Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

The conjure man didn’t answer her immediately. His gaze followed the escaping boys.

“As you sow,” he muttered.

Following his gaze, Wendy saw the boy who’d thrown the stick trip and go sprawling in the grass.

An odd chill danced up her spine. The boy’s tumble came so quickly on the heels of the conjure man’s words, for a moment it felt to her as though he’d actually caused the boy’s fall.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

She looked back at the conjure man, but he was sitting up now, fingering a tear in his corduroys, which already had a quiltwork of patches on them. He gave her a quick smile that traveled all the way up to his eyes and she found herself thinking of Santa Claus. The little dog pressed its nose up against the conjure man’s hand, pushing it away from the tear. But the tear was gone.

It had just been a fold in the cloth, Wendy realized. That was all.

She helped the conjure man limp to her bench, then went back and got his bike. She righted it and wheeled it over to lean against the back of the bench before sitting down herself The little dog leaped up onto the conjure man’s lap.

“What a cute dog,” Wendy said, giving it a pat. “What’s her name?”

“Ginger,” the conjure man replied as though it was so obvious that he couldn’t understand her having to ask.

Wendy looked at the dog. Ginger’s fur was as grey and grizzled as her master’s beard without a hint of the spice’s strong brown hue.

“But she’s not at all brown,” Wendy found herself saying.

The conjure man shook his head. “It’s what she’s made of—she’s a gingerbread dog. Here.” He plucked a hair from Ginger’s back which made the dog start and give him a sour look. He offered the hair to Wendy. “Taste it.”

Wendy grimaced. “I don’t think so.”

“Suit yourself,” the conjure man said. He shrugged and popped the hair into his own mouth, chewing it with relish.

Oh boy, Wendy thought. She had a live one on her hands. “Where do you think ginger comes from?”

the conjure man asked her.

“What, do you mean your dog?”

“No, the spice.”

Wendy shrugged. “I don’t know. Some kind of plant, I suppose.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong. They shave gingerbread dogs like our Ginger here and grind up the hair until all that’s left is a powder that’s ever so fine. Then they leave it out in the hot sun for a day and half—which is where it gets its brownish colour.”

Wendy only just stopped herself from rolling her eyes. It was time to extract herself from this encounter, she realized. Well past the time. She’d done her bit to make sure he was all right and since the conjure man didn’t seem any worse for the wear from his fall—

“Hey!” she said as he picked up her journal and started to leaf through it. “That’s personal.”

He fended off her reaching hand with his own and continued to look through it.

“Poetry,” he said. “And lovely verses they are, too.”

“Please ...”

“Ever had any published?”

Wendy let her hand drop and leaned back against the bench with a sigh.

“Two collections,” she said, adding, “and a few sales to some of the literary magazines.”

Although, she corrected herself, “sales” was perhaps a misnomer since most of the magazines only paid in copies. And while she did have two collections in print, they were published by the East Street Press, a small local publisher, which meant the bookstores of Newford were probably the only places in the world where either of her books could be found.

“Romantic, but with a very optimistic flavor,” the conjure man remarked as he continued to look through her journal where all her false starts and incomplete drafts were laid out for him to see. “None of that Sturm and drang of the earlier romantic era and more like Yeats’ Celtic twilight or, what did Chesteron call it? Mooreeffoc—that queerness that comes when familiar things are seen from a new angle.”

Wendy couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. What was he? A renegade English professor living on the street like some hedgerow philosopher of old? It seemed absurd to be sitting here, listening to his discourse.

The conjure man turned to give her a charming smile. “Because that’s our hope for the future, isn’t it?

That the imagination reaches beyond the present to glimpse not so much a sense of meaning in what lies all around us, but to let us simply see it in the first place?”

“I ... I don’t know what to say,” Wendy replied.

Ginger had fallen asleep on his lap. He closed her journal and regarded her for a long moment, eyes impossibly blue and bright under the brim of his odd hat.

“John has something he wants to show you,” he said. Wendy blinked. “John?” she asked, looking around.

The conjure man tapped his chest. “John Windle is what those who know my name call me.”

“Oh.”

She found it odd how his speech shifted from that of a learned man to a much simpler idiom, even referring to himself in the third person. But then, if she stopped to consider it, everything about him was odd.

“What kind of something?” Wendy asked cautiously. “It’s not far.”

Wendy looked at her watch. Her shift started at four, which was still a couple of hours away, so there was plenty of time. But she was fairly certain that interesting though her companion was, he wasn’t at all the sort of person with whom she wanted to involve herself any more than she already had. The dichotomy between the nonsense and substance that peppered his conversation made her uncomfortable.

It wasn’t so much that she thought him dangerous. She just felt as though she was walking on boggy ground that might at any minute dissolve into quicksand with a wrong turn. Despite hardly knowing him at all, she was already sure that listening to him would be full of the potential for wrong turns.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t have the time.”

“It’s something that I think only you can, if not understand, then at least appreciate.”

“I’m sure it’s fascinating, whatever it is, but—”

“Come along, then,” he said.

He handed her back her journal and stood up, dislodging Ginger, who leapt to the ground with a sharp yap of protest. Scooping the dog up, he returned her to the wicker basket that hung from his handlebars, then wheeled the bike in front of the bench where he stood waiting for Wendy.

Wendy opened her mouth to continue her protest, but then simply shrugged. Well, why not? He really didn’t look at all dangerous and she’d just make sure that she stayed in public places.

She stuffed her journal back into her knapsack and then followed as he led the way south along the park path up to where the City Commission’s lawns gave way to Butler University’s common. She started to ask him how his leg felt, since he’d been limping before, but he walked at a quick, easy pace—that of someone half his apparent age—so she just assumed he hadn’t been hurt that badly by his fall after all.

They crossed the common, eschewing the path now to walk straight across the lawn towards the G.

Smithers Memorial Library, weaving their way in between islands of students involved in any number of activities, none of which included studying. When they reached the library, they followed its ivy hung walls to the rear of the building, where the conjure man stopped.

“There,” he said, waving his arm in a gesture that took in the entire area behind the library. “What do you see?”

The view they had was of an open space of land backed by a number of other buildings. Having attended the university herself, Wendy recognized all three: the Student Center, the Science Building and one of the dorms, though she couldn’t remember which one. The landscape enclosed by their various bulking presences had the look of recently having undergone a complete overhaul. All the lilacs and hawthorns had been cut back, brush and weeds were now just an uneven stubble of ground covering, there were clumps of raw dirt, scattered here and there, where trees had obviously been removed, and right in the middle was enormous stump.