The Father Tree

Chapter 1

Andro wasn't frightened about the move; he was ten years old and nothing frightened him anymore –not even the Father Tree. Most trees were people in a crowd –nameless and for the most part forgettable; the rest stood apart like adults and you had to get to know them before you made friends. They needed watching.

He was small for his age, with curly red hair that stuck out at odd angles even when he was forced to brush it. He wore glasses with butterscotch frames and scratched lenses that were always dirty and needed to be taken off and wiped if anything important came along. Otherwise, he was like all ten-year-old boys, with shredding jeans, and mud-caked shirts, running shoes with soles peeling off like sun burnt skin, and deafness in the woods whenever his mother called him.

He walked slowly over the lush, uncut lawn behind the house to the rotting brown picket fence whose boards stooped like sick old men trying to guard the grass from the wilderness beyond. He could see the field where, each spring, birds would arrive in noisy crowds, chatting and gossiping about their trip, nesting on anything that seemed out of his reach. The fence also kept the woods away -the woods, so full of silent footprints in the winter snow: tracks that led to the silver lake, and a fairy meadow where the moon sometimes caught their moving shadows in the evening breeze. And the huge pile of heavy rocks near the grove of alder trees that his father had told him were part of a castle in the days before even he was born. The woods were deep and dark, full of secret forts on camouflaged trails that snuck under bushes and crept beneath fallen trees that only he could find. Andro knew the woods, and loved them like they were his family. And since his father had moved away, they almost were.

But the trees were silent on the subject: they didn’t argue in the cloudless nights. Their limbs didn’t break like dishes on the walls, their roots didn’t cry out in pain. The woods were not moody or tearful, and dawn did not find them tired and sleepless. They did not have bad days, or apologize for being rude. They forgave him when he ran away or trampled through an unmade trail; they understood the times he had to get away and run crying into their unseen center where he could be alone. They laid down moss for him to lie on and covered him with leaves to hide him. He was welcome anywhere, any time.

Every time Andro went into the forest with his father, they would take the same trail, at least to the lake. It was a big, well-marked path that wound mindlessly through the forest past huge ancient trees that had been there since the world began, according to his father. And they would always stop beneath one particularly old and misshapen tree. This tree must have been through hell, eh Andro? he would say, then walk over to the disfigured trunk and stroke the scaly, moss-stained bark. How it must have suffered over the years. He’d shake his head and sigh. And yet, look at it. Beaten to its knees, crippled by arthritis but still alive and fighting back, pointing its branches defiantly at the sky. Then it would be the poem -Andro could still hear one of the verses: 'In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced, nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of Chance, my head is bloody but unbowed'. He hadn’t the slightest idea what it all meant, except that whoever wrote it must have been hit a lot.

Sometimes, under the old tree with its branches so close he could smell the moss, his father would look at him with a serious expression on his face, grasp his shoulders tenderly, and say Andro, do you ever wonder what happens when people die? He wouldn’t expect an answer, because he would continue right on as if he hadn’t actually asked a question. As if he hadn’t asked it a hundred times before. I wonder if some of them get put in trees. Their souls, I mean. And everything that they did comes back to haunt them. Good people get big, tall, strong trees, and the others... He would look at the grotesquely twisted tree and shudder. Andro had always wondered why he shuddered. Fathers would never get assigned trees like that.

Actually, when he really thought about it, the big kneeling tree bothered him. The huge, deformed trunk had twisted the path around it like a bully, its roots holding the ground in hard fingers. An ageless cedar that had seen the centuries evolve like compost; it was an arthritic old tree, blind with time and bent with countless crops of branches. Doubled almost in half where it had fractured in some ancient wind, it formed a giant 'N' like a kneeling man. Its bark was deeply furrowed and discoloured in spots by moss that made Andro imagine the tree was sick. Perhaps that was why nothing grew around its trunk. Not so much as a blade of grass or seedling bush dared to brave its shadows.

On either side of the tree, the path broke free. But after his father left, Andro seldom went past the cedar if he could help it. Like the footprints of the little foxes, he entered the shadowy realm of brambles and bushes, forsaking the security of the dim light that filtered through the trail and onto the tree.

Before stepping through a gap in the fence, Andro turned back to look at the house he would soon be leaving forever. It was an old wooden thing with an upstairs and a veranda running around the entire downstairs like a necklace. It needed paint his mother always said, but to Andro, it looked as it always had: spotted. It must have been coloured white at one time, because the spots were white on a faded grey wood -or were they grey spots under white? He’d asked his mother about that once, and she’d thought for a moment as puzzled as he was, and then said maybe the house was like a zebra and you never could figure out which was zebra and which was stripe. His mother was very smart.

Anyway, the house also needed new front steps; you had to be careful, especially at night, not to walk on the third step from the bottom because it was loose and sometimes fell off. It needed a patch on the roof over the laundry room, and linoleum in there to cover the hole in the floor where the mice lived. His bedroom window was cracked, too, but that was his fault. His head had hit it accidentally when his mother had become angry with him one night. His father and mother had been arguing in the next room, and Andro became frightened when something large and heavy hit the wall with a muffled scream. He’d pounded on the wall for them to stop. Suddenly, his door had burst open and it had happened. But his mother hadn’t meant to hurt him; Andro was certain of that. His mother loved him –his father said so the next morning just before he left and never came back.

Andro stared at the house and sighed. How could you just leave a house that you knew so well? A house that knew you and all your habits. A house that tolerated you just because you knew its weaknesses and how to treat it: where to step and just how hard to close a door. A house got to know you, to trust you. It let you in on all its secrets, whispered things to you in the night, creaked a welcome on the stairs, warmed you, and sheltered you like friend. You didn’t leave friends.

On his last day in the country, Andro felt sad for the house, and sad for the yard and its pathetic old fence. He even felt sad for the Tree. He decided to visit it one last time. Even monsters deserved a good bye if you knew them.

As he started off down the trail at the edge of the field, he had no clear idea of what he wanted to do there. Nor did his dog, Bones, who immediately ran into the outlying hedge of trees that watched the more sombre woods within. The sky was overcast, but enough light remained to clothe the trail in an indistinct shadow that promised dampness in the forest. The day itself was chilly, and a few of the deciduous trees were busy painting coloured dots on their lower branches. There was even a premature smattering of fallen leaves on the forest floor, like clothes in his bedroom at the end of a tiring day.

For most of the way, though, the trail was lined by bushes still in full September green, or cedars both young and old, but tall and straight to catch the slowly failing light of summer's end. There was no breeze to stir the branches, but sometimes in the thick, deep canopy of leaves, he heard the chattering of a bird, or the soft thump of a lonely grouse -lonely like him. Even Bones had left him to explore the world where only animals go. Bones, the largest dog in the world, and the most loyal friend he had, was a camouflage brown and once he disappeared into the underbrush, he was virtually invisible to anyone with scratched and finger-smudged glasses. The size of a small deer, he moved with the grace of a bulldozer, preferring to go through a bush rather than around it. His presence was a loud thing in the woods; animals with ears were safe from him.

As he looked around at the familiar trees, and listened to Bones rummaging around just out of sight, Andro found it hard to believe that he would never be here again. Never trip over a hidden root, or scratch himself running through a prickle bush. He’d never see things grow old, or watch the maples shed their leaves. A move was a serious thing. Ever since Andro’s father had left for the city, he'd known it was just a matter of time before he and his mother would be forced to follow. It was more the why of it all that bothered him. Why did fathers leave -or mothers, for that matter? A home was for both. It wasn't entirely his father's fault that he had to leave, he supposed -his mother had a temper. Even at ten he realized that parents had to quarrel sometimes. But his friends never lost their fathers no matter how loud they yelled through the walls at night. Not even when they screamed in the woods.

He shivered as he walked carelessly along the well-worn path. Wrapped as he was within himself, his feet still knew exactly where to go. The occasional branch fallen from the trees above could not confuse them. It was as if they had been in training for the six years they’d been here, and had forgotten the old paths in the town where they’d been born. Even when they first came, there had been a trail, and even then the old tree had grabbed it, torn it from the forest's carpet, and forced it to crawl in conquered shame around its feet. Why? The world was still filled with whys at ten.

The Tree was close now; he could feel it. The air was always cooler near the Tree, and there was a kind of silence in an invisible ring around the area. Once crossed, it was unmistakable: like entering a shadow. But there were no marks -he’d checked. No change of color, no eagle’s nest to scare away the small animals; the birds still sang nearby, but twittered nervously on adjacent trees and flew away quickly at the slightest excuse. Mushrooms grew inside the ring of course, but he had never trusted mushrooms. They grew on decaying things -frightful things that changed night by night until they disappeared or melted. The tree, however, never changed.

*

Already he could feel the roots like hard, quiet worms just underneath the ground. Occasionally, they would emerge,snake-like, from the dirt for a quick breath, hide for a while, then surface closer to their protector.

Another step and the circle closed around him like a room. Even the light was different: as if filtered through gauze, the colors lost their feeling. They were like the photographs of his grandmother: faded, not the real thing. But only he could sense it -adults walked the path with laughter and only mild complaints at having to duck beneath the branches at the turn.

Last summer had been fine. He remembered walking with his father to the lake. His father was tall and strong, with wonderful long red hair. He walked with all the confidence of a pirate; nothing scared him, nothing puzzled him. He’d pick up a leaf off the trail and tell Andro what tree it came from, and why it had fallen. He’d make up little stories about wandering leaves and their adventures in the forest. He made the woods seem like a city neighbourhood, with families of trees talking to each other, their children playing games in the summer and sleeping in the winter. How he knew all this, Andro could only wonder.

Both of them always came out here before he went away; his job seemed to take him away a lot Andro thought, but the time in the woods was their time at least –just the two of them.. and Bones, of course. Each time they’d come to the Tree and each time they’d stop and look at it, lost in their own private thoughts. Sometimes his father would tell him a story, or point out some branch or leaf he’d noticed on the tree, but more often he would just stand there and stare at it, drinking it in –or, as Andro would sometimes think, be consumed by it.

And each time they came, Andro would watch his father, and memorize him just in case. The tree frightened him, even with his father there. And his father changed from visit to visit, from leaving to returning. Not everything changed, of course –he always came home as tall as before, and his hair was always red, and long, with curls that he could never control, rolling onto his forehead, and grabbing onto his ears like earmuffs. And his hands were big and strong, with wiener-fingers that matched the beefy, no-nonsense hands –perfect matches, except for the ring finger on his right hand that was bent like a hook at the end where mommy had accidentally broken it.

And his nose stayed the same: Romanesque, he would call it –whatever that meant. Apparently it went with his chin that stuck out almost as far –something about balancing his face, he would tell people. And his deep green eyes would always match the woods he loved. In fact he often told Andro that you had to have green eyes to be a forester. Andro’s eyes were also green, so he’d always smile when he said that.

But some things did change. Sometimes he’d come home with a different face –a beard, or a goatee. Mommy hated the beard –said it scratched her, and anyway it made him look like a logger. For some reason the goatee was okay; maybe loggers weren’t allowed to wear them.

And sometimes he’d come home with worry wrinkles around his eyes, and a face that seemed to bury his eyes. And he’d spend long hours saying nothing at all, avoiding them both –but especially mommy. And then, suddenly, his job would call him away once more, and Andro and he would walk out to the Tree again to say goodbye. No! Not goodbye, he would always say, before they left the Tree. He would always be around to watch out for him. Always.

Andro remembered the last time he’d told him that. On that day so long ago, it had been warm and they’d walked hand in hand along the trail dense with dripping leaves. They'd stopped as always beneath the Tree and his father had picked a sprig of cedar, squeezed it between his fingers, and then rubbed it on Andro for him to smell. The sweet sticky scent had lasted all day long. But now it seemed there was no odour to the tree.

As he stared at the branches above his head, it became clear what he had come to do. He needed a branch, a piece of bark -something to prove to himself he hadn’t really been afraid. It was an act of defiance, an acknowledgement of his right to these woods that he was leaving. It was his mark. It was his father.

He had no idea how to approach the Tree to do it -slowly and with quiet dignity, or at a run, like a warrior in battle. A low-lying finger of needles brushed gently over his hair. He was a long way from the trunk and he had to follow the finger to the hand and then to the arm to be sure it was the right tree. He reached up and tried to tear a tiny branch away but he felt the tree shudder at the attempt and let go. The needles caressed his head to forgive him for the trespass. Quickly he got out his pocket-knife and reached for the branch. In one swift motion he sliced off a tiny twig and ran for home, with the silent screams of the old, tortured wooden man following like a shadow.

Where have you been Andro? said his mother, looking up from a pile of boxes in what had been their living room. She was dressed in jeans and a red plaid shirt; her long brown hair was piled untidily on the top of her head and threatened to escape in an avalanche over her face at any moment. She was a tall, dominating woman usually, but not today. This had been their favourite room, looking out as it did on the field behind the house. But now it was filled with cardboard like a warehouse; it didn't feel the same. Neither did his mother.

He looked around and sighed. Oh just in the woods with Bones.

His mother watched at him with tired eyes that were red from crying. She seemed older now, and rarely smiled. Even when she did, the smile hurt her face. He could tell, because she would usually turn her head to hide the tears that followed as surely as if she'd been slapped.

Mother we're taking Bones, aren't we..?

She ran to him in tears and enveloped him in a hard, desperate hug. Of course we are, sweetie. We're taking everything.

But how will daddy find us when we go?

He couldn't see her face, but he could tell she was crying and trying not to let him know.

Daddy will know how to find us, she said after what seemed a long time. She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of the oversized flannel shirt she was wearing and walked over to one of the boxes. Do you have anything else to pack? There's room in this box for a little more, I think. But the car's already pretty full...

Even at his age, he noticed that she never really finished a sentence without making it seem as if she had just a bit more to say, if only she could squeeze it out. No, he said, trying to think really hard just Bones... And this, I guess. He stared at the little sprig of cedar in his hand. Maybe we can pack this. He thought about it for a moment, and then put it in his pocket.

But that's just a branch, dear. Can't we leave it behind? There are trees where we're going... But his look told her that what he had was not just a branch. Andro was taking his beloved woods with him.

Chapter 2

The ride to the city was long and it rained the whole way. All along the spruce-lined road, their tops bent and waving in the grey swirling wind, trees whispered in the dark green way that forests do and pointed at their car accusingly as if to say We know what you did, Andro Johnson. And at every twist in the road, the woods closed in on them and only let him through because he was with his mother.

But as guilty as he felt, he was sad when the tunnel of trees gradually opened into sparse meadows populated by an increasing number of buildings. They were still in the mountains -sort of- but they were also amongst cars and people, all huddled together for protection from the trees that stood in defiant hordes on the hem of the still untamed hills.

They drove right through the lights and noise and eventually stopped in front of a large old house on the edge of town. Andro looked up at his mother who had been even more quiet than usual for the past several hours since they'd left their house.

It's just for tonight, Andro. We're staying with a friend and then leaving tomorrow morning. She sighed and shook her head slowly. The city's a long way away yet, she whispered to no one in particular.

It had started to rain and the mountains had disappeared into the mist by the time they arrived at the place where her friend lived. Andro looked at the house through the drops on the car window and fingered his cedar twig. The house had two floors, and the big rambling porch going all round the house made it seem larger than it should have been -like an old woman with a hoop skirt. And although the house was painted and everything seemed to be in the right place, he got the impression that it was like the makeup his mother sometimes wore: it made you look healthy even when you were sick.

The lawn was cut and flowers stood at lazy September attention along the sidewalk that led up to the dark wooden front door. A single light in an upstairs window was the only sign of life he could see. What caught his attention, however, were the trees that ringed the house. Tamed trees, of course, not the free spirits that roamed the mountains back home. City cousins, perhaps. But at least they were alive. Unlike the house they drank the rain and worshipped in the wind. Tame or not, they had not surrendered to the shaven land despite the zoo in which they found themselves. Trimmed and pruned, they still could call to the hills each night and pretend to be content all day. It bothered him that they were captive, rooted to an area where they had no hope of friends and family. Maybe they had never known anything else, but at least there was still the chance that the house would fall and the buildings crumble, and the forests retake the dying fields.

His mother’s friend was a fussy old lady who was not fond of dogs so Bones had to sleep in the car. And the house was not fond of the weather. All night long, as Andro lay in bed snuggled under a huge feather comforter, the house moaned and complained of the cold and damp. He wondered how the old lady could sleep with all the fuss, and how she tended its obviously aching joints during the daylight hours. He was just beginning to get used to the groans and drifting off with thoughts of her rubbing the corners with liniment, when he heard a tapping on the window pane. Mixed with scraping, it was a fingernail sound.

He surfaced from under the covers head first like a turtle, and peered timidly over the windowsill above the head of his bed. Nothing. It was cold in the room -the old lady saw no need to heat the house until the winter- but he sat wrapped in the covers under the window until the noise made the glass shiver again. It was dark outside and his window overlooked the back of the house, so there was not even the reflected glow of a street light. He wasn't frightened, though. There was no threat. It was the branch of a tree and its insistent scraping was a friendly chat.

The phone rang in the middle of the night –he could hear it through the thin wooden walls. His mother’s friend let it ring a long time, hoping it would stop. Andro thought of getting up himself, but before he could get out of the bed, a sleepy voice said, Who? Then, Just a minute... Then he could hear his mother’s voice, but so softly, he wondered if it was just the wind. And then he fell asleep again to the sound of the branch chatting.

Mommy, he said as soon as they were back in the car and on the highway again, is Daddy in this town?

His mother glanced at him, her eyes wide, and the car swerved briefly on the road. She kept her voice steady. Why did you say that, Andro?

He shrugged, certain she wouldn't understand. I don't know... I just kind of thought he knew where we were.

He... he knows where we're going... Her voice was thin and he lost it in the roar of the engine. But she kept looking at him out of the corner of her eye and he got the impression he'd said something he shouldn't have.

*

The city, when they finally arrived, was worse than he had expected. Despite his mother's patient explanations, the city was not a place for children. First of all, there were dirty buildings everywhere smothering the sky, crowded together as if they were afraid. Maybe the noise that rose thick and confused from the frantic streets scared them, or the bewildered stain of lights that ricocheted off each window and door in every color except green; or maybe it was the air, so grey and heavy it made his eyes water. The buildings certainly didn't look healthy. And there was nothing growing -nothing except streetlights poked above the cement of the sidewalks: poor imitations of dead, leafless trees. Groups of sad-faced people waited at car-lined intersections for the lights to change, and then threaded through the herds that charged at them from the opposite side, careful to touch nobody and nothing, careful to watch the pavement at their feet in case it disappeared.

Well, this is it, said his mother with a little tremble in her voice as they pulled up in front of a dirty once-white house with no lawn. It was a two story wooden toad that squatted uncomfortably between a little grey stucco corner store and a brown, rotting thing that looked a bit like a deserted gas station. The front door of the tiny houselet was only a foot or so from the sidewalk, but someone had built a miniature picket fence along the front, probably to keep people from bumping into the walls at night. It certainly wouldn’t keep Bones in. Two steps led up to the scratched and peeling door, but even they seemed crowded in, squeezed and uncomfortable like the house.

It'll look better when we've had a chance to fix it up, she said, and then wiped her face with her sleeve as if she had something in her eye.

Andro was speechless at first. There was really nothing much to say. He was at a zoo -a building zoo- just like the trees at the old lady's place. He peered through the greasy car window, unwilling to open his door. But you said there were trees here. His voice was pleading.

Ah, there's a tree in the backyard... I think, his mother said with forced cheerfulness, and got out of the car. You'll see it tomorrow.

It wasn't so much the house as the wood that seemed to bother him. Like strips of muscle plastered on the walls to dry, it reeked of mutilation, murder. Silent screams hung loosely in invisible folds, skin thick, along the thinly disguised boards of the hall. He shuddered as he followed his mother through the ill-lit passage. It was like being swallowed by some rigid, wooden throat. And as they passed into the thing's stomach -the kitchen- dark shadows scurried away at the sudden dim explosion of the single 40-watt bulb above the pockmarked sink. Andro stared at the room with fright-wide eyes. It was, he imagined, like being imprisoned in that tree back home. He was going to mention it to his mother, but she seemed sad, so he decided to wait.

She looked at Andro with an embarrassed expression and shrugged. I only saw it in the daylight, she whispered apologetically, looking around the dirty little kitchen. The room was about the size of a large car and was lit only by the single bulb. Even in that light, however, the linoleum on the floor appeared stained and uneven. A small brown table with one leaf folded down over its legs hunched uneasily in one corner as if surprised in the act of dressing. Two unsavoury metal chairs with torn vinyl cushions loitered nearby, uncertain whether or not to stay. There was a refrigerator, of course, and a stove, but neither seemed confident. Both were stained, old and in need of a bath. Between them was a tiny window, hung like a dark painting on the wall. Through it -through the grease and a large diagonal crack- the soft grey beams of a solitary street lamp just penetrated and served merely to highlight some fingerprints on the lower pane.

Perhaps some plants... his mother said, but her voiced trailed off and lost itself in the shadows pinned around the room. She turned and put her hand on Andro's shoulder. I'm sorry, she whispered, afraid to look into his eyes.

The night was even worse. His bedroom smelled of bleach and even opening the window didn't help much. He supposed someone had been sick in there, or maybe died. He remembered when he was very young in the other house by the woods. His mother had been