Read Online Tree By Leaf by Cynthia Voigt - Free Book Online Page B

already dead. She looked quickly down at herself, the blouse, rumpled now from the exertions of running, the blue skirt hanging, the toes of her shoes with their laces threading back and forth between the eyelets. She didn’t think she was dead.
    “I—” she started to say. But she didn’t know what to say next and she thought she should have kept on waiting. Was she supposed to stand and wait? “What—” she tried next, which was no better.
    “You called to me,” the Voice said. “Knocking upon my door.”
    “No, I didn’t,” Clothilde said. “Did I?” Because the Voice must be right about everything. “Why are you saying that?”
    The Voice smiled. It wasn’t the way a grown-up smiled at something a child said, and it wasn’t the way someone smiled when he heard something funny. Itwasn’t exactly the way the whole world smiled on a bright day, but that was the closest.
    “I didn’t,” Clothilde repeated. She wasn’t going to be forced into saying something that wasn’t true.
    “Sit down,” the Voice told her. “Sit down up on this rock, and let your body rest.”
    That was what Clothilde wanted to do anyway. She sat down abruptly, Indian fashion, carefully arranging her skirt over her legs. Once she was sitting, she wanted to be standing again. She needed to move, she could feel that in her legs; but she wanted to sit still and silent, with not even the blood going around her body. This was more than frightened. This was fear of something you were glad to be afraid of. “What do you want me for?” she finally asked, looking out to the east, over the spreading sky and water, as if she could see the Voice.
    “To be my people, to know the creatures of land and sea and air, to know the leaf and to know the tree. To carry light in your hand as you step from one season to the next, to guard the light from darkness, guard the darkness from the—” The Voice stopped, as if it saw the smile Clothilde was hiding. Of course, the Voice couldn’t understand her question—it was too large to know how small she was—she understoodthat, but the smile rollicked along under her skin and the most she could do was to conceal it.
    “Yes,” the Voice said. Then, “Yes?”
    “I meant, what do you want me to do?”
    “You called to me,” the Voice said.
    “Do you mean, what do I want you to do?” she asked, so surprised that she didn’t hear the disrespectful speech until she had uttered it. “I’m sorry—I didn’t think—I shouldn’t have even—it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I shouldn’t have disturbed you, if I did. I didn’t mean to. It’s not important.”
    “The leaf grows and the tree grows; it is important.”
    Clothilde knew then what was happening, and she was ashamed. She knew why it had happened—because it was more than she could bear. To bear meant to carry, and her strength wasn’t equal to the weight of what piled up on her. Like an egg you pushed and pushed down on until its shell gave way, and your hand’s weight crushed the shell into the yolk and white, her brain had given way. She retreated into herself, to find her normal self again. Her crazy self—the self that thought she could call out and be answered, and be asked what she wanted—as if God had time—Clothilde was frightened of herself. She’d never been frightened of herself before, and that frightened hereven more And if the Voice might be real—which she half believed—which was the craziest thing about the whole—she felt her brain’s shell cracking.
    Clothilde jumped up, to stand on the rock with her hands on her hips and the sea before her and the trees behind her. Turning her face right up to face the sky, she called: “Why do you make wars, anyway?”
    It rose up, a great black wave from the sea. It curled over her. She was there where the air was thick yellow and red, where the thick air smelled of things burning, and of mud. She was there with whistling explosions, with voices crying out