Harriet Doerr Read Online Free Page B

mountain fever, from which he recovered after two months in a hospital.
    Then he raised one hand and smiled. “But,” said Mr. Doi, and, repeating the word “But,” went on to tell me there was a stand of cottonwoods near the headquarters of the camp. When night fell, the men of the Japanese families went to these trees and broke off branches, which they planted in the ground around their houses.
    Mr. Doi, a small, wiry man, lifted his hand again and smiled. “We poured water on these branches and they grew,” he said, still smiling. “And by the time we left,” he went on, “there was shade, shade everywhere.”
    And at that moment I wanted to apologize and bow a formal bow to Mr. Hajime Doi, as I wished I had bowed to the caretaker of the Japanese house seventy-five years ago.
    I think of a conference in Park City, Utah, where I spoke one afternoon to a number of published and unpublished writers. I explained my late start as an author after forty-two years of writing “housewife” on my income tax form. These years without a profession, from 1930 to 1972, were also the years of my marriage. Hands were raised after my talk, and I answered questions. The final one was from a woman who assumed, incorrectly, these were decades of frustration. “And were you happy for those forty-two years?” she asked, and I couldn’t believe the question. I asked her to repeat it, and she said again, “Were you happy for those forty-two years?”
    It was then that I said, “I never heard of anyone being happy for forty-two years,” and went on, “And would a person who was happy for forty-two years write a book?”
    My son called to say he was dying. He had fallen down and couldn’t get up.
    I think of what it is like to write stories. It is a completion. It is discovering something you didn’t know you’d lost. It is finding an answer to a question you never asked.
    I think of all our children. Let us celebrate the light-haired, the dark-haired, and the redheads, the tall ones and the short ones, the black-eyed, brown-eyed, and blue-eyed, the straight ones and the gay ones. Let us celebrate our vision, clear or clouded, central or peripheral. Let us celebrate our uneasy foot-hold on our shaken planet.
    Now here is my fierce old companion, half threat, half friend. If I listen, I can hear him breathe. I see him sidelong. Sidelong, he sees me. We are still in step after all this time, my tiger in the grass and I.
     
     
    —April 9-May 18, 1995

Part II
    First Work

1
    The Flowering Stick A fable for Carmer Hadley

    Once there was a far-off country ruled by a king who ordered his privy council to order the earls to order the mayors to order the constables to carry out the royal edicts. Thus the king was privileged to command his subjects as he pleased, by wisdom or by whim. But in all the realm there was only one who could turn dreams to substance, and that was the magician.
    On the shortest day of the year, when dusk fell in midafternoon and the air was bitter with wind and snow, a beggar woman went to the magician’s door and, after hesitating until her fingers froze, found courage to knock. When the magician came, she saw behind him logs burning on the hearth, a lamp lit, and brightly covered chairs as soft as newly shorn wool. She sat in one, with her bare feet on the rug and her hands stretched to the fire.
    The magician said nothing, and at last the, beggar woman spoke. “I have three wishes. Can you help me?” He asked what they were. When she described them, he said that, though he could make a fish walk and a tiger sing, the first two wishes were unattainable.
    “The last one, though,” he said, contemplating her. “The third wish, perhaps.”
    Then he opened a cupboard door, took out a crooked stick as long as a cripple’s cane, and said, “Walk with this.”
    “I didn’t ask for a stick,” said the beggar woman.
    The magician led her to the door in silence and watched her disappear among the hurrying