Tracing a Line: Evangel
The Meeting Place. THREE.
She wasn’t used to thinking in long sentences or philosophizing about free will. Her mind had been honed by hunger and want of safety. What she had done wouldn’t bear witness to anything except that she was responsible for one thing. Her dogged resistance to giving up or letting the spoils go to the greedy, the heartless, and, in her way of thinking, the weak. Living outside the law had been something she’d come upon by necessity. Even her father hadn’t been able to shield her from those who had been entrusted with the care-taking of the many but who were only interested in protecting the interests of the few. Her feet had taken her far from the place where the suffering began and the distance had given her just enough faith to believe that she could endure. She stumbled over a fallen branch, nearly tripped by her relief. What steadied her was the hand now holding hers.
What will we find today, Evangel? the round-faced youth asked as he kicked the guilty branch off the path and into the thicket.
The voice of a teacher more than a mother replied. What do you hope to find, child?
With furrowed forehead, the boy looked forward beyond trees where the morning light broke through. I shall keep my wish to myself, he answered, continuing a familiar exchange.
So you shall, Evangel nodded, and as they reached the meadow, she let go his hand and tore into a run.
She never meant to scare him when she took off like a jackrabbit. But she did. Try as he might after all these weeks, he couldn’t predict her dashes. Was it the open space that made her feet break away? No, she had run off on bridges and in forests, she had sped past him in the market on busy Sundays, a sack of potatoes and a handful of carrots banging against her hips. She never looked back and sometimes would run around corners or up alleys or down into the boggy undergrowth of the swamp. Eventually she would stop and wait, always preoccupied with something that took her attention: a stand of aspens, a mossy boulder, a nesting osprey. A street beggar. Church bells. There she would be, frozen in place like a statue, unwinded and apparently unburdened by any worry about him.
Today he’d found her beside a bramble of climbing roses near the river as the sun crept above the early clouds. Why do you do it? he asked her, feeling the courage that came from tracking her down in record time.
That’s for you to figure out, Sprout, she’d said. And she snapped a branch spilling with buds and leaves and thorns and twisted it into a crown that fit snug in his curling auburn hair.
The Meeting Place series will continue next week with Part Four. See this post for an introduction.
