Dust & Decay(107)

“If you need to use the bathroom,” said the Greenman without looking up, “there’s an outhouse behind that row of pines.”

Lilah drifted away and came back in a few minutes. When she did, she found a fresh cup of tea at the far end of the table. The Greenman was shelling nuts into a small wooden bowl. He paused and pushed a bowl of water, a bunch of flowers, and a pair of tweezers to within her reach, always careful not to move quickly or get too close.

“If you want to help,” he said, “I’ll tell you how.”

Lilah looked at the flowers and then at him. She nodded.

“Use the tweezers to remove each petal and place it in the water. Let it float. Be careful not to get your skin oil on the petals. We want them pure. Once you fill the bowl, we’ll cover it with cheesecloth and set it out in the sunshine for four hours. We have that much sun left. After that, we’ll strain the water through a coffee filter into some jars. I’ll add a little brandy, and we’ll set it in my root cellar.”

“Why?” It was the first word she had spoken in hours.

“We’re making flower essences. We’ll add walnut and Mimulus ringens.” He nodded to the thick bunch of large purple flowers with yellow centers. “It’s very rare for those to bloom this early. Usually don’t see them until June or later, but we needed it now and nature provided. Funny … but I didn’t know why I picked them yesterday. Now I understand.”

“What is it for?”

The Greenman smiled. His face was heavily lined, but when he smiled, all those creases conspired to make him seem much both younger and timeless. “For courage, Lilah,” he said.

Lilah tensed. “You know my name?”

“Everyone in these hills knows your name,” he said. “Lilah, the Lost Girl. You’re famous. The fearsome zombie hunter. The girl who helped bring down Charlie Pinkeye and the Hammer.”

She shook her head.

“I know, I know,” said the Greenman with a gentle laugh. “No one is really who people think they are. It’s unfair. When they give us nicknames and create a story for us, everyone expects us to be that person and to live up to that legend.” He went back to shelling walnuts. “Tom knows something about that. Out here, people see him as either a hero or a villain. Never anything in between, not for Tom. He hates it too. Do you know that? He doesn’t want to be anyone’s hero any more than he wants to be a villain.”

“Tom isn’t a villain.”

“Not to you or me, no. Not to the people in town. But to a lot of the people out here—people like Charlie and his lot—Tom’s the boogeyman.”

“That’s stupid. They’re the villains.”

“No doubt.” He nodded to the flowers. “Those petals won’t jump into the bowl by themselves.”

Lilah stared at the purple petals for a moment, then picked up the tweezers and began pulling them off. She tore a few before she got the knack. The Greenman watched, nodded, and picked up another walnut. “Who are you?” she asked. “I mean really.”

“Most of the time I’m nobody,” said the Greenman. “When you live alone, you don’t need a name. I don’t need to tell you that.” She said nothing, but she gave a tiny nod. “I used to be Arthur Mensch—Ranger Artie to the tourists in Yosemite. That was before First Night.”

“When the world changed and everything went bad,” she said.

“A lot of folks see it that way,” said the Greenman, “but it was death that changed. People are still people. Some good, some bad. Death changed, and we don’t know what death really means anymore. Maybe that was the point. Maybe this is an object lesson about the arrogance of our assumptions. Hard to say. But the world? She didn’t change. She healed. We stopped hurting her and she began to heal. You can see it all around. The whole world is a forest now. The air is fresher. More trees, more oxygen. Even in Yosemite the air was never this fresh.”

“The dead—,” she began.

“Are part of nature,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because they exist.”

She thought about that. “You don’t think they’re evil?”

“Do you?”

She shook her head. “People are evil.”

“Some are,” he admitted. He set the walnut shells aside and began shaving the walnut meat with the cheese grater. “People are all sorts of things. Some people are evil and good at the same time. At least according to their own view of the world.”