down on himself, ought to have been the focus of everyone’s thoughts, just then, as Ethan dragged his sorry self off the field to the bleachers, where his father was waiting with the crumpled flower of his smile. His teammates ought to have lined up on either side of him and beaten him with their mitts as he was made to run a gauntlet. They ought to have ripped the patch from his uniform shoulder, broken his bat, and uninvited him to come have post-game pizza in Clam Centre with everybody else. Instead they seemed quickly to lose interest in the shameful saga of Ethan Feld, and to turn their wondering faces to the sky. On Jock MacDougal Field, at the Tooth, where every summer for as long as white men could remember there had been an endless supply of blue sky and sunshine, it had started to rain.
*“The Darndest Way of Getting from Here to There” – slogan, Feld Airship, Inc.
THE NEXT MORNING Ethan awoke from dreams of freakish versions of baseball where there were seven bases, two pitchers, and outfields beyond outfields reaching into infinity, to find the little red fox-monkey sitting on his chest. Its thick fur was neatly combed and braided, and the braids on its head were tied with bright blue ribbons. And it was smoking a pipe. Ethan opened his mouth to scream but no sound emerged. The creature weighed heavily on his chest, like a sack of nails. Whoever had bathed it and tied its hair in bows had also doused it in rosewater, but underneath the perfume it stank like a fox, a rank smell of meat and mud. Its snout quivered with intelligence and its gleaming black eyes peered curiously at Ethan. It looked a little dubious about what it saw. Ethan opened and closed his mouth, gasping like a fish on a dock, trying to cry out for his father.
“Calm, piglet,” said the fox-monkey. “Breathe.” Its voice was small and raspy. It sounded like an old recording, coming through a gramophone bell. “Yes, yes,” it went on, soothingly. “Just take a breath and never be afraid of old Mr. C., for he isn’t going to hurt not the tiniest hair of your poor hairless piglet self.”
“What—?” Ethan managed.” What—?”
“My name is Cutbelly. I am a werefox. I am seven hundred and sixty-five years old. I have been sent to offer you everlasting fame and a fantastic destiny.” He scratched with a black fingernail at an itch in the dazzling white fur of his chest. “Go ahead,” he said. He pointed at Ethan with the stem of his pipe. “Take a few deep breaths.”
“Sitting…” Ethan tried. “On… my… chest.”
“Oh! Ha-ha!” The werefox tumbled backwards off of Ethan, exposing him to the startling sight of its private parts and furry behind. For Cutbelly was quite naked. This had not struck Ethan as odd when he was under the impression that he (Cutbelly was definitely a he) was an animal, but now Ethan sort of wished that Cutbelly would at least wear some pants. After completing his back flip, Cutbelly landed on his long bony back paws. The feet were much foxier than the quick black hands. “My apologies.”
Ethan sat up and tried to catch his breath. He looked at the clock on his nightstand: 7:23 A.M. His father might walk in at any moment and find him talking to this smelly red-brown thing. His eyes strayed to the door of his bedroom, and Cutbelly noticed.
“Not to worry about your pa,” he said. “The Neighbours worked me a sleeping grammer. Your pa would not hear the crack of Ragged Rock.”
“Ragged Rock? Where is that?”
“It isn’t a place,” Cutbelly said, relighting his pipe. It had been worked from a piece of bone. Ethan thought: Human bone. On the bowl was carved the bearded likeness of Abraham Lincoln, of all things. “It’s a time. A day, to be precise. A day to wake anybody who might be sleeping, including the dead themselves. But not your pa. No, even come Ragged Rock he will sleep, until you return safely from speaking with the Neighbours, and I tuck your little piglet self snug back into your bed.”
In a book or a movie, when strange things begin to happen, somebody will often say, “I must be dreaming”. But in dreams nothing is strange. Ethan thought that he might be dreaming not because a nude werefox had shown up making wild claims and smoking a pipe that was definitely not filled with tobacco, but because none of these things struck him as particularly unexpected or odd.
“What kind of a fantastic destiny?” he said. He did not know why, but he had a sudden flash that somehow it was going to involve baseball.
Cutbelly stood up and jammed his pipe between his teeth, looking very foxy.
“Aye, you’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” he said. “It’s a rare chance you’re to be offered. A first-rate education.”
“Tell me!” Ethan said.
“I will,” Cutbelly said. “On the way through.” He blew a long steady jet of foul smoke. It smelled like burning upholstery. Cutbelly sprang down from the bed and crept with his peculiar swaggering gait towards the window. He reached up with his long arms and dragged himself up onto the sill.
“Wear a sweater,” he said. “Scampering is cold work.”
“Scampering?”
“Along the Tree.”
“The Tree?” Ethan said, grabbing a hooded sweatshirt from the back of his desk chair. “What Tree?”
“The Tree of Worlds,” Cutbelly said impatiently. “Whatever do they teach you in school?”
WEREFOXES HAVE LONG been known for their teacherly natures. As they started down the drive from the Feld house, Cutbelly lectured Ethan on the true nature of the universe. It was one of his favourite subjects.
“Can you imagine an infinite tree?” Cutbelly said. They turned left at the mailbox that read Feld Airship, Inc., ducked under a wire fence, skirted the property line that separated the Felds from the Jungermans, and wandered west a little ways. “A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything? And whose outermost tippity fingers stretch as far as anything can possibly reach?”
“I can imagine anything,” Ethan said, quoting Mr. Feld, “except having no imagination.”
“Big talk. Well, then do so. Now, if you’ve ever looked at a tree, you’ve seen how its trunk divides into great limbs, which divide again into lesser limbs, which in turn divide into boughs, which divide yet again into branches, which divide into twigs, which divide into twiglings. The whole mess splaying out in all directions, jutting and twisting and zigzagging. At the tips of the tips you might have a million million tiny green shoots, scattered like the sparks of an exploding skyrocket. But if you followed your way back from the thousand billion green fingertips, down the twigs, to the branches, to the boughs, to the lesser limbs, you would arrive at a point – the technical term is the axil point – where you would see that the whole lacy spreading mass was really only four great limbs, branching off from the main trunk.”
“OK,” Ethan said.
“Now, let’s say the tree is invisible. Immaterial. You can’t touch it.”
“OK.”
“The only part of it that’s visible, that’s the leaves.”
“The leaves are visible.”
“The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million million places where life
