gold in the green; red in the black
Hollis Norcoat had always seemed like a
giant, to his nephew—and he had that sort of giantess that seemed unnatainable,
as though no matter how much Paxton grew, he would always have to hurry just to
keep up. That day, in his heavy coat and with his giant, tan boots, his thick
beard and his smiling cheeks, Uncle Hollis looked like a huge bear—and a happy
one, at that.
The road wound endlessly up through the
avenues of trees—but Paxton didn’t mind. No matter how far they went, they
always somehow encountered new colors, brighter and richer, and trees that were
different than those down in the groves beside the house.
“More evergreen up here,” said the uncle.
“But just wait until we get to the top. I’ve got a thing or two to show you,
there. I used to take little Lucy up here every year, but she’s got a bit tired
of the trek. I knew you’d want to see it, though.”
The wind was icy, but the sun had a
warmth to it, whenever it fond a gap to slip through, and fall slantways onto
their shoulders. Paxton’s breath became a cloud that tried to block his eyes as
they climbed higher and higher. His lungs ached from the cold and his legs
burned from he climb, but with every step his wonder and excitement somehow
swelled.
It wasn’t long before they reached a spot
where his uncle put a hand on his shoulder and pointed to an upcoming break in
the trees, through which nothing but sky could be seen. “Just around this
corner,” he said eagerly.
Paxton could hardly help but run toward
the turn, and his uncle didn’t stop him. His breath escaped in bursts as he
ran, but when he came around the corner, and when he saw the reason that they’d
both come so far, he abandoned whatever little bit of breath he still
had.
Before him, the road slipped away into a
rolling bed of boulders and red rocks, tumbling into the endless expanse of
trees. But these trees were different than the ones they'd left around the
house. Most were those everyday evergreens, unchanging and familiar—but in
their midst, scattered like stars, stood trees of shining, solid gold. They
burned like torches amidst the mottled blue and grey, a pattern that wrinkled
and rippled into hills crowned in clouds like cotton candy.
It was unlike anything Paxton had ever
seen. He stood, unsure of what to say or do. His eyes were too busy for his
brain to really have any say. He was searching—as children often do, for
something b which he could make sense of this. Some means of appropriating this
glorious view, into something that he could hold onto more plainly.
Trees like fire. Like honey. Gold, like
his mother’s ring. Like…like something and yet entirely like nothing.
The problem with autumn, you see, is that
it really isn’t like anything. In fact, the more he stared, hunting for
words, the more he realized that this was the sort of thing that other
things were like—but that was itself like nothing but itself.
And there aren’t many things like that. He was lucky, in so short a life, to
have already encountered so many.
“Two weeks,” his uncle said. “Two weeks,
and all the yellow will be gone. They’ll drop their needles and the whole
hillside will turn black and white and blue with the snow. Just you
wait.”
Paxton heard these words with a pang of
stark, almost frustrated seriousness. He didn’t really want to see it. He
didn’t want to even think of the gold falling off, of snow coming down to cover
all this. It was a horrible thought.
“I don’t want to watch them die,” he
said.
“Die?” Hollis chuckled thinly. “Oh, son.
They don’t die. They only go to sleep. And the snow comes to tuck them in and
keep them warm until morning. And just you see this place then. It’s own
beauty, is spring. The colors against the ocean of green.” And then he put a
hand on the boy’s shoulder to say, “Nothing dies, really. Everything wakes, in
time.”
It was strange, to hear such gentle and
lovely words come from such a massive and rough-handed man. But it somehow made
sense, too. It was somehow autumnal. It reminded Paxton of the strength that
his little mother carried around inside her, and at once the thought of her
forced his eyes forward again. “I wish mum could see this,” he said.
“Oh don’t you worry,” said the uncle, and
the hand on the shoulder squeezed fondly. “She’ll see them again. Don’t you
worry.”
Together the two of them stood, watching
the collapse of the afternoon into evening, the sunlight giving out like
breaking pillars. The boy thought about his mother; about her little smiles and
sweet words and about how much he’d like to bring her here, and about that book
that she kept on the floor beside her chair, which she looked into every now
and then, to see the colors of the leaves.
The uncle thought of his sister. And he
thought of the trees—how soon they’d give up. He thought about her pale face,
with the cold and the dark looming around it. He saw her like gold against
green. And the boy who stood beside him, his mind and heart swelling with
wonder, was red against black. Something sturdy. Strong. Something that would
last.
There was something in him that the uncle
recognized. You see, people assume that, in order to truly be magical, a thing
has to be disordered, nonsensical, inexplicable—but it doesn’t. They try to
make sense of colors and they make sense of changing leaves and assume that
just because microscopes exist, real magic can’t.
Only they can’t change the fact that what
Paxton saw, on those hills, was fire. What he felt was glory, and it tingled.
Maybe magic doesn’t exist laboratories—and really why would it?
But it exists out there. And once you see
it, really see it, and once it gets into you, it changes you.
You see, the problem with “people” is
that they are most always wrong.
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