Authors: Margaret Atwood
The Tent (9 page)
Tree Baby
You remember this. No, you dreamed it. Your dream was of choking, and sinking down, and blankness. You woke from your nightmare and it had already happened. Everything was gone. Everything, and everyone – fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, the cousins, the tables and chairs and toys and beds – all swept away. Nothing is left of them. Nothing remains but the erased beach and the silence.
There is wreckage. You didn’t see that, in your dream. A jumble of smashed years, a heap of broken stories. The stories look like wood and chunks of cement and twisted metal. And sand, a lot of sand. Why is it they say
the sands of time?
You didn’t know that yesterday but now you do. You know too much to say. What can be said? Language turns to rubble in your throat.
But look – there’s a baby, stranded in a treetop, just as in those other dreams, the ones in which you can lift yourself off the earth and fly, and escape the roaring and crashing just behind you. A baby, alive, caught in a green cradle; and it’s been rescued, after all. But its name has been lost, along with its tiny past.
What new name will they give it, this child? The one who escaped from your nightmare and floated lightly to a tree, and who looks around itself now with a baby’s ordinary amazement? Now time starts up once more, now there is something that can be said: this child must be given a word. A password, a talisman of air, to help it through the many hard gates and shadow doorways ahead. It must be named, again.
Will they call it Catastrophe, will they call it Flotsam, will they call it Sorrow? Will they call it No-family, will they call it Bereft, will they call it Child-of-a-Tree? Or will they call it Astonishment, or Nevertheless, or Small Mercy?
Or will they call it Beginning?
But It Could Still
Things look bad: I admit it. They look worse than they’ve looked for years, for centuries. They look the worst ever. Perils loom on all sides. But it could still turn out all right. The child fell from the eighth-floor balcony, but there was a sheepdog underneath that leapt up and caught it in mid-air. A bystander took a picture, it was in the paper. The boy went under for the third time, but the mother – although she was reading a novel – heard a gurgling sound and ran down to the dock, and reached into the water, and pulled the boy up by his hair, and there was no brain damage. When the explosion occurred the young man was underneath the sink, fixing the plumbing, and so he was not injured. The girl survived the avalanche by making swimming motions with her arms. The father of two-year-old triplets who had cancer in every one of his organs watched a lot of comedy films and did Buddhist meditation and went into full remission, where he remains to this day. The airbags actually worked. The cheque did not bounce. The prescription drug company was not lying. The shark nudged the sailor’s naked, bleeding leg, then turned away. The rapist got distracted in mid-rape, and his knife and his penis both retracted into him like the soft and delicate horns of a snail, and he went out for a coffee instead. The copy of Darwin’s
Origin of Species
the soldier carried next to his heart stopped the oncoming machine-gun bullet. When he said,
My darling, you are the only woman I will adore forever,
he really meant it. As for her, despite the scowling and the cold shoulder and the unanswered phone, it turned out she’d loved him all along.
At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter’s tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire. The sun sets at four, the temperature plummets, the wind howls, the snow cascades down. Though you nearly froze your fingers off, you did get the tulips planted, just in time. In four months they’ll come up, you have faith in that, and they’ll look like the picture in the catalogue. In the brown earth there were already hundreds of small green shoots. You didn’t know what they were – some sort of little bulb – but they were intending to grow, despite everything. What would you call them if they were in a story? Would they be happy endings, or happy beginnings? But they aren’t in a story, and neither are you. You tucked them back under the mulch and the dead leaves, however. It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.
Acknowledgements
Material in this collection has been previously published as follows:
“Our Cat Enters Heaven” in
Brick
; “Warlords” and “Voice” in
The Walrus
; “Take Charge,” “King Log in Exile,” “Salome Was a Dancer,” and “Post-Colonial” in
Daedalus
; “Life Stories” and “Resources of the Ikarians” in
Short Story
; and “Chicken Little Goes Too Far” and “The Tent” in
Harper’s Magazine.
In addition, “Bottle,” “It’s Not Easy Being Half-Divine,” and an earlier version of “Nightingale” appeared in a limited-edition booklet published in aid of the Harbourfront Reading Series; these three and “Take Charge,” “King Log in Exile,” “Thylacine Ragout,” “Post-Colonial,” “Faster,” and “Bottle II” were published in a limited-edition booklet called
Bottle
, in aid of the Hay-On-Wye Festival in Wales; “Tree Baby,” “But It Could Still,” and “Something Has Happened” appeared in
New Beginnings
, an anthology published in support of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake charities; “Bottle” appeared in a German-language literary advent calendar called
Das Geschenk
; and “Chicken Little Goes Too Far” was auctioned in a holograph-illustrated edition of one, in aid of the World Wildlife Fund.
Books by Margaret Atwood
FICTION
The Edible Woman
Surfacing
Lady Oracle
Dancing Girls
Life Before Man
Bodily Harm
Murder in the Dark
Bluebeard’s Egg
The Handmaid’s Tale
Cat’s Eye
Wilderness Tips
Good Bones
The Robber Bride
Alias Grace
The Blind Assassin
Good Bones and Simple Murders
Oryx and Crake
The Penelopiad
The Tent
FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree
Anna’s Pet
(with Joyce Barkhouse)
For the Birds
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda
NONFICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
Days of the Rebels 1815–1840
Second Words
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature
Negotiating with the Dead:
A Writer on Writing
Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983–2005
POETRY
Double Persephone
The Circle Game
The Animals in That Country
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
Procedures for Underground
Power Politics
You Are Happy
Selected Poems
Two-Headed Poems
True Stories
Interlunar
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976–1986
Morning in the Burned House
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2007
Copyright © 2006 by O.W. Toad, Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, 1939–
The tent / Margaret Atwood—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PR9199.3.A8T46 2006
813'.54—dc22 2005043729
eISBN: 978-0-307-38694-6
v3.0