed by Henry Day, and him playing the organ as well.”
“You can’t miss that,” Luchóg argued. “Another day or two, and the journey is just as long.”