The Language of Trees

by Ilie Ruby

  “Who’s Doris?” Grant asks.

  “My first wife,” Squeaky replies. “Melanie’s got a bird. Says ‘Luke.’” He leans in toward Grant. “The dead brother.”

  “Right,” Grant tells him.

  Joseph shakes his head. “Tears me up. You’ll see a whole lot of books in there, stacked ’bout so high.” Joseph holds his palm about two feet off the ground, and then notices the dark liver spots. He pulls his hand back.

  “School books?” asks Grant.

  “No. Self-help books. She could break your heart, the way she was trying so hard. She planned to start college next year. Kept saying her life was about healing now. She wanted to heal things in the past, with her sister, too. See, damnedest thing. She was just beginning to remember what happened the night the boy died. Said she blamed herself. That she’d been trying all these years to get the picture straight.”

  “She remembered seeing the giant out on Squaw Island,” Squeaky says. “But she was just a kid of nine, so who knows.”

  “Maybe she was remembering a ghost story. I don’t ask, never needed to know,” says Joseph, “but she needs to know.”

  “Staying clean frees up all kinds of things from the mind,” says Squeaky. “I mean, that’s what I hear.”

  GRANT WAS TWENTY-ONE WHEN Luke Ellis drowned. But this is not the memory shifting through his mind. He remembers how the three Ellis children once left footprints of coal dust on the yellow shag carpeting in his cabin. How they had stood in his mother’s kitchen years ago, their ice blue eyes glowing against blackened cheeks, rosebud lips quivering, clutching each other so tightly that they became one trembling mass of blond tangles, as though trying to disappear into each other. Melanie had stepped forward and told Emily Shongo that they were hunting for diamonds in the basement coal bin. She had learned in school that diamonds came from coal. She said they would collect the shiny pieces that were changing into diamonds, just before the Diamond Trees could pull them up through their roots and into their leaves. She promised that they’d only take enough to make their mother rich. Melanie spoke so clearly, her hands moved so gracefully through the air that she seemed a very adept storyteller even at the ripe old age of eight. No taller than the kitchen counter.

  “Goblins, that’s what my mother called them. Blond goblins,” Grant remembers. “Said they were afraid of their own shadows. One minute they were explaining and the next, they took off running like cats out of a bath.”

  “Ah well, Leila’s got her hands full now. Melanie’s boy’s almost two years.” Joseph removes his glasses again and rubs his bloodshot eyes before taking the photo from his wallet. “Here’s Lucas. Near five pounds at birth. Almost didn’t make it. Get a look at those eyes, real watchful.”

  Grant takes the photo. From outward appearances, Melanie’s past has done little to harden her. She’s smiling in a black bikini top and purple shorts, kneeling in the grass and holding a toddler in red overalls. Her blond hair is swept back from one side of her face revealing dewy skin that would make her look more like an Ivory girl than a drug addict, if it weren’t for the deep red scar at the corner of her left eye.

  “Who’s the father?” asks Grant.

  “Lionel Williams,” says Joseph. “Good man. Works down at the garage. Rough around the edges, you’d like him probably.”

  “Fixed my car last year,” adds Squeaky, now seating himself on the step. “Saved me two hundred dollars.”

  “Christ, Melanie looks so young to go through all that,” says Grant.

  “Ah, not for us to judge. We can’t know, can’t even try to guess the Creator’s plan,” Joseph says, motioning toward the trees. “Who can say what they’d have done in her situation? She’s stronger than she knows. I tried to tell her that every day, too.”

  “Was that the truth?” Grant asks.

  Joseph smiles. “You ever see a tree that’s dying, it’s nothing but a bunch of dried-out branches? You can talk to this tree, tell it all about how its leaves are growing green and healthy. Then you sit back and watch how it changes.”

  Grant looks at him, interest piqued.

  “You don’t believe it?” Joseph says. “Well, you should have seen Melanie’s face light up when I said that to her. Most beautiful thing is to see hope come back into a face. That’s all she wanted. People to believe in her without wanting anything back. People don’t need much else.”

  The sky is incandescent, like the pearly inside of a shell. An explosive cough cracks the air. Joseph doubles over. His pipe rolls across the porch. Squeaky dives toward him, helps him to a chair. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Joseph says in a low voice, but this time he’ll not send help away.

  Instinctively, Grant rests his hand on Joseph’s back, right between the shoulder blades and waits. After a moment, he removes his hand. “You should get to a doctor, Joe. Have those lungs checked,” Grant says.

  “Maybe one of these days,” Joseph says, stunned, staring at the crown of mayflies that have gathered around Grant’s feet, their forked tails twitching. He’s not sure why there is a tingling sensation between his shoulder blades. As Joseph watches the clump of live tobacco burn like a miniature smoke signal in front of them, he feels better, more alive somehow. He zips up his coat. Joseph gets up without using his cane and crosses the porch, once, then back without the slightest limp.

  Shrugs make their way around the porch of the Feed & Grain. It could be the air, they ponder silently. The fresh spring air on the lake is like that. It can do things to you, can make you dizzy and throw you off balance.

  “Grant, what’s that you’re doing?” Joseph asks.

  “Sometimes dirt makes a man feel clean,” Grant says, rubbing his hands in the mud. He climbs the stairs as the tobacco smoke slithers away across the floor.

  “Let me have a look at those hands, boy.”

  Grant reluctantly holds up his right palm. Joseph touches Grant’s fingertips and short square nails. The two men face off for a few seconds, Joseph’s knotted fingers pushed against Grant’s broad palm, thick with calluses. Just then, the sheriff emerges from the doorway, and Grant pulls his hand away.

  “Hey Joe, I hate to break this up but I don’t have much time. Folks are crazy today, calling right and left about these damn white stones everywhere,” says Charlie Cooke, spilling his coffee into a nearby section of grass. “Tornado took them right out of the lake and dropped them all over town. Anyhow, Melanie Ellis is why I’m here, so let’s get to it.”

  “I’m coming in, Charlie.”

  Grant can feel his chest muscles tighten. He doesn’t have to involve himself in every ounce of trouble that comes his way. He needs to get back to the cabin, needs the cool meditative compass of the water to rein him in. He thinks about a thing like perfect timing, about how the heron takes slow deliberate steps as it scans the water for minnows or crayfish, waiting, one leg held in the most tempered expectancy. Then it tilts its head, and flash. Snags its prey. And the dance repeats.

  “BEFORE YOU GO,” JOSEPH says to Grant, taking out his wallet one last time. “I thought you might like to see my kiddo. The picture was taken at some fancy lunch for her work. She lives in Boston. She’s got a very big job now. Copywriter, you know. It’s a lot of pressure, but of course she handles it.”

  Despite his better judgment, Grant reaches for the photo. He smiles at the wide brown eyes ringed with soft coal.

  “She still has freckles,” says Joseph.

  “She finally got her braces off.”

  It was his fault. Grant remembers that fateful bike ride to Naples a week before she turned fifteen. She hit a rock and flew right over the handlebars, landing on the pavement, blackening her left eye, breaking her nose, and knocking out her two front teeth. By her own account, she looked like “a drunken sailor after a fight—hideously awful.” He knew then that he didn’t deserve her because of his one despicable thought: Now, she won’t leave me.

  He had sat with her all night in the hospital, holding her hand, hardly
leaving her side. Her recovery was deemed miraculous. The doctors couldn’t explain how her nose had healed overnight. The bruise around her eye had disappeared by the next morning.

  “She should have been more careful. Only by the grace of God that she didn’t lose her sight. Well, she just gets more and more beautiful all the time,” Joseph says. “She’s still wearing that uniform of blue jeans and T-shirts. You remember, it was all about comfort. She hasn’t changed her ways.”

  “She always said she’d never work in a place where she couldn’t wear blue jeans and T-shirts.”

  “She won’t change. Not for any amount of money.”

  When they’d met, Echo wasn’t what most kids their age considered beautiful, with a tornado of long red hair, and thick pink plastic-framed glasses. But each day, he’d see her reading behind the counter at the Feed & Grain, and Grant was transfixed by the wave of her lips moving silently, forming the shapes of words. It was just fine with him that Echo rarely looked up from her book. Back then, he hardly spoke to anyone but his mother. Terrified by his father, too afraid he would be teased for his clumsy speech.

  On the day of reckoning, he had stood at the counter for a good five minutes in his uniform of sandals with black socks, T-shirt and tan shorts, pretending to decide what to buy. The shelves were brimming with delicious jars of jellies, vinegars, dressings, and sauces. Horseradish and jalapeño pretzel dips, Three-oak aged balsamic vinegar, and a slew of homemade jams.

  “So, I guess it’s you,” Echo had said, looking up, closing the book, as though Grant was a long lost friend. Her dark eyes were large, sensitive and clear. He thought her beautifully human. At twelve, she was gentle with the world but not afraid of it, a quality he lacked.

  He asked for five jars of the horseradish. It was the first thing he thought of to say.

  Everyone thought Grant was just being helpful, running to the store on daily errands. The significance of his every thought grew with the anticipation of sharing it with her, a piece of driftwood that had sprouted a seedling, a fistful of lake glass the color of autumn leaves, an arrowhead still razor sharp as though it had just been fashioned. When Grant would stutter trying to explain something, her hand on his shoulder eased his words. The first book he gave her was from a collection about the Appalachian mountain people. Together, they read about customs, remedies, and folkways, breathless at the timbre of each other’s voice.

  At each summer’s beginning, he and Echo picked right up where they’d left off. One of the first things Echo shared with him was something she had read. That’s when he knew.

  She said she wanted to be like the trees, that she had read they were most trusting of all creatures because they put their roots down in one place, knowing they’d be there for their entire lives.

  At the end of their first summer, when she said good-bye, he put his finger to her lips.

  “We have no good-byes. We say, Es’GönGëheit. I’ll see you again.”

  His ancestors believed you’d always see again those people who meant something to you, whether in this life or the spirit world.

  During their last summer, on the night before she left for college, they had picnicked on the top of Bare Hill. He had put off college for a year to be with her as much as possible. Joseph had let him work alongside her and sleep in a room in the back of the store. He and Echo had grown closer than ever.

  That night the August heat made the crickets’ wings slick with fervor. They had kissed for hours on the blue flannel blanket, when suddenly Echo pulled away. He had asked her what was wrong. He could see she was afraid, but she wiped the sweat from her forehead and pulled off her T-shirt. Topless, she stared at him. She unhooked the yellow cotton bra that held her small breasts, and let it fall off her shoulders. “We don’t have to do this,” he said. But she moved toward him, trembling. She unzipped his shorts, touched him, first gently, then harder. He reached up. Her breasts fit perfectly in his hands. He kissed her on the forehead. He told her again that they didn’t have to do this, but this time, he persisted, his mouth tracing the freckles across her chest, down to her waist and then back up to her mouth as she knelt back onto the blanket and he pressed against her. He asked her if it was too soon, if she was ready to do this. “Think about it,” he told her.

  “Stop thinking,” she answered. “Just don’t think.”

  He pulled her on top of him, and pushed himself into her for the first time, and he felt the force of his own energy as he never had before. As he entered her, her warm mouth coursed over his neck and he moaned, aching with the intense release, his lips parted slightly.

  The grass scuttled in circles around their bodies, each blade a somber purple hue blurred in the haze of moon. In a moment the flood of emotion intoxicated him. As she hovered over him, he noticed the delicate curve of her neck, the soft tendrils of hair falling across her forehead, how her skin grew more flushed with each moment, as though she were drawing all the color out of the earth. He noticed these things with unusual clarity, the way a man notices something just before he loses it. “I think I might love you,” she whispered, blurting it out fast. It was the first time either of them had said those words. Grant couldn’t speak. Not because he didn’t feel the same. More, because the weight of that emotion was towering, and because of the promise ring that he had been carrying in his pocket, now hidden under a heap of clothing in the grass.

  When he didn’t respond, Echo looked away, hurt, as though she had been slapped. His silence had spoken volumes.

  Quickly, she got up. She refused to look at him as she slipped her clothing on, gathered up her blanket and basket. Then she took off running across the field. For a moment he didn’t move, lying there, trying to make sense of it. When he finally caught up with her, she shrugged him off. “Tonight was a mistake,” she said, pulling the blanket around her body. “I lied. I don’t really love you.” She waited for a reaction, tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

  He stammered, grabbing for the ring. It was his mother’s, though she never wore it—a gift that his father had carved from catlinite, a soft red stone flecked with tiny dots the Indians called stars. This stone contained a heart-line, a straight black hair-thick line that looked like a crack. It made the stone lucky for whoever wore it.

  “You can’t trust me, that’s your problem,” she told him. “Because of what your mother thinks of me.” Echo had stared at Grant, daring him to leave her. She was drumming up as much meanness as she could muster, hatred even, he felt, as he looked into her red puffy eyes. Her tears dried an instant after they fell.

  “Go ahead. I could care less. Hate me,” she ordered.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “What’s wrong with you!” she cried. “We’re not the same. I’m no good for you. Stop feeling sorry for me.” He watched her run home, the silvery grass splintering in her wake. He did not follow her.

  The next day, Joseph drove her to the bus station, where she bought a ticket and left immediately for Cornell University.

  Grant dialed her number that first week at least one hundred times. He could feel her breath on the line. He could picture her staring into her bedroom mirror as he once had seen her do, searching for the defect that she felt had relegated her to a lifetime of abandonment.

  He knew the loss of her parents had walled up a part of her heart, but he wasn’t so different. He wanted to remind her of something they both wanted.

  “We’re like the trees. Remember?”

  “No, you’re like them,” Echo had said on the phone. “Not me.”

  “If I were with you right now, I could change your mind. I could take a bus. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Grant, I met someone. Please don’t call me again. I won’t ever love you,” she whispered. There was a tinge of fear in her voice almost as though she blamed him for making her say it. He hadn’t talked to her since.

  “WHO CAN TELL HER anything,” Joseph says, with a smile.

  Grant may tell himself that
it is just curiosity but both men know the truth. That just as there are some people you try to love but can’t, there are those you can’t stop loving no matter how hard you try. None of it has anything to do with logic.

  Echo had always chided herself aloud for being too sensitive. She said that her eyes betrayed her, but this was the very thing that drew Grant to her. She could be listening to him, nodding, but her eyes would tell him she was thinking of other things. She was unable to mask anything. This had made her irresistible to him. It took him a long time to get over Echo. To move on.

  Now his heart needs to settle. His fingers leave prints on the picture, but that is all he is willing to leave. He hands it back quickly. Grant manages to speak. “Duct tape?”

  “Second aisle up on the left,” Joseph says, slipping the picture back into the wallet. “We’ll be seeing more of you now. You know, boy, I always said you had some wisdom. Not a lot, don’t go getting a big head.”

  Grant stares at Joseph. “Well, you were sorely wrong, Joe.”

  “Nah, look. I don’t believe it,” Joseph replies. “One way or another we get a second chance.”

  Joseph looks vulnerable, standing there, thin, brittle, with an ache behind his eyes. And Grant has seen that look before. Grant turns and starts to walk away. He knows that some people leave their mark on you forever. As much as a man tries, there will still come a day when he picks up the phone and dials a once forgotten number, or starts to follow someone who he thinks might be her, in the grocery store, in the street, at the park. He may look everywhere for a replacement. And even when he thinks he has found one, deep down he knows that it will never feel the same.

  “Patience,” Joseph reminds him. “It takes a long time to become young.”

  “Not sure what that means,” Grant says.

  “You’ll understand someday. All folks want to escape from their problems sometimes. Some try by praying all the time, thinking Spirit will take care of everything. But they can come to depend too much on this. The fact is that people right here on earth can do more for each other than the spirits can.”