11
The Conjure Man
I do not think it had any friends, or mourners, except myself and a pair of owls.
—J. R. R. Tolkien, from the introductory note to Tree and Leaf
* * *
You only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.
—G. K. Chesterton, from The Man Who Was Thursday
* * *
The conjure man rode a red, old-fashioned bicycle with fat tires and only one, fixed gear. A wicker basket in front contained a small mongrel dog that seemed mostly terrier. Behind the seat, tied to the carrier, was a battered brown satchel that hid from prying eyes the sum total of all his worldly possessions.
What he had was not much, but he needed little. He was, after all, the conjure man, and what he didn’t have, he could conjure for himself.
He was more stout than slim, with a long grizzled beard and a halo of frizzy grey hair that protruded from under his tall black hat like ivy tangled under an eave. Nesting in the hatband were a posy of dried wildflowers and three feathers: one white, from a swan; one black, from a crow; one brown, from an owl. His jacket was an exhilarating shade of blue, the colour of the sky on a perfect summer’s morning. Under it he wore a shirt that was as green as a fresh-cut lawn. His trousers were brown corduroy, patched with leather and plaid squares; his boots were a deep golden yellow, the colour of buttercups past their prime.
His age was a puzzle, somewhere between fifty and seventy. Most people assumed he was one of the homeless—more colourful than most, and certainly more cheerful, but a derelict all the same—so the scent of apples that seemed to follow him was always a surprise, as was the good humour that walked hand in hand with a keen intelligence in his bright blue eyes. When he raised his head, that brim lifting, and he met one’s gaze, the impact of those eyes was a sudden shock, a diamond in the rough.
His name was John Windle, which could mean, if you were one to ascribe meaning to names, “favoured of God” for his given name, while his surname was variously defined as “basket,” “the red-winged thrush,” or “to lose vigour and strength, to dwindle.” They could all be true, for he led a charmed life; his mind was a treasure trove storing equal amounts of experience, rumour and history; he had a high clear singing voice; and though he wasn’t tall—he stood five-ten in his boots—he had once been a much larger man.
“I was a giant once,” he liked to explain, “when the world was young. But conjuring takes its toll. Now John’s just an old man, pretty well all used up. Just like the world,” he’d add with a sigh and a nod, bright eyes holding a tired sorrow. “Just like the world.”
There were some things even the conjure man couldn’t fix.
* * *
Living in the city, one grew used to its more outlandish characters, eventually noting them in passing with an almost familial affection: The pigeon lady in her faded Laura Ashley dresses with her shopping cart filled with sacks of birdseed and bread crumbs. Paperjack, the old black man with his Chinese fortune-teller and deft origami sculptures. The German cowboy who dressed like an extra from a spaghetti western and made long declamatory speeches in his native language to which no one listened.
And, of course, the conjure man.
Wendy St. James had seen him dozens of times—she lived and worked downtown, which was the conjure man’s principal haunt—but she’d never actually spoken to him until one day in the fall when the trees were just beginning to change into their cheerful autumnal party dresses.
She was sitting on a bench on the Ferryside bank of the Kickaha River, a small, almost waif-like woman in jeans and a white T-shirt, with an unzipped brown leather bomber’s jacket and hightops. In lieu of a purse, she had a small, worn knapsack sitting on the bench beside her and she was bent over a hardcover journal, which she spent more time staring at than actually writing in. Her hair was thick and blond, hanging down past her collar in a grown-out pageboy with a half-inch of dark roots showing. She was chewing on the end of her pen, worrying the plastic for inspiration.
It was a poem that had stopped her in mid-stroll and plunked her down on the bench. It had glimmered and shone in her head until she got out her journal and pen. Then it fled, as impossible to catch as a fading dream. The more she tried to recapture the impulse that had set her wanting to put pen to paper, the less it seemed to have ever existed in the first place. The annoying presence of three teenage boys clowning around on the lawn a half-dozen yards from where she sat didn’t help at all.
She was giving them a dirty stare when she saw one of the boys pick up a stick and throw it into the wheel of the conjure man’s bike as he came riding up on the park path that followed the river. The small dog in the bike’s wicker basket jumped free, but the conjure man himself fell in a tangle of limbs and spinning wheels. The boys took off, laughing, the dog chasing them for a few feet, yapping shrilly, before it hurried back to where its master had fallen.
Wendy had already put down her journal and pen and reached the fallen man by the time the dog got back to its master’s side.
“Are you okay?” Wendy asked the conjure man as she helped him untangle himself from the bike.
She’d taken a fall herself in the summer. The front wheel of her ten-speed struck a pebble, the bike wobbled dangerously and she’d grabbed at the brakes, but her fingers closed over the front ones first, and too hard. The back of the bike went up, flipping her right over the handlebars and she’d had the worst headache for at least a week afterwards.
The conjure man didn’t answer her immediately. His gaze followed the escaping boys.
“As you sow,” he muttered.
Following his gaze, Wendy saw the boy who’d thrown the stick trip and go sprawling in the grass. An odd chill danced up her spine. The boy’s tumble came so quickly on the heels of the conjure man’s words, for a moment it felt to her as though he’d actually caused the boy’s fall.
As you sow, so shall you reap.
She looked back at the conjure man, but he was sitting up now, fingering a tear in his corduroys, which already had a quiltwork of patches on them. He gave her a quick smile that traveled all the way up to his eyes and she found herself thinking of Santa Claus. The little dog pressed its nose up against the conjure man’s hand, pushing it away from the tear. But the tear was gone.
It had just been a fold in the cloth, Wendy realized. That was all.
She helped the conjure man limp to her bench, then went back and got his bike. She righted it and wheeled it over to lean against the back of the bench before sitting down herself. The little dog leaped up onto the conjure man’s lap.
“What a cute dog,” Wendy said, giving it a pat. “What’s her name?”
“Ginger,” the conjure man replied as though it was so obvious that he couldn’t understand her having to ask.
Wendy looked at the dog. Ginger’s fur was as grey and grizzled as her master’s beard without a hint of the spice’s strong brown hue.
“But she’s not at all brown,” Wendy found herself saying.
The conjure man shook his head. “It’s what she’s made of—she’s a gingerbread dog. Here.” He plucked a hair from Ginger’s back, which made the dog start and give him a sour look. He offered the hair to Wendy. “Taste it.”
Wendy grimaced. “I don’t think so.”
“Suit yourself,” the conjure man said. He shrugged and popped the hair into his own mouth, chewing it with relish.
Oh boy, Wendy thought. She had a live one on her hands.
“Where do you think ginger comes from?” the conjure man asked her.
“What, do you mean your dog?”
“No, the spice.”
Wendy shrugged. “I don’t know. Some kind of plant, I suppose.”
“And that’s where you’re wrong. They shave gingerbread dogs like our Ginger here and grind up the hair until all that’s left is a powder that’s ever so fine. Then they leave it out in the hot
sun for a day and half—which is where it gets its brownish colour.”
Wendy only just stopped herself from rolling her eyes. It was time to extract herself from this encounter, she realized. Well past the time. She’d done her bit to make sure he was all right and since the conjure man didn’t seem any worse for the wear from his fall—
“Hey!” she said as he picked up her journal and started to leaf through it. “That’s personal.”
He fended off her reaching hand with his own and continued to look through it.
“Poetry,” he said. “And lovely verses they are, too.”
“Please…”
“Ever had any published?”
Wendy let her hand drop and leaned back against the bench with a sigh.
“Two collections,” she said, adding, “and a few sales to some of the literary magazines.”
Although, she corrected herself, “sales” was perhaps a misnomer since most of the magazines only paid in copies. And while she did have two collections in print, they were published by the East Street Press, a small local publisher, which meant the bookstores of Newford were probably the only places in the world where either of her books could be found.
“Romantic, but with a very optimistic flavour,” the conjure man remarked as he continued to look through her journal where all her false starts and incomplete drafts were laid out for him to see. “None of that Sturm und drang of the earlier romantic era and more like Yeats’s twilight or, what did Chesterton call it? Mooreeffoc—that queerness that comes when familiar things are seen from a new angle.”
Wendy couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. What was he? A renegade English professor living on the street like some hedgerow philosopher of old? It seemed absurd to be sitting here, listening to his discourse.
The conjure man turned to give her a charming smile. “Because that’s our hope for the future, isn’t it? That the imagination reaches beyond the present to glimpse not so much a sense of meaning in what lies all around us, but to let us simply see it in the first place?”
“I…I don’t know what to say,” Wendy replied.
Ginger had fallen asleep on his lap. He closed her journal and regarded her for a long moment, eyes impossibly blue and bright under the brim of his odd hat.
“John has something he wants to show you,” he said.
Wendy blinked. “John?” she asked, looking around.
The conjure man tapped his chest. “John Windle is what those who know my name call me.”
“Oh.”
She found it odd how his speech shifted from that of a learned man to a much simpler idiom, even referring to himself in the third person. But then, if she stopped to consider it, everything about him was odd.
“What kind of something?” Wendy asked cautiously.
“It’s not far.”
Wendy looked at her watch. Her shift started at four, which was still a couple of hours away, so there was plenty of time. But she was fairly certain that interesting though her companion was, he wasn’t at all the sort of person with whom she wanted to involve herself any more than she already had. The dichotomy between the nonsense and substance that peppered his conversation made her uncomfortable.
It wasn’t so much that she thought him dangerous. She just felt as though she was walking on boggy ground that might at any minute dissolve into quicksand with a wrong turn. Despite hardly knowing him at all, she was already sure that listening to him would be full of the potential for wrong turns.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t have the time.”
“It’s something that I think only you can, if not understand, then at least appreciate.”
“I’m sure it’s fascinating, whatever it is, but—”
“Come along, then,” he said.
He handed her back her journal and stood up, dislodging Ginger who leapt to the ground with a sharp yap of protest. Scooping the dog up, he returned her to the wicker basket that hung from his handlebars, then wheeled the bike in front of the bench where he stood waiting for Wendy.
Wendy opened her mouth to continue her protest, but then simply shrugged. Well, why not? He really didn’t look at all dangerous and she’d just make sure that she stayed in public places.
She stuffed her journal back into her knapsack and followed as he led the way south along the park path up to where the City Commission’s lawns gave way to Butler University’s common. She started to ask him how his leg felt, since he’d been limping before, but he walked at a quick, easy pace—that of someone half his apparent age—so she just assumed he hadn’t been hurt that badly by his fall after all.
They crossed the common, eschewing the path now to walk straight across the lawn towards the G. Smithers Memorial Library, weaving their way in between islands of students involved in any number of activities, none of which included studying. When they reached the library, they followed its ivy-hung walls to the rear of the building where the conjure man stopped.
“There,” he said, waving his arm in a gesture that took in the entire area behind the library. “What do you see?”
The view they had was of an open space of land backed by a number of other buildings. Having attended the university herself, Wendy recognized all three: the Student Centre, the Science Building and one of the dorms, though she couldn’t remember which one. The landscape enclosed by their various bulking presences had the look of recently having undergone a complete overhaul. All the lilacs and hawthorns had been cut back, brush and weeds were now just an uneven stubble of ground covering, there were clumps of raw dirt, scattered here and there, where trees had obviously been removed, and right in the middle was an enormous stump.
It had been at least fifteen years since Wendy had had any reason to come here in behind the library. But it was so different now. She found herself looking around with a “what’s wrong with this picture?” caption floating in her mind. This had been a little cranny of wild wood when she’d attended Butler, hidden away from all the trimmed lawns and shrubbery that made the rest of the university so picturesque. But she could remember slipping back here, journal in hand, and sitting under that huge…
“It’s all changed,” she said slowly. “They cleaned out all the brush and cut down the oak tree….”
Someone had once told her that this particular tree was—had been—a rarity. It had belonged to a species not native to North America—the Quercus robur, or common oak of Europe—and was supposed to be over four hundred years old, which made it older than the university, older than Newford itself.
“How could they just…cut it down…?” she asked.
The conjure man jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the library. “Your man with the books had the work done—didn’t like the shade it was throwing on his office. Didn’t like to look out and see an untamed bit of the wild hidden in here disturbing his sense of order.”
“The head librarian?” Wendy asked.
The conjure man just shrugged.
“But—didn’t anyone complain? Surely the students…”
In her day there would have been protests. Students would have formed a human chain around the tree, refusing to let anyone near it. They would have camped out, day and night. They…
She looked at the stump and felt a tightness in her chest as though someone had wrapped her in wet leather that was now starting to dry out and shrink.
“That tree was John’s friend,” the conjure man said. “The last friend I ever had. She was ten thousand years old and they just cut her down.”
Wendy gave him an odd look. Ten thousand years old? Were we exaggerating now or what?
“Her death is a symbol,” the conjure man went on. “The world has no more time for stories.”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” Wendy said.
He turned to look at her, eyes glittering with a strange light under the dark brim of his hat.
“She was a Tree of Tales,” he said. “There are very few of them left, just as the
re are very few of me. She held stories, all the stories the wind brought to her that were of any worth, and with each such story she heard, she grew.”
“But there’s always going to be stories,” Wendy said, falling into the spirit of the conversation even if she didn’t quite understand its relevance to the situation at hand. “There are more books being published today than there ever have been in the history of the world.”
The conjure man gave her a sour frown and hooked his thumb towards the library again. “Now you sound like him.”
“But—”
“There’s stories and then there’s stories,” he said, interrupting her. “The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you’ve heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on and the giving only makes you feel better.
“The others are just words on a page.”
“I know that,” Wendy said.
And on some level she did, though it wasn’t something she’d ever really stopped to think about. It was more an instinctive sort of knowledge that had always been present inside her, rising up into her awareness now as though called forth by the conjure man’s words.
“It’s all machines now,” the conjure man went on. “It’s a—what do they call it?—high tech world. Fascinating, to be sure, but John thinks that it estranges many people, cheapens the human experience. There’s no more room for the stories that matter, and that’s wrong, for stories are a part of the language of dream—they grow not from one writer, but from a people. They become the voice of a country, or a race. Without them, people lose touch with themselves.”
“You’re talking about myths,” Wendy said.
The conjure man shook his head. “Not specifically—not in the classical sense of the word. Such myths are only a part of the collective story that is harvested in a Tree of Tales. In a world as pessimistic as this has become, that collective story is all that’s left to guide people through the encroaching dark. It serves to create a sense of options, the possibility of permanence out of nothing.”