Harry's Trees

by Jon Cohen

  And there was a difference between grief and fixation. Spring, summer, fall, winter and now spring again—and Oriana’s hope for that shimmering door had never waned, never flagged. No, not hope. Obsession. Oriana in her dense and tangled forest.

  “Yes, you’re right, it is a kind of obsession, but it’s not harmful, Amanda,” that therapist had said. “It will take time and it will be uncomfortable. Oriana will go through phases.”

  “She’s just in one phase,” Amanda said. “She’s stuck in the my-Daddy’s-coming-back phase, doing everything normal, trying to trick me so I won’t bother her about Dean. About what she knows is true. I got a little believer on my hands.”

  The therapist said, “She’ll move on. And if she needs fantasy for now, even a little obsession, let her have it. Give it time. She’s not you. She’s Oriana.”

  “Okay, of course, I get that,” Amanda said. “Still.” She stared at the floor. “She’s taking food to him now. Candy. Cookies. When she thinks I’m not looking, she’ll slip something from the table into her pocket. She takes things from the pantry.”

  “Yes,” the therapist said. “She’ll do all sorts of things. It’s a process.”

  “She leaves it for him. In the...woods.”

  “In case he visits when she’s not there. Amanda. Just call it the forest. Call it what you said she calls it. Don’t let it get to you, that fairy tale word.”

  Amanda sighed and looked away. Oriana and her books. Olive Perkins at the library and now this therapist. Everybody with the make-believe.

  “It’s a good thing, Amanda. This is what fairy tales have always been for, to guide children through the scary parts of their lives. Oriana needs an explanation for why her father was taken from her. You said that the way Dean died seemed impossible. Imagine it through a child’s eyes. A father is already a powerful figure, but Dean, he was special. He built your house at the edge of the forest, hunted with a bow and arrow, he was tall and strong and handsome—he was almost the hero of a fairy tale in real life, don’t you see? A man like that can’t die. Oriana’s certain of it.”

  A man like that can’t die. But he surely did, thought Amanda.

  Oh, the convoluted conversations she and Oriana had. Over and over, Oriana molding the straightforward logic of death into the elaborate nonsense of fairy tale, and Amanda, as calmly as she was able, restating the facts—that Dean had an aneurysm and died, that he was in a grave they could see with their eyes, marked with a gravestone with his name spelled out in fresh-chiseled letters they could trace with their fingers.

  They went to Maplewood Cemetery often, Amanda trying to cause the simple truth of it to sink in, immersing Oriana in the undeniable evidence of Dean gone. Oriana, always trying to outmaneuver her. Last October, perfect example. They were sitting beside Dean’s grave. Oriana had picked up a maple leaf from the red and orange fall leaves scattered in the grass. She fluttered it about in the air like it was a bird or a butterfly.

  “Mom,” she said that day, her eyes intent on the leaf in imaginary flight, “you were almost right about Daddy turning into an angel.”

  Amanda inhaled sharply. “As soon as I said that, I took it back. You know I did,” she said.

  Oriana said, “The thing is, if he was an angel in the snow, he couldn’t have left a print. Angels don’t weigh anything, they don’t have bodies. He’s something else. Some kind of real animal. With wings.” She picked up another leaf, one in each hand now. She danced them together like a pair of butterflies in a field. Or swallows swooping and chasing.

  “Oriana.”

  “Wingèd,” Oriana said.

  “What?”

  “He’s wingèd.”

  Amanda pressed her lips tight. Wingèd. Oriana pronouncing it in that way she transformed everything to her single purpose, turning a plain one-syllable word into a magical two syllables.

  Her voice rising, Oriana said, “It happens, you know. It happens all the time. People get turned into other creatures all the time. You keep saying Daddy just fell back dead in the snow. But he didn’t make a dead snow print. Something extra happened. Ronnie—he was right about the wing part, just not the angel part. Angels don’t weigh anything. Pastor Jim said that angels are made of light and Heavenly Matter. Daddy was growing some other kind of wings in the snow. Real ones. Don’t you see?”

  Amanda kept her voice even and calm. “All he did was move his arms, Oriana. The wing imprint meant nothing. Why didn’t he just vanish? Why did we have a body to bury?”

  “He left it behind. Sometimes that happens. The new animal rises from the old body, like the pupa and the butterfly. It happens all kinds of ways.”

  “So, Daddy sprouted wings and turned into what, a butterfly?”

  “Or a bat or even a Japanese beetle. Or an eagle, maybe. Or a hummingbird. Or maybe a moth. He’s a wingèd creature of some kind.”

  “A moth. Okay. All right, so then why haven’t we seen a six-foot-four moth buzzing around?”

  Oriana reached over and pulled from her mother’s knapsack the new book Olive had given Oriana that morning when they stopped at the library before coming to the cemetery, The Frog Prince. On the cover was an illustration of a frog wearing a crown sitting on a lily pad. She pointed, as if at a court document. “See how the frog’s the right size? The human becomes a real animal, not a monster animal. Daddy would be the size of a real beetle or hummingbird.”

  Amanda said, “But the wings Daddy left in the snow were big.”

  “Because he was changing from big down to the right size. Metamorphosis.”

  Metamorphosis, thought Amanda. Oh great, Oriana scaffolding fantasy with science.

  Oriana said, “And then whatever he became, he flew away into the forest. He’s in the forest behind our house. He’d stay close. That’s where he’d go.”

  “Oh Lord, Oriana.”

  “You should be happy, Mom! Daddy’s not dead and he’s not an angel made out of light. He’s real, and he’s wingèd and we can find him. But first we’ll have to figure out what kind of wingèd animal he is.”

  Amanda felt light-headed and sick. Oriana, wild in her forest. She was truly her father’s child. Dean, in his way, had been a wild creature of the deep woods. Bow hunting, trout fishing along the hidden, shaded banks of Meshoppen Creek, long hikes until after dark—he could go anywhere in the Endless Mountains and return home as if he’d left a trail of bread crumbs. Where else would the enchanted woodsman return to Oriana, but in the forest? And Oriana had her father’s brute patience. Dean could build a wall stone by slow stone, or target shoot until he hit the bull’s-eye five times in a row even if it took all afternoon. Oriana would search the forest of the Endless Mountains for a sign of him...endlessly.

  When Amanda had told the therapist about this new phase, metamorphosis, the therapist said, “It’s all good, this talk of transformation. Her thoughts are evolving, moving forward.”

  Then the therapist made a mistake. “What about your grief, Amanda? We never talk about you.” That was the last visit to the damn therapist.

  * * *

  Amanda looked at her watch. Then into the woods, scanning for a flash of red coat. But Oriana would be too far in to see. Always deep in, hiding food, searching for winged Dean. Wingèd.

  Amanda chopped wood. Stacked it. Looked at her watch again. And at the woods.

  Where are you, Oriana? A half hour, that was the deal.

  Amanda started across the backyard. When she reached the old stone wall that Dean had rebuilt, she paused to place her hand on it. It’s something she always did. Touched the wall. And always, at the electric moment of contact, the immutable memory was conjured: Dean shirtless. July heat. Broad shoulders glistening.

  She closed her eyes.

  Amanda’s grief? What she did not tell the therapist that day? Here was her grief. This wall. This wall was Dean. And th
e log house behind her. And the venison stew in the freezer—all these things were him. How could she explain that to some stranger? That what she missed most of all was Dean’s physical, solid presence. That Dean had been so physically present. That his spirit was always here in some earthly object. He was always here and never here.

  Blushing with need, Amanda reached into her pocket for her phone and texted Cliff Blair. Let’s get together tomorrow. She wanted Cliff right now, but it would have to wait. Oriana had been gone for almost an hour. There would be tears and nonsense and complicated explanations. She turned to the trees.

  “Why do you make this so hard, Oriana?” she said as she stepped across the creek and marched into the forest to find her daughter. “Why does it always have to be so damn hard?”

  5

  One year after Beth died, Harry received a phone call from God.

  One year had passed, four gray, indistinguishable seasons, and Harry had missed not a single day of work, because what was he going to do at home? Home: the place where he ate peanut butter on stale crackers and fell asleep in the wingback chair beside the fireplace that still contained the half-charred log that Beth had tossed onto the grate the night before she was killed. Harry would lurch awake, rise stiffly, shower or not shower and drive to work before dawn.

  Really, was there a better way to punish himself? He would work for the Forest Service until he was sixty-five. No, the way the world was going they’d keep raising the age of retirement—he’d work until he was seventy, eighty, ninety. Perfect. Decade upon decade, clacking away on his keyboard until his heart sputtered out, his corpse sitting there for years, no one noticing the gnarled finger frozen above the delete key.

  Sometimes he’d screw up and it would be a Saturday or Sunday. Didn’t matter. He’d pull into the parking lot of the suburban headquarters of the Northern Research Station of the USDA Forest Service, park in the paved-over spot where the eastern hemlock had once stood, lug himself up the back stairwell to the third floor, then drop into his chair like a sack of sand and start right in on the reports: rangeland management, forest resource utilization, sustainable harvest, regulatory policy, ecoregional protocol monitoring. He took on all the worst assignments, the deadliest of the deadly dull, day in and day out, rolling the bureaucratic shit ball uphill like a Saharan dung beetle.

  Even Bob Jackson, who dodged, whined, griped and shirked his way through every workday, felt a smirking pity whenever he emailed Harry a huge batch of files or plopped a fresh stack of fat folders onto his desk.

  “Christ, Harry, you’re allowed to, like, get up and take a leak once in a while, you know.” Bob bit off a sliver of fingernail and swallowed it like an egret gulping a minnow.

  How pathetic to be pitied by Bob Jackson, a creature who chewed his nails to slimy nubs, picked his nose with the insouciance of a three-year-old and used spit to finger-smooth the four hairs of his comb-over. But the life-form that was Bob no longer rankled Harry, nor did Harry notice the widening ring of cubicles around him that had gone vacant as his fellow workers jockeyed for less psychologically intense office real estate. Who wanted to sit near a black hole, to be vortexed into that? Sure, the guy’s wife had died in a spectacular freak accident but, yikes. And although no one actually said it—the upside? Shell-shocked Harry Crane was a bottomless dumpster for crappy assignments. Forest initiatives, SOPA reports? NFS studies, FSI summaries, process predicament reviews? Turf ’em to The Widower!

  Harry’s relentless dedication impressed his boss, Irv Mickler, who promoted him from a GS 12 to a GS 13. Over the thirty-eight years of his own government career, Irv had sacrificed a not inconsiderable portion of his mind to the intricate convolutions of USDA red tape and most of his eyesight to its small print, so he understood the value of hard work.

  Irv blinked behind thick glasses, leaning in for a long squint at Harry’s ID badge. Harry could see Irv’s dry, pale lips moving as he read. Irv looked up. “So. Harry Crane. You’re certainly the engine that keeps this office forward-moving. Harry. Crane.”

  Irv reached out to pat Harry’s shoulder but stopped a millimeter short. Even addled and half-blind, Irv could perceive Harry’s consumingly desolate aura. Irv drew back and cleared his throat.

  “I should get back to work,” Harry said.

  “Yes, right, good idea,” Irv replied, leaning out of his doorway to watch until Harry was safely out of sight.

  Harry ate lunch at his desk (if he ate at all), worked late and, on occasion, if the cleaning crew didn’t shoo him out, slept in his chair. Chairs were good, beds were bad. Bed: the place where Beth was most dreadfully absent. Alone in the office at night, he’d climb up on his desk and stare out over the sea of cubicles, empty white graves stretching into the black beyond.

  Then, one blustery early April morning, his cell phone rang. Well, not rang, exactly. As a joke, a few years ago, Beth had snuck a novelty ringtone onto his phone—the sound of a large tree falling to the forest floor.

  “Hello?” he said, picking up on the third fall.

  “Harry Crane!” boomed the voice of God in his ear.

  For who but God spoke at that volume and with such heart-stopping authority?

  “Yes, sir?” Harry whispered.

  “Harry, speak up. You there?”

  Oh, Harry thought, not God, but His super-aggressive lieutenant, Jeremy Toland. Once a month for the last year, Toland called with updates Harry did not wish to hear. He never gave Toland a thought, except during these brief phone calls, never seriously contemplated where all that legal effort might lead. Harry didn’t care. The outcome of the lawsuit would not affect him one way or the other. But today there was something extra in Toland’s voice, a powerful mix of testosterone and adrenaline. Harry’s body began to tingle. “Yes, I’m here,” he said.

  On Toland’s end, a long suck of breath like an approaching tornado takes just before it explodes the windows out of your house. “Give me a ‘J,’ Harry!” yelled Toland, like an insane cheerleader.

  “J?” repeated a stupefied Harry.

  “Now give me an A-C-K! And what’s that spell? What’s that spell?!”

  “Jack?” said Harry in a faraway voice. Sweat prickled, his heart accelerated.

  “That’s right! Jack! As in jackpot, Harry! Never, my friend, never ever have we had a defendant in a wrongful death case settle so quickly. This could’ve gone on for years. For decades! But these pricks were multiple violators, and we had ’em.” Toland chortled and growled, “We had Carlisle Demolition by the balls, baby, and we squeezed until the bastards said ouch.”

  Harry winced.

  “Oh yes,” roared Toland. “We seized ’em and squeezed ’em to the tune of—okay, remember our first meeting when I told you the average award for wrongful death in Pennsylvania is four-point-two million dollars? You ready, Harry? One minute ago, Carlisle Demolition settled for seven million unprecedented dollars!”

  Harry left his body and returned to it, the atoms of his brain short-circuited as if struck by lightning. Seemingly on its own, Harry’s left hand withdrew the wallet from his back pocket. His fingers groped for the faded lottery ticket inside, the irrefutable evidence of his unforgivable sin.

  Toland kept talking, the echoey cascade of words like coins regurgitated from a slot machine. “Of course, this doesn’t bring dear Beth back, but I’m telling you, my friend, it’s the next best thing. This is her gift to you. From the Other Side, Beth is saying, ‘Harry, your life begins again right now. The past is the past, move on, I release you. And I bless your future with this financial windfall!’”

  Harry hung up on Toland and held the lottery ticket out in front of him with both hands like Lady Macbeth gripping her dagger. Working at the Forest Service had not been the punishment but only Limbo. Now he grasped why he had allowed the lawsuit to go forward: to deliver absolute guilt. He could never tell himself, At least I didn’t
buy a winning ticket that day. At least, there is that. Because he had won. The jackpot just took a little longer to arrive, that’s all. Here it was, his millions. It was official, unequivocal: he had given his Beth away for a bag of money. Jackpot, Harry!

  Suspended in an awful and unnatural calm, Harry stepped out of his cubicle into the cramped aisle. He turned in a slow 360. He heard something, coming from deep within the endless forest of cubicles. Not the hum of computers and printers but the whisper of leaves. Trees, he thought.

  Trees.

  To the forest and the trees.

  In a daze, he drifted through the office and away, beckoned by the scent of pine trees and oaks and the distant rustle of leaves in the wind. Outside in the parking lot, Harry walked across the asphalt grave where the eastern hemlock had once stood, got into his car and drove away from the treeless, soul-sucking suburban headquarters of the Northern Research Station of the USDA Forest Service.

  Jackpot, Harry!

  He didn’t choose the roads, the roads chose him, guided him to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Pointed him north. The outer suburbs of Philadelphia vanished as if plucked away by a great unseen hand and bare trees rose and grew dense along either side of the highway. American larch. His eyes flicked and narrowed as he gauged the shape and possibility of each one. White oak. Sycamore. Honey locust.

  He reached the northeast corner of Pennsylvania, the center of the secondary-growth hardwood forests of the Endless Mountains. He had managed this stretch of the Appalachians by computer for over a decade. Of course he would end up here. Treeless words that had crowded his brain for too long—forest resource utilization, sustainable harvest, inventory and analysis, development and evaluation—receded.