Solomon's Oak

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  The choking feeling that accompanied a turtleneck drove Joseph crazy. “I’ve never been much good at writing. Give me a camera, different story.”

  “Oh, that’s right—Penny was always taking pictures. Must have made a big impression on you to choose that for your career. So what do you take pictures of, if I might ask?”

  Crime scenes and dead people? Wounds and bullet casings? Bloody palm prints on walls and tire treads in mud? “While I’m here, I plan to take pictures of trees.”

  “Trees? Why trees?”

  “California has giant redwoods.”

  “But a tree just stands there. Why not take pictures of pretty girls?”

  He smiled. “I find trees more interesting.”

  “Someone broke your heart, didn’t they?”

  More stories she didn’t need to hear about. “I’m just taking some time for myself. A vacation, I guess.”

  Lorna got up to leave, picking up his empty plate. “I’m going to tell you something, Joseph. In between trees, I suggest you start doing some push-ups. Get that broken heart of yours back in fighting shape or you could miss out on something wonderful.”

  “Sound advice. Thank you for the meal, senora.”

  “Oh, call me Lorna. Everyone does.”

  How could you not find comfort in a place like that? Creamsicle bars. Bottles of root beer so cold and slushy it hurt your teeth to drink. Return the empty, you’d get a nickel back. Also, a large-size Swamp Juan came with four Tootsie Pops. Even leftover, the pizza was good.

  On Monday, December 1, Joseph got up at dawn, still not accustomed to the time difference. He looked out the cabin window and saw frost on his car windshield. The air steadily warmed up in what he’d come to think of as a California-style winter, much warmer than Albuquerque. He drank coffee and reviewed his photos of the pirate wedding. He photoshopped the red eyes on the bride back to brown. He cropped the sword-fight pictures to zero in on the groom’s steel and grimace, and occasionally he looked at the picture he’d shot of the frowning woman who was running the show, Glory Solomon. She was a good cook. But her expression—what did she have to be pissed off about? He’d saved her bacon with his camera. He could not imagine showing his face there again, but that’s where the white oak tree was, the only one like it in the entire state. He’d seen it once before, the summer he was ten.

  That summer had been the second year in a row that the oak trees had failed to produce acorns. When squirrels and chipmunks began to raid trash cans and boldly challenge campers at the lake, the Forest Service investigated. That the oak trees might be dying out was one of the explanations. UFOs, pollution, secret government projects, the coming of another ice age … those were the explanations discussed at the Butterfly Creek. The predictions terrorized a ten-year-old boy’s heart, giving him his first taste of insomnia.

  “What will the squirrels eat, Grandmother? Where will birds make nests? If there’s no shade, won’t the animals die?”

  “Come with me,” Grandmother Penny said. She drove her pickup truck to Solomon’s Oak, chatted with the man who came to the door of the farmhouse, then she and Joseph walked over to the white oak, a tree with one strike against it already. This variety of tree wasn’t supposed to grow here.

  “This tree is over two hundred years old,” she said. “Does it look sick to you?” she asked him, bending down to collect a few of the beautiful nine-lobed leaves.

  Joseph remembered his heart racing as she placed the sturdy leaf in his fingers. “It could be sick deep inside. With something you can’t see.”

  His grandmother held up a leaf so that the sun shone through it. “See those lines, Joseph? Those are the tree’s veins, just like the ones in your body. Blood flows through your veins. Sap flows through the tree’s veins.”

  “But what about the missing acorns?”

  She smiled and smoothed his hair. “Nature follows its own rules, nieto. We can say a prayer for the acorns if that will help you feel better.”

  He couldn’t remember if they prayed or not. Probably. Grandmother Penny covered the bases. In case the acorn drought was the death knell, she made sure he saw Solomon’s Oak. Taking a safety pin from her purse, she pinned the biggest oak leaf on his shirt, over his heart, like a forest ranger’s badge. That summer he wore it until the leaf crumbled, leaving only the pin. This year, before driving to California, he read up on oak trees for his photography project. Among the many tree stories, he found this: Pin an oak leaf next to your heart, and you will be protected from lies and deceit.

  If he’d worn the leaf all these years, would it have saved his marriage to Isabel?

  When your family stretched across the state from Crownpoint, New Mexico, to Dona Ana County in the southern part of the state, to the green-chile capital, Hatch, you went to weddings every month. A dozen bridesmaids and groomsmen was not unheard of. Formal dress was necesario.

  He thought about their wedding—his and Isabel’s—such a far cry from the pirate wedding he’d been to a few days before. Video, a full mass at Saint Francis Cathedral Basilica in Santa Fe, and tamales were three essentials Isabel insisted upon. She wore a handmade, lacy, white dress with a six-foot train. Joseph wore the tux he owned rather than rented, because every Vigil male owned one. Isabel placed the traditional bouquet of white roses at the feet of Blessed Mother’s statue. In front of 180 guests, maximum seating allowance for the sit-down, formal dinner reception to follow at La Fonda, they spoke their vows twice, first in Spanish, then in English.

  A mariachi band led them and all their guests out of the cathedral onto San Francisco Street, playing music as they walked the short block to the hotel for the reception in La Terraza Sala and garden patio. From there they could see the basilica, the Plaza, and the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Isabel’s family was conservative. They served fruit punch instead of champagne. Alcohol was consumed clandestinely, in the restrooms and in the Bell Tower Bar. People stepped out for a bit of fresh air and returned ready to dance for hours with no one the wiser. For sure there were no crazy wooden barrels of grog. There had been no swords, either, though it struck Joseph as the perfect metaphor for his brief marriage.

  Isabel could not get pregnant.

  The tests showed nothing wrong with either of them. After mass every Sunday she asked the priest to bless her útero. Nada. Joseph was mala suerte, bad luck, her mother told her. Best to part now, before she grew too old to bear children. Isabel annulled their marriage on the grounds that as a practicing Catholic, Joseph had failed to “establish a community of life and love with another person.”

  She married in the same church six months after their official divorce was final and gave birth to twin boys the following year.

  Joseph’s cop friends and fellow crime-lab techs set him up with sisters or cousins, but he hadn’t clicked with anyone, and to be fair, he hadn’t really tried. After the shooting, he considered it divine intervention that he was alone at this time of his life because no woman deserved to go through this ordeal with him. Yes, it was a miracle that he could walk, that he was alive, but he was miles away from whole. That was part of why he was spending the winter here instead of in Albuquerque.

  Not only was he was on permanent disability, but the lawsuit payout was so ridiculous that Joseph could comfortably live the rest of his life without working, if he chose to. He’d given himself six months to photograph those enormous trees. Maybe those two acorn-free summers had initially piqued his interest in trees, but he was also fascinated by the root systems they sank into the rockiest earth, and the way some could survive earthquakes, fires, and drought years, with so little water.

  He organized the pirate-wedding photo thumbnails, culled, and ended up with five halfway decent shots for each segment of the wedding, and dozens of candid shots that captured the spirit of the party. The picture of the cake made him laugh. Vigil wedding cakes were about snowy white layers and silver-frosting bells and pale pink roses. The pirate ship cake had ambition. He pictured Glory
Solomon with a library book on pirates in one hand and a spatula full of buttercream in the other, and still wearing that pissed-off look. He laughed again.

  He downloaded the photos onto a disc and printed out the best one of the bride and groom to slide into the front of the empty CD jewel case. On the back of the case he used one of his tree shots, imposing the bride’s and groom’s names and the date over it, a touch he knew the couple would like. He e-mailed Glory Solomon:

  Dear Ms. Solomon,

  If I send the photos to you as attachments, it’ll take all day to download, so I mailed you a CD. Let me know if there’re any problems. Here’s my cell number.

  Regards,

  Joseph Vigil

  Okay, so he was sending the CD by snail mail because after the gun he didn’t want to embarrass himself further, but her tree was another story. Of all the trees in California, he wanted particularly to photograph Solomon’s Oak. Now that Grandma Penny was gone, and the cabin soon to follow, he wanted a last reminder of that tree and his summers.

  On Thursday, Joseph woke to rain, made coffee, and sat down with a book. By eleven the rain turned into a torrential downpour. His grandmother had told him that pounding kind of rain was “male,” according to the Navajo. All Joseph knew was that the damp made his bones ache even more, necessitating an early-morning pain pill. When he couldn’t find a comfortable position sitting or standing, he lay down and shut his eyes, reliving the shooting that caused the aches he now had to find some way to live with.

  He and Rico had met in a pre-law-enforcement class at the community college and discovered they were both on track for AA degrees in criminology. With the degrees in hand, they would work their way up to the better-paying jobs immediately. Both joined the force, finished training, and began as beat cops in Duke City. But where Rico thrived on dangerous circumstances, Joseph hated them. He worried he’d freeze at some critical moment, end up responsible for somebody’s death, so when a technician position in the crime lab opened up, Joseph applied. Enamored of the nifty equipment for analysis of crime-scene findings, he found a use for his high school geometry, learned to foreshorten photographs and to do ID fingerprint recovery in the field. Rico and the guys gave him a ration for it:

  “Buy a chemistry set to play with on weekends.”

  “You’d rather take orders than give them?”

  “Less chances of meeting cute women.”

  “You’ll have to turn in your gun.”

  Those things were true. The job turned out to be more of a science than the art he imagined, but there were always new tools and systems to learn, and the difference they made in conviction rates satisfied him. Three years later, Rico was promoted to detective, and while most detectives scorned lab workers outright, Joseph and Rico remained close.

  They met for beer after work sometimes. On the weekends, Joseph went to Rico’s kids’ soccer games and family barbecues. Rico never let up trying to pry him out of his lab chair. “Come along on one of our busts. It’s exciting. Nothing feels as good as cuffing some jackass and throwing him into the paddy wagon.”

  Joseph got up. His back pain nagged him so that he couldn’t concentrate. He poured himself a cup of coffee, then noticed a trickle of rainwater seeping down the inside of the kitchen window. It wasn’t worth fixing, but it would be nice if he had the option to. On the back porch was a stepladder. If he tried to carry it indoors, he would spend the rest of the day lying on a heating pad, popping pills. For a task other men could do one-handed.

  The Oak Shore was so deserted this time of year that all it needed was a couple of wandering burros to qualify as a ghost town. At one time there had been trees in every direction, fir, oak, cottonwood. Clear-cutting had created three hundred acres for custom homes. Once Penny’s cabin was bulldozed, entrance through the double gates to the area would require a punch code. Homeowner fees kept the landscape at a civilized distance.

  Joseph had learned to swim in this lake. He had rocked in the green canvas hammock on the front porch while Grandma Penny sat on the steps shucking corn for their dinner. One of the three sisters was always present: corn, squash, or beans, often the creamy Santa Maria pinquitos she’d simmer for hours in her beloved micaceous-clay pot. They’d fold them into fresh tortillas and feast for days.

  Grandma Penny collected rainwater in a barrel because why waste such a precious resource? When a rainbow appeared, she reminded Joseph, “It’s bad luck to point at a rainbow with your finger. Best to use your thumb, otherwise you might catch arthritis.” She had her opinions on the birds, too. “That bluebird right there? Angry bird. Thinks it’s a hawk.”

  Like Lorna at the general store, his grandmother wanted to know his life plans.

  “What are your ambitions, Joseph?”

  Stuntman. Pro basketball player. Race-car driver. Pilot. FBI agent.

  “Yes, nieto. I know you can do this if you put your mind to it.”

  The cabin had no television, so every night he reread the books she’d given to him as a kid. From their mildewed pages he learned about the California Gold Rush, the migrant farmers, and the positive side of the Spanish missionaries, yet the book that burned within him was the tale of Ishi, the last California Indian living wild. One day, Ishi walked out of the forest and agreed to spend the rest of his life as an aboriginal artifact living in a museum exhibit people could visit. In his youth, Joseph thought that was beyond cool. Now it sickened him to think of any Native person living his life on what basically amounted to a stage set. But since the shooting, Joseph understood Ishi. In some situations all you could do was make a place for yourself and wait for time to pass.

  “Without a job, a man is no better than a horse,” Joseph’s father had often told him during his growing-up years. “He might look handsome, but God gave us muscles to use, not admire.” His father gathered piñon nuts the old-fashioned way, laying a tarp under the tree and climbing a ladder to strike the open cones to dislodge the nuts. He took his twenty-five-pound limit every week and parked his truck off the interstate and sold bags. He grew Hatch chiles and hauled his barrel-roaster-and-propane-torch contraption to Albuquerque to broil green chile to sell at the farmers’ market.

  “Fire up!” he’d call out as he lit the flame. The roaster tossed the chiles around like bingo numbers. “Chiles coming out!” he’d holler when the blackened chiles released their skins. He sold them in sandwich-size Baggies all the way to fifty-pound sacks. Driving anywhere in late summer or early fall, Joseph rolled down his window just to smell the smoky, spicy scent unique to his state.

  His mother grew tomatoes and corn and tended her orchard of stone fruit. She braided chile ristras and sold them through a mail-order catalog. These days she needed a magnifying glass to braid neatly, and it took longer to make her quota. The last letter she’d sent to him made her feelings about the upcoming holidays clear.

  Primo,

  I am making and freezing tamales though my hands get numb after only an hour. If you were here, you could help me with the cornhusks. I forgot to dot the dessert tamales with food color, so I guess Christmas dinner will be a surprise. Your father and I wish we were all together to go to Mass, open presents, and enjoy visiting friends.

  Love from your madre, who is triste y solo.

  When the rain let up, Joseph washed out the cup and spoon, checked to make certain the propane was turned off, and put on his jacket. He drove to the post office, mailed the CD to Glory Solomon, then headed out toward the highway. To get to the city of Carmel, you drove Highway 68 to the two-lane Highway 1, which was always crowded from Salinas to Monterey, and finally arrived in Monterey, with the excellent aquarium and Fisherman’s Wharf. Today he bypassed the tourist attractions and headed to the doctor’s office, where he had an appointment with an orthopedic specialist. The office was in the gallery-filled village of Carmel, known for its world-class golf course and expensive cottages.

  Afterward, if the weather stayed dry, he’d drive south to the Big Sur redwoods. />
  “You need to get things looked at every three months, sooner if any of your symptoms worsen,” the surgeon in Albuquerque had told him. The California doctor looked more like a surfer than a surgeon. Joseph sized him up. Maybe thirty-five, 160 pounds, caramel leather deck loafers with a Goodyear-tread sole. He had one of those sticking-up hairstyles that made him look as if he’d just woken up. On his way to the exam room, Joseph passed doors to X-ray machines and other equipment he couldn’t identify. He lay down for the X-rays, which were digitally delivered to a flat-screen television monitor in the exam room.

  The doctor took time out to shake his hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Vigil.”

  “Same here.”

  The young doctor frowned as he studied the films.

  “Bad news?” Joseph asked.

  “We should do an MRI. If you can come back this afternoon, we can do it today.”

  “That fast? Is there a life-and-death problem?”

  The doctor chuckled. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you. I have my own machine, and I like to get fresh films. Waiting around for CHOMP to get an opening just isn’t practical. I’ll give you some Valium intravenously, of course, and you’ll need someone to drive you home. Can you call your wife?”

  “No.”

  “Can you arrange to spend the night in town?”

  Joseph sat back on the exam table. “I’m in the middle of a project. How about we do it after the first of the year?”

  “I know your type,” the doctor said.

  “What type is that?”

  “The type of man who thinks an MRI is a waste of time.”

  “Is it going to change how my back feels? Heal the broken parts?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “With the MRI in hand, I can assess other avenues we might explore to manage your pain. There are new procedures every year.”

  It sounded to Joseph like “A cure for—insert disease here—is just around the corner.”

  “I’ve been wondering, how long will it take before I can get off the painkillers?”