Sprout

Miller, they were to have been used (what is that tense called? anterior conditional? future subjunctive? bass ackwards?) in the making of pickle barrels, but something, either the pickle maker or the pickle-barrel maker, went bust in the Great Depression. I think that’s Mrs. Miller’s idea of a joke—they were probly supposed to’ve been fenceposts—but no matter what the real story is, they were never cut down, but left to grow and flower and fall and seed themselves, until, at least to the glancing eye, they gave the illusion of nature. But if you peered through the underbrush (equal parts ragweed, marijuana—er, hemp—and itch ivy) you could still see the perfect lines stretching north, south, diagonally.
    Mrs. Miller calls it “a composition of balanced tensions”: the regularity of the planted trees juxtaposed against the chaos of their splayed limbs and vibrant, vibrating leaves (alliteration, ahem ). I tended to think of the trees in a more metaphorical—mythological, ahem, ahem—kind of way. It was as if my neighbors on Long Island had been transformed by a Greek god into beings of bark and sap instead of flesh and blood. This cottonwood had a hollow trunk, just as the boy who’d lived down the block had a tubular prosthetic arm. That dead hackberry was laced by vines, just as the brown-haired girl who got on the bus after me had worn braces on both legs. A slanting but sturdy mulberry was the bent back of the old Italian woman who walked every day to the grocery store with her trolley, or dolly, or whatever you call those little cages on wheels that old people use to carry their stuff in. The old Italian lady’s cart was red; the mulberry was covered in five-leaved creeper that turned crimson in the fall.
    But the myths I thought of most, at least when I was in the forest, were the ones in which women get turned into trees. Not just women, but mothers. Mothers of sons usually. Adolescent boys who always find their way to the shelter of the maternal limbs. Deep within its trunk, the trapped spirit groans with the desire to communicate her love, but all her son hears is the creak of wood. The tree showers fruit on him, but all the son does is take a bite from the apple or orange and curl up for a nap, and sometimes—because life is like that—the son ends up cutting his mother down, and the woman who gave birth to him is turned into a table or a bed or maybe just logs for the fireplace, the maternal body warming its son in death just as it had in life.
    I suppose that’s where the story breaks down for me. Eventually I came to love our forest. Even on the coldest winter days I trekked through the trees for an hour or two after school, and during the summers I sometimes even spent the night there, curled up in a sleeping bag on the bug-infested remnant of the sofa that had sat in our living room on Long Island. But no creaking or cracking of tree limbs, no cawing or gnawing or patter of paws ever made me feel anything other than alone when I was there. During our first months here I pretended the constant creaking of the trunks was like our gossiping neighbors back on Long Island.
    I hear the mother’s got
    The old man’s been hitting the Do you think the boy is
    Wait, where’d they
    If I was silent long enough, I thought the trees would forget I was there and reveal their secrets to me. But as time went on I realized they never would—not because I wasn’t listening hard enough, but because they weren’t actually saying anything. The only thing I heard was the echo of my own thoughts, obsessions, fears. The trees weren’t trapped souls: they were just trees, and the most likely reason they’d been planted was to cover the barrenness of the prairie. To limit the vista, create places to hide. To shelter a lonely widower and his only son so they could nurture their grief while they hid from the world.
    Or at least that’s what it felt like. Because after my dad bought the trailer and moved as much of our stuff in as would fit and threw out the rest (the aforementioned sofa and my mom’s easy chair, the antique writing desk my grandmother had given her as a wedding present and a half dozen other pieces of furniture, not to mention boxes and boxes of books, clothes, knickknacks, and plain old junk) he never left. I mean, sure, he went to town to buy groceries and stuff (by which I mean booze) but he made no effort to get a job or meet people, just lived off the proceeds of the sale of