Beneath the Night Tree

by Nicole Baart

  But as we unlatched the door, I remembered in a wave of sorrow that there would be no more summers on the farm. We were moving to Iowa City. To an apartment. As Parker and I stood for a second in the shadow of the old chicken coop, I was gripped by a sense of loss. Of regret. Why hadn’t I let my boys experience all our farm had to offer?

  “They’re not here, either,” Parker told me, though I could see as much with my own two eyes.

  “It would make a nice fort,” I mused.

  Parker gave me a sidelong glance and nudged me gently with his elbow. “It would.”

  That one moment of understanding, of tenderness, was so unexpected that it all but knocked me off-balance. I almost confided in him. I could feel the words like water on my tongue, liquid and heavy with all the emotion that sprang from the well of my doubt. But the inappropriateness of such an intimate confession was not lost on me. I swallowed all I longed to say and hopped down the steps without acknowledging his small act of kindness.

  The barn was the only building left, and though the farm was filled with other nooks and crannies—the dense interior of the grove; the wooded graveyard, where Grandpa had piled rotten sections of old fencing; the unused horse field lush with prairie grass that rose chest-high—I was starting to believe that Parker was right. There was a certain allure to the ancient structures of our farm. They seemed to whisper with the near-forgotten echo of years gone by. If I closed my eyes, I could almost see my grandpa’s shadow as he disappeared around a corner, a length of rope slung over his arm and his Norwegian elkhound Lucy at his side.

  “I hear something coming from the barn,” Parker said as we made our way up the hill.

  “Sure you do,” I sighed, for our morning banter had lost its luster for me. I was feeling nostalgic and more than a little depressed—downright sick with the knowledge that my chance to bring up farm boys was rapidly coming to an end.

  “No, Julia. I mean it.” There was something in Parker’s tone that made my head snap up.

  We both paused for a moment, ears angled toward the barn, straining to hear whatever had given Parker reason to wipe the seemingly ever-present smile off his face.

  “Somebody’s screaming,” he exclaimed.

  And he was right. It was faint but unmistakable.

  We started to run at the same moment, but Parker was faster than me. I watched helplessly as he rocketed toward the barn, his long legs eating up the distance as if he was used to taking off at a flat-out sprint up a fairly substantial incline. As we neared the barn, I could see that the bottom section of the red-painted door was closed, but the top half was open just a crack.

  Daniel and Simon were in the barn. I was sure of it.

  Parker entered the long shadows of the tall building several paces ahead of me and wrenched open the door. As he disappeared inside, I sent a prayer after him. A desperate, wordless plea for help, for strength, for whatever he would need to make everything okay within the darkness of a place that I hadn’t stepped foot in for almost a decade. It seemed unfamiliar to me, alien and filled with countless hazards. With danger.

  Gasping, I finally gained the gaping door and threw myself into the half-light of the barn, blinded by the sudden gloom. But it didn’t take long for my eyes to adjust.

  Parker was standing next to Simon with his strong arm wrapped tight around my brother’s slight shoulders. Had I once believed that Simon was on the path to young adulthood? He looked like a child beside Parker, a scared little boy. I was about to shout their names, to make them tell me what was going on, when I heard a whimper from somewhere above me. I followed Parker’s gaze and saw what they were staring at.

  Daniel was suspended above us.

  He was at the center of the same beam that I had crossed a hundred times. The only difference was, I had never fallen off. Daniel was clinging to the solid girder of thick timber for dear life, his slender legs dangling into an expanse of open space that seemed as deep and cavernous as the Grand Canyon.

  “Daniel!” I screamed.

  “Mommy!”

  I felt rather than saw Parker turn to shush me. “Don’t distract him,” he warned, his words tense with authority.

  “Distract him?” I shrieked.

  Parker crossed the space between us in a flash and grabbed my arms. He gave me a little shake and forced me to look him in the eye. Although I was choking on my own fear, I was startled to see that his face was flushed with the same emotions I was feeling: terror and love. A nauseating sense of This can’t be happening.

  “We’re going to get him down,” Parker hissed, his jaw clenched in determination. “He’ll be fine.”

  But even as he spoke the words, I knew that it was too late.

  I floated out of my body when Daniel fell. I saw his fingers slip and heard his scream, but it was as if those things were disconnected. They were merely two elements from the filming of a bad movie, a pair of recordings that would comprise a whole when edited together. But they meant nothing apart. Fingers skidding off a splintered board. A scream that sounded shocked, unearthly.

  It was all over in a flicker. A blink. There was nothing more than a flash of red from Daniel’s T-shirt and the hummingbird beat of his legs as he bicycled in the nothingness above us. I gasped at the innocent puff of dust and the sudden, high-pitched cry when he landed. It pierced my soul.

  And then, everything was quiet.

  Falling Down

  I hate emergency rooms for the obvious reasons. The smell; the cold, clinical feel; the thin atmosphere punctuated by worry and fear. But my dislike for the ER goes much further. I abhor the cutesy nurses’ smocks—the ones with ugly cartoon characters or giant pastel daisies like lick n’ stick appliqués from some craft project gone wrong. And I loathe the way the doctors’ eyes never meet yours, the way they are too occupied to look you in the face for even a second as they scan charts, monitor their patients, and mentally assess the damage. I don’t like how my shoes stick to the floor with every step or the little sucking sound that accompanies each footfall. I don’t like the unfamiliar noises or the bustle or the sense of macabre excitement. When it comes down to it, there is little I find redeeming in an emergency room.

  But I could have kissed the middle-aged doctor who informed me that my son had fractured his talus.

  “Talus?” I wheezed. It could have meant imminent death for all I knew.

  “His anklebone.”

  “Daniel broke his ankle?”

  “Yes, ma’am. But it’s a nice, clean break. No need for screws or surgery. We’ll put it in a hard cast and he’ll have to stay off it for four to six weeks. Your son will be good as new by summer.”

  The relief that rose inside me was a flower that grew from seed to brilliant, open-petaled glory in the span of three short words: good as new. They were the most beautiful three words in the world. Better even in that moment than I love you. I repeated them out loud, loving the soft way they rolled off my tongue: “Good as new.”

  “Yup. He was lucky. How far did you say that fall was?”

  “I don’t know . . . fifteen, twenty feet?” It was little more than a guess, for distances to me were measured in quantities like time or steps or the energy it took to achieve my goal. If I were to gauge the distance from the beam of the barn to the dirt-covered floor according to my own personal experience of it, Daniel had fallen from the height of heaven.

  The doctor shook his head and made a final notation on the chart he was holding. “That could have been a lot more serious. Just goes to show you that kids really are made of rubber.”

  I grinned as if nothing could be funnier than that statement. But even as I rejoiced in the very limited scope of my son’s injuries, I worried that something had been overlooked. “You’re sure it’s just his ankle? No internal injuries? When he hit the ground, I thought . . . I thought he was dead.”

  “He probably had the wind knocked out of him. He was screaming pretty good by the time you got him here.”

  The doc
tor was right. Daniel had been beside himself with pain, writhing in the backseat of Parker’s car in such a frenzied state of panic that the corners of his mouth were frothed with foamy spittle. More evidence that he was surely on his deathbed.

  But just as I was about to drill the ER doctor further, a pair of nurses rolled Daniel’s gurney back into the large emergency room bay.

  “Honey,” I breathed, stepping to his side and taking his small hand in both of my own. “Are you okay?”

  They had let me accompany him to X-ray, but when they performed the MRI, I was left to hug myself in the brightly lit room and imagine every worst-case scenario. Now I could see that my Daniel, the boy who held my very soul in the palm of his hand, still existed beneath the patina of pain. They had obviously given him something, and his crooked smile was relaxed and just a bit loopy.

  “I got to ride in a spaceship,” he told me.

  My eyes shot to the nurse, and she mouthed the letters MRI.

  “Sounds like fun,” I said, pressing my lips against his forehead, his temple, his cheeks in turn. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  “I broke my ankle.”

  “I know.” It probably wasn’t the time or the place for an interrogation, but I was desperate to know why Parker and I had found Daniel clinging to the beam that spanned our barn in the first place. “What were you doing up there?”

  “Learning to tightrope walk.”

  “But . . .” There was nothing I could say. I had told him the story, after all. And I had done exactly the same thing when I was a kid. Maybe I had been a bit older, but I shouldn’t have been surprised by Daniel’s tenacity. It made me wonder what other escapades he got into without my knowing about it.

  “Never again,” I whispered against the side of his sweet head, my mouth all but kissing the curved chrysalis of his ear.

  He shrugged. “Okay.”

  Daniel was more than happy to let me slip out for a moment while they prepared his cast. Though it was next to impossible to leave him, I knew that Simon and Parker were beside themselves with worry. They were pacing the hallway outside the ER, waiting for a shred of news, for some indication of how Daniel was doing. When I caught sight of their faces, I knew that the vigil they kept was as tense and anxious as the hours we had spent here with Grandma. I broke into a grin when it hit me that our two emergency room experiences couldn’t have been more different.

  “He’s going to be fine,” I croaked.

  Simon let out a whoop, and Parker looked as if he was about to collapse. I reached for him, and for the span of one uncertain breath, he wavered there in the hallway, weak-kneed and quivering as he stared at the tile floor. But then he looked at me, and his gaze was so intense, I almost took a step back. He didn’t let me. My hand was still outstretched, and he grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me to him. Parker clung to me, pressing his face into my neck, and before I knew what I was doing, my arms were around him, too.

  I don’t know how long we held each other, but it was like surfacing from a fathomless, foreign sea when Simon asked, “Can we see him?”

  Parker’s hands released me slowly, and I swallowed hard before I said, “Of course, Si. Let’s go see him.”

  While they prepped Daniel’s ankle for a fiberglass cast, I called Grandma to let her know how we were doing. We felt terrible leaving her behind, but our frantic race down the hill was filled with such horror that we had left the farm in a flurry of gravel and despair. I called the house from my cell phone as I lunged into the backseat, and she had assured me, “Go! Just go.”

  By myself in the sparkling hospital hallway, I filled her in on the situation in minutes, and she alternated between chuckling softly and murmuring praises. Hearing her voice put the entire experience into perspective, and suddenly everything that had seemed so dark and serious such a short time ago was almost funny. Almost. From my bet with Parker to Daniel’s spaceship ride, this would be the sort of story that would be told and retold. A favorite chapter from our family history, if only because the ending was so happy.

  After Grandma and I hung up, I hurried back into the emergency room, where I found that Parker and Simon had already helped Daniel pick out a lime green cast. It was so obnoxious, I was sure it glowed in the dark. The doctor already had it halfway on and was cheerfully telling Parker about the benefits of fiberglass when the break wasn’t too serious as he rolled wet coils of lizard-colored casting on Daniel’s lower leg.

  “Can I sign it?” Simon wondered.

  “Sure.” The doctor smiled. “Your mom and dad can pick up a Sharpie on the way home. They work the best.”

  My mouth gaped a little, and Simon’s eyes darted between Parker and me so fast, I could hardly keep up with their riotous pace. But he didn’t say anything, and as I fumbled for just the right words myself, I felt Parker take my hand. He gave it a tight, quick squeeze, a secret embrace that was laced with meaning. Let it go, I almost heard him whisper. Just this once, let it go.

  We did stop at the store for a Sharpie marker, and before we even made it home, Simon had signed Daniel’s cast. He spelled out his name in block letters across the very top rim, a statement of ownership. His name on Daniel’s leg seemed to bind them together.

  The fishing plans were abandoned for obvious reasons, and though I half expected Parker to leave for home by midafternoon, he elected to stick around. Daniel napped a little, and while he slept the dreamless sleep of the drugged, Simon and Parker and I started on the project that had flitted through my mind earlier that morning. It was probably an exercise in futility, but I blamed myself for misunderstanding the needs of my boys. Maybe if I had paid closer attention, Daniel wouldn’t have found himself crumpled in a heap on the barn floor. Besides, I had to do something.

  The leaning chicken coop was in better shape than I imagined it would be. Grandpa had taken meticulous care of his farm, and when he passed away, everything seemed to simply fall asleep too. Though we had all entertained grandiose plans of running the farm together—of filling the coop with chicks in the spring or buying a pony for me to ride—our plans never materialized. Once we realized that none of us had the time or energy to look after the farm the way Grandpa did, Dad and Grandma and I sold the half-dozen milk cows and mucked out stalls for the last time. And except for a few hens that wandered the farm, the chickens were already gone, so we just swept out the coop and closed the door. We lived on our pretty acres but slowly let the farm go dormant.

  Standing in the middle of the sunny henhouse, I questioned why. It felt like we had squandered our chance. Wasted the opportunity for a life that was now lost to us.

  “This will be great for the boys,” Parker told me as we surveyed the small building. He handed me one of the brooms we had carried from the garage. “Once we get through the dust and clean up the debris, it’ll be an awesome hideout.”

  “Awesome!” Simon agreed from the far corner. He was inspecting the brooder room, a ten-by-ten enclosure that used to house our spring chicks. Grasping the thin chicken wire of the half walls in his fingers, he rattled the flimsy cage and let out a mock cry of distress. “Help! I’m trapped!”

  “That’s the perfect place for you,” Parker said, crossing the concrete floor to kick the door closed with his foot. “Can’t get into much trouble there.”

  “Oh yes I can.” There was a mischievous glint in Simon’s eye.

  We worked for an hour or more, sweeping dust into piles that Parker loaded into a grain shovel and dumped out the door. The broken glass went straight into our metal garbage can, and Simon got so carried away with our impromptu renovation that he took it upon himself to fix gaps in the netting with lengths of old wire he found curled in the corners. The roosting boxes were cleared of moldy hay, and Parker even brushed off the front steps. When we were done, the little building looked ready. Expectant. I could only imagine what my boys would hide in the stacked boxes or how they would utilize the corner room with its stone water trough.

  “It’s great
,” Simon declared when we were all done. And it was.

  “I think we need to celebrate.” Parker leaned his shovel against the wall and turned toward the door. “I’ll go get us some juice. A toast is in order.”

  The chicken coop was quiet with Parker gone, warm and almost dreamy as the tranquil air trembled with a million amber dust motes. Simon still wore a soft half smile that lit his face from within. I watched him for a few moments, loving the peaceful way he absorbed the small universe around him, the way he looked his age again. It was beautiful to me.

  In one smooth movement, I stepped behind my brother and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. I fully anticipated his rejection, and I waited cautiously for him to pull away. But instead of shrugging me off, Simon turned and slid his arms around my waist. He hooked his chin over my shoulder, and my heart skipped a beat at his obvious growth. We stayed there for a few precious seconds, and then Simon remembered that he was too old for hugs and backed away.

  Before he could disappear and make everything go back to the way it had been, I caught him just below the elbows and held him at arm’s length.

  “I want to be your mom,” I whispered. He stared at me, and my heart lurched at the realization that I had said those words aloud. I had thought them a hundred times, a thousand, never quite believing that I would be able to share them with my troubled brother. But I just had. And I couldn’t pretend it was a slip of the tongue.

  Tears filled my eyes so fast, I didn’t have time to blink them away before they slipped down my dusty cheeks. “She’s gone,” I breathed, my voice wavering. “I don’t think she’s coming back. And I don’t want you to be Simon Wentwood anymore. You’re a part of our family. You always have been.”