The young man did not listen to them. He only looked through his bag for some nails. He placed three of them in his mouth and attempted to hammer a fourth one into the tree. The first branches were now extremely high and he estimated that he needed four nails to use as footholds to reach them.
“Look at this idiot,” roared one of the watching men. “NO one else could chop it down with an ax, and this fool thinks he can do it with—”
The man fell silent.
THE FIRST nail entered the tree and was held steady after five blows. Then the second went in, and the young man started to climb.
By the fourth nail, he was up in the arms and continued on his way. He was tempted to call out as he did so, but he decided against it.
The climb seemed to last for miles. It took many hours for him to reach the final branches, and when he did, he found the word shaker asleep in her blankets and the clouds.
He watched her for many minutes.
The warmth of the sun heated the cloudy rooftop.
He reached down, touching her arm, and the word shaker woke up.
She rubbed her eyes, and after a long study of his face, she spoke.
“Is it really you?”
Is it from your cheek, she thought, that I took the seed? The man nodded.
His heart wobbled and he held tighter to the branches. “It is.”
TOGETHER, THEY stayed in the summit of the tree. They waited for the clouds to disappear, and when they did, they could see the rest of the forest.
“It wouldn’t stop growing,” she explained.
“But neither would this.” The young man looked at the branch that held his hand. He had a point.
When they had looked and talked enough, they made their way back down. They left the blankets and remaining food behind.
The people could not believe what they were seeing, and the moment the word shaker and the young man set foot in the world, the tree finally began to show the ax marks. Bruises appeared. Slits were made in the trunk and the earth began to shiver.
“It’s going to fall!” a young woman screamed. “The tree is going to fall!” She was right. The word shaker’s tree, in all its miles and miles of height, slowly began to tip. It moaned as it was sucked to the ground. The world shook, and when everything finally settled, the tree was laid out among the rest of the forest. It could never destroy all of it, but if nothing else, a different-colored path was carved through it.
The word shaker and the young man climbed up to the horizontal trunk. They navigated the branches and began to walk. When they looked back, they noticed that the majority of onlookers had started to return to their own places. In there. Out there. In the forest.
But as they walked on, they stopped several times, to listen. They thought they could hear voices and words behind them, on the word shaker’s tree.
For a long time, Liesel sat at the kitchen table and wondered where Max Vandenburg was, in all that forest out there. The light lay down around her. She fell asleep. Mama made her go to bed, and she did so, with Max’s sketchbook against her chest.
It was hours later, when she woke up, that the answer to her question came. “Of course,” she whispered. “Of course I know where he is,” and she went back to sleep.
She dreamed of the tree.
THE ANARCHIST’S SUIT COLLECTION
35 HIMMEL STREET,
DECEMBER 24
With the absence of two fathers,
the Steiners have invited Rosa
and Trudy Hubermann, and Liesel.