The Old Oak

The Old Oak.

“How’re you feeling today old girl?”

I press my face against her rippled skin, fingers rasping over her wizened bark, sense all 500 years pushing back against me, the weight of time, generations of loss, they’re in there, she’s letting me feel them, carbon unit to carbon unit. She bathes me in liquid shade, casting herself well beyond her steel boundary fence. It’s our time, to commune, still moments for us to be, well before faces are permitted to peer, fingers to point or voices to cry out with inane questions.

“What does a tree actually do?”

Maybe it’s the children’s home or the foster families, the shared loss that taps me into the oak’s suffering; abandonment bitterness – sour-cold like rusted metal. Orphans learn to make alliances beyond humans, drink, drugs, substances, but in my case - plants. The Davidson’s, my fifth foster parents, with their planted garden, rare, colourful and tender. Learning to care for plants, to nurture fresh growth, drew me in, on to botany, and now late in life to this planet’s last, large, lonely species.

“Why is it so big?”

She’s stressed, I know it, can feel it, can see it. High up, on the tendril tips of new life, leaves are struggling to form, bud-like clenched fists refusing to unfurl. She’s hot, hungry and pissed off, not like the end-of-day pissed off people get, but a visceral 500-year-old scorched fed-upness. To lessen her burden, I’ve removed a few of the labouring lower branches. Talked her through it, felt like a war surgeon in one of those old historical movies, sawing off a leg, but unable to administer brandy to still the pain.

“I thought there were supposed to be acorns”

Ten years back they built the ‘Info-motion centre’ where visitors can learn about trees, what they were, where they were. There are buttons for kids to press, holograms, virtual reality forests to walk through, sensory suits, bugs to recoil from. There are stories about fossilised trees, how are ancestors burnt them and destroyed our atmosphere. The stories don’t say that building the centre further stressed out this final tree and damaged its root system, guess they didn’t want to spoil the mood. The café is the busiest part, they serve buns shaped like cartoon trees, if you’re hungry you can eat a forest.

“Why bother keeping it, it’s, like, not even pretty or anything.”

Sure, they’ve tried cloning her, grown small oak saplings, crossed her with other species, all laboratory work – like I used to do, in the days before I was assigned here. None of the saplings took when planted out, we could never produce soil rich enough, with enough organic matter. Each effort died a rapid death. This will be the last, is the last, in open air – sure there are a few weedy efforts in malls, entertainment complexes, but they may as well be plastic. If I could travel back in time, I’d choose to walk among vast oak woodlands, feel the transpiration, sense the trees communicating, run my hands through the depth of leaf litter, the treacle-darkness, the cloying soil. Witness the unity of life and decay. Hear the birdsong I read about, experience rainfall filtered through the canopy – sense what is lost.

“Is it lonely?”

The question snags me, like a splinter, I snatch my breath before replying.

“Yes, it is. Haunted by the loss of its kin.”

“How do you know?”

“I, I can see it.”

The girl asking the questions looks past me, pushes her face between the bars of the fence, up at the top branches, looking like she can see what’s coming, like she has an extra sight.

“I can. See it too, I mean”

I let her through the gate, invite her to hug the tree which she does. Naturally, her parents take pictures, imploring her to smile, but she doesn’t seem able.

“You don’t smile for the pictures?”

She turns away from them.

“They’re not my real parents. They’ve just got me – for a while.”

I signal my understanding with a wink.

“Does it talk to you?”

She whispers this.

“No, but I can feel some of what she is feeling. Can you?”

“I think I can.”

She looks up at me.

“If I was this sad, I’d want to die.”

I can’t answer that.

“Do you think you’ll visit again?”

“Probably not. Maybe when I’m older. If it’s still here.”

She pauses a while, gives the tree another hug.

“Do you think it will be?”

“I think you already know the answer to that.”

Without warning, the young girl throws her arms around me, as if I were a tree, as if I was the tree, as if, as if I were her grandfather. I felt an emptiness in her that only young orphans carry, that I’d forgotten I still carried dormant, deep within me. I pass her an acorn from a few I keep near the foot of the tree.

“Here’s something to remember her by.”

Before the end of my day, I use the ladder to climb up into the tree, take temperature readings, photographs of the new growth, sample the sap and measure widths, lengths, diameters. All the numbers will tell me what I already know, the pointlessness of the job and her suffering.

The night shift security arrives on time, Jim and Samantha, Jim the old hand, Samantha only a few months into her role. Jim always asks the same question, ‘how is the old girl’ to which I’m obliged to reply, ‘I ain’t that old.’ We chuckle and pass the time while the two of them set out their chairs, flasks, lamps and flashlights, and settle in.

At home I tend to my desert garden, check on the Saguaro, the Desert Lily and Marigolds, my Aloe Vera which had been struggling but was now looking stronger, the Agave of which the Parryl is my favourite and the Desert Sage. My Hedgehog Cactus is in bloom, showing violet flowers that ripple in the breeze. I sit under my canopy to eat dinner, listening to the low wail of the wind turbines labouring through their revolutions. Later I watch the stars like I did when I was a boy, the same stars, shedding their sparkles and glimmers over this cursed planet.

Around lunchtime I get a message that the tv news will be down the next day, doing a piece about the tree and the old guy that looks after it. They could recycle the ones they did five years earlier when they did the same thing – film, ask dumb questions, talk to people visiting, folk who work in the centre, then put together a piece to make people feel good after hearing all the bad news there is that day. ‘It’ll be good to wear something smart’ the message adds.

The moment I took the job I sensed how it might end, how all life ends. It’s only now, after the encounter with the girl, the imminent arrival of the tv, the continued suffering of the tree, I understand it must be me, and it must be now. As the centre closes to the public, I have an hour before Jim and Sam arrive. I embrace her, let her feel the decision I’ve made. I tell her about Shakespeare, the fated lovers, sense the relief that soon her misery will end.

The teeth of the turbo-saw move so fast, with such lethal intent, that they scorch the wood. I inhale her death lungful after lungful as I carve into her trunk. Shards of blistered bark shower me, as I sculpt out a deep v-section. I fight against my natural instinct to preserve, I yell screams of anguish into the showers of splinters.

“It won’t be long” I yell over the scream of the saw.

A few cleaners from the centre have come out of the centre to watch the old man. They see me cut a second deep section of trunk and witness the tree begin to pitch, letting out a tortured moan, a cry steeped in age, from her very core. I step out, through the gate, throwing off my goggles, as the old girl tips itself onto its steel fence which in turn gives way, allowing her branches to slam into the dry earth beyond its bounds. As a cloud of dry sand and dust settles there lies a new exhibit for people to visit – the death of the earth’s final tree.

I embrace her, listen to her settle, let her feel my compassion, beg for forgiveness. I’m still prone on her trunk, muttering and heaving, when Jim and Samantha arrive.

“Just go, clear off before the law-drones arrive. You know what they’ll do to you.”

Jim pleads with me but understands I’ve reached the end just as much as the old oak. He knows what waits when I’m caught. Samantha is less forgiving.

“You’ve just cost me my job mister.”

I sit and wait. The law-drones will do their job, it’ll be swift and final. Jim and Samantha will still have their jobs guarding the tree. The tv crews will have proper news to tell – not the jolly piece for the end of their bulletins they’d planned – headline making. The centre will continue to tell their stories, sell their novelties and pastries, soon with a brand-new line – genuine pieces of the final tree on earth.