The Family Tree

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The day went on being weird. Hysterical people phoned about vines invading their bathrooms, trees sprouting through their sidewalks. Every available person worked the phones, making reassuring noises. “Yes, ma’am, it’s happening everywhere…. No, ma’am, they don’t seem to be dangerous…. Yes, sir, we’ll let the public know just as soon as we do.”

  An hour or two later, after getting reports from the street and the hospitals, they were saying, “Not dangerous unless you try to cut them down, ma’am. Don’t try to cut them down.” Halfway through the morning, the captain came out into the room, looked around with a frustrated expression on his face, then beckoned to Dora.

  “There’s some kind of briefing at the statehouse. I’m sending you as liaison.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you get along with people, Dora! Most people, anyhow. Because I haven’t got anybody else.”

  “I’m only a sergeant….”

  “You’re a person with eyes and ears! You can observe, can’t you? You can listen!”

  She said yessir, took a car and went. The statehouse was downtown, the streets were passable; she got there to find the same confusion and conjecture she’d left behind. The briefing was equally confused. Some high muckety-muck botanists were supposed to be flying in from some high-powered university—different people mentioned three different ones—and a team of chemists was expected.

  Into the silence that followed this remark, Dora blurted, “Chemists? Why chemists?”

  “Experts in working with defoliants, weed killer,” said the chairman impatiently.

  “That would be a mistake,” Dora remarked. “A very bad mistake. My husband tried weed killer on one of them. He ended up in the hospital. We’ve had reports of multiple injuries this morning. They fight back, you know.”

  Twenty pairs of eyes fastened on her. Twenty jaws went lax.

  “Surely you’re joking,” said a pale, plump man in his sixties with an M.D. name tag. “Surely…”

  “No.” She shook her head firmly. “My husband tried to kill one of these new plants, and he would have died if we hadn’t got him to emergency care fast. And he wasn’t the only case. We’ve had calls all morning about similar things happening.”

  “Get her out of here,” the man snarled.

  Dora felt her face reddening. “Before you go on gratuitously asserting your authority Dr….” She craned, getting a look at his name tag. “Dr. Jonas, wouldn’t it be smart to check out what I’m telling you? All it’ll take is a call to any hospital.”

  There were snarls and grumbles, someone recessed the meeting for twenty minutes, someone else went off somewhere to speak on the phone, returned, whispered. Meantime Dora sat, staring at the doctor and his henchmen, bureaucrats to the teeth. They had no idea what was going on. They had even less idea than Dora herself. They were scared, as Phil was, and when people were scared, all they wanted to do was kill something.

  In the end, nothing happened. The doctor had a whispered conference with the man who’d been on the phone and then grudgingly agreed to inform the chemists and scientists and who all about the local cases of poisoning. It was almost five, and Dora had some questions she wanted to ask her former mother-in-law, so she drove over to the boardinghouse. From the corner, Dora peered toward Jared’s place down the side street, which had also been narrowed to one lane. Curiosity got the best of her. She turned the car down that way, slowly swerving from side to side as the single lane curved one way and the other. The forest didn’t like straight lines. The street was now a sinuous trail, like a snake track.

  If it hadn’t been for the Tree, she’d have gone right past Jared’s place, for nothing showed of the house at all. Even the For Sale sign was overgrown. The driveway had vanished, the stoop was a green mound, the house a tangle of vines, the windows mere slits between heavy branches of liana. The Tree, two houses down, still towered above everything else, but it no longer seemed a strange presence. Now it was only part of the general jungle.

  She drove around the block and returned to the boardinghouse, where she parked in the one empty space and got out, closing the door loudly enough that Mrs. Gerber could hear her. From where she stood, she could see the parking lot of the mall where she and Polly had had dinner. The lacy weeds around the bottoms of the light posts had grown into stout vines by now. Each light post had a growth reaching high around it, and each one looked suspiciously like Jared’s weed.

  “Dora.” Jared’s mother stood in the doorway, behind the screen. “Come in.” She held the screen ajar, then led Dora down the immaculate hallway to her own private sitting room. The room looked as though it had been cleaned only moments before, everything shining, ruler straight, no clutter, no little ornaments or plants or doilies. Momma Gerber sat stiffly down on a straightbacked chair, gesturing to Dora to take the upholstered one. Through a closed door Dora could hear the clatter of pans and cutlery. Supper was being prepared for the boarders.

  “Jared’s firm is having a meeting tonight,” Mrs. Gerber said. “He won’t be home until later.”

  Dora had forgotten all about Jared. “I came to see you, not Jared.”

  The older woman sighed. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Dora, especially since Jared says he thinks he can change your mind. He says he would have done it sooner, only you cleaned the house too thoroughly. Now, what does he mean by that? It’s nice you came to see me, through all this mess. Isn’t this awful? What’s the world coming to?”

  “I don’t know,” Dora confessed. “But I thought you might be able to help figure it out. It’s possible this started at Jared’s place.”

  Mrs. Gerber didn’t reply for a moment. She sat very still, finally saying, “Why would you think that?”

  “I think it started with that weed that grew up in the stoop. It went to seed. I saw it. The little seeds were so tiny and light, they just blew away on the wind. But it started there. I’m sure of it.”

  “It couldn’t have anything to do with her,” the older woman mused, her face pallid in the evening light, slablike, as though carved from marble. “That woman. Not after all this time. I’m sure. Could it?”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “That woman Jared married. And the older one.”

  Dora settled herself into her chair. “Why don’t you tell me about that again.”

  “I don’t like talking about it.”

  “I know. But I think you need to tell me. It may be very important.”

  The older woman sighed, got up and moved about the room, touching one thing and another, stopping at her desk to stroke a picture of Jared, taken when he was no more than seventeen. “He was always such a…stiff little boy. I suppose he got this stiffness from his dad and me. I’m that way. It’s hard for me to warm up to people. I feel somehow they don’t like me, really, and I mustn’t impose on their good nature. And I got that from my pa, God knows.”

  “That sounds like a kind of shyness,” said Dora.

  “I suppose. With the mister it wasn’t shyness, though. He just never figured anybody was worth his wasting words on.”

  “So, Jared’s father died….”

  “And I used the insurance money to buy this house. Women didn’t have as many choices then as they do now. Not so many ways to make a living. We lived here right along, just the way we do now. Nothing much out of the ordinary ever happened, except for Jared’s accident and that girl.”

  “Accident? What accident?”

  “When he was hit by lightning. He was sixteen. He went on a field trip, a kind of scout trip, out where the airfield used to be, and he got hit by lightning. We thought he was gone. They had him in the hospital, and they told me he was dead, you know, in the brain. And then, all of a sudden, he woke up. He said, Mother, here I am, and he was. Just like nothing had happened. The doctors didn’t believe it. So I brought him home.”

  “He never told me about that.”

  “Well, Jared doesn’t talk about himself much.”

 
Which was true, so far as it went. “So, tell me about the girl.”

  “Well, that was the year after the accident. Jared was in his last year at high school. Then that girl and her mother came to visit the Dionnes, down the block….”

  Words seemed to fail her, for she stared at the floor, mouth working, trying this phrase and that without uttering any of them.

  “Yes,” urged Dora.

  “Vorn Dionne looked like a goat,” she blurted. “All his kids looked like goats. They had hair all over theirselves. Once I saw them when they were out washing the car in the driveway, just with trousers on, and my God, Dora, they looked like animals. You could of skinned them and made a fur coat.

  “Well, this girl and her mother came to visit. It was hard to tell which was which. The girl looked too old to be fifteen, and the woman looked too young to be her mother, more like her sister. Anyhow, the neighborhood boys trailed after either one of them like dogs after a bitch in heat. All the menfolks in the neighborhood did, including men old enough to be her granddaddy. And the next thing I knew, there was my Jared going after her, too, and before I could take a deep breath, he called me on the phone from long distance and told me he’d married her.”

  “He must have been what? Eighteen?” asked Dora.

  “Well, he wasn’t, not yet. He talked like somebody crazy, like he didn’t know who he was. Neither one of them was old enough by state law, and they didn’t have my permission, so I said they couldn’t be married, that I’d get it annulled.

  “And here came the mother, like a crazy woman, hair out to here and painted eyes, telling me the girl needed to marry somebody right away. Well, you know what that means! I said to her, like hell! I wasn’t going to support Jared and any fifteen-year-old wife and then babies. I wasn’t going to do it.” She fell silent, chewing her lip.

  “What happened?”

  The older woman looked away, uncomfortably. “Well, she…she threatened some. I told her to match the girl—Cory, her name was—up with one of her cousins; they were two of a kind. But then Jared showed up, alone.”

  “Alone?”

  “He said the girl…well, he said she’d run off. I called her mother and told her that’s what happened.”

  “And then the Dionnes moved away?”

  Long silence. She sighed. “She went off, looking for her daughter. Then the Dionne house burned down, so the Dionnes moved. And that was the end of that. Jared got through high school all right, and he went to college, worked his way through. He got his degree, and he went to work for the paper company, in their research department. And none of that would’ve happened if he’d gotten married to that Cory girl.”

  “Cory. Was that short for Cornelia?”

  “I don’t know. It might have been. The mother cursed me up one side and down the other….”

  “Why you? You weren’t responsible.”

  “Well, I was responsible for Jared, and the girl had run away from him, according to her mother. The way the woman acted, you’d think I’d been the one got her daughter pregnant! If she was pregnant. Well, that’s why she popped into my head when Jared got poisoned that way.”

  “Do you know where she moved?”

  A quick negation, a shake of the head that was almost a spasm. “No!”

  “How about the Dionnes?”

  “Somewhere out of town, that’s all I know. Some junkyard, probably. That’s what their place looked like when they lived here. Junk everywhere. And stuff growing every which way. Like a jungle.”

  “Like now?”

  She looked surprised at the question. “Well, yes. I suppose like now.”

  “That big old tree down the block, was it on the Dionne property?”

  Mother Gerber’s mouth shut like a trap. “I suppose it was. Acted just like the Dionnes, too. Pushy! Roots comin’ up everywhere, in people’s gardens and sewer lines. When Jared was digging the foundation for the garage over at his place, he said there was roots every which way. And that’s every bit I can tell you, Dora. It’s long gone and over and they’re all long gone and over, and now this jungle growing up like to cover us up, like to bury us. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  Dora patted her shoulder and went to the kitchen for coffee for both of them, and commiserated until supper was ready and Mrs. Gerber had to go oversee the dining room. “Pigs,” she whispered. “Some of my boarders are just pigs. I got to keep an eye on them. If they had their way, they’d eat it all and nobody else would get any….”

  Dora smiled behind her hand. “How’s Mr. Calclough?”

  “Still pinching bottoms,” Mrs. Gerber said with a sniff. “You’d think a man that age would let up. And Mr. Fries is still as messy as he ever was. I never saw so much underwear so many places it didn’t belong.”

  “Does he still rattle the house doing judo?”

  “He says it isn’t judo, but it still rattles. I told him the chandelier comes down, he pays for it.”

  “How’s Mrs. Sohn?”

  “Poor thing. Her canary died. You’d think she lost a child.”

  “Well, it’s all she had, Momma Gerber.”

  “That’s true, Dora. Just like Jared’s all I have.”

  Dora dropped the borrowed car back at the precinct and took the bus. Buses were still running, though the particular driver looked more than a little stressed and not quite sure who or where he was. Dora watched their progress out the side window and got off at the corner where she saw her bike. It was against the tree where she’d left it, two branches holding it fast.

  “Thank you,” she said to the tree as the branches came loose with a friendly rustle. “Very kind of you.”

  The tree reached down and dropped a handful of cherries into the bicycle basket. Dora ate them on the way home. Not quite as sweet as Bing cherries, but definitely not sour ones. And since when had cherries and apples ripened at the same time? It was late for cherries and way too early for apples.

  She would have gone past the house if a tree hadn’t rustled at her. She almost heard her name, Doradoradora, like a whisper. They’d left her a bicycle lane back to the garage and enough space to open the door. Inside the gate, the copses and vines were taller than the night before, and outside the fence…or, rather, where the fence had been, the trees stood well above the second story of the garage. She went out into the woods, dropped the handful of cherry seeds on the soil and pushed them under with the toe of her shoe.

  Upstairs, she turned on the TV before opening the curtains. Her living room window looked out on the woods, down a grassy swale with trees on either side and wild flowers peeking up at the sides through a litter of dead leaves or dropped twigs. There were stones she hadn’t noticed before, complete with moss. The bedroom window, the one toward the front, was totally overgrown by a fine screen of rootlets. The air came through, but insects could not.

  The newsman’s voice brought her back to the living room. “…United Nations calls for all member nations to investigate the possibility of biological mutations unleashed by some dissident state. The Department of Agriculture reports no sizeable incursions onto cropland, though fallow land is growing up in woods while crop land is being surrounded by hedgerows. In the meantime, cities are reeling under the assault. Though gas, electric and phone lines have not been disturbed, street traffic is at a standstill in many neighborhoods. Police and rescue workers have been forced to work on foot or from horseback….”

  There were pictures of various cities on the eastern seaboard from Georgia to New Hampshire. Thus far, it had not yet reached the city of St. Louis, though trees were springing up along the highways of Illinois. The trees had reached Nashville. Another growth was centered on Denver, and others on Los Angeles and Portland. Hospitals were full of people who had tried to chop them down and had received stinging rebukes from the trees themselves. Trees. And more trees.

  She went to the phone book and looked for an entry under V. Dionne. Nothing. There was a Harry Dionne. She called the number, hear
ing it ring and ring and ring before a far-off voice answered in an insect chirp: “Dionnes.”

  Dora introduced herself and asked about Vorn Dionne.

  “That’s Harry’s father. He’s doesn’t live here in town. Would you like Harry to call you?”

  Dora thanked her and said yes, she’d like to talk to Harry. After she’d hung up, she wondered who else she could talk to. The people who’d bought the house where the Dionnes used to be? The firemen who’d fought the fire? Jared was forty-six, forty-seven. So the fire had been what, twenty-eight, twenty-nine years ago? Somebody who’d been a rookie then might remember.

  She looked up the firehouses and called the one nearest to Jared’s place. Sure, said the fireman, he’d been around that long, and he kept a kind of journal. Give him a day or two, he’d look it up for her. Don’t mention it, glad to help the police. Brothers and sisters in arms, so to speak.

  After a supper of leftovers, she had a hot bath and stretched out on her bed, intending to read. The air coming through the root-netted window was sweet and soft. The sound of the leaves outside was hypnotic—her name again, Doradoradora. Before she knew it, the book had fallen onto the bed beside her and she was asleep.

  15

  Opalears: Sorcerous Associations

  Izzy led us down the road, Oyk and Irk just behind, with me close behind them, driven partly by curiosity and partly by the desire that he shouldn’t have to face the trees alone. The rest of our group seemed inclined to let him handle matters. Certainly force of arms would not serve us against such a forest. When he arrived a few arm lengths from the first of the trees, he pulled Flinch to a halt and alit, scuffing the dust of the roadway into little clouds as he went still closer.

  An ominous rustle among the leaves.

  “What is it you want?” asked Izzy, in the Uk-Luk speech of the shore counties. I understood him, just as I had before.