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By Root 2065 0

was walking, but he could not actually feel his feet touching the ground; it was more like the kind of wayfaring that we do in dreams, moving soundlessly and effortlessly from place to place, maybe even leaving the ground and flying. He must have flown over a few of those mountains. Journey within a journey: fish leaping for him on the still pools of a richly imagined creek that looked so much like the west fork of Shop Creek near the village of Spunkwater, just over the mountain from home. Even the distant chimneys and school-house bell tower of Spunkwater, where he hadn’t been in longer than he could remember, he remembered still as looking like that, or created them to look that way: familiar and comfortable and welcoming. The village had been named by some early drought-stricken settler after the lifesaving rainwater that remains in the cavities of trees or stumps, from the Scottish “sponge-water.” The drinking of spunkwater is supposed to cure you of wanderlust or make you handsome, one or the other or both, just as the waters of Solgohachia give you marital success.

If Nail actually stopped at Spunkwater for a sip of the leftover rainwater, then he was cured of his roaming and would never do it again, and was transformed back into a good-looking man. If he only imagined that he had reached Spunkwater, the last community before you approach Stay More from the east, then he was a beggar riding his wish and spurring it on beyond its endurance.

He would never afterward have any clear memory of the…hours? days?…of the following long passage of time. His last reasonably clear memory had been of the sheep disappearing, and that sheep pasture had been miles and miles from home, and then of his feeble efforts to find a shelter for the duration of his day’s sickness, where he could lie still and pretend he was hiking through Spunkwater, and up the steep eastern slopes of Ledbetter Mountain above Butterchurn Holler, and down, down into the glen of the waterfall. If we are only going to imagine things, we may as well imagine them as we have known them.

The waterfall seemed so very real that he could almost use the help of the last time he had visited it, not the help of my letter but his memory of the last visit, before the trouble had started, in June of the previous year, just a little over a year before, and nothing had changed much since then, except that maybe the volume of the falls, springfed though it was, did not seem quite so full. That time he had explored again the caverns beneath the ledges on both sides of the waterfall and inspected their meager contents, the bits of woven stuff, shards of pottery, bones. This time he staggered into the larger cavern expecting to find exactly what he found: a bed. That bed was the best creation of his fevered brain, the product of his most burning fancy.

He fell into it, that pile of blankets, quilts, comforters, and pillows, topped, as he had known it would be, with fresh white sheets, but he forgot to grope around for the fresh white sheet of paper with her handwriting on it that would tell him there was a harmonica beneath the bedpile; nor did he think to grope for the harmonica and play it all night. Nor did he think to notice even if it was night or day. His eyes closed as soon as he hit the bedpile, and he spread his arms to embrace the bedpile, and his overworked imagination failed him and dropped him into a deep, deep slumber.

I was on my way to my own little waterfall when I spotted the mullein stalk standing upright. Looking back, it is a wonder how I managed to keep on going to my destination. My first impulse was to fetch Viridis immediately with the news that the mullein stalk was up! But two things stopped me: First, I really needed that bath; it was an exceptionally hot morning, and I’d sweated more than a girl should, and I wasn’t about to go off to meet my hero with garden dirt on my face and dried sweat all down my sides. And second, I could just see myself hollering, “Viridis! Viridis! The mullein has risen!” and her saying, “The what?” and me trying