The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “The garden, it’s a womb,” she said. “The green and, in the end, barren hell of Violet’s own womb, guarded by carnivorous plants. I mean, really, those pitcher plants and the Venus flytrap and whatever the hell else Violet was keeping in that miniature greenhouse, that garden within the garden, those plants she hand-fed—if that’s not the vagina dentata, I don’t know what would be.”

  I turned away from the window and stared at Constance a moment or two before saying anything more. The smoke rising from her cigarette curled into a sort of spiral above her head.

  “I tend to avoid conversations about vaginas with teeth,” I said, finally, and she laughed again and tapped ash into an empty saucer.

  “So not a big fan of Freud?” she asked.

  And, by this point, I was growing angry, what with the heat and the sunlight and the fact that Constance was clearly, for reasons known only to her, trying to pick a fight with me. Thinking back on what I said next, I’d like to believe it was something more than me being a cunt, that she had the embarrassment coming, whether or not it’s the truth of the matter.

  “The vagina dentata isn’t a Freudian concept,” I replied. “I’m not sure Freud ever even addressed it, as that image runs counter to the whole Oedipal thing. Freud said that little boys are afraid that their mothers have been castrated, not that their mothers’ vaginas have teeth.”

  Check.

  Constance glared at me and narrowed her hazy red-brown eyes, taking a long drag on her cigarette and then letting the smoke ooze slowly from her nostrils. I could tell that she was choosing the words that would form her retort with exquisite care. I glanced back to the window.

  “What about our friend out there?” she asked. “You believe that old tree has teeth?”

  Checkmate.

  “You’d think it would fucking rain,” I said, and I suppose that can stand as a white flag of surrender, my refusal to acknowledge her question.

  “Screw it,” Constance muttered, and I didn’t look at her, but I could hear her standing, could hear the legs of her chair scraping loudly across the floor as she pushed back from the table. “There are better ways than this to waste my time.” And when she’d gone, and the attic door had slammed shut, I sat alone and watched the red oak, pretending that I didn’t feel like it was watching me.

  July 18, 2008 (9:15 p.m.)

  Home again, home again . . .

  Home. Does that word, and the concept behind the term, retain any meaning whatsoever for me at this point? If not, how long since it has? Did Amanda and I ever have a home? Any of the women I lived with before Amanda, did we have homes? Was that shitty little house I shared with my parents, back in the dim, primeval wilds of Mayberry, was that home? I can hardly look at this old farmhouse of Squire Blanchard’s and see it as anything more than a place where I am presently sleeping, eating, writing this idiot journal, hiding from New York and the ruins of my career, and so forth.

  The house I share with Ms. Constance Hopkins. A few nights ago I fucked her, and briefly thought I’d found some sort of fulfillment or satiety or surfeit, whatever. This morning, I came very goddamn near to murdering her. I don’t know what she’s doing up there, in the chilly seclusion of her ivory garret. But unless she has contrived some daring new oil-painting technique that involves hammers, power tools, and stomping about as loudly as possible, I’m left to conclude she’s just trying to get on my nerves.

  Late this morning, after washing my breakfast dishes, I was trying to read, nothing important, nothing of any consequence, nothing I was really even interested in reading, but still, I was trying to read. In this house where I also live, and for which I also pay rent, whether it is or is not a “home.” Finally, I got the broom and banged the handle sharply against the ceiling several times. She responded with about fifteen minutes of complete and utter silence, after which, the noise resumed anew, with the addition of Very Loud Music (it might have been the Pogues, but I’m really not sure, as I could only clearly make out the bass lines). Maybe the right thing to do would have been to knock on her door and politely ask her to hold it down. But, I know myself well enough to know that what I would have done, instead, is pound on her door and order her to lay the hell off before I strangled her. A fight would have ensued.

  So, I got in the car and drove up the road to the Tyler library in Moosup. I’m not sure what effect my retreat might have had on Constance. Did she see it as a victory, having chased me from the house? Or, if her objective was to bedevil me, did I rob her of the satisfaction? I don’t care, not really. I’m only thinking out loud. I realize that, either way, the trip to the library merely delayed some inevitable confrontation. If she’s spoiling for a showdown, I cannot hope to avoid it indefinitely. Sooner or later, tomorrow or the next day, I’ll find the proverbial end of my proverbial short fuse and tell her to lay the hell off or die. Jesus, how many times have I, directly or indirectly, threatened the bitch’s life in this entry? When they find her rotting corpse in the basement, this will be the document that sends me to the chair. Or to the room where the lethal injections are administered. Does Rhode Island have the death penalty? I should hope so. I’d hate to actually serve a life sentence for the death of Constance Hopkins.

  Really, Judge. Honest injun. The noisy little clit-tease had it coming.

  So, yeah. The library. The woman at the front desk commented that she hadn’t seen me in a while and wanted to know if maybe I’d been working on a new book. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, right? I said something inoffensive, I can’t recall what, found an anthology of New England writing (essays, scary Puritan sermons, short stories, etc.) and did my best to hide among the shelves. At least the place is air-conditioned, so it was an escape from the heat, which shows no signs of letting up, regardless of what the weathermen are telling us. I found a reasonably comfortable armchair, and proceeded to read an excerpt from Thoreau’s The Maine Woods (1864). I’ve never read much Thoreau, beyond Walden, of course, which I think I “had” to read for some college lit class or another. Anyway, this excerpt from The Maine Woods sort of sucked me in, and I sat there for more than an hour, reading. At one point, I got up and photocopied a page, to get a passage that had struck a chord. I think I’m going to include part of it here, though I’d not planned to do so when I sat down and started typing. Reading the following lines by Thoreau, I could not help but see them in light of Dr. Harvey’s manuscript and the red tree:. . . Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever,—to be the dwelling of man, we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,—not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,—no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,—the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husband-men planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which
I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

  Is this a fraction of the tree’s apparent mystery, that it exists, essentially, out of time, and so, in some sense, out of sync with the world that surrounds it? Having been spared (or successfully having resisted) the tripartite ravages of deforestation, agriculture, and human population that so quickly reshaped the geography of New England, has the red oak become—I don’t know—an embittered survivor? Does it hold within it resentful memories of an earlier state of this land, Thoreau’s elder “. . . Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night.” I am well enough aware what shaky ground I am on, seeming to ascribe the potential for acrimony to a plant, to something that, even now, I could not believe is in any way sentient.

  And yet, have I not previously, and with all fucking sincerity, called the red tree wicked? Am I trying to have my cake, and eat it, too?

  This afternoon, sitting there in the AC and the reasonably comfortable armchair, reading Thoreau, I was interrupted by the librarian who’d seen me come in. She’s the sort of woman who puts me in mind of egrets and herons—tall and thin and frail, the skeleton beneath her skin seeming hardly more substantial than the hollow bones of wading birds. Maybe ten years my senior, and, admirably, she’s made no attempt to hide the gray in her hair, which, unfortunately, had been molded into some do that would have been out of style when I was still in high school. She was standing over me, holding the only book of mine anywhere on the library’s shelves (and I was surprised, back in May, to see even that one), a ten-year-old hardback of Silent Riots. The paper dust jacket was protected behind one of those crinkly, clear cellophane covers they put on library books. Both were somewhat tattered and had yellowed with time.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Miss Crowe,” she said, “but would you please sign this for us?” And she held the book out to me, and a ballpoint pen, making it clear that telling her no really wasn’t an option.

  “Have you read it?” I asked, and she nodded.

  “I have, indeed. Right after the first time you came in, I guess, I remembered seeing it. And I read it then.”

  I took the book from her, and the pen, and opened Silent Riots to the title page. I signed my name, trying to remember the last time I’d signed one of my books, trying hard to recall how long it had been.

  “Not the sort of thing I usually read,” she admitted, “I mean, it is rather explicit. A bit grim for my tastes. But, even so, I thought it was quite well written. Poetic, even.”

  I gave the pen back to her, but kept the book, flipping past the dedication and indicia pages and the table of contents to the first story, “The Ammonite Violin.”

  “If a few more reviewers had agreed with you,” I said, forcing a smile, “maybe it would still be in print. Then again, maybe not.”

  “Is that very important to you, what critics say, or what readers think?”

  “I won’t lie,” I replied. “Audiences are nice. So are royalty checks.”

  She stared at me then, mired in that uncomfortable sort of silence that often follows the receipt of unexpectedly candid answers. Finally, she nodded and said something about how nice it must be to have the “cottage” all to myself, how conducive to writing the solitude must be. To my meager credit, I didn’t laugh at her. But I did explain that I was no longer alone, and I mentioned Constance by name and added that she was a painter.

  “Oh,” the librarian said, her face brightening at once. “Oh, well, now that’s wonderful, isn’t it? I mean, a writer and a painter, under the same roof. Why, you almost have your very own artists’ colony, don’t you?”

  “Almost,” I replied.

  “Please ask her to stop by here sometime. I’d love to meet her.”

  I told her that I would, knowing that I wouldn’t do anything of the sort. Then I asked the birdlike librarian if she’d mind me holding on to the book a while, and she said certainly not, because, after all, I’d written it, hadn’t I? So, she left me by myself again, and I laid the anthology of New England writing on the floor beside my chair and spent the next couple of hours reading those stories I’d written more than a decade ago. Some of them hold up well enough. Some of them almost do. And others make me cringe, and leave me thankful that Silent Riots vanished after the hardback and then only one paperback printing.

  It was almost six o’clock when I finally closed the book and allowed myself to think about heading back to the sweltering house and temperamental Constance. The library’s open until eight on Wednesdays, and I seriously considered hanging around until they shooed me out the door. But poring over all those old stories had a peculiar effect on me—I never read my own stuff after it’s published. Well, practically never. I wasn’t exactly depressed, at least no more than usual, no more than when I’d come in. But I found myself wanting to be back in the house, because even if it isn’t home, it’s the sorry substitute that has to suffice for the foreseeable future, and at least there are enough of my things there to foster the illusion that it’s where I belong. I wanted a beer, and I desperately needed a cigarette, and to lie in my “own” rented bed for a while. Maybe, I thought, while I was gone, Constance had succumbed to an attack of ennui and hung herself. Or maybe she’d had a nasty accident with a nail gun.

  No such luck.

  I found her sitting in the hallway, not far from the foot of the attic stairs. Just sitting there, sobbing, her legs pulled up close to her chest, her arms wrapped tightly about them. The hall light was off, and the shadows had grown almost as thick as the heat and the incongruent reek of sweat and turpentine coming off her. I stood staring at her, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do or say, and then she let me off the hook by speaking first.

  “I think I owe you an apology, Sarah.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, squatting down next to her. “I think you do.”

  “I’m never at my best when I’m afraid,” she said, and I recalled her telling me the exact same thing the day she’d dared me to go back to the tree alone and we’d argued (And how long ago was that? A week? Ten days?). She wiped roughly at her snotty nose with a paint-stained hand, then, leaving a dark smear of indigo across her upper lip and the end of her nose.

  “Constance, have you entirely given up washing your hands? Or is that part of your process?” I asked, and she smiled and almost laughed.

  “They just get dirty again,” she replied. “Well, no. Not dirty. It’s not dirt, is it? But you know what I mean.”

  “The sacred grime of creation,” I said, affecting as professorial a tone as I was able. I stopped squatting, because it was making my hips ache, my hips and my kidneys, and I sat down on the floor.

  “Anyway, I wanted you to know, I am sorry.”

  “You should be,” I told her.

  She didn’t respond immediately, but stared at her hands a while, staring into all those competing, intermingled hues of blue and green smudged across her palms and knuckles, the flecks of red and orange and yellow on her fingers. Her hands made me think of autumn leaves tumbling in a rough surf. In the waves before a storm, perhaps.

  “You know, last time,” she said, “you were a lot more gracious.”

  “Last time was the first time. And last time, we’d not made love.”

  Constance smirked and shrugged her shoulders. She’d stopped sobbing. “Is that what we did, Sarah? Did we make love? I thought it was just sex.”

  I sighed and dug my cigarettes and lighter out of my shirt pocket. I offered her one and she accepted, and then I lit it for her before lighting my own. I breathed the smoke in, and breathed the smoke out, hurrying the nicotine into my bloodstream.

  “Yeah, it was just sex,” I admitted. “Poor choice of words. I’m not feelin
g at all perspicuous at the moment.”

  “I’m not saying it wasn’t good.”

  “I didn’t take it that way,” I told her, and watched our cigarette smoke rising, commingling, curling and slowly dissipating in the muggy air.

  “It was good,” she said. “At least, it was good for me. And it helped clear a lot of negative shit out of my head. It just didn’t stay cleared out.”

  I blew a smoke ring, and said, “I’m always available for repeat performances.” Which is about the best I’m capable of, when it comes to flirting.

  She laughed and stopped looking at her hands long enough to wink at me.

  “Then I’ll keep you posted,” she said. And, changing the subject, “I think there’s a coyote hanging around the house.”

  “So there are coyotes up here.”

  “Oh, yeah. There are,” she replied. “Lots of them. But this might only be a fox. I’m not sure.”

  “No wolves, though, right?” I asked her, and looked about for something within reach that could serve as an ashtray.

  “Not likely. Not anymore. Though, back in March, a farmer shot a wolf somewhere up in western Massachusetts. It was in the newspapers. It was even on television.” She took the now-familiar ginger Altoids tin from her smock and opened it, tapping ash into it, then passing it to me. “It was killing livestock,” she continued. “Still, the first wolf anyone’s seen in Massachusetts in something like a hundred and sixty years, and this Swamp-Yankee fucker up and shoots the poor thing for eating his goddamn sheep.”

  And I very nearly asked Constance how she knew what had been in the local papers and on the local news, given she was in Los Angeles back in March. But there are always phone calls to, and from, relatives and friends back east, right? There’s always the internet. I kept the question to myself.

  “You saw a coyote?” I asked, instead.

  “No. Well, maybe. I’ve seen something a couple of times now, skulking around by the garbage cans. It might only be a fox, but it seemed big for a fox. And the wrong color.”