The Man in the Tree

Chapter One

Before he was born he remembered the darkness and the light. The darkness was the color of old blood, and in it there were drifting shapes that were not stars.

He remembered the doctor's face -- he had plump cheeks and a ragged black mustache -- and a voice saying: "My gosh, he's a big one, isn't he?"

When he was four, he told his mother some of the things he could remember; later he heard her saying to his father, "What an imagination Gene has." But she was thinking, What a strange child.

By the time he learned to walk, he was already too large for infants' clothing, and his mother had to buy shoes for him at the boys' store. His father, who was worried about money then, said that he had taken up the wrong trade; he should have been a cobbler.

The Andersons lived in a small town called Dog River in northern Oregon. It was the only world Gene knew, and he did not understand then how pure the air and water were, how blue the sky. From their yard he could see two snowcapped mountains, Hood and Adams.

From the time Gene was very young he could glimpse the other worlds that were all around him; in some of these worlds, things were just the same as they were here, and in some they were different. He was not more than two when he found out how to reach with his mind into another world and turn it. He could put a marble on the floor, for instance, and then reach into another world where the marble was in a slightly different place, and bring it into this world: then there would be two marbles. He was four when he first realized that other people could not do this.

One afternoon he was turning somersaults on the lawn with Zelda Owens' little brother Danny, mesmerized by the stiff grass-blades against his forehead, the green sun-warmed smell, and the surprising way the world turned to thump him on the back. Danny was looking for something in the grass, tearing out big clumps with his fingers. He was crying. Gene asked him what the matter was, and he said he had lost his nickel.

"Why don't you make it come back?" Gene asked. Danny did not seem to understand; he kept on beating the lawn with his hands, pulling up grass and dirt. Gene gave him a nickel to make him stop crying, and then Danny said it was his nickel and that Gene had stolen it, and ran into the house to tell his mother.

Later that day, on Zelda's porch, Zelda and Petie Everett were playing "Can you do this?" Zelda could wriggle her ears and cross her eyes; Petie could make a noise like a cork by putting his finger into his mouth and pulling it out again, and he could bend his thumb back until it touched his arm. Gene could not do any of these things, but he said, "Can you do this?"

A beetle was crawling across the warped yellow boards of the porch. Gene knelt and put his finger in front of it to make it change direction. Then he reached into the shadows and found the place where it could just as easily have gone the other way. Gene turned it there, and then there were two beetles. He turned the beetle again, and now there were three, crawling away from each other as fast as they could.

Zelda and Petie were crouching beside him. Petie said, "Aw, that ain't nothing. You had them in your hand."

They argued about this, and Gene lost because he was outnumbered. When he left, Zelda and Petie were shouting, "Liar, liar, your pants on fire!"

One day when Gene was five, after a hard morning rain, he was sailing walnut boats in the gutter. When he tired of this, he brought a bucket full of dirt from the garden and made dams. The mud washed away, but he built the dams up again with twigs and straw, and sent his boats down the stream to watch them tip over the dams and spin in the whirlpools.

A boy he didn't know came down the street carrying a long stick. Before Gene realized what he was doing, he had broken one of the dams. "Don't do that," Gene said, but already the boy was breaking another one.

Gene got up and rushed at him; he was the taller, although the other boy was two years older. The boy jabbed him with his stick and danced away; Gene could not get near enough to hit him. The boy broke the last of the dams and then hit him with the stick again; Gene was crying with anger and pain. At that moment he felt with his mind where the nerves and muscles of the other boy's arm were; he reached in and turned them in a way he had never done before. The stick fell. Gene picked it up and began to beat the other boy, who ran away crying.

That evening the boy's father brought him to Gene's house with his right arm in a sling; he said the boy's arm was paralyzed because Gene had hit him on the shoulder. He was very angry, and shouted at Gene's father. Gene denied everything, but he was frightened, and he reached in again to make the boy's arm well. When the father saw him moving his arm, his face changed, and he took the boy away.

Gene's parents were nearly the same height, but his father was squarely built, dark and muscular, whereas his mother was small-boned and had thick auburn hair, now turning gray. Her skin was very pale and fine, and she had bright blue eyes. Gene was their only child. She told him, weeping, about her two stillborn daughters, and he used to imagine that he would meet them in heaven. His birth had been so difficult, she told him, that she could never have another baby. He felt guilty about this, and resolved to make it up to her by being a good son, but he forgot this whenever he was angry with her.

Gene's father was a carpenter; he had a shop in the garage where Gene often sat and watched him work. Gene loved the aromatic smells of cut pine, glue and shellac, and he liked to watch the clean white shavings curl out under the plane. When he was still very young his father began letting him help with small tasks, carrying boards from the stack, measuring, clamping pieces together to be glued. He let Gene use the hand-saw and play at nailing boards together. One day when he was busy, he said, "Cut this piece eighteen and seven-eighths inches for me, Gene, can you do that?" Feeling proud and honored, the boy measured the board and sawed it, but when he brought it to his father, it was too short; he had made a mistake in the measurement. "Well, that's ruined," his father said, and threw the piece down.

Gene's eyes filled with tears. "I can fix it," he said.

"No, you can't." His father went to the other side of the room for another board.

Gene picked up the rejected piece and laid it on the worktable beside the frame his father was making. He reached into the shadows to a place where he had cut it correctly; it jumped a little and was longer. "Look, Dad," he said, "it's all right."

At first Gene's father would not come; when Gene insisted, he looked at the board impatiently, then stared at it, picked it up, and finally measured it with his steel rule. He knew it was the same board because of the two knots near one end. There was something in his mind that he would not let himself think.

"It's all right, isn't it?" Gene asked. He was afraid, and didn't know why.

"Yes, it is," Gene's father said slowly. He rubbed his eyes with his hands. "I must be getting tired. Gene, you go on out and play."

From these things he learned that his power was somehow dangerous and shameful, and he kept it a secret. For a long time he did not even use it when he was alone, unless he had lost some toy and wanted to bring it back. Once or twice it happened by itself, and that disturbed him.

He often daydreamed that he was a magical changeling, a prince given away in infancy, and that someday his real father would come to take him away to his kingdom, or perhaps would touch Gene on the forehead while he was asleep, conferring on him some power greater than he could imagine.

In the first grade he was a foot taller than any of the other children. The desks were too small for him; he had to sit sideways with his legs in the aisle. On the first day, the teacher gave all the children strips of purple and yellow paper and showed them how to make paper chains, first a purple link, then a yellow one. Gene liked the yellow ones best, and made his chain all of yellow. A girl across the aisle showed it to the teacher and said, "He's doing it wrong."

Later they were coloring in their books; there was a picture of a rabbit; Gene colored its fur blue, as the teacher had told them, but he made the insides of its ears yellow instead of pink. When the teacher came by to look at their work, the same girl said, "Look, he's doing it wrong again. He can't do anything right, can he?"

The teacher said, "That's all right, Dolores; he can do it that way if he wants to," but when she was gone the girl stuck out her tongue. Gene was angry, and turned all her crayons to yellow ones. When she saw them, she called to the teacher that he had taken her crayons. Gene denied it, and the teacher brought her other crayons, but as soon as her back was turned Gene changed them to yellow too. She began to scream, and the teacher moved Gene all the way across the room. From that day on, the other children understood that he was a troublemaker. They began calling him "Big Feet," then just "Feet." They were not brave enough to attack him, because he was so much bigger, but they threw stones at him from behind, and when he chased them they scattered, shouting, "Fee-eet, Fee-eet, can't sit in his sea-eat."

After a few weeks of this he discovered an overgrown corner of the playground where he could lie hidden, and then he spent every recess there, pulling sweet grass stems and sucking the nectar. He daydreamed often of sending himself into another world, but his power was not strong enough for that: the largest thing he had ever turned from one world into another was the piece of wood for his father, and afterward he had had a headache. Even with smaller things, if he used his power too often, he became weak and dizzy.

After school and on weekends life was better; there was a group of neighborhood children of mixed ages, none of whom were Gene's classmates, and they did not mind his being tall. In the winter they went sledding and had snowball fights, and made snowmen that melted little by little until they were only slumped mounds in their circles of grass. In the long summer evenings they played King of the Hill, Red Light and hide-and-seek. He never forgot the scent of the tall lilacs in the dusk, and the lonesome sound of "All-ee-all-ee-out's in free."

Long after the other children had left it behind, he was still engrossed by the world of small things. There were different sorts of grasses that were good to suck: one kind slipped with a sliding sweetness out of its sheath, and another would only break. There was a weed growing close to the ground that bore tiny grayish-green buttons, and these buttons were also good to eat. He learned to stretch a grass-blade tight between his thumbs pressed together as if in prayer, and then by blowing into the hollow between the first and second joints of his thumbs, to make a shattering squawk. Noises could be made with the bitter milky stems of dandelions, too, and with the stalks of green onions.

He never had a tricycle, because by the time he was old enough he was too big. When he was seven his parents gave him a bicycle, and all that summer he explored the country roads across the river and into the hills.

Often he left his bicycle beside the road and walked up a little way into the woods. When he sat down with the trees all around him, he had a curious feeling that they were aware of him as he was of them, or at least that there was some intelligence watching him. This feeling disturbed him, and he never stayed long in the woods, but he kept on going there because he needed solitude.

Even in town, however, there were quiet places where he could be alone. One of them was the long tree-shaded lawn below the library, where he sat for hours reading books of fairy tales. The library had a set of Grimm, with old-fashioned engraved illustrations that were all the more mysterious because they were so dark and badly printed. He avoided stories about giants -- they were always monsters, to be outwitted or killed by the hero -- but he liked stories about the Little People, their trickiness and magical powers, and he liked the "Brownie" books of Palmer Cox. The verses were labored and dull, but he never tired of the illustrations; each one was full of hundreds of tiny figures, all doing different things, but all together. His daydreams were of secret caverns under the earth, hidden treasures, and a mysterious fellowship.

Because he was growing so fast, his clothes seldom fitted; either his wrists and ankles stuck out and his shirts bound him across the chest, or, if he had new clothes, the sleeves hung over his hands and his pants-legs had to be rolled up. He used this as an excuse not to go to church with his parents, but there were other reasons. The first time he went to Sunday school, the lesson was about David and Goliath, and after that, for a while, he had a new nickname. The hard pews in church made his bottom ache, and he did not understand the purpose of all that varnished wood, the tall organ-pipes, the minister in his pulpit talking on and on, the bad singing.

When he had a nickel and had spent it, he could always reach into another world where it was still in his pocket. If he wanted more, he could multiply the nickel as he had done with the beetle. From the time he found this out, he always had money for candy or anything else he wanted, and he sometimes treated other children to a bottle of pop or a package of gum. Once or twice they asked him for money, saying, "Come on, you're rich," and he foolishly gave it to them.

One day his mother said to him, "Gene, Mrs. Everett says Petie told her you bought him a model airplane. Did you?"

He saw that he was in trouble, although he didn't understand why, and he said, "Petie's a liar. He lies all the time."

"But she says Zelda Owens saw you. And I talked to her mother, and Zelda says you gave her some money, too."

"Only a quarter."

She put her hand on his jaw to make him look at her. "Gene, tell me the truth. Did you give Petie the money to buy that airplane?"

"Aw -- yeah."

"But where did you get the money?"

He knew that if he told the truth his father would beat him for lying. He told his mother that he had found a five-dollar bill on the street. She let him go, but he knew she thought he had stolen the money.

That night while his mother was washing the dishes, his father made him sit down in the living room and gave him a lecture about stealing. Gene insisted on his story about finding money on the street; the guiltier he felt, the more vehement he became. At last he said, "You believe everybody else, but you won't believe me," and ran into his room.

After that he never gave other children money, and whenever he got anything for himself that he could not have bought with his allowance, he smuggled it into the house and hid it.

Gene Anderson never had any of the usual childhood illnesses; once in a while he had a fever, but it passed away overnight. When he was seven his mother took him to the dentist for the first time, and he disliked this so much that from then on he examined his teeth every night, using a little piece of mirror that he had found behind the garage, and when he discovered a cavity, he made it go away. After a while he must have learned how to recognize them without looking; he stopped thinking about cavities, but he never had another.

One Saturday when he was eight, his father took him downtown to Dr. Rodeman's office where he was to have his tonsils out. He was apprehensive about this, but his father told him that it would not hurt, and that he could have an ice cream cone afterward.

Dr. Rodeman made him lie down on his table and put a little gauze mask over his face. Something sweetish and stinging dripped onto the mask; his lungs were full of tiny bright needles. In terror of his life, he reached out and did something without knowing what it was. He heard the doctor say, "That's funny, this can seems to be empty. Just a minute."

Then he understood what he had done, and when the doctor brought another can, he made that one empty, too. Dr. Rodeman took the mask away' and stood looking at him with an odd expression. He told Gene's father that they would have to come back next week, but they never did, and he never had his tonsils out.

Gene knew that his parents suspected there was something strange about him, other than his tallness, but they never talked to him about it. He knew that they were worried about his future. Once a visitor stupidly asked him, "And what do you want to be when you grow up?" Gene was almost as tall as he was. "I mean, when you get older."

"I want to be a giant," Gene said, and left the room. His mother lectured him about politeness afterward, but her eyes were moist.

Because Gene was so tall and strong, his father began to make use of him again, in the afternoons after school and on weekends. He learned to plane a board smooth, to use a miter box, to make and read working drawings. Under supervision, he was allowed to use the bench saw, and his father promised that in a year or two he would teach him to work on the lathe.

Once or twice, during school vacations, Gene's father took him to a house he was building with another carpenter, and it was here that Gene first glimpsed the satisfaction of having imagined something new and then made it real. The things he could make were only copies of other things. He tried imagining things and then looking for them in the shadows, but they were not always there. Occasionally, when he had been given a present he didn't like, he found that he could reach through into another world where his parents had decided on something else. In this way he got a book that was his favorite for a long time: an illustrated copy of "The Little Lame Prince," by Miss Mulock.

All through school he was too big to sit with his knees under the desk. It did not occur to anybody, and certainly not to him, that they might have brought in a bigger desk from another grade. He sat sideways, cramped into the narrow space between the seat and the desk, with his feet in the aisle. He wore men's shoes with pointed toes until the fourth grade, when the teacher gave him permission to come to school in tennis shoes. "Feet" was still his nickname. Several times the teacher called him that without thinking, and there was a roar of laughter.

In school he wrote at first in large, awkward loops, but when the teacher criticized him for this, he began to write smaller, then smaller still. The teacher complained about that, too, but he kept on until he could get hundreds of words on a page. He began to make carvings out of soft pine, little figures that he kept in walnut shells hinged with adhesive tape.

In the fourth grade there was another boy who was almost as tall as Gene, a lumpish, red-faced creature whose lower lip was always shiny with spit. His name was Paul Cooley; he was twelve years old and had been kept hack three times. He was the son of the police chief, a red-faced man who dressed like a sheriff and carried a revolver on his hip. Whenever Paul saw Gene he called out, "Hey, Feet, you stink," and then laughed, looking around as if he had said something clever. They fought at recess, and Gene beat him; afterward Paul wanted to make friends, but Gene disliked his dullness and his slobbering lip.

One Sunday afternoon Gene was playing alone in the upper story of a half-finished house of his father's, as he often did. The floor was strewn with sawdust and with nails dropped by the carpenters; through the window openings he could see the tops of maple trees; He was pretending that it was his house, and that he was grown and could do anything he liked.

He heard footsteps below, and in a moment a shaggy head appeared over the top of the stairwell: it was Paul's. He hesitated when he saw Gene, then came up. "Hey, Feet, what you doing here?"

"Nothing."

"You want a Cigarette?" He pulled a pack of Luckies out of his pocket and offered it.

"No."

"Well, okay." Paul lit a cigarette and tossed the match away, still burning.

"Don't do that," said Gene, and stamped it out. Paul struck another match and dropped it.

"This is my dad's house. You better quit." Gene stepped on the second match, but Paul was already lighting a third. Because Gene did not want to fight him again, he reached with his mind and made the match disappear, then the rest of the pack.

Paul looked stupidly at his empty hand. "What'd you do with my matches?"

"Nothing."

There was a whistle outside, then a low voice: "Hey, Paul?"

He turned his head. "Up here!" Two boys came up the stairs; they were twelve-year-olds, friends of Paul's. One of them, a tall boy wearing a baseball cap, was already smoking. "Who's this?" he said.

"That's Feet, he stinks," said Paul, and laughed vacantly. "He took my matches away and he won't give 'em back."

"Yeah?" The two boys came toward Gene. "Listen, why don't you give him back his matches?"

"I haven't got them."

The two looked at each other. "Grab him!" said one, and they wrestled him to the floor. While they held him, Paul went through his pockets, pulling out a few coins, a wad of string, some baseball cards and a wadded handkerchief. "Guess I'll keep these for my matches," he said, and laughed again.

"Lemme see them cards," said the tall one, and they let Gene up. Paul was backing away, but they tripped him, sat on him, took the cards and money out of his fist. While Gene was putting out their dropped cigarettes, Paul got up and rushed at him. He took Gene off balance and fell with him half out of the window. "You took my matches! You took my matches!" he blubbered. Gene was pinned by his weight across the window frame, one arm under him, his head down.

"Get his pants," somebody said. Hands were fumbling with Gene's belt buckle. He kicked and struggled, but all he accomplished was to force his body farther out the window. He was crying. Blindly he reached and turned, felt Paul's weight slip away from him. He heard a shriek, then a thump below that echoed against the house like a pistol shot.

He grasped the window frame and pulled himself in. Below, Paul lay with his head on a blood-spattered two-by-four.

The other two were gray-faced. "You killed him!" the tall one said. "I'm going to tell my dad!"

Their footsteps rattled down the stairs. Gene followed. They were running down the street toward town; he went the other way. He ran until a pain in his side forced him to stop; then he went on, weeping and groaning, up the hill into the trees. It was about three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon; be was nine years old, and he knew he couldn't go home.