May Belle slid her eyes around suspiciously. “What kind?”
“Life in Colonial America.”
May Belle shook her head. “I want Bride or Miss America.”
“You can pretend these are bride paper dolls. They have lots of beautiful long dresses.”
“Whatsa matter with ’um?”
“Nothing. They’re brand-new.”
“How come you don’t want ’um if they’re so great?”
“When you’re my age”—Leslie gave a little sigh—“you just don’t play with paper dolls anymore. My grandmother sent me these. You know how it is, grandmothers just forget you’re growing up.”
May Belle’s one living grandmother was in Georgia and never sent her anything. “You already punched ’um out?”
“No, honestly. And all the clothes punch out, too. You don’t have to use scissors.”
They could see she was weakening. “How about,” Jess began, “you coming down and taking a look at ’um, and if they suit you, you could take ’um along home when you go tell Momma where I am?”
After they had watched May Belle tearing up the hill, clutching her new treasure, Jess and Leslie turned and ran up over the empty field behind the old Perkins place and down to the dry creek bed that separated farmland from the woods. There was an old crab apple tree there, just at the bank of the creek bed, from which someone long forgotten had hung a rope.
They took turns swinging across the gully on the rope. It was a glorious autumn day, and if you looked up as you swung, it gave you the feeling of floating. Jess leaned back and drank in the rich, clear color of the sky. He was drifting, drifting like a fat white lazy cloud back and forth across the blue.
“Do you know what we need?” Leslie called to him. Intoxicated as he was with the heavens, he couldn’t imagine needing anything on earth.
“We need a place,” she said, “just for us. It would be so secret that we would never tell anyone in the whole world about it.” Jess came swinging back and dragged his feet to stop. She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “It might be a whole secret country,” she continued, “and you and I would be the rulers of it.”
Her words stirred inside of him. He’d like to be a ruler of something. Even something that wasn’t real. “OK,” he said. “Where could we have it?”
“Over there in the woods where nobody would come and mess it up.”
There were parts of the woods that Jess did not like. Dark places where it was almost like being underwater, but he didn’t say so.
“I know”—she was getting excited—“it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope.” Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s find a place to build our castle stronghold.”
They had gone only a few yards into the woods beyond the creek bed when Leslie stopped.
“How about right here?” she asked.
“Sure,” Jess agreed quickly, relieved that there was no need to plunge deeper into the woods. He would take her there, of course, for he wasn’t such a coward that he would mind a little exploring now and then farther in amongst the ever-darkening columns of the tall pines. But as a regular thing, as a permanent place, this was where he would choose to be—here where the dogwood and redbud played hide and seek between the oaks and evergreens, and the sun flung itself in golden streams through the trees to splash warmly at their feet.
“Sure,” he repeated himself, nodding vigorously. The underbrush was dry and would be easy to clear away. The ground was almost level. “This’ll be a good place to build.”
Leslie named their secret land “Terabithia,” and she loaned Jess all of her books about Narnia, so he would know how things went in a magic kingdom—how the animals and the trees must be protected and how a ruler must behave. That was the hard part. When Leslie spoke, the words rolling out so regally, you knew she was a proper queen. He could hardly manage English, much less the poetic language of a king.
But he could make stuff. They dragged boards and other materials down from the scrap heap by Miss Bessie’s pasture and built their castle stronghold in the place they had found in the woods. Leslie filled a three-pound coffee can with crackers and dried fruit and a one-pound can with strings and nails. They found five old Pepsi bottles which they washed and filled with water, in case, as Leslie said, “of siege.”
Like God in the Bible, they looked at what they had made and found it very good.
“You should draw a picture of Terabithia for us to hang in the castle,” Leslie said.
“I can’t.” How could he explain it in a way Leslie would understand, how he yearned to reach out and capture the quivering life about him and how when he tried, it slipped past his fingertips, leaving a dry fossil upon the page? “I just can’t get the poetry of the trees,” he said.
She nodded. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You will someday.”
He believed her because there in the shadowy light of the stronghold everything seemed possible. Between the two of them they owned the world and no enemy, Gary Fulcher, Wanda Kay Moore, Janice Avery, Jess’s own fears and insufficiencies, nor any of the foes whom Leslie imagined attacking Terabithia, could ever really defeat them.