The Day the Angels Fell

by Shawn Smucker

  Mr. Tennin had a sad look on his face. “Sam, the Tree of Life, as spoken about in this legend, was a powerful tree. That’s certain. If anything could bring someone back from the dead, it would be fruit from this Tree. But even if it could, would that be the best thing to do?”

  I stared at the table, embarrassed. “So you think it could?” I asked again, not looking up.

  “Sam,” my father said with the sound of warning in his voice.

  Mr. Tennin held up his palm toward my father. “It’s okay. It’s an important question.” He turned back to me. “It might be able to, Sam. But sometimes the correct question isn’t, ‘Can we?’ Sometimes the correct question is, ‘Should we?’”

  I glanced over at Abra. She stared at Mr. Tennin, as if waiting for him to start telling us another story.

  “Imagine this, Sam,” Mr. Tennin continued. “What if death isn’t as dark and scary as we think it is? What if death is simply the path from this world, full of hurt and pain, to a better place?”

  He waited and let that sink in.

  “Now imagine destroying that path, covering it up so that no one could follow it. Imagine eliminating the only way to escape from this broken world. Because the Tree of Life doesn’t eliminate pain, at least not forever. It doesn’t eliminate disease or old age or scars. So when you introduce the Tree of Life, you eliminate the only means of traveling away from all of those things. If people would eat from that Tree, they would be trapped here. Their bodies would eventually decay even as they lived, and their skin would grow thin and their eyesight would dim and eventually they would be nothing but bones, wearing away in the wind and the water, and still they would be here, alive. Do you know what this earth becomes when people are trapped here for thousands of years in their pain and their decaying bodies?”

  I shuddered.

  “Hell,” he said. “That’s what this earth would become if there was a Tree of Life and everyone ate from it.”

  “But it’s not real, right?” Abra interrupted. “I mean, you’re talking about this Tree as if it exists for real.”

  Mr. Tennin smiled at her, and it was kind of a sad smile, but he didn’t say anything.

  “What’s real? What’s true?” he asked, and my gaze darted over to Mr. Jinn.

  “Yes, yes, a good story,” Mr. Jinn said. When he had ambled into our yard, he had the look of a man staring down a day of leisure, but now he seemed nervous, anxious to leave. “Moving and all that. Now it appears lunch has come and gone.”

  He stood up and took his plate into the kitchen, and the rest of us followed. But I couldn’t stop thinking about this Tree of Life. I thought about the words scribbled on the table and the words the preacher had read at my mother’s funeral. I thought about Mr. Tennin’s story. And my mind became obsessed with one thing: finding the Tree of Life and bringing my mother back from the dead. I wanted her there with me. I wanted to hug her and hear her voice in the kitchen. I wanted to see her waving from the third base line at the ball field. If we both ate from the Tree of Life, we could figure out the future together.

  I felt a certain kinship with that first cherub. I would do many things in order to possess that Tree. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything I wouldn’t do, if it meant plucking one piece of fruit from that Tree, if it meant bringing my mother back from her dark grave.

  My father and Mr. Tennin walked out toward the barns. Mr. Tennin didn’t look ready for work, still dressed in his all-black fancy clothes, but he had taken off his suit coat and rolled his sleeves up, and my father had lent him a pair of knee-high boots. I figured they wanted to have a look around and talk about pay out of the hearing of nosy children. I watched them both disappear into the dark shadows of the barn, where only a few days before I had bottle-fed the lamb.

  “We’ve no time to lose,” Mr. Jinn said once they were out of sight. He put his comb back into his pocket. “That much is clear to me now. We’d best do what that old hag wrote on the table. We’d best find the Tree.”

  He stomped out onto the porch, hurried down the steps, and crossed the yard to the lightning tree. I looked at Abra, and we both followed him.

  14

  “SO YOUR MOTHER was right up there in the tree when the lightning struck?” Mr. Jinn asked, his round head leaning back, his thick neck bulging.

  I bristled at the casual way he talked about my mother’s death, especially considering we had buried her body in the ground not three hours earlier. I didn’t know what to say. Abra moved up beside me and grabbed my sleeve again. I thought I might start crying. In that moment I was thinking about how my mother had been such a good mother. And once again I thought, I would do anything to bring her back.

  Mr. Jinn looked over at me and squinted, as if he was trying to figure out what was wrong.

  “Oh my,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh my. Come here, kid. Come here.”

  I went to him, Abra reluctantly letting go, and Mr. Jinn raised his arm and welcomed me against his side.

  “There, there,” he said. “There, there.”

  But it didn’t comfort me. It didn’t comfort me at all. He smelled like the stone road after a storm—heavy and dark. His embrace felt more like he was luring me in than trying to make me feel better. And once his arm came down around me, I felt stifled, trapped. Still, I wasn’t sure what to do. I had never had to pull myself away from an adult before.

  “Listen,” he said, and then, as if on second thought, he shook his head. “No, sit down. Both of you. You might as well know.”

  We sat down on either side of Mr. Jinn, but once he had settled in, Abra stood up and came around to my other side, which put me in between both of them. I looked up over my shoulder, and the lightning scar in the tree crashed down right on top of Mr. Jinn’s head and continued down where his back rested against the tree. The sky was very blue, and carefree clouds wandered over the fields from one mountain to the other.

  “What would you do to bring back your mother?” Mr. Jinn asked me.

  It shocked me, like he had been reading my mind. He didn’t wait for an answer.

  “I know. You’d do anything. Anything. Just as I would. Or you,” he said, pointing over my head at Abra. “When someone we love dies, we’d do anything to bring them back.”

  He was right. A sense of resignation washed over me, from the tips of my brown hair to the soles of my nice shoes that I hadn’t taken off after the funeral. I would do anything, and I wasn’t the only one. I was justified in how I felt. It was an admission that filled me with both relief and guilt.

  “Here’s another question. What would you say if I told you I could help you bring her back?”

  A wondrous hope surged through me like a jolt of electricity. That thing I wanted—here was someone willing to talk about it, someone willing to help. To feel her skin again, to hear her laugh, to smell her hair as she bent over my bed and kissed me good night—he could bring all of that into reality. Deep inside, I knew it was true.

  But all of that hope, all of those good feelings, popped like a soap bubble at the sound of Abra’s voice.

  “You’re crazy,” she said. “No, you’re not crazy. You’re evil.”

  Panic rushed through me. I wanted her to keep quiet. I wanted Mr. Jinn to keep talking and feed the small flame of hope growing inside me. I didn’t want to face life without my mother. I wanted to chase after her return, no matter how long it took, no matter what I had to do.

  “Shut up!” I said. “Wait.”

  I had never told her to shut up. She was my best friend, and it didn’t feel right. She looked at me as if I had slapped her.

  “I can do it,” Mr. Jinn said in the softest voice I had ever heard him use. He pulled out his comb and made long, sweeping motions as he slicked back his hair again and again. “I can do it. But I need your help.”

  Abra stood up. “If you don’t stop it, I’m going to tell his father about your lies. If you don’t stop saying these things, I’m telling everyone.”

 
“You think they’ll believe you?” Mr. Jinn said, still in his soft voice. “Will you tell them about being attacked by the vultures? Will you tell them about the Amarok?”

  Abra’s face went empty. No one would believe her. No one would believe any of it.

  “So what if you bring her back?” she asked. “What if it works? Do you have to go dig her up out of the ground? Will she still have all that stuff in her from the funeral home? You can’t bring someone back from the dead! It’s impossible.”

  At the mention of digging her up, I stood to my feet and stared into her eyes. And in that moment I hated her, or at least I hated what she represented—the end of my hope and the finality of death.

  “Don’t you dare talk about my mother that way,” I said. “It’s disgusting.”

  Fury rose up in me, and I let it take over. It felt good to be out of control, to let that simmering anger boil over, and I could tell immediately that it rose up out of the darkness I had been nurturing inside me. I stared hard at Abra, and the words that came out surprised even me.

  “Leave. Now.”

  And I pointed down the lane.

  This time it was worse than slapping her. Her face pulled back, hurt and red. Her eyes filled with tears, like new puddles in a spring rain. She pushed past me, crying for real, sobbing and sniffing and trying to cover it all with a stubborn scowl. Once she was out from under the shade of the old oak tree, the lightning tree, her walk gradually turned to a jog, then a run. At the end of the lane she glanced back toward us, slowed to a walk, and slid out of sight down the long country lane. I watched her the whole time.

  “I can do it,” Mr. Jinn said, as if none of that had happened. As if Abra had never even been there. “But I need your help.”

  I looked away from him, up into the lightning tree. “I would do anything,” I said, and it felt like a handshake. It felt like an agreement that I would not be able to back out of.

  I waited for him to say something, to continue the conversation, but when I looked over at him he was staring at the church. I followed his gaze. Three large, black dogs came trotting up the lane. They looked like German shepherds except they were all black and their noses were shorter. Long, pink tongues hung out between their oversized white teeth. They were the same three dogs that had been in the fight with the groundhogs.

  The darkness inside me seemed to swell with the approach of those animals. It felt like a living thing, that darkness, and my insides twisted, the way my mom had twisted a dishrag before she hung it to dry on the spigot. And like that rag, all the goodness was wrung out of me, and I was focused on finding the Tree. Bringing back my mom. That’s all I cared about.

  The dogs seemed to be headed right for us, and even though the darkness had grown inside me, I still felt fear as they got closer. They looked unpredictable. They looked angry. I glanced up into the tree but knew I could never make it to the first branches without a ladder, so I got ready to run. I looked at Mr. Jinn to see what he was going to do, and I saw him make these subtle shooing motions with his hands. He whispered something, and the dogs somehow seemed to hear him, even from that distance. They curled off to the side, cut through the small pasture back out to the road, and headed the same direction as Abra.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “They’re here to protect us,” he said.

  “Like the vultures?” I don’t know if I meant it to, but it came out as an accusation.

  “Now that the vultures know you and I are working together, they won’t do you any harm either.”

  “They were protecting you?” My mouth dropped open.

  He didn’t reply.

  “Did you send those dogs after Abra?” I could feel the edges of panic gathering inside me.

  “They won’t hurt her,” he said. “They’re here to protect us.”

  He emphasized the word us as if Abra was no longer us. As if Abra was on the other team, and the dogs would do what they needed to do to protect “us” from “her.”

  “This tree right here, the one where your mother died,” he said, as if still trying to explain the presence of the dogs. “There will be more and more coming for it. The Tree of Life is close by. It must be.”

  I felt heavy inside, sad, and unsure of myself. It was hot and I was still in my nice clothes. The sun moved slowly toward the west, but we had four or five more hours of heat ahead, and even after the sun set the night would be warm. I wanted this to all be a dream. I wanted everything to be the way it had been before lightning struck the tree, before my mom stopped the car so that I could pick up Icarus, before I ran into the antique store and saw the words Find the Tree of Life.

  “Why will the animals come looking for the tree?” I asked.

  His words came out in the form of a spell, a monotone recital of a long-dead incantation. “It’s the nature of everything to seek unending life. Nothing, no one, wants to die. And the Tree of Life will be somewhere close to this tree, the one that died.”

  The words fluttered around us, and they reminded me of the words of the three women in the darkened room, the words I hadn’t been able to understand. The living words.

  “What do I have to do?” I asked.

  “The Tree is important, but we need more than the Tree. We need a suitable container to hold it in, something made of stone. We need the right kind of water. And we need the right kind of sunshine.” When it was clear I was more confused than ever, he spat out a list. “Four items. Four seasons. Four rivers. Do you see?”

  I nodded, but I didn’t see. Not completely.

  He shook his head and waved his hand at me. “No matter. All you need to know is this: we need to find the Tree. It will still be small, maybe six inches tall, maybe only an inch or two. A tiny green thing is all. At first you might think it’s a plant.” His eyes came alive as he spoke of it, like an old man reciting tales from the glory days of his youth. “It will have two or three small white flowers on it by now. The flowers are important. We mustn’t break the flowers.”

  “Only an inch or two?” I sighed. “It could be anywhere.”

  He didn’t say anything, and I looked closer into every nook and bend of the tree.

  “It has to be up there somewhere,” he said. “It always forms around or inside the tree that died. Do you have a ladder?”

  I hurried to the shed and dragged the extension ladder over, and it banged against the ground, banged against my legs. I couldn’t carry it across that stretch of grass without thinking back to the night my mom died, the night I propped the ladder up against the tree and climbed up.

  What happened to Icarus? I wondered for the first time. And it felt strange, because I had barely thought of the cat since the lightning had struck and I saw the branch was missing. I didn’t think I could care for that cat anymore, not after what it had brought about.

  I propped the ladder against the tree and climbed up, then pulled myself into that first nest of diverging branches. I looked for the small tree that Mr. Jinn had described, but I saw nothing.

  “A bit higher!” he shouted up to me, so I climbed higher. “A bit higher!” he shouted again, and up I went.

  I was so high I started to shake. I didn’t enjoy heights. From there I saw Mr. Jinn’s house out across the field. I turned and saw Abra’s family’s farm to the south. I saw the three large dogs sitting in the middle of the road and vast fields of corn waving at me, waving in great green ripples of movement like an ocean. The vultures flew across the valley in a straight line, wheeled in a circle, and continued over to the other mountain. But I didn’t see any small tree or plant, either hidden in the branches or anywhere else.

  “Nothing!” I shouted down. “I can’t go any higher. I’m too big for the branches.”

  “Fine, fine. Come down,” he muttered reluctantly.

  I made my way back down the tree, and it was like moving backward in time, back past all of these different choices to the heart of the matter. The beginning point. The beginning of all thing
s. I stood there on the bottommost branches, in that palm of the tree’s hand, and I didn’t want to go back down. I wanted to stay there, and I wanted Abra to come up to where I was and hang on to my sleeve as she had done at the graveside service.

  “Hey,” a voice called up to me, and it wasn’t Mr. Jinn. “What are you doing up there?”

  I looked down. It was Mr. Tennin.

  15

  MR. TENNIN SHIELDED his eyes from the sun. Mr. Jinn looked annoyed.

  “You climbed pretty high. Impressive. I bet you could see a lot of things from the top of that tree.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Mr. Tennin had a kind voice, the type of voice that was so kind it was almost unnerving. I thought back through our brief conversation after lunch about the Tree of Life, and it made me feel uncomfortable. I felt weak for the determination I had shown to bring someone back from the dead, and I felt more than a little foolish for putting all of this hope in someone like Mr. Jinn. He seemed convincing when it was just him and me, but when someone like Mr. Tennin came around, someone so full of kindness, Mr. Jinn seemed like a poor copy.

  “I’m going to be moving into your house,” Mr. Tennin said, spreading his arms wide the way people do when they make an announcement that surprises even them. “Your father said I could stay in the spare room, the one right next door to yours.”

  I nearly fell out of the tree. That room had been empty for as long as I could remember. I didn’t like going in there because the door to the attic was in that room. I didn’t say anything, but I sensed a movement and glanced quickly down at Mr. Jinn. He looked agitated at the news.

  “Great,” I finally said, but the word came out flat, devoid of meaning.

  “I’m going to walk over to the church and drive my car back over here. It’s got all of my things in it. I’ll talk to you later,” Mr. Tennin said.

  I watched him walk down the lane in my dad’s oversized rubber work boots. They jerked forward and backward as he walked, the way big boots tend to do if they’re not tight. He looked all around, taking things in. His hands were halfway in his pants’ pockets with his thumbs outside, and his bald head gave off a glare in the sunshine.