panic that circled all about me, like a pesky, yapping dog, bouncing on its
pipestem legs, waiting for a chance to sink its needle teeth in me. Nothing
one could fight, nothing one could stand against – a little yapping panic
that set the nerves on edge.
There was no fear of danger, for there was no danger. One could see
with half an eye that there was no danger. But there was, perhaps worse than
any danger, the silence and the loneliness and the sameness and the not
knowing where you were.
Down the slope was the wet and swampy area where Stiffy’s shack should
be, and there, a little farther off, the silver track of river that ran at
the edge of town. And at the place where the river bent toward the south, a
plume of smoke rose daintily against the blue wash of the sky – so faint and
far a trickle that one could barely make it out.
‘Tupper!’ I shouted, running down the slope, glad of a chance to run,
of some reason I should run, for I had been standing, determined not to run,
determined not to allow the little yapping panic to force me into running,
and all the time I’d stood there I had ached to run.
I crossed the little ridge that hid the river and the camp lay there
before me – a tiny hut of crudely woven branches, a garden full of growing
things, and all along the river bank little straggling, dying trees, with
most of their branches dead and bearing only a few tassels of green leaves
at their very tops.
A small campfire burned in front of the hut and squatting by the fire
was Tupper. He wore the shirt and trousers I had given him and he still had
the outrageous hat perched on his head.
‘Tupper!’ I shouted and he rose and came gravely up the slope to meet
me. He wiped off his chin and held out his hand in greeting. It still was
wet with slobber, but I didn’t mind.
Tupper wasn’t much, but he was another human.
‘Glad you could make it, Brad,’ he said. ‘Glad you could drop over.’
As if I’d been dropping over every day, for years.
‘Nice place you have,’ I said.
‘They did it all for me,’ he said, with a show of pride. ‘The Flowers
fixed it up for me. It wasn’t like this to start with, but they fixed it up
for me. They have been good to me.’
‘Yes, they have,’ I said.
I didn’t know what it was all about, but I went along. I had to go
along. There was just a chance that Tupper could get me back to Millville.
‘They’re the best friends I have,’ said Tupper, slobbering in his
happiness. ‘That is, except for you and your papa. Until I found the
Flowers, you and your papa were the only friends I had. All the rest of them
just made fun of me. I let on I didn’t know that they were making fun, but I
knew they were and I didn’t like it.’
‘They weren’t really unkind,’ I assured him. ‘They really didn’t mean
what they said or did. They were only being thoughtless.’
‘They shouldn’t have done it,’ Tupper insisted. ‘You never made any fun
of me. I like you because you never made any fun of me.’
And he was right, of course. I’d not made fun of him. But not because I
hadn’t wanted to at times; there were times when I could have killed him.
But my father had taken me off to the side one day and warned me that if he
ever caught me making fun of Tupper, like the other kids, he would warm my
bottom.’
‘This is the place you were telling me about,’ I said. ‘The place with
all the flowers.’
He grinned delightedly, drooling from both corners of his mouth ‘Ain’t
it nice?’ he said.
We had been walking down the slope together and now we reached the
fire. A crude clay pot was standing in the ashes and there was something
bubbling in it.
‘You’ll stay and eat with me,’ invited Tupper. ‘Please, Brad, say
you’ll stay and eat with me. It’s been so long since I’ve had anyone who
would eat with me.’
Weak tears were running down his cheeks at the thought of how long it
had been since he’d had someone who would stay and eat with him.
‘I got corn and potatoes roasting in the coals,’ he said, ‘and I got
peas and beans and carrots all cooked up together. That’s them in the pot.
There isn’t any meat. You don’t mind, do you, if there isn’t any meat?’
‘Not at all,’ I told him.
‘I miss meat something dreadful,’ he confided. ‘But they can’t do
anything about it. They can’t turn themselves into animals.’
‘They?’ I asked.
‘The Flowers,’ he said, and the way he said it, he made them a proper
noun. ‘They can turn themselves into anything at all – plant things, that
is. But they can’t make themselves into things like pigs or rabbits. I never
asked them to. That is, I mean I never asked them twice. I asked them once
and they explained to me. I never asked again, for they’ve done a lot of
things for me and I am grateful to them.’
‘They explained to you? You mean you talk with them.’
‘All the time,’ said Tupper.
He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the hut, scrabbling
around for something, with his back end sticking out, like a busy dog
digging out a woodchuck.
He backed out and he brought with him a couple of crude pottery plates,
lopsided and uneven. He put them down upon the ground and laid on each of
them a spoon carved out of wood.
‘Made them myself,’ he told me. ‘Found some clay down in the river bank
and at first I couldn’t seem to do it, but then they found out for me
and…’
‘The Flowers found out for you?’
‘Sure, the Flowers. They do everything for me.’
‘And the spoons?’
‘Used a piece of stone. Flint, I guess. Had a sharp edge on it. Nothing
like a knife, but it did the job. Took a long time, though.’
I nodded.
‘But that’s all right,’ he said. ‘I had a lot of time.’
He did a mopping job and wiped his hands meticulously on his trouser
seat.
‘They grew flax for me,’ he said, ‘so I could make some clothes. But I
couldn’t get the hang of it. They told me and they told me, but I couldn’t
do it. So they finally quit. I went around without no clothes for quite a
spell. Except for this hat,’ he said. ‘I did that myself, without no help at
all. They didn’t even tell me, I figured it all out and did it by myself.
Afterwards they told me that I’d done real good.’
‘They were right,’ I said. ‘It’s magnificent.’ ‘You really think so,
Brad?’
‘Of course I do,’ I said.
‘I’m glad to hear you say so, Brad. I’m kind of proud of it. It’s the
first thing in my life I ever did alone, without no one telling me.’
‘These flowers of yours…’
‘They ain’t my flowers,’ said Tupper, sharply.
‘You say these flowers can turn themselves into anything they want to.
You mean they turned themselves into garden stuff for you.’
‘They can turn themselves into any kind of plants. All I do is ask
them.’
‘Then, if they can be anything they want to be, why are they all
flowers?’
‘They have to be something, don’t they?’ Tupper demanded, rather
heatedly. ‘They might as well be flowers.’
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose they might.’
He raked two ears of corn out of the coals and a couple of potatoes. He
used a pot-lifter that looked as if it were fashioned out of bark to get the
pot off the fire. He dumped the cooked vegetables that were in it out onto
the plates.
‘And the trees?’ I asked.
‘Oh, them are things they changed themselves into. I needed them for
wood. There wasn’t any wood to start with and I couldn’t do no cooking and I
told them how it was. So they made the trees and they made them special for
me. They grow fast and die so that I can break branches off and have dry
wood for fire. Slow burning, though, not like ordinary dry wood. And that’s
good, for I have to keep a fire burning all the time. I had a pocket full of
matches when I came here, but I haven’t had any for a long, long time.’
I remembered when he spoke about the pocket full of matches how
entranced he had always been with fire. He always carried matches with him