The Language of Trees

by Ilie Ruby

  She takes the cup from him so he doesn’t have to hold anything.

  “Just a little stiff, that’s all. Anyway, his hands.” Joseph holds his hand up and points across the palm. “He was a big man. Tall. So tall that it looked like the clouds rested on his shoulders. Even though he worked with fire and wood all his life, his hands were soft. Most amazing thing, no cracks in the skin, no calluses, nothing. Never lost his sensitivity, you know? Never lost a human being, either, even the stubborn ones wanting to hold on to their illness.”

  Echo, listening silently, takes Joseph’s hand.

  “One day a couple arrived with their daughter, traveled all the way from Niagara Falls to see him. The daughter wouldn’t eat, was too sick. Her people said her heart was black.”

  Suddenly, a flurry of blackbirds erupts in the trees, creating a loud twitter. “Do you hear those birds out there?” asks Echo. “They’re going crazy.”

  “They feel the spirits. Don’t pay them attention and they’ll be quiet. Anyhow, my friend wouldn’t believe he could fail, that his spirits could fail. Didn’t believe that sometimes you can’t fight the river. That the river is bigger than you. But he took that girl into his cave. Sat with that girl for six days, lighting his fires, grinding his herbs. A few mornings I woke up early and came out here on the porch. I swear I could hear his voice through the trees, saying sacred prayers. He was tangling with the spirits in there. Squeaky Loomis and me had to pull him out of the cave, and the body of the girl. Could hardly tell which one was alive. She was gone. It was a hard lesson. Two Bears had never lost anyone before.

  “He couldn’t take the failure. He turned his back on the native medicine, lost faith in the spirits, in his tradition. Disappeared. People said it was because of the fight over land at Loomis Hill. But they didn’t know it was because when he lost that child, he lost his faith. He moved away. Changed his name. Cut off his long hair. He tried to forget all he knew. But he didn’t give up. He was determined to find another way to heal. He became a doctor of Western medicine. A great doctor in this area. He took a wife and he had a son. But he looked different. He fulfilled the prophecy of his name, Two Bears. He lived two lives. No one knew who he had been.”

  “I know,” says Echo. She gets up and walks to the railing. She looks out at the shadows climbing from the trees. She is putting it all together. “Ben Shongo,” she whispers, as all of these strange things about Grant start to make sense to her. The time that he sat with her after her bike accident and her face healed. Just last night with the bird.

  “It was many years later,” continues Joseph. “I wouldn’t have said it was the same man. Even the look in his eyes was different. We never talked about the past. Actually, only once. He asked me never to tell Grant. I had to respect it.”

  Echo can’t believe what Joseph is telling her. “Why wouldn’t he tell his own son? If he was such a great doctor, why couldn’t he help his own wife?” She is confused, agitated. She is thinking about how Grant suffered under the discipline of his father, the rejection he felt. Ben Shongo had too many secrets. She is thinking about Emily Shongo sitting on the porch smoking, imagining the loneliness that woman felt. Everything in her life added up to waiting and patience. How much did Emily know? She wonders. Maybe she was punishing him. Maybe she had given up and the illness was all she had. “Do you think Emily didn’t want his help?” she says.

  “Don’t know for sure. I think of it like this. Illness is like a knot in a tree. How can you just go ripping out that knot? The tree could die. You take away the sickness, you have to fill the hole with something else. You see? But some people are afraid of emptiness.

  She thinks about if this knowledge will change Grant. How knowing who he is will make him different. How it will affect him once he knows who his father is.

  She wonders if knowing this will hurt him. If this will make him angry at his father, make things worse. Or whether it will release him from all that has kept him walled off from her.

  Echo is finally getting answers to her questions about what she has seen all these years. She feels overwhelmed. Tired. Her eyes burn. She wonders how she is going to bring this up to Grant.

  “Grant and the birds, Pop? Does this mean that what I thought I saw was real?”

  “Honey. This is a sacred place. Certain people can do things.” The birds twitter around them. She can smell lilacs in the air. She leans back against the railing. Joseph gets up, holding his arms a few inches from his sides. For a second, the blackbirds that have gathered in the nearby trees stop singing. The waves stop lapping at the shoreline and for a moment, there is quiet. “Picture it, honey,” Joseph says, his head tilted back. All lit up in the lamplight, Joseph closes his eyes. “Birds are easy. They don’t see illness. They don’t know about limits. They assume the currents will carry them. They trust. They jump. They fly. In human terms, it’s called blind faith. Blind faith makes you see the world as complete perfection. They’re one of the few living creatures that can see the world in this way.” She looks up at the sky, noticing the temperature change. “And that, my dear, is why they can fly.”

  Echo can feel the heat from the feathers, from all the blackbirds swirling around in the sky. The air takes on the smell of lilac and burning wood. A strange sensation comes over her. The warmth in the air is cradling her. And although she is facing the thing she fears most, her heartbeat has calmed. She feels at peace. She is still afraid, but her limbs are relaxed, heavy. As the sun’s rays reflect off the windows and scatter across the porch, she notices Joseph’s expression. He looks at peace, too. And for a moment, she could swear his feet aren’t touching the ground.

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, sitting on the porch bench, she tightens her arms around him to still his cough. The sun is high in the air, rising off the tips of the Diamond Trees. “Well, look at that sun,” Joseph says, staring at the pink glow gliding across the tips of the trees. “You have to respect a God that can make that happen.” She kisses him on the cheek. When he turns to her, she can see the haziness in his stare, the pale yellow dinge across the whites of his eyes. “Honey, I worry you give up too easily. You’re afraid that there’s not enough love for you. But love is the one thing we never empty out of.”

  “Love has never made me feel particularly good.”

  He chuckles. “Love isn’t tested by how good it makes you feel. It’s tested by whether you are brave enough to feel every part of it.”

  Three women: Leila. Emily. Clarisse. Their words run through her mind. “Do you have any regrets, Pop?”

  “Well, one. Wish I could remember jokes,” he says. She smiles and pulls him close. “Always wanted to be one of those guys who could just pull a joke from memory and make people laugh.”

  “Is that all?” she asks, softly.

  “Maybe a few other things that I’ll keep to myself, okay?”

  She nods. She understands. Grateful, she finally understands.

  “Now help me go in and put my feet up,” he says, weakly. As he is getting up, he turns to her. “Honey, is fear holding you back, fear of having something precious taken away?”

  “Like what’s happening with you now?” she asks, trembling. Tears stream down her cheeks. He leans down and wipes her tears away with his hand and she closes her eyes, trying to memorize the warmth of his hand on her face.

  “Don’t cry, kiddo. You’ll always be okay. When you get older, you’ll look back and you see everything happened in the right time. You gain a faith that things are as they’re supposed to be. You can’t imagine how much this helps your life.”

  “I don’t know what to do next,” she tells him.

  “Some foreign countries you know you have to visit, right? And some of them you’re just content to look at the pictures. You find your country, honey. And then you pack up and buy a one-way ticket.”

  “Which is the right country?” she asks, as she starts weeping again.

  “The one that feels like home. The one that always has.”

&n
bsp; These words strike right to the heart and she can’t stop the tears. She grabs him and holds on to him, and she knows there’s nothing she can do. “Most people deserve a second chance, even you,” he whispers. Through her tears, Echo glances at the Diamond Trees a few miles away.

  19

  LEILA DOESN’T CARE THAT she’s already called everyone she knows. She’s got less self-control now. Melanie has been gone for five days.

  People are compassionate, they’ll do their best to listen, to offer sympathies, but they’ve got their own lives. After they hang up, her life will just be a story. They’ll grope for the snooze button on the clock radio, or they’ll make love in a state of half wake with her words drifting sadly through the air. What about her? She’s left with the silence. Even imaginary discussions she has with herself about the tarnished spots that crawl across her copper pots won’t distract her. For a while, she’ll try and focus on the fraying edges of the yellow gingham curtains she so painstakingly put together way back when she believed that the success of her marriage depended on whether she could sew a straight seam or boil a slab of corned beef to perfection, so that the meat just fell apart when touched with a fork.

  She knows just how bad it is when the old fleeting urge to see Victor sweeps over her. She runs to the sink, overwhelmed by the fact that her emotions can distort reality in such a way, making him seem sympathetic, even comforting. She refocuses on a few terrifying memories, thankfully recalling them with amazing clarity. Every night for months after Luke died, Melanie spilled her milk, and every time, Victor would become so enraged, he’d slam his fist on the table as the white rivulets spilled into the grooves of the green linoleum tiles. Melanie was determined to overcome the shame, though. Night after night, Leila would sit in angst throughout each dinner, praying for the milk to spill just so it would be over. No sooner had Victor gotten used to it than Melanie stopped spilling. Strange how things in a family were synchronized that way, a seesaw of spilled milk and fists.

  When Leila splashes water on her face, the urge to see Victor subsides.

  It’s 6 A.M. and Lucas hasn’t stopped crying in almost twenty-four hours. Even though the doctor has told Leila “teething causes fever” is a wives’ tale, she’s sure he’s sick because his molars are breaking through a swollen gum. Leila won’t resort to baby Tylenol, but she wishes she could stop the pain, especially when he just stares at her with pleading eyes, like he knows it isn’t fair and it’s somehow her fault. One thing is certain, though. Leila remembers how to distract a little boy. She could try to make him laugh the way she did with her own son, cradle him in her arms and rub her nose against his, or put him in a bath and show him how to splash the water so that it rains down around him. But Lucas has a certain need to assert his independence. He doesn’t seem to want any of Leila’s kisses right now. Just squirms to get away. She wishes she could make him understand. This is just the beginning of the things to accept because there is no other choice. Even a little tooth is part of a cycle as predictable as the onslaught of the mayflies.

  The house feels distant, like an island. Leila can’t just sit here, comatose, waiting for the phone to ring. Lucas’s cries are the only thing keeping her going. She’s got to respond to him.

  Where is Lion? Were those his footsteps last night? She heard him walking around downstairs, but she’d been too tired to move, even to lift her head. He’d left dirty dishes for her to clean when she woke up, which was unlike him. He’d eaten all the leftovers from the refrigerator and left the dirty plates and silverware everywhere, caked with food. Not just the lasagna but a week-old piece of pie and a container of pork and chicken fried rice from the Aloha restaurant. Lion didn’t even like that food. And now there’s more than three hundred dollars missing from her money box. She had gone to the bank, just in case she had to get Melanie out of a dangerous situation. Of course, he wouldn’t steal from her, would he? She’d willingly give him as much as he wanted. She can’t believe he’d just go and do something like this, especially when she’s entrusted him with so much already. Maybe she’s not thinking clearly.

  For the last few days, she has had that eerie feeling of being watched. So often now, while standing in the kitchen, goose bumps prickle up on her arms and the hair on the back of her neck stands up. Someone has tracked mud all over her kitchen floor. Sometimes she even thinks she smells whiskey, even though she doesn’t keep it in the house.

  A thin trickle of saliva dribbles down Lucas’s chin and Leila dabs it away with a cool cloth. She catches the white flash of his toothy smile.

  It’s just about the most beautiful thing she has ever seen, even more enchanting than the flash of white wings near the pier, and the sound of sun-bleached clamshells that litter the trees. It’s the gulls’ dance, a select tribe of gulls who pick up the unbreakable shells in their beaks and carry them into their nests. When a wind brushes by, or the nest is shaken, the shells rain from the sky and fall through the leaves. Up and back, the gulls swirl after the shells, drawing eights in the air.

  Unlike their cousins who fatten on French fries before flying south, these graceful dancers are so entranced by their own movements that they will never leave, toughing out the coldest winters. Leila has seen this with her own eyes. After her three nights in February with Charlie Cooke, and then not hearing from him all winter, she finally contacted him. It was May by this time. And she needed an explanation. She had sat with Charlie on the granite boulder, waiting for him to tell her there was no future for the two of them, his heavy black police umbrella held over their heads as falling shells battered the taut nylon. If Leila hadn’t known the difference between hail and a shell, she might have agreed with Charlie when he said distractedly what was raining down around them.

  Although she’s not the sort of woman to see things this way, to demand any kind of payback, her fingers dial his number after all these years in the very sort of way that her car just naturally seems to drive itself back from O’Connell’s store once a week, often leaving her wondering whether she saw anyone on the way and forgot to wave.

  Didn’t Charlie Cooke want her once?

  He hadn’t just lusted after her. He had wanted to marry her. Why did he have to talk of how they were going to leave Canandaigua and move into that old farmhouse she loved? Why had he asked her to describe in detail a house she had driven by countless times, certain that if she could just live there, her life and her children would blossom like those huge roses that clung to the fence? What about the son or daughter he’d always wanted? Candice had had an emergency hysterectomy years ago and Charlie always regretted not having the chance to be a father. Leila had been thrilled with the possibility of giving that to him. She would have had eight more children if he’d wanted.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Leila says when he answers.

  “Morning, Leila.” She presses her nail into her palm to keep the tears at bay. His tone stings. She’s always believed you could tell how a man feels about a woman by the way he says her name. Leila, Charlie used to say with reverence. My-wife-Candice, he’d say stiffly, and you could hear the tightening in his throat. Never just Candice. Always My-wife. It had sounded sinister, even. It had never occurred to Leila that one day he’d say her own name this way, with the same sort of contained belligerence. She’s reminded of those painful dialogues she’d once written out between her and Candice, just to free her thoughts. She’d never spoken them though, just waited till the urge had left. And it always had.

  “We caught an archaeologist that’s been selling artifacts,” Charlie says.

  “I don’t care. What I care about is Melanie.” In the middle of her own kitchen, Leila covers her mouth with her hand. A flash of heat rises up inside her, making the iron-shaped birthmark blaze.

  She’s thinking about fistfuls of dirt and beads, and how once, a very long time ago, her girls had emptied their pockets across her linoleum floor, their dirt-stained hands letting go of the blue, red, and white glass seed beads, and a few be
ads of brass. Maya and Melanie had unknowingly unearthed one of the unfound burial sites, and had presented Leila with a catlinite pendant. They knew she wouldn’t keep it but they wanted the feeling of giving it to her anyway. Catlinite dust was cherished for its healing properties, but that’s not why they sprinkled it over Luke’s grave when Leila wasn’t looking. They simply thought he’d like the colors. When Leila drove them to the police station the next day, the girls had offered the precious findings to Charlie Cooke without an argument. That was when Leila first found Charlie.

  “I’m coming over,” he says, and hangs up.

  She tries to picture Charlie standing here, but her reflection in the mirrored toaster oven catches her off guard, the chalky skin stretched tightly over her cheekbones. Despite all the rain, everything is drying up. Her skin actually flakes when she touches it. With the phone held under her chin, she reaches for the hand cream on the windowsill. Then she pours it in a line down each arm. Sweat mixes into the lotion as she massages her elbows and wrists, then her neck. The touch of her own hand feels so soothing, it’s almost painful.

  Leila opens the kitchen window to let his words filter out into the air. She replaces the phone in the receiver.

  Leila folds back the living-room curtain and ties it on its clip. She’s got to do something. She pulls out her cleaning supplies from underneath the sink and immediately goes to work on the windows. She welcomes the ache in her body, the small fist of her lower back relaxing as she pulls a sheet of newspaper in long strokes over the panes so that fibers aren’t left on the glass.