The Woman and the Tree

The Woman and the Tree

by Joshua James Pack

I see the man approach the hill that has long given me importance. It now

gives him a sort of slow inevitable pace. I see the ax sitting over his shoulder. I see his callused hands, which confirm my grim suspicions. He steps over my protruding roots that have long brought me nutrients and strength. He lowers his weapon and swings it back and forth as he trudges along. Like a pendulum in a clock it swings, counting down the minutes, the seconds until my end. I look around at the former forest that was once my kingdom. Now it is a path for the humans who have long pressed upon my borders. I do not fear death, but as I look back, I see how the world around me has changed.

From the beginning I knew my potential. It took me days to break from my hard shell. My thin stalk broke the ground and hugged the sun’s light close like a golden embrace. As my limbs parted from my core and my solid trunk thickened, my roots burrowed down, deeper and deeper into the earth. After a few years, I saw the scope of the surrounding world. Oaks large and small surrounded the foot of the hill on which I rested and rest still. Even a few stubborn palms, a bit far from the sea but still close enough to be accepted by the soil, were scattered around. As I gazed into my surroundings, I realized there were none like me. So I grew taller, wider and deeper. I then realized that I was now greater than the insignificant smaller trees. I was on the towering hill that was my throne, and they were not. I was of the grand race of the Angel Tree. So I took much of the nutrients of the surrounding soil and stretched out my branches to take more of the sun. For I was the king of the hill and surrounding glades. Though, some cold nights I would sit alone, for I was at the peak of the desolate hill, and they were not.

Then one day everything changed. I saw a figure walking up the hill. Like I see the man now. Many creatures of four legs had come to pay respects to me, but this creature was different. It wore the hide of other animals and walked with a certainty which I could not yet understand. The color of its skin was like that of dried clay. The creature came and placed its hand on my trunk. It seemed to admire me. I liked that. But then it did something I did not expect. It sang:

I sit under the branches lean

I gaze into the leaves green

I feel the great Earth below me

I sense the roots under me

I sit under the branches lean

I gaze into the leaves green

I feel the great Earth below me

I sense the roots under me

And I smell the fresh evergreen

It was not like bird song, it was something else, something I had never heard before. I later learned that the creature was a human woman considered very beautiful amongst her people. I learned this from the things she told me. After that first visit the woman came back every day. She spoke to me and I listened. I suppose that she thought that I did not pay attention, for she told me many secrets. She spoke of how her father had died three years previous at the cruel hands of a rival tribe. She also talked of the man she loved and how he would always bring her a hare whenever he went hunting. Then of the pale ghosts with branches that spewed flame and death. The colder months went by and one day the woman brought beautiful uprooted flowers to plant at my base. At first, I refused to share the sun and soil. The next week she found them dead and tears fell from her eyes for the flowers had been beautiful. At this I felt something akin to remorse. Again, something previously unknown to me, that this small woman had introduced to me. She brought more in hopes that the soil would accept the new flowers. I let these grow. Before long, we had a beautiful garden. She supplied the flowers and seeds, and I protected them.

Then to my disappointment she was absent for nearly ten months. During this time I moved my roots to make room for the flowers and even brought a few to the surface to make a sort of border to our garden. Just as I began to think that she was never going to return, I saw her feminine form walking up the hill with a small bundle in her arms. She was lightly singing her song to the bundle. When she came up to me, I saw that in the bundle, was a small infant. It was different from the offspring of my race, it had the skin and eyes of its mother. It looked up into my towering branches and stuck out a small, wrinkled hand to my trunk. It touched the same place as the woman once did, and so like the woman’s flowers, I accepted her son.

From that point on, both the woman and her child came to me. First to sit and sing, then to play and climb, then to teach and learn. Through it all, as she nurtured the child, I nurtured the garden. The years went by and the child grew taller and stronger, then eventually stopped coming. The woman stayed, and through the years, we continued to be each other’s oldest companions until her skin began looking more and more like my trunk, and her hair more and more like the moon's light.

One day, after a few weeks' absence, the woman came again. As she was making her way up the hill, she tripped. That was something that had never happened before. She was still able to rise. Once she made it to me, I saw that tears were again flowing from her eyes. Yet, the garden was safe and blooming, so there must have been something else. She sat down in her spot and openly wept.

“What am I to do now?” She asked. “Without Camian I am empty!” I then realized she was speaking of her mate. She cried until the sun set and she was out of tears. Then she was simply heaving. I wanted to comfort her but I couldn’t, I could just watch and offer her my trunk to lean against. Eventually she stopped weeping and just sat there, looking to the bright white moon. After a while her child, now a man, walked up the hill. When he reached the woman and me he just sat next to her.

“I miss him too, you know.” The child said sympathetically, leaning his head on her shoulder. “You know, the thing about loss is that you know it’s coming, but you can’t help but cry when it does. You have to remember though, he was a good man and lived a good, fulfilling life. He is in a better place now, so if you must weep, don’t do it for him, weep for yourself and wait until you meet again.” The woman was leaning on her son’s head now. She smiled a weak, feeble smile. The moon made its nightly voyage across the sky and we simply sat, sat and looked out to the glades of oaks and a few stubborn palms. Then we saw smoke billowing out from some blazing fire about a half a mile away to the North. I didn’t think much of it for there were no other trees on the hill to help the spread of the flame if it got near. Even if it did reach me, it had rained the night before and I was still damp, so I thought I was safe. The others, however, did not share my comfort and hurriedly rose, the woman being helped by her child. They looked at each other panickedly. The child released his mother and began running down the hill.

“My son! Don’t go! You’ll surely be killed!” The woman cried after him. He stopped halfway down the hill and turned around before responding in a surprisingly firm voice.

“I have to try!” And with that he turned back and continued to run towards the flames.

The woman paced back and forth wringing her dress with her shaking hands. As time passed, the smoke grew thicker and thicker, blotting out the stars. The blaze grew and we began to hear what sounded like footsteps. Then a figure came running through the trees. The woman beamed with relief at her son’s return, but it wasn’t him. It was a pale human clad in cotton. He looked back and gestured to what must have been his companions to come forward. Through the trees we could see a flame being carried by another pale human. Five in all began hurrying up the hill. The woman was scared, showing real fear. Sweat beaded down her forehead, her knees buckled, and she was breathing heavily. She just stood there, watching, until something seemingly clicked. She hurriedly turned around, and tried to run, but stumbled on one of my roots. She fell to the ground. The men were hollering something in a strange language. She put her hand on my trunk to help her up and rose timidly. The men crested the hill. When she turned around she and the lead man’s eyes met. The woman had her back turned to me. There was a moment of silence, then the man raised a large wooden stick laced with iron stolen from the earth. He aimed it at her heart. She didn’t move, but looked death right in the eyes. Now there truly wasn’t anything I could do. The man squeezed the trigger, and with a bang, my world came crashing down.

The bullet went straight through her and deep into me. It is still there today. The woman held her hand to the wound and fell into the garden. It made me feel a deep pain. The man who had shot the woman made the same gesture as before and they went off towards the West. The next day was a windless one, and brought three others of the sort that killed the woman to take her body away. I began to understand them and I believe that a skinny one said something like,

“Why do these Natives have to die so far apart?” Another with flaming red hair responded with the same complaining tone.

“Better question is why do we need to clean them up?” The first shook his head in agreement before the third, a large man with a mustache who seemed to have some authority over the others said in an explanatory voice,

“We have to get them because we were chosen to. They have to be got so they don’t start smellin’ up the place and start attracting bears and other sorts.” This seemed to end the discussion, at least for the time. The skinny one grabbed the woman’s ankles and the red haired one her shoulders. The mustached man looked on in grim amusement. I didn’t want them to take her away to bury her in some unmarked grave on top of and under countless others of her people that had been killed. I was done doing nothing. I began shaking my branches and leaning my trunk back and forth, back and forth. The skinny man, who was the only one facing me, dropped the woman’s ankles in terrified astonishment. He pointed at my branches and stuttered something that I couldn’t recognize.

“Why’d you go and drop her ankles? What are you talking about? Trees aren't alive.” The mustached man was wrong, I had never felt more alive. I began moving more violently and the others saw my wrath, and in amazement said something about how there wasn’t any wind to shake the branches. In my rage I didn’t hear much of anything else that the panicked trio said. All that I remember is that they left the body, ran away screaming and nobody else bothered me or my friend for many, many years. Once my anger had subsided, I used my remaining strength to encase the woman in a wooden tomb of my own thick roots. As I worked, animals came but I scared them away easily enough. It took me nearly a year and a half to finish my work. By then, there wasn’t a single sign that anything other than earth was under my roots. After my labors I was tired and sorrowful. I rested long in my wooden form, being what everything but my friend thought I was, a mindless log.

The years passed faster than ever and eventually people came. Not to spend time with me though. They were not of age by their fathers reckoning and I guess that’s why they came, to do things they shouldn’t have. They drank, and kissed, and carved meaningless messages into my side. I didn’t mind though, I saw everything through a lens of grief. They leaned against me in each other’s arms and watched the stars, without me. I was alone again, and so my wood dried, paled and began to flake, my leaves lost their once vivid shade and the sap inside of me hardened.

Then one day in spring, two humans came in one of their strange transportation devices. One was a young man and the other was a boy. An echoing voice came from the transportation device,

“..and now for the new hit by everybody’s favorite musician!” Another, also echoing voice went on to ask,

“Annie are you okay, so, Annie are you okay, are you okay Annie.” Over and over again. Singing had changed a lot, just like everything else. Now the older of the two humans said in an irritated voice to the other,

“Mom thinks I’m taking you to the movies but I’m not sitting in a cold, no smokin’ movie theater. So you go and play or something.” The smaller one reluctantly got out of the transportation device and began walking up the hill. “And be back by four!” the older boy cried out. The child came up the hill slowly, and to my shock placed his hand under the place my friends once did. I was stunned. His hand was like warm honey running down my grey and dry trunk. It reminded me of the last time the woman came to me. So he began to play with me, climbing, and swinging from my branches. He sat fiddling with the grass, sitting like the woman once did. That is how we spent the day… together. I felt more alive than I had in decades, all because of this little, seemingly insignificant boy. Then, as the sun was waning, the older boy came stomping up the hill and asked,

“What are you doing? I told you to be back by four!”

“I’ve been playing with my new friend!” the child said, joyfully pointing up to my branches, seemingly unaware of his brother's hardness.

“Are you crazy? It’s just a dead tree.” retorted the eldest, softening his voice and grabbing his brother by the hand, taking him back to the transportation device. It wasn’t so much the fact that they left that hurt, it was what the older boy had said, ‘It’s just a dead tree.’ I could have become that right then and there, but I didn’t. In my despair, I remembered what the woman’s son had said,

“…he was a good man and lived a good, fulfilling life. He is in a better place now, so if you must weep, don’t do it for him, weep for yourself and wait until you meet again.” Those words reawakened something inside of me. They reverberated off of my dead shell and into my core. I wasn’t sure if we would go to the same place, but I did know deep down inside me that she was content with her mate and son, and that I could let go.

That brings me to today. The man with the ax is nearly here. I see him like the grim specter of death itself, his weapon a cruel scythe. I know he heralds the end, but as I said, I do not fear death. I’m not afraid because I know that death will set me free from the hill which I now know to not be my throne, but my prison. I wait for the fatal blow to send me off, off on my greatest adventure.