Chapter 22 The Years

Tom grew older, and the work went on beneath his hands. He watched his children grow up in the house with the strange root in the basement, the chamber he had built around it becoming as ordinary to them as a water heater or a fuse box, a thing in the house they did not question because it had always been there. He told them the story, the way you tell children anything difficult, carefully, age-appropriately, never frightening them, leaving out the parts that would keep a small person awake and keeping only the parts that explained why their father spent his evenings in the basement with a lantern and a journal. They thought it was a game, at first, a special room with a special plant, and Tom let them think so for as long as he could. He watched the underground forest's influence spread, the way a stain spreads through cloth, slowly and without any edge that announced itself. The garden grew wilder, the vegetables running to shapes and sizes that belonged to the world below more than the one above, the sunflowers standing taller than the fence and leaning, always, toward the foundation where the root pulsed. The trees at the edge of the property grew taller too, the oaks and the birches thickening until the line between yard and forest blurred, and the boundaries of the property, which had once been a clean thing marked by fence posts and a survey, became less defined, less certain, as if the land itself had decided it no longer wanted to know where it ended. He watched the figures emerge, slowly, into the world above. They came up through the chamber at first, through the root and the thinned boundary, one or two at a time, cautious as any creature that has spent a hundred years in the dark and is unsure of the light. They were patient. They had waited a hundred years. They could wait more. They stepped into the yard on mist-heavy mornings and stood among the tomato plants with the silver-veined leaves, and they breathed the air of the surface, and they learned, slowly, that they could live in it. They discovered that they could eat the food. The tomatoes, the beans, the bread Nora baked, all of it went down and stayed down, and the figures, who had subsisted on the pale glow of the forest for a century, found the solidness of surface food strange and then welcome. They could drink the water. They could breathe the air, which was thinner and colder and brighter than the air below, but survivable, the way a high place is survivable if you do not rush it. They helped Tom and Nora maintain the chamber. They taught the children about the forest, the way you teach a thing you love, with patience and a kind of wonder that the children caught like a contagion. They shared their knowledge of plants and animals and healing, the old lore of the world below, which turned out to have uses in the world above that no one had expected, remedies and growing methods and a way of listening to the soil that Tom took into the garden and never gave up. It was a strange household. Human and otherwise, living together, learning from each other, the way any household learns, through small daily frictions and smaller daily graces. The figures took the spare room. They learned to use the stove. They developed preferences, one of them for the blue chair by the window, another for the particular silence of the study in the early morning. Tom's children grew up seeing the figures as family, which is to say they fought with them and forgave them and forgot, eventually, that there had ever been a time when the people in the blue chair had not been there. The bridge held. The worlds, slowly, leaned toward each other, and the leaning became a habit, and the habit became a shape, and the shape became, without anyone quite deciding it, a new kind of world. The children grew, and with them the integration of the two peoples deepened, until the household on the hill was no longer a human home with strange guests but a thing unto itself, a small working model of the merged world that was slowly coming to be outside its doors. The figures learned the stove and the television and the particular comfort of a chair by a window, and the children learned the old lore of the forest, the names of the glowing creatures, the uses of the silver-leaved plants, the patient way of listening to the soil that the guardians had carried up from below. Tom watched it all with a grandfather's wonder, the way you watch a thing you started become larger and stranger than you imagined, and he understood that the bridge he had begun with a single uncut root and a slow opening of a door had become a life, a household, a small new world that would outlast him. The garden ran wild now in a way that was no longer frightening, the plants of two earths tangled together in a green abundance that fed them all, and the hum of the boundary was so faint it was almost a memory, a sound you remembered rather than heard. The forest pressed in at the edges of the property, but it no longer pressed like a threat; it pressed like a relative at a window, wanting in, and being, more and more, let in. Tom's children grew up seeing the figures as family, which is to say they loved them and fought them and forgot, eventually, that there had ever been a border between the people of above and the people of below, and in that forgetting, Tom understood, lay the whole quiet victory of the work. He took to sitting on the porch in the evenings, the leaning porch he had never quite fixed, watching the sun go down behind trees that were no longer entirely of one world, and he felt the two earths leaning toward each other through the soles of his feet, the way you feel a train through a floor, and he knew that the leaning was permanent now, that the habit had become the shape, and that the shape, whatever came after him, would hold. The bridge held. It would always hold, because it was no longer a thing he maintained but a thing that maintained itself, the joined worlds breathing through the root in the basement, through the garden, through the children, through the strange and ordinary household that was, he had come to believe, the real meaning of the house all along. ---