Lois Lowry: Messenger

"It does take days, Matty, from where you started."

"Yes, I know. It still takes days. But now it doesn’t seem as far or as long. Because I’m older, and bigger, and I’ve gone back and forth again and again, and I know the way, and I’m not scared. So it seems shorter."

Leader chuckled. "And the fish?"

"Well," Matty acknowledged, "there don’t seem to be as many. But maybe it’s just that I was a little boy back then, when the fish seemed endless."

Leader tapped the tip of his pen on the desk as he thought. "Maybe so," he said after a moment. He stood. From a table in the corner of the room he took a stack of folded papers.

"Messages?" Matty asked.

"Messages. I’m calling a meeting."

"About fish? "

"No. I wish it were just about fish. Fish would be easy."

Matty took the stack of message papers he would be delivering. Before he turned to the staircase to leave, he felt compelled to say, "Fish aren’t ever easy. You have to use just the right bait, and know the right place to go, and then you have to pull the line up at just the right moment, because if you don’t, the fish can wiggle right off your hook, and not everybody is good at it, and…"

He could hear Leader laughing, still, when he left.

It took Matty most of the day to deliver all of the messages. It wasn’t a hard task. He liked the harder ones better, actually, when he was outfitted with food and a carrying pack and sent on long journeys through Forest. Although he hadn’t been sent to it in almost two years, Matty especially liked trips that took him back to his former home, where he could greet his boyhood pals with a somewhat superior smile, and snub those who had been cruel to him in the past. His mother was dead, he had been told. His brother was still there, and looked at Matty with more respect than he ever had in the past, but they were strangers to each other now. The community where he had lived was greatly changed and seemed foreign, though less harsh than he remembered.

Today he simply made his way around Village, delivering notice of the meeting that would be held the following week. Reading the message himself, he could understand Leader’s questioning about the supply of fish, and the concern and worry that Matty had felt from him.

There had been a petition—signed by a substantial number of people—to close Village to outsiders. There would have to be a debate, and a vote.

It had happened before, such a petition.

"We voted it down just a year ago," the blind man reminded Matty when the message had been read to him. "There must be a stronger movement now."

"There are still plenty of fish," Matty pointed out, "and the fields are full of crops."

The blind man crumpled the message and dropped it into the fire. "It’s not the fish or crops," he said. "They’ll use that, of course. They argued dwindling food supply last time. It’s…"

"Not enough housing?"

"More than that. I can’t think of the word for it. Selfishness, I guess. It’s creeping in."

Matty was startled. Village had been created out of the opposite: selflessness. He knew that from his studies and from hearing the history. Everyone did.

"But in the message—I could have read it to you again if you hadn’t burned it—it says that the group who wants to close the border is headed by Mentor! The schoolteacher!"

The blind man sighed. "Give the soup a stir, would you, Matty?"

Obediently Matty moved the wooden ladle around in the pot and watched beans and chopped tomatoes churn in the thick mixture as it simmered. Thinking still of his teacher, he added, "He’s not selfish!"

"I know he isn’t. That’s why it’s puzzling."

"He welcomes everyone to the school, even new ones who have no learning, who can’t even speak properly."

"Like you, when you came," the blind man said with a smile. "It couldn’t have been easy, but he taught you."

"He had to tame me first," Matty acknowledged, grinning. "I was wild, wasn’t I?"

Seer nodded. "Wild. But Mentor loves teaching those who need it."

"Why would he want to close the border?"

"Matty?"

"What?"

"Has Mentor traded, do you know?"

Matty thought about it. "It’s school vacation now, so I don’t see him as often. But I stop by his homeplace now and then…" He didn’t mention Jean, the widowed schoolteacher’s daughter. "I haven’t noticed anything different in his household.

"No Gaming Machine," he added, laughing a little.

But the blind man didn’t chuckle in reply. He sat thinking for a moment. Then he said, in a worried voice, "It’s much more than just a Gaming Machine."

"The schoolteacher’s daughter told me that her dog has three puppies. I can have one when it’s big enough, if I like."

"Isn’t she the one who promised you a kiss? Now a dog as well? I’d settle for the kiss if I were you, Matty." The blind man smiled, loosened a beet from the earth, and placed it in the basket of vegetables. They were in the garden together.

"I miss my dog. He wasn’t any trouble." Matty glanced over to the corner of their homeplace’s plot of land, beyond the garden, to the small grave where they had buried Branch two years before.

"You’re right, Matty. Your little dog was a good companion for many years. It would be fun to have a puppy around." The blind man’s voice was gentle.

"I could train a dog to lead you."

"I don’t need leading. Could you train a dog to cook?"

"Anything but beets," Matty said, making a face as he threw another into the basket.

But when he went in the afternoon to the schoolteacher’s homeplace, Matty found Jean distraught. "Two died last night," she said. "They took sick. Now there’s only one puppy left, and it’s sick, and the mother as well."

"How have you tended them?"

Jean shook her head in despair. "Same as I would for my father or myself. Infusion of white willow bark. But the puppy’s too little to drink, and the mother’s too sick. She lapped a bit and then just put her head down."

"Will you take me to see them?"

Jean led him into the small house, and though he was concerned for the dogs, Matty found himself looking around as they walked through, remembering what the blind man had asked. He noticed the sturdy furniture, neatly arranged, and the bookcases filled with Mentor’s books. In the kitchen, Jean’s baking pans, and the bowls in which she mixed dough, were set out, ready for her wonderful breads to be made.

He saw nothing that hinted of a trade. Nothing silly like a Gaming Machine, nothing frivolous like the soft upholstered furniture decorated with fringe that a foolish young couple down the road had traded for.

Of course there were other kinds of trades, Matty knew, though he didn’t fully understand. He had heard murmurs about them. There were trades for things you didn’t see. Those were the most dangerous trades.

"They’re in here." Jean opened the door to the storage shed attached to the house at the back of the kitchen. Matty entered and knelt beside the mother dog where she lay on a folded blanket. The tiny puppy, motionless but for its labored breathing, lay in the curve of her belly, the way any puppy would. But a healthy pup would have been wiggling and sucking. This one should have been pawing at its mother for milk.

Matty knew dogs. He loved them. Gently he touched the puppy with his finger. Then, startled, he jerked his hand away. He had felt something painful.

Oddly, it made him think of lightning.

He remembered how he had been instructed, even as a small boy back in his old place, to go indoors during a thunderstorm. He had seen a tree split and blackened by a lightning strike, and he knew that it could happen to a human: the flash and the burning power that would surge through you, looking for a place to enter the earth.