The Language of Trees

by Ilie Ruby

  It’s comical how long the two of them stand there, fog circling around them, their eyes shifting across the wet ground, the dusky breeze bristling a chill into the air. Of course everyone had said they were too young, that it was too much of a good thing, too fast. But now it’s as though the past has been whisked away, leaving only an empty space between them. Echo will not feed it with words. Instead she lets all the fear and apprehension spread out through the trees, jolting awake the snowy owl that has positioned itself on a branch above their heads.

  Echo feels her wet T-shirt clinging to her chest, and the wind is making it worse. No bra. Careless. Unprepared. She folds her arms and looks down as often as possible. She tries to envision Grant as she did that first time. But her eyes fall on his sharp cheekbones. He looks stronger, rougher. His skin is dry and sandy, like baked earth. They’re older now. People change. She can feel the emotion stiffening her fingers and catching in her throat, making her clumsy and silent.

  One of these days she will forgive herself.

  Striking out at him was a finely honed instinct, the same troublesome aspect of her personality that showed itself whenever she felt the most vulnerable, the same part that, at six, had caused her to put her cornhusk doll on the floor of her closet. She had left the door slightly open and had sat in bed, staring at the doll, aching to hold her. Even as tears rolled down her cheeks, she had forced herself not to move, refusing to hold the doll or bring her back into bed where she had slept alongside her for the last two weeks since arriving at Joseph’s. She was getting attached to Joseph and so she was teaching herself how to say good-bye, just in case.

  “Pretty incredible, seeing you,” he says.

  “It’s been fifteen years,” she says.

  “It’s been too long.”

  She nods. “I’m freezing.” The goose bumps prickle up on her bare arms. The hair blowing across her face catches in her mouth. She’s all of a sudden aware that she’d like a blanket and a glass of wine. “I’ve got to go. I think the Jeep is drivable, don’t you?”

  Grant picks up a stone and tosses it into the bush. A family of napping flies explodes into the air. “Let me drive you.”

  The wind blowing off the water is getting colder by the minute. Does it matter that they’re out here getting drenched, and neither of them cares? She’s remembering the four stray hybrid wolf pups they once found in an old black stove in a neighbor’s barn. She and Grant had stayed for hours, worried the pup’s mother wouldn’t return, as the pup’s needle teeth chewed their shoes and bit their fingers. As the rain lapped at the windows, the farmer stuck his head in and said it was best not to get attached, that these strays had no right to expect much from life. Echo said she wanted to adopt them. She ached to feel what a mother felt, or perhaps it was to feel loved by a mother. All that emotion. All that belonging. She would adopt them all. Joseph would let her keep them, she was sure. She would raise them, and Grant would help her. When the ice blue mother wolf with the singed beard slinked through a crack in the wall, rib thin and teats swollen, she went right to her babies. Echo ran out and jumped on her bike. Echo didn’t wear her jacket on the ride home through the rain. She pedaled hard, staying ahead of Grant, her head down and her eyes open, letting the tears soak the loss from her skin.

  GRANT NOTICES THE GASH in the door of the Jeep, the twisted metal bumper. Silently, Echo follows him. She gets in on the passenger’s side as though they’ve been doing it this way forever. She doesn’t think this is necessarily the best idea, sitting in a contained space with all this emotion about to blow the windows right out. She edges as far away from him as she can because there are only two things you can do with this much feeling. Run like hell or get naked.

  Grant backs up the Jeep. There is the sound of wood cracking, metal tearing.

  “Wake me up when it’s over,” she says.

  He backs up a few more feet. “Give me a second, I need to check something.” He hops out. From the Jeep, Echo watches Grant run his hand along the dark broad trunk. He is trying to find the face in the wood, to see the spirit in the tree. This is something he once shared with her, something he knew that his father used to do. But only those who were a part of the Senecas’ secret medicine societies could do this, and Grant’s father had strictly forbidden him to be part of it.

  Grant tramples around the side of the Jeep, and stands in front of the exposed orange inner bark of the black oak. This man moves her. She can’t argue it. There’s something that links a human soul with the soul of trees, the blue herons and the wild grasses. And he’s part of that chain. The fact that he knows there’s a spirit deep within every single tree is something rare. Grant told her this long ago. But she might just as easily have told it to him.

  GRANT IS GLAD TO get a moment to calm his pulse. He’s off balance, swears he can feel her right in his belly. He breathes a sigh of relief when he touches the tree. Really he’s just trying to ground himself. Three days ago, he could barely muster the will to live let alone an ounce of desire. But now he’s overflowing with it.

  What is she doing here? He knows that you don’t return home at this age unless you’re leaving a marriage, putting one of your parents in a rest home, attending a wedding or funeral.

  He’s remembering the old oak tree outside Echo’s bedroom window above the Feed & Grain, how he used to climb it on summer nights. It’s been years, but he remembers how well his hands found the knots, how his feet trusted the thick branches to hold him as he’d climb. He’d stand on the biggest branch, looking down through the leaves at the sun-scorched patches of grass under the floodlights. He can picture their last summer with amazing clarity, how he held her in his arms, her thin body pressed against his chest. Each night, they pushed their desire a little further until soon they couldn’t even be in the same room without touching. Grant would walk through the front door of the Feed & Grain, and the entire line of people waiting at the cash register would turn around to see the reason for her flushed cheeks. Echo would smile at him and he’d have to walk right back out for fear someone would see that he was nothing more than a blade of grass, flattened with the slightest wind.

  Grant climbs back into the Jeep. Echo is shivering. He wants to put his arms around her but that was another life. What doesn’t make it any easier is that she still has the freckles spilling across her face and arms. He feels such a strong affection for her that he has to roll down the window to get some air even though it is still raining. Then he takes off his windbreaker and hands it to her. “Put this on.”

  “Your wife,” she says, staring at the jacket in her lap. “She’s a wonderful photographer. I came across some of her work a while ago in a magazine.”

  “How’s Boston?” he says, pulling a stick of gum from his back pocket before pushing the gear into reverse. In his mind Grant is pacing the halls of a house in Rochester on a cold December morning. Susanna’s guilt made her so tired she couldn’t get out of bed. Yet when she left, she had run from the house without her coat, her breath forming icicles out of things she could not say. The turquoise barrette must have fallen from her hair as she pushed her bags into the trunk. He found it just yesterday.

  “Cambridge,” says Echo. “My house is near a pond. Has everything. Fish, ducks, geese, frogs.” She smiles.

  “Any good trees?”

  “A huge sugar maple,” she says. “Right out in front of my house. It has thick roots that buckle the concrete. In September, it’s pure fire.” She sits back and crosses her arms. “I can see it from practically every window. It’s just the same as seeing the Diamond Trees from every part of the lake. And there’s a Dairy Queen next door.”

  “Now that I’d like to see.”

  “Mmm.” She fastens her seat belt, untangles her hair. They’ll just keep talking about trees and ice cream and it’s fine with him. He can still smell those smoldering leaves along the upper trail of Bare Hill when the Seneca leaders stand by the boulder on the Saturday of every Labor Day weekend and give tha
nks for peace by lighting a ceremonial fire at the summit. So began the Ring of Fire, the end-of-summer celebration in which homeowners light a bonfire or a red flare on their piece of the shore. Each year, Echo and Grant would join with the rest of Canandaigua residents, and watch the circle of light creep around the lake after dusk, signifying the end of summer and the beginning of their hiatus from each other’s lives.

  “BOSTON. I’VE BEEN MEANING to get there,” he says.

  “Autumn in New England isn’t the end of something, like it is here.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s the beginning. I love beginnings.”

  Grant bristles at the words. He starts to say something, but then becomes quiet, just looking at her. Echo is not sure what to do, so she keeps talking.

  “Oh, there’s so much activity. Cambridge speeds up. Everyone is running from here to there, late for meetings and classes. People are running through Harvard yard with their books. The entire city is a campus. My office is right in Cambridge. It’s not beautiful like Naples, though. There’s something so fragile about this place. It’s not as fragile as here,” she tells him.

  “Not much is.”

  “No,” she agrees. “Maybe not.”

  She sighs heavily. “This is so awkward,” she says. She takes a deep breath and looks over at him. “Listen, I need to get something off my chest. After your father died, I wasn’t sure if it was right to send you the cards. I know you and your dad had this wall between you. But I knew you would miss him. I knew you would take it hard and I felt so terrible because I hadn’t gotten in touch with you when your mom passed away. I didn’t know if you wanted to hear from me. I wasn’t sure I had any right to try. But I wanted you to know I cared.”

  The tightness in his throat makes him look away, recalling how his mother had insisted on not having a funeral, her only request that his father spread her ashes across the lake. “I guess it was easier not to call.”

  “How could I expect you to? After the horrible things I said. We were too young,” she says, shaking her head. “God, I was terrified. I said terrible things. You hurt me. I wanted to hurt you back.”

  “I don’t hold it against you. I never did. Anyway, you met someone else. That’s it. Life happens.”

  “I didn’t meet anyone else,” she says. “I lied.”

  He stares at the windshield masked with wet leaves, unable to speak. “How are you doing? Now, I mean,” he says finally. He reaches around and tries to push the leaves off with his hand. The wipers won’t budge.

  “Oh, I’m great,” she tells him. “Really super, actually. Pretty great.”

  “That’s good. Really, that’s—”

  “You?”

  “Yep. Great. You know, overworked. But who isn’t?” This isn’t a complete lie. His hands are worn. He has open blisters on his palms, but this is nothing compared to how he feels inside. Raw. Open. Obvious as hell. He has always pushed himself, he was compelled to. He could never just run one mile, it had to be a marathon. He couldn’t just carve one statue; he had to fill a whole house with them. In high school, he carried a stopwatch in his back pocket everywhere he went. He’d time himself, clutching it as he raced along the upper trail of Bare Hill to the large boulder at the top, a place that marked the Senecas’ annual ceremony of peace. Then he’d race down to the dock, where he’d dive into the cold lake and swim the mile and a half across. Time. He’d hit the button. The race against himself has never ended.

  The Jeep stalls. “Easy on the clutch,” Echo says.

  “As I recall, I taught you to drive.”

  He starts the engine again and backs up across the dirt and out into the highway, branches scraping the hood. An acorn falls in through the window. “Two years,” he says, dropping it in her lap.

  “What?”

  “It takes it two years to ripen.”

  “That’s a lot of patience for a little acorn.” She waits for some reaction, a smile, but he doesn’t move. “It’s good to see you again.”

  He won’t answer. They drive for a while in silence. “She left me,” he says finally, pushing the words out between them. “Susanna, my wife.” His voice trails off as the engine sputters, sending the mayflies swirling.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she says, her voice hushed.

  “Perfect. Let’s not talk then.” He’s thinking of the way one tiny rock can change the direction of an entire river. And how the bark of a tree grows around an injured place, becoming a knot, changing its whole landscape. He thinks about the tree she just hit, how it now holds the memory of an accident, and a reunion.

  She pulls her hair back into a ponytail, and he tries not to notice the way it falls in a fan over her chest. “Wait. Don’t look,” she says. She opens the glove compartment and grabs something. “I told you not to look.”

  “I’m driving. Some of us actually think that watching the road makes us better drivers.”

  “Not me, I drive on intuition alone.”

  “How’s that working for you?”

  “Clearly not that well.” She smiles. “You won’t believe this. I’ve never been able to throw this out.”

  “You know your wipers are broken?”

  She nods, opening the book.

  “So, how exactly do you drive in the rain?” he asks.

  “I don’t actually drive. Not technically. Not that often,” she shrugs. “I bike to work. The mayflies here are worse than rain anyway.”

  She holds up a tattered paperback. The Foxfire Book. The pages are still dog-eared.

  “Jesus, that thing is ancient,” he tells her. Reading together from this book is one of the most intimate experiences he’s ever had with a woman.

  “So much history here,” she murmurs, staring out the window at the old boathouses lining the lake. Ancient things make her feel comfortable: a well-loved threadbare couch, and a slight wrinkle to a man’s shirt, worn hardwood floors. But he doesn’t hear her. “You know when a place is so filled with memories, you can’t even see it for what it really is?”

  He nods. Too soon, they are nearing Bare Hill. He pulls off to the side of the road, stops the Jeep, and gets out.

  “What are you doing? It’s another half mile to your cabin,” she says, concerned.

  “It’ll be better if I walk from here,” he says, as she gets out. She hands him back his jacket, anticipating something. A handshake. A hug.

  But he’s staring up at the Diamond Trees. He’s imagining the old wooden swing glowing against the dark curtain sewn with lights. The frayed rope is caught in moonlight, wrapped around one of the highest branches. When he was very young, during one long winter, his father teased him about being afraid to jump from the swing, bragging about how when he was a boy on the Tonawanda Creek Reservation he could jump from branches much higher. Grant had been reluctant to climb that high, and even more so, to jump into the deep black water. His father said it was because Grant thought too hard, and too much. That a boy had to be broken of this type of negative thinking or it would ruin him when he was a man. It was a lesson.

  His father listened with relief as Grant protested that he wasn’t afraid to do anything, much less jump from a tree into a lake. Over that entire winter Grant dreamed of climbing the great willow, climbing to the very top, his head poking out from the canopy, looking down on his mother and father with the swing positioned underneath him, then jumping off the branch, arms outstretched before floating down into the water. In his dreams his body was weightless and the usually cold water was as warm and as welcoming as a bath. When his family arrived at the cabin the next summer, Grant jumped the first day. But the water was cold and as hard as glass when he landed. Still, he jumped all summer long, shattering it, his skin permanently stung red, his father looking on with pride.

  “You sure I can’t drive you home?” she asks. He turns around and she is standing behind him. The wind floods her T-shirt. He can feel her warmth even if he can’t exactly see her eyes.

  “Very
sure,” he says. “I need to walk.”

  “Positively sure?”

  “Echo.”

  “Okay, give me back my book.”

  He turns around with the book in his hand.

  “Forget it. You keep it,” she tells him. “Just for a while. Maybe you’ll feel like reading. In case you get the urge to make moonshine.” Echo smiles. Their dark eyes meet once, and then he’s pulling her close to him but only in his mind. The stillness of the water catches him.

  Patience is the ability to slow down.

  “Go on. You get to walk away now. And I promise I won’t get angry this time,” she tells him.

  “Keep your eyes on the road.”

  “Intuition is bullshit. I agree,” she says.

  “Take this, it’s cold out,” he says, tossing her his jacket.

  “You know, I’m still never dressed appropriately for the weather.” She pulls the coat over her shoulders and smiles, encouraged by the conversation.

  He walks away. With such weight of emotion washing over him, he no longer feels like reminiscing. When her Jeep is clear out of sight, he begins to run.

  7

  THE JEEP’S BROKEN BUMPER trails along the road, making a terrible racket as Echo drives into the parking lot of the Feed & Grain. This isn’t exactly the sort of entrance she envisioned. She pulls up alongside a police car and her mind begins to race. Something has happened to Joseph, she is certain of it. Wouldn’t that be her luck, arriving seconds too late? She dashes through the puddles, up the front steps of the store and flings open the door to see Charlie Cooke and Joseph leaning against the counter, deep in conversation. Out of breath, wet from the rain, Echo forces herself between the two men and into Joseph’s arms.

  “What is this? Echo!” says Joseph.

  “Did something happen? Are you okay?” she cries. She squeezes Joseph tight.