Lois Lowry: Messenger

He had watched through the window and seen great fiery bolts split the sky, and he had smelled the sulfurous smell that they sometimes left behind.

There was a man in Village, a farmer, who had stood in the field beside his plow, waiting as dark clouds gathered overhead, hoping the storm would pass by. The lightning had found him there, and though the farmer had survived, he had lost all his memory but for the sensation of raw power that had entered him that afternoon. People tended him now, and he helped with farm chores, but his energy was gone, taken away by the mysterious energy that lived in lightning.

Matty had felt this sensation—the one of pulsating power, as if he had the power of lightning within his own self—in the clearing, on a sunny day with no storm brewing.

He had tried to put it out of his mind afterward, any thoughts of the day it had happened, because it frightened him so and made him have a secret, which he did not want. But Matty knew, pulling his hand from the ailing puppy, that it was time to test it once again.

"Where’s your father?" he asked Jean. He wanted no one to watch.

"He had a meeting to go to. You know about the petition?"

Matty nodded. Good. The schoolteacher was not around.

"I don’t think he really even cares about the meeting. He just wants to see Stocktender’s widow. He’s courting her." Jean spoke with affectionate amusement. "Can you imagine? Courting, at his age?"

He needed the girl to be gone. Matty thought. "I want you to go to Herbalist’s. Get yarrow."

"I have yarrow in my own garden! Right beside the door!" Jean replied.

He didn’t need yarrow, not really. He needed her gone. Matty thought quickly. "Spearmint? Lemon balm? Catnip? Do you have all of those?"

She shook her head. "No catnip. If cats were attracted to my garden, the dog would make a terrible fuss.

"Wouldn’t you, poor thing?" she said sweetly, leaning down to murmur to the dying mother dog. She stroked the dog’s back but it did not lift its head. Its eyes were beginning to glaze.

"Go," Matty told her in an urgent voice. "Get those things."

"Do you think they’ll help?" Jean asked dubiously. She took her hand from the dog and stood, but she lingered.

" Just go! " Matty ordered.

"You needn’t use a rude tone, Matty," Jean said with an edge in her voice. But she turned with a flounce of her skirt and went. He barely heard the sound of the door closing behind her. Steeling himself against the painful vibrating shock that he knew would go through his entire body, Matty placed his left hand on the mother dog, his right on the puppy, and willed them to live.

An hour later, Matty stumbled home, exhausted. Back at Mentor’s house, Jean was feeding the mother dog and giggling at the antics of the lively puppy.

"Who would have thought of that combination of herbs? Isn’t it amazing!" she had said in delight, watching the creatures revive.

"Lucky guess." He let Jean believe it was the herbs. She was distracted by the sudden liveliness of the dogs and didn’t even notice how weak Matty was. He sat leaning against the wall in the shed and watched her tend them. But his vision was slightly blurred and his whole body ached.

Finally, when he had regained a little strength, he forced himself to stand and leave. Fortunately his own homeplace was empty. The blind man was out somewhere, and Matty was glad of that. Seer would have noticed something wrong. He could always feel it. He said the atmosphere in the homeplace changed, as if wind had shifted, if Matty had so much as a cold.

And this was much more. He staggered into his room off the kitchen and lay down on his bed, breathing hard. Matty had never felt so weak, so drained. Except for the frog…

The frog was smaller, he thought. But it was the same thing.

He had come across the little frog by chance, in the clearing. He had no reason to be there that day; he had simply wanted to be alone, away from busy Village, and had gone into Forest to get away, as he did sometimes.

Barefoot, he had stepped on the frog, and was startled. "Sorry!" he had said playfully, and reached down to pick the little fellow up. "Are you all right? You should have hopped away when you heard me coming."

But the frog wasn’t all right, and couldn’t have escaped with a hop. It hadn’t been Matty’s light step that had injured it; he could see that right away. Some creature—Matty thought probably a fox or weasel—had inflicted a terrible wound upon the small green thing, and the frog was almost dead of it. One leg dangled, torn away from the body, held there only by an oozing bit of ragged tissue. In his hand, the frog drew a shuddering breath and then was still.

"Someone chewed you up and spit you out," Matty said. He was sympathetic but matter-of-fact. The hard life and quick death of Forest’s creatures were everyday things. "Well," he said, "I’ll give you a nice burial."

He knelt to dig out a spot with his hands in the mossy earth. But when he tried to set the little body down, he found that he was connected to it in a way that made no sense. A painful kind of power surged from his hand, flowing into the frog, and held them bound together.

Confused and alarmed, he tried to scrape the sticky body of the frog off his hand. But he couldn’t. The vibrating pain held them connected. Then, after a moment, while Matty knelt, still mystified by what was happening, the frog’s body twitched.

"So you’re not dead. Get off of me, then." Now he was able to drop the frog to the ground. The stab of pain eased.

"What was that all about?" Matty found himself talking to the frog as if it might be able to reply. "I thought you were dead, but you weren’t. You’re going to lose your leg, though. And your hopping days are over. I’m sorry for that."

He stood and looked down at the impassive frog. Churrump. Its throat made the sound.

"Yes. I agree. Same to you." Matty turned to leave.

Churrump.

The sound compelled him to go back and to kneel again. The frog’s wide-open eyes, which had been glazed with death only a few moments before, were now clear and alert. It stared at Matty.

"Look, I’m going to put you over here in the ferns, because if you stay in the open, some other creature will come along and gobble you up. You have a big disadvantage now, not being able to hop away. You’ll have to learn to hide."

He picked up the frog and carried it to the thicket of high ferns. "If I had my knife with me," he told it, "I’d probably just slice through those threads that are holding your leg. Then maybe you could heal more quickly. As it is, you’ll be dragging that leg around and it will burden you. But there’s nothing I can do."

He leaned down to turn it loose, still thinking about how best to help it. "Maybe I can find a sharp rock and slice through. It’s just a tiny bit of flesh and it probably wouldn’t even pain you if I did it.

"You stay right here," Matty commanded, and placed the frog on the earth beside the ferns. As if it could bop, he thought.

Back at the edge of the small stream he had crossed, Matty found what he needed as a tool: a bit of rock with a sharp edge. He took it back to where the wounded frog lay, immobilized by its wound.

"Now," Matty told the frog, "don’t be scared. I’m going to spread you out a bit and then carefully cut that dead leg away. It’s the best thing for you." He turned the frog onto its back and touched the shredded leg, meaning to arrange it in a way that would make the amputation simple and fast. There were only a few sticky strands of flesh to slice through.

But he felt a sudden jolt of painful energy enter his arm, concentrated in his fingertips. Matty was unable to move. His hand grasped the nearly severed leg and he could feel his own blood moving through its vessels. His pulse thrummed and he could hear the sound of it.