The Wife Tree (24 page)

Yesterday afternoon the temperature dropped to twenty-five below and every hour the roof beams cracked and shouted with the cold until it seemed the whole house would split apart. After supper, I went from room to room closing the curtains to hold the heat inside. Upstairs in the rear bedroom, I looked down onto the backyard and saw the sinuous branches of the felled Wife Tree glazed with moonlight. It made me think of the day many years ago when William pruned her back hard, destroying forever her lovely shape.

We had an early spring that year and in April William could smell the damp thawed earth, the fragrant soil. It was a perfume that always drove him wild, made him yearn for the prairie. At the time he was employed at Dominion Textiles, riding a bike to work at seven each morning because the car had been repossessed, coasting downhill into the dappled light of the historic town sleeping still beneath the giant maples. Gliding down into those quiet streets, past the venerable turreted and towered and shuttered and weather-vaned houses. Past the blood-red-steepled and copper-roofed churches. Past the war monument and the stone fences and the grand old parks. Past the cemetery and into the turn-of-the-century working-class soot-stained row housing and over the railway tracks to the cluster of factories.

“Those factory walls,” he’d tell me every night, anguished, pacing the kitchen. “There’s no natural light. The place is nearly windowless. I can’t stand it. I grew up with a sky overhead the size of — of heaven, Morgan. I feel like I’m going to explode when I’m in there. I’m not made for indoor work.”

One day he arrived home in the middle of the afternoon with a bloody nose.

“What are you doing home early?” I asked him. “What’s happened?”

“I’ve been let go,” he said, avoiding my eyes.

“Why is your nose bleeding? Were you in another fight?”

“I had a little dust-up,” he admitted sheepishly.

“Who started it this time? Was it you again? Did you take the first swing?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I suppose someone just looked at you the wrong way. That was all. It doesn’t take much, does it?”

“I’m not worried.”

“Well, I am. I’ve got five dollars in my purse. That’s all the money we have.”

“I’ll find something else.”

“Where? Where will you find it? Men are losing their jobs everywhere and you throw yours away over a fight. In the meantime, what do you expect me to feed our children? What will we eat?”

“Potatoes, Morgan,” he said. “We can always survive on potatoes.”

Over the following weeks, he showed no sign of looking for a job. One morning I put on my hat and coat.

“Where are you going?” he asked me.

“There’s a Mass at ten o’clock,” I told him. “I’m going to church and pray that you’ll find work.”

“Oh, prayer will do us a lot of good,” he said sarcastically. “That’ll save the day, won’t it? Maybe you should write to the pope.”

He went down to the basement, returned with shears, the power saw.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I’ve got some pruning to take care of,” he said. “The Wife Tree needs cutting back.”

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “Her shape is perfect the way it is.”

“She’s spreading too much. She’s throwing shade on the Man Tree.”

“But she’s in flower. This isn’t the time to prune her.”

The girls had left for school, except for Merilee, who was sleeping off a hangover. She’d come home late, sick from an evening in a tavern. She was sixteen, drinking under the legal age, using borrowed identification. William had taken the strap to her before she went to bed, striking her on the palms of her hands. It was the first time he’d strapped anyone other than Morris.

“Why is Morris still home?” I asked William before leaving for church.

“I need him to help me with the pruning.”

“He shouldn’t miss school,” I protested. “He needs educating just as much as the girls.”

“A day off won’t hurt him. Nothing stays in that head of his, anyway.”

I set off for church. The last thing I saw when I looked over my shoulder was Morris gripping the ladder with his big hands while William ascended it, carrying the power saw, his head disappearing into the branches of the Wife Tree, into the recesses of her fragrant blooms.

“Hold the ladder still!” I heard him bark at Morris as I walked away down the street. “I said, hold it steady, goddamn it!”

Although it was late April and warm, with the heat of the day rising, it seemed, right out of the earth, the season in the church was still winter, the stained glass windows shutting out the perfume of the rhododendrons and the song of the chickadees. The icy pew pressed against my thighs, cold radiated off the terrazzo floors. The clanging communion bell shook the poor frigid barefoot saints on the walls, their blue toes curling over shallow ledges. Looking up at the naked Christ on the Cross, I saw the bronze blood pouring from his lanced side, saw it blooming like orchids in the palms of his hands.

At the altar rail, the priest pressed the brittle host onto my tongue. It snapped in two, melting like snow in my mouth. I thought of the white blossoms of the Wife Tree and pictured the petals, loosened by William’s assault, snowing down on Morris. Gazing up at the fresh wound in Christ’s side, at the fleshy opening, I suddenly had a premonition of disaster. I saw the power saw
slip from William’s hands, fly toward Morris, slice his head in two, like a watermelon cleanly split open, its red meaty fruit glistening. Leaving the church, I hurried home, the papery taste of the communion host still fresh on my tongue.

Behind the house I found the Wife Tree cut back hard, like a woman with her long hair sheared off. As I’d feared, the yard was deserted, the ladder toppled over, ribbons of blood decorating its rungs and spattered against the slender tree trunk. With her healthy branches scattered all around me, their tiny petals thrown across the long grass, I wept until I thought I’d split down the middle like a tree struck by lightning. I stood beneath the Wife Tree and shed what felt like a lifetime of tears. And yet, for what did I weep? For the Wife Tree’s dismemberment, the destruction of her beauty? For the idea of Morris with his poor small brain split open: for my lost son? Did I weep because we never love, do we, until it’s too late? Or because my husband was bent on injury?

Finally, when I felt cleansed, destroyed by my own tears, I heard a footstep rustle in the long grass and, whirling around, I found Morris before me, whole and unharmed, his head in one piece. Not dead at all.

You might have thought that, when this son of mine miraculously appeared, sound and unmaimed, my tears of grief would have swelled into a cataract of joy, that I would have thrown myself at him like a lover or at least reached up and, wondrous, touched his head where I’d imagined it cleaved in two. But at the sight of him, the sorrows dried up in me like a desert lake and my grieving heart turned to sand.

“Morris, what is this blood?” I asked him as we stood under the dismembered Wife Tree.

“There was an accident,” he said. “The saw slipped. Have you
seen Merilee? She was supposed to look for Dad’s fingers. He reached too far, Mom. I said to him, ‘Shouldn’t we move the ladder over, Dad? You’re going to fall.’ I could see it wasn’t safe. ‘Just let me get this one last branch,’ he said. It was a high one he wanted. I couldn’t hold him. The ladder started to tilt. Everything toppled. The fingers were sheared off. They flew past my ear like hummingbirds. You should have seen the blood, Mom. Dad was wild with the pain. I got him into the house. Sat him down in the kitchen and called a taxi.

“When he caught sight of Dad’s hand, the driver didn’t want to let us into the cab. ‘What the hell?’ he said. ‘You never said nuthin’ about
blood,’
he said. He tried to lock the door, to keep us out. But I forced my way in and made the bastard drive. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said when he saw the blood on his car seat. ‘You sons o’ bitches!’ he shouted at us and took a corner on two wheels.”

Morris looked tired, weary as an old man, his face streaked with blood, his clothes stained red. The Wife Tree’s white flower petals were caught in his big ears and inside his shirt collar.

“When they saw Dad’s hand, the nurses in Emergency stampeded us like a herd of cattle,” he said. “They gave Dad a shot to ease the pain, something strong. Morphine maybe. It calmed him down pretty fast. He started to float away. That scared me a little. I thought he might drift off for good. I wanted to stick with him but they closed the operating-room door in my face. In a little while a man came out wearing gloves and a mask. An Indian. Not from Canada. From India, I mean. And I thought: I hope Dad didn’t catch sight of this guy before he went under.

“But you could tell he was kind, this doctor. He pulled his face mask down to talk to me. I saw that his lips were lavender. His teeth were white as pearls. He smiled at me and put a hand gently
on my shoulder. He said, ‘You’re the son? Did you see the accident? Were you there? How did it happen? Have you any idea if the fingers are intact? Is there someone who could find them? Somebody still at the scene? Tell them to look well. It’s worth a careful search. There’s a good possibility we could sew them back on. Those severed endings seek each other. They want to fuse. The human body, you know, is quite miraculous.’

“The kitchen,” Morris told me apologetically. “It’s a mess. I’m sorry. We were in there making a tourniquet. There’s blood everywhere. Someone’ll have to clean it up.”

“It’s all right.”

“What the hell happened to Merilee?” he said, looking toward the house, his brow furrowed. “She was supposed to call the hospital. I phoned over and told her to go out and look for the fingers in the grass. I guess she didn’t find anything. Jesus Christ,” he said, pressing his forehead against the trunk of the Wife Tree. Was this the first time I’d noticed his thinness? The washboard chest, the slouch of his shoulders?

“How many fingers?” I asked.

“Three,” he said. “Three and a half, I guess.”

“Did he have to prune so many branches?”

“I told him he was going too far. I told him he was destroying the tree, but that only made him more determined.”

At the hospital that night, William said, “I’m so tired, Morgan. I feel as if I’ve lived my whole life today.” He sighed and looked out the window, his jaw tightening with anger. “If Morris had held that goddamned ladder steady —”

“You can’t blame him, William,” I said.

“If he had a brain in his head, if he could pay attention for more than two minutes.”

“William, can’t you just leave him alone?”

“They wheeled me into the operating room, Morgan,” he told me later. “The lights were so bright in there, I thought it must be heaven. By that time I was off my head with the morphine. They put a goddamned Indian onto me.”

“Oh, William,” I sighed wearily.

“What kind of training do you think he’d have? India’s practically a Third World country, Morgan. Do you know what the hospitals are like over there? Primitive. Full of germs. Why would they put a brown bastard like that in a Canadian hospital? Haven’t we got enough white doctors around here to take care of us? ‘Don’t let that Indian son of a bitch near me,’ I warned them just before they put me under.”