Free Messenger by Lois Lowry Page A

bread from Jean, who tucked a chrysanthemum blossom into the wrapping. She smiled at Frolic and leaned down to let him lick some crumbs from her fingers.
    â€œAre you going to the meeting tomorrow?” he asked her.
    â€œI suppose so. It’s all my father talks about.” Jean sighed and began to rearrange her wares on the table.
    â€œOnce it was books and poetry,” she said with sudden and passionate anguish. “I remember when I was small, after my mother died, he would tell me stories and recite poems at dinner. Then, later, he told me about the people who had written them.
    â€œBy the time we studied it in school—you remember, Matty, studying literature?—it was all so familiar to me, because of the way he had taught me when I didn’t even know he was teaching.”
    Matty remembered. “He used different voices. Remember Lady Macbeth?
‘Out, damn’d spot! Out, I say!’”
He tried to repeat the lines with the sinister yet regal voice Mentor had used.
    Jean laughed. “And Macduff! I cried when my father recited Macduff’s speech about the deaths of his wife and children.”
    Matty remembered that speech as well. Standing by the bakery stall with Frolic scampering about at their feet, Matty and Jean recited the lines together.
    Â 
All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What! all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop? . . .
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me.
    Â 
    Then Jean turned away. She continued restacking the loaves on her table, but clearly her thoughts were someplace else. Finally she looked up at Matty and said in a puzzled voice, “It was so important to him, and he made it important to me: poetry, and language, and how we use it to remind ourselves of how our lives should be lived . . .”
    Then her tone changed and became embittered. “Now he talks of nothing but Stocktender’s widow, and of closing Village to new ones. What has happened to my father?”
    Matty shook his head. He did not know the answer.
    The recitation of Macduff’s famous speech had reminded him of the woman he had spoken to on the path, the woman who feared for her lost children’s future.
All my pretty ones.
    Suddenly he felt that they were all of them doomed.
    He had forgotten completely about his own power. He had forgotten the frog.

Ten
    The meeting to discuss and vote on the petition began in the orderly, careful way such meetings had always been handled. Leader stood on the platform, read the petition in his strong, clear voice, and opened the meeting to debate. One by one the people of Village stood and gave their opinions.
    The new ones had come. Matty could see the woman he had met on the path, standing beside a tall, light-haired boy who must be Vladik. The two were with a group of new ones who had a place apart, since they could not vote.
    Small children, bored, played along the edge of the pine grove. Matty had once been like them, when he was new here and hadn’t liked meetings or debates. But now he stood with Seer and the other adults. He paid attention. He had not even brought Frolic, who usually accompanied Matty everywhere. Today the puppy was left at home, whimpering behind the closed door as they walked away.
    It was frighteningly obvious now, with the population gathered, that something terrible was happening. At Trade Mart it had been evening, dark, and Matty had been so interested in the proceedings that he had not noticed many individuals, only those who went to the platform, like Mentor, and the woman who had been so oddly cruel to her husband as they started home.
    Now, though, it was bright daylight. Matty was able to watch everyone, and to his horror he could see the changes.
    Near him stood his friend Ramon, with his parents and younger sister. It was Ramon’s mother who had asked to trade for a fur jacket and been denied. But they had