The Listening Tree

They don’t know that I’m watching. People are blind, I’ve come to learn, which is saying something considering I don’t have eyes of my own. They never wonder if the sapling might be watching, what the oak might observe.

That’s why my roots are stained with love and blood alike. I think they’d quiver to know what I remember.

I don’t know how I got there—to the edge of that little farm. One day I wasn’t, and then suddenly: awake. Sipping water from the soil and stretching young bark up and up. I always had a great view of the sun, my leaves bathing in its beams. Maybe that’s what it was, the sun, that gave me such a good view the first day Michael tottered up to my teenage roots. The hound was with him, who I’d met many times before and never particularly liked as he made a point to urinate on me at least twice a day. Of course, I’ve made an effort to forget about it, but there was also that time that Michael decided to try it for himself and well—never you mind.

Even so, I liked Michael. I liked how his hair flopped into his eyes, how he never minded the dirt under his nails, and how he packed ham on rye sandwiches to eat under my canopy. He wasted his after-lunch hours prattling to the dog, but considering we all know how dull dogs are, I pretended it was me he told about his mother’s new husband, balding Bill, or the red bicycle he wanted for Christmas. When he got bored of that, he put on an excellent commentary regarding the squirrels and mockingbirds that I let reside in my leaves, and he made sure his hound never got ahold of one of my residents. (Thank heavens—come to think, I never would have had a tenant again).

Michael usually came during the day, my thickening limbs his shade from the sun and his shelter from the rain, and that was when I was happiest. Just me and Michael, and unfortunately, the hound, but everything changed the first time he visited me at night. 

The lights on the farm had long gone out, and the crickets had set about their usual ruckus. He surprised me, Michael, out of bed at so late an hour when he was usually such a good boy, but then I felt him. He had tears everywhere: his cheeks, his shirt, the hound he held in his too-small arms. I don’t know how Michael managed to carry him. 

If I could have hardened the ground, I would have. The hound was too young to die, not soft and gentle the way the old birds went when they crooked at my base. I could still feel the stiffness of deserved life in the dog when Michael spent all night burying him. He sobbed relentlessly, so I didn’t even complain when he nicked my roots with his shovel.

After that, Michael didn’t visit me for a long time.

Someone else came instead.

I recognized him for the bald spot on the back of his head. He tried to hide it with a comb-over (Michael had regaled me of it), but I’m tall, you see, and there was no hiding that fleshy square of scalp from me.

Stepdad Bill, or balding Bill, as Michael preferred to say.

The girl with him was more of a mystery. At first, I thought it was Michael’s mother, but I was also fairly certain that Michael’s mother was fully grown, and by the look of things…

Trees don’t often sleep. We’re too busy growing and drinking and eating the sunlight—not to mention the work of oxygenating the world, but I quickly learned that when Stepdad Bill came, it was best to sleep. So I did. I slept and slept until my leaves fell off and my roots started to shrivel. I might have even slept to death had I not woken to the most violent of wounds, straight to the flesh. Slashes hacked into my tender phloem. I screamed, but the only ones who heard me were the squirrels.

The tattoo Bill left behind was a misery—the coward too afraid to carve it into his own skin, so he cut it into mine.

B+S

I never learned who S was, but I have the suspicion that Michael’s mother did because not long after the whole farm emptied. The cows were gone. The tractors, gone. No Michael, no Bill. The loudest part of the land was the groan of my heaviest limbs.

My bark never did grow back properly.

It must have been years, just me and the dead hound. My tenants came and went of course—that’s all that kept me sane—but I thought no one else might ever move back onto my farm. I missed the crumbs of rye. I even missed the oblivion of sleep. I’d never hear talk of bald men or bicycles again. 

I was sure of it the day the house lit on fire.

The air was cool and the earth damp, but even from a half-mile distance, my roots could sense the warmth. It was too early for summer, and this warmth felt different. Hungry. When I finally recognized the blaze for what it was, all my fall leaves fled. 

Trees know what fire does to them, and there was no one to douse it. I’m sure I had a cousin who died to it once, as all trees are cousins, so I knew the hound and I were doomed. I waited in quiet terror, wondering how long it would take the flame to cross the field, but as I watched, it wasn’t flame that came towards me. It was man. Michael. His hair still flopped into his eyes, even if he was two feet taller and had an ugly sprinkle of hair on his chin. He wasn’t panicked as he approached; he didn’t even seem bothered by the fact that my farmhouse was burning down, and there was something about it that made me decide I didn’t need to worry either. 

My limbs would have reached out for him if they could, but he reached for me instead. His palms, too smooth for a farmer, trembled across my beautiful knots and crags. When they came to my scar, he stilled. He took out his own knife, and this time, I welcomed it.

He shaved down the marred tissue until I was bare in one spot. I ignored the fact of how much this made me look like Bill.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Michael said.

I think he knew it was.

“Have you looked after Charlie for me?” He toed the earth at my roots.

Finally, I breathed. Finally, he was talking to me.