Farewells
Farewells
“All right now, Stephen,” Willow lapsed into thought as we walked over a flower strewn stretch of luxurious, level ground. But she was silent only for a moment. “I have it! Next question. Can we make it six out of six? The train that travels below ground in London is called the…?”
“The tube!” I said.
“Right you are,” said Willow, ducking a little, even as I reached up to lift aside an overhanging branch. “Going for seven now. The four wheeled vehicles that travel on the roads above it?”
“The big ones or the small?” I asked, letting go the branch and hearing it swish back into place behind us.
“No extra points for answering a question with a question, even if it is a good one.”
Her sidelong glance was amused. “But since you brought it up, name them both.”
“The big ones are buses,” I laughed. “Or lorries. The smaller ones are automobiles.”
“And,” she asked, giving me barely an instant to enjoy my success. “The juice that makes them go?”
“Petrol.” I told her, slowing my steps to take a deep breath of the sweet scented air.
It was an old game. One we’d begun during those dark winter days.
Questions about making food while she cooked dinner. “How many teaspoons go into a tablespoon?” Even more of them once she started turning some of the tasks over to me. “And how do you keep the oatmeal from getting lumps in it again, hmmm, Stephen?”
Questions about the names of tools she used around the house. Tacks, ruler, hammer, nails. “And where is it, Scruff, that you must be careful not to put your thumb?”
Questions about songs that she sang to me in a sweet alto voice as she stirred herbal decoctions or beat the dust from the rugs out on the doorstep. “This one was one of my favourites. It was sung by a lovely group of lads from Liverpool…”
Questions about travel as I accompanied her to check on mothers-to-be or the new babies she’d helped deliver. Questions that had shortened the trips over the long snowy roads of winter or the muddy ones of spring. Questions that would, perhaps, slow this final journey down a little.
“Right you are, Scruff, petrol. And the other kind of juice? That runs through wires to make the lights come on?”
“Electricity,” I said, not stumbling, even a little, over the word that had been my downfall back in school during exams in Muggle studies. “But neither petrol nor electricity really come from juice. They’re sources of energy.”
“Precisely!” Her encouragement was genuine, but the words were coming a bit too fast and the cheerfulness in her voice was beginning to sound forced. “You might seem a bit rustic to some Londoners, but a lot of people from the furthermost parts of the country do, also. The thing is, you know the names of things now. Even some good old songs and shows on the telly. You’ll learn how to do a lot more by continuing to watch people doing them. You’re quick, Stephen. See something twice, and you’ll remember it.”
Remember it. Those were the words that had kept rhythm with my footfalls more and more over the last stretch of winding pathway. Remember it. The quiet of this time without the crowding sounds of trains and roads and honking, petrol filled cars. Remember it. The bright mahogany lights in the wind-rippled hair of the woman beside me. Remember it. The lilt of her words. The sound of her laughter. The kindness in her voice. Remember it. Remember… Remember…
That need to remember had wrapped itself around so many moments today. Here and now, beneath the trees, back along the steep winding path to the spot where we’d stopped for lunch, all the way to Willow’s small, snug house this morning
To the moment when breakfast time was over. The dishes were all put away and Willow was packing us another picnic. Like that first one we’d shared at the end of last summer. As I came and went from the house, finishing the last of my chores, I’d spotted bread, cheese, a few hard-boiled eggs and the first of the summer’s strawberries making their way into the basket on the kitchen table. Travelers’ food, Willow called it. Perfect for walking the hills.
All morning, I’d moved about the house and the clearing, collecting memories. From beside the chopping block, I gazed into the woods where, in the cold of winter, I’d used Magic to transform into my canine form to hunt rabbits for our supper. I carried in a last load of firewood, and stacked it beside the hearth where, without Magic, I’d learned to skin, clean and prepare them for the cooking pot. On the way to the chicken coop, I passed the neat garden rows that I’d hoed and seeded and weeded the past weeks. Smiled at the array of leaves and young vegetables covering what used to be naked black soil. Didn’t need a Wizard for Magic like that. I stroked the smooth wood of the boards I’d hammered into place to make a new door frame for the hen-house. Sucked the tip of my thumb and remembered how motivated I’d been to learn to do that right. Gathered up more remembrances along with the eggs.
All at once the old sadness of staying had become the new one of leaving.
But it was a clean, honest sadness. The kind people who care about each other feel at parting. Though its edge was sharp, it did nothing to cut into the excitement I felt at the prospect of going home. To wish it away would have been a disrespect to the friendship which had grown between Willow and me.
The sun shone bright across the kitchen table as I drank one last cup of tea. Remember it. Warm, midsummer sun, its light and angle not so different than when I first saw it streaming through that same window almost eleven months ago now.
Rising from the table, I hurried into Dylan’s old room and picked up the small bundle of possessions I’d acquired during my time here. A few items of clothing and some herbal recipes Willow had penned for me. There was a little cloth bag with a surprisingly heavy collection of Muggle coins and paper money in there, too. “I had it with me when I came and I can’t possibly use it here!” Willow had said, then added before I could protest. “Okay, now they are not called what you said… Sickles, galleons and what?- newts? Come on, Scruff, tell me quick! What are they?” And there was a fat packet of papers for Harry, all wrapped and specially sealed now for the journey ahead.
On leaving the room, I’d paused for a moment as the eyes of a stranger met mine through the mirror glass hanging beside the door. Amazing. The face that gazed back at me had little resemblance to the one that used to greet me from the woodland ponds near Hogwarts or tarnished gilt mirrors in my family’s old London house. Gone was the sunken eyed, tangle-haired prisoner of Azkaban and the gaunt, pale captive of Grimmauld Place. Beneath a clean shining cap of neatly trimmed dark hair, the face staring back wore the healthy glow of country sun and fresh air.
Coming back into the main room, I paused by the settle where I’d spent my first feverish days here. Remember it. I looked for the last time into the hearth where I’d tried to find so many answers. Then, moving to the table, I picked up our picnic basket as Willow brought her lantern down from its hook beside the door. Glancing back to see if I was ready, she stepped ahead of me out into the morning.
I walked a little behind her down the path, out of the clearing, beneath the canopies of willow branches and past the oak-lined wall. Without saying anything to each other, we stopped to listen for the sounds of John Burkett’s bull behind the stones and laughed. Nothing. Probably he was down in his usual pasture. I was sorry about that. I’d have liked to have given him a silent word of thanks for his part in my journey home.
At first our talk was full of summer flowers, the warmth of the day and the hundreds of yellow butterflies rising from the rain-puddles as we passed, not our destination. But the growing awareness of its closeness began to thrum in the air around us. It crowded out everything else, leaving room only for periods of silence. There were, all at once, so many things to say, so few words to express them and so, so little time left now. But sometimes the unhurried stillness between old friends speaks more deeply than any word knows how to.
We’d eaten our lunch after the steepest part of the hill was behind us.
Remember it. The fresh bread baked in the early hours of morning. The sweet taste of the berries. The smooth shells of the eggs I’d gathered.
Sitting in the shade of a lilac tree just past its blooming, we took our time and reassured each other that we’d earned the chance to rest. But afterward, walking on even ground beneath the clear Solstice-blue sky with the sun shining as far above us as it ever would, neither of us pressed ourselves to meet our earlier pace. We’d begun the old game. Trying to ignore the thrum, the prickle, the tingle of Magic filling the air and sending chills down our backs. Seeking one last time to wrap ourselves in the teaching, laughing and learning that were the fabric woven from our months together.
“Willow,” I said finally. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to know. I’ve meant to ask you these last months, but usually thought about it at some odd hour in the middle of the night. I don’t think that guy at the fair you told me about went round showing that picture of himself with his automobile to just anybody! How did he recognize that you were, like him, from the future?”
Her laughter rang clear as we paused beneath a grove of larch. To my surprise, she set down her lantern, before straightening to give me an answer. “Remember when I gave you soup and you said ‘wow!’?”
“Yeah, kind of.” At least, I thought, watching her bend over the lantern again and strike a match to set it to glowing. I remembered the wonderful rich smell of that soup and the warm, gentle hands that had steadied it for me.
“Well…” her laughter turned into bubbling giggles as she stood up holding the light in her hand. “I looked at all his pans and pots and trinkets and ribbons and bows and said… and said…”
“And said what?” I couldn’t help grinning as she battled to get her words through the bright, ringing giggles.
“And I said… ‘Oh, cool! Man! All this stuff is so far out!’”
I laughed with her, though that thrumming I’d noticed before was growing stronger.
Not a prickle any more, either. Or a tingle. Almost a buzzing. “And so,” I said through my own laughter. “When you went to meet him at the fair grounds, he…?”
Willow gestured with her free hand. I followed the motion toward a patch of sun beyond the border of the larch grove and up one last short stretch of rocky, overgrown slope. “What he did was to bring me here.”
With that, Willow turned and stepped ahead of me, slipping nimbly around a tangle of young rowans, then reached back for my hand. Just ahead of her, I could see a parting between two rocks, where shadows lay, patiently waiting. Now, after so many months, after such a short day’s journey, we had reached the entrance to the cave.
The last of our laughter carried us bravely into dark. By the time it faded, my eyes had adjusted and I was able to take in our surroundings.
It was nothing like I’d imagined.
Long, graceful stalactites hung, glittering pink and green and pearl. “This way,” Willow said, picking her way carefully ahead of me along a narrow, twisting, downward path between up-thrusting stalagmites.
“This is beautiful!” I exclaimed, sparing a moment to gaze round in wonder. The cave room was enormous. Despite what she had told me, I realized that I’d expected our voices to echo, but they seemed almost muffled in the windless space. Still, there was no oppressive closeness. Instead, the deep, cool quiet of the place was almost vibrating with the feel of Magic, both ancient and powerful.
“Yes, it is.” She smiled at me over her shoulder in the lantern light.
As she moved, the light reflecting from her lantern seemed to change. There was a shimmer in it, a rippling quality to the colours on the stone she passed.
The path was growing steadily steeper now. The rock formations were broader and taller, creating deep canyons through which we passed at a slow but steady pace. “We’re almost there,” said Willow.
The buzz that had skittered across the back of my neck outside was now a shiver. Above me, beyond the glowing circle of lantern light, the roof of the cavern was almost invisible. Through the dimness, I felt more than saw it stretching up and away to some immeasurable distance. That sense of ancient power was stronger with every step, steady as a living pulse in the air around me.
The shiver spread across my neck and back, down my arms, and then round my head til it felt like every hair was trying to stand up on end.
“Here we are,” said Willow, moving beyond the last stalagmite and stepping to one side so we could stand shoulder to shoulder.
The lake below us was enormous, stretching off into the darkness. The water was crystal clear and so still that I could see our two perfect reflections.
I looked down at the two mirrored faces. There was Willow’s, her features very dear and familiar. Beside it was the image of the stranger I’d seen in her mirror this morning.
“What do I do next?” I asked the steady eyes gazing up from the water.
Willow’s reflected face split with her sudden grin. “What else?” asked her voice at my shoulder. “You swim.”
But the half-chuckle that so often followed that grin never came. I turned to see her cheeks shining with sudden tears. She brushed them away with the back of one sleeve as she bent and carefully set the lantern down. Straightening, she pointed into the darkness.
“You’ll go that way,” she said. “There’s no light to set a direction by, but there is a current. You’ll feel it. Not fast, but strong and sure. Don’t fight it. Give in and let it take you. You’ll reach a spot where there’s nothing left for it but to pull in as full a breath as you can and dive deep. You’ll know that when you get there.”
“And this will bring me to…?”
“To where you believe you need to be. Once you’re out of the water, you’ll find your way back home from there. Now, you’ve got the name of the friend I told you about? The one person I trusted with the story of what had really happened to me when I disappeared on our walking tour? The one who knows I was going back here to the past to marry Hal? You remember? I told you she was so happily married herself, that she thought I’d be denying destiny if I’d stayed in the future?”
I nodded. Reached back to tap the bundle tied across my shoulders. “Right here.”
“And you’ll give her my name. Tell her Willow Evans met you where she’d gone to live with Hal. That I was the one that sent you forward to her. You won’t have to say anything about being a Wizard. She won’t ask any questions, except maybe, to know if I’m all right. Answering those will be enough so that she’ll help you. She clerks in the kind of office that can set you up, get you papers. So you can find work. At least…” Willow paused. “She did the last time I saw her. But nonetheless, she’ll know someone, know how to get it done for you… You know, her husband works for the railway. Maybe he can get you on there…”
“Driving a train?”
She laughed. “Not your first day. Now, you’re sure you’ve got all that?”
I managed a smile. “Yeah. Got it. And, Willow? What do they call the kind of place the two of you used to share a long time from now?”
“What?” Her voice was startled. “A flat. We used to share a…”
“One for one,” I said and was rewarded with a brief, muffled laugh and the pressure of her hand circling itself around mine.
Together, in silence, we stared into the lake. It looked as smooth, cold and black as polished marble. The shivering was now almost like the crawling of hundreds of tiny insect feet across my back and neck. “Okay,” I said at last. “Let’s do it.”
But I made no move toward the water. Instead, I turned and looked into the face of my friend. “You’ll get back home all right?” I asked.
“Of course I will.” Finally there came that throaty chuckle. “Remember when you wanted to come with me to deliver Ellen’s baby and I talked about being perfectly safe?”
“Yeah, and I said I didn’t believe in anything being perfectly…” I stopped, my words catching on my own amazed laughter. “But you were! You knew it because…”
“Because I already knew there were things I needed to do that I hadn’t done yet. And still haven’t gotten round to. I knew from the things Iris wrote down, that there’s still a lot left that goes into how my part of the story comes out.”
“But you could have told me that. Instead, you stopped arguing and let me come.”
We stood silent for several long moments, hands joined.
Willow drew a deep breath. “One of those things I know,” she said, releasing my hand. “Is that, according to Iris, because of all they’d been through together, Granny and the Wizard knew that they would forever be very special friends… Even when…” Her voice cracked. “When he left to go back to his world of Magic and they knew they would probably never meet again-”
“Do they?” I picked my words carefully. “Know for certain they won’t meet again?”
“Why-!” Her tone was startled, then thoughtful. “Well… maybe not. Those two were the only complete stories Iris wrote down about Granny and the Wizard. Or at least...” Excitement rose in her voice. “Those were the only two the family history people had among their papers. So it’s not impossible to think that-”
“Not impossible at all” I said, then found I was repeating something I had told myself in silent despair the night of the storm. This time though I was speaking it out loud in a tone whose excitement matched hers. "Magic defies the very idea of impossible.”
“Well,” Willow looked for and found a bit of her usual brisk tone. “Then we know what we need to do. I have to go home and set my grandchildren on the path of believing in all kinds of Magical possibilities and you, Sirius! You need to go jump in the lake!”
It was odd, hearing that name on her lips. For the past six months, I’d always been Stephen. Except when I was Town Scruff. Or just Scruff. “Because Stephen’s what you’ll need to react to without a moment’s hesitation,” she’d said. “Not Sirius.”
And of course, she’d been right. As far as the world waiting beyond the water knew, Sirius Black, the dangerous, wanted criminal, Sirius Black, was dead. That man, Sirius, was, at least for now, part of the past. The past before this one. And whether I would ever openly carry his name again in the future was something yet to find out.
But in this moment of Magic, she was telling me she would always remember Sirius the Wizard, along with that Scruff, Stephen, who’d shared her hearth and home, who’d laughed and learned with her this last year.
“That’s an odd choice of words. You ‘have to’ go home.” I said. The crawling feel of those insect feet was now an insistent thrumming through all my veins as I felt the awesome power of the water pulling at me.
It wasn’t fear that kept me talking though. Leaping into the water felt right.
Like it had when I left Azkaban. Swimming away from prisons could almost get to be habit forming. But that other time I’d felt no tearing in my heart for a friend left behind. “Willow,” I grasped her hands in mine. “I think that those magical possibilities mean there’s really no such thing as ‘have to’. Somewhere, I think, there’s always a choice.”
“Well, then, I have chosen to keep the magical possibilities alive in my family by staying here. At least for now. Who knows, maybe if we believe enough and hope enough, someday one of my great, great- oh, I get all the greats mixed up! My great-grandchildren might turn out to be a…”
“To be a Wizard!” I exclaimed.
“Or a Witch,” added Willow.
“Or a Witch,” I agreed.
“I’d love to think so,” She was almost hugging herself in delight. “There was something in one of those family papers about one of my great-great-great- well, you know, put in a few more greats- great grand-daughters having some very interesting traits as a little girl. That was one of the last things I came across before I left the future to come back here to live. Do you think it could mean she’s Magical?”
“Well, yeah, maybe!” I grinned at her. “I mean, it’s possible. New Magic pops up in families all the time!”
“Oh, I hope so!”
“Me too.”
Suddenly, Willow turned to me and lifting her hands, pulled me against her and hugged me hard. Kissed my cheek. “Go now, Scruff. Go safe to your Godson.”
I was hugging her too. Tight. Not wanting to let her go. “You too. Go dream for your how many- greats-granddaughter!”
We stepped apart, staring at each other in the lantern light. Gathering both her hands in mine for the last time, I kissed first one, then the other, before I turned and walked toward the water’s edge. I studied it for a moment, judging the depth and distance as best I could through the dimness.
“Are you going to-” came a breathless voice behind me. “Transform yourself?”
Looking over my shoulder, I nodded at her. “Yeah, I am. I’m a better swimmer when I’m a dog”
I grinned at her then, and before she could say anything more, for the first time in my life, I calmly and deliberately transformed myself into a dog in front of a Muggle.
Trails of tears were dark on her cheeks in the lantern light, but her eyes were glowing and her face was radiant with smiles. I trotted back to her, lifted on my hind legs, placed my front paws on her shoulders and gave her one long slurp across the cheek. I tasted the salt of her tears. Felt that familiar old swift and gentle caress of fingers through the fur on my neck and heard Willow’s laughter, high and clear with surprise and delight.
I could still hear the sound of it as I spun away from her, ran a few steps and, gathering myself, leapt into the water.