Meet the Elms (Continued)
by Alan DeNiro
My father's skin became more pale, and it became more difficult for him to speak.
My mother had to work at the school supply shop most nights, but during the days she remained by his bedside. We took shifts. She rarely cried. "I had a feeling it would come to this," she said. "I've been preparing for it for thirty years."
We came home to the old split level with the tidy lawn behind us. A few straggling robins pecked away at the ground, hard as overcooked brownies. The hills arching above the river were ruddy and brown.
Sitting in the kitchen over a pot of tea, I told her that I knew about Dad's true nature. She said, "Well, it's come to that. It makes sense that he would want to tell you now."
Then I said, beginning to shiver from a draft, "The strange thing is that sometimes I'm afraid for his life and other times I'm not afraid. Even when I know that he has to die. But I'm not afraid. Not at all."
"Oh honey," she said. "That's because you're half–'tree."
I hadn't thought of it quite that way before.
"Why didn't you tell me earlier?" I said to her. I raised my voice a little and I was sorry I did. Her shoulders slumped. "It's not easy," she said, putting her hand flat over her teacup. "We debated a long time, but decided to let you live as normal of a life as possible."
"So what does that mean," I asked, standing up from the dining room chair, trying to walk off my tremoring. "Does that mean I'm susceptible to Dutch Elm disease too?" I didn't feel, exactly, like a half–tree but then again I wasn't sure how a half–tree should have felt.
"It's possible," she said, unflinching. Sometimes I wondered if my mother was attracted to my father because of her hardness and toughness, a quality in him that she recognized in herself. Now I saw it went deeper than that. The quality in her was one of an ancient tree in winter, enduring.
At last, the woman said yes. "Yes, I'll marry you."
"I need to become human," the tree said. "It isn't fair to you to become an elm."
The woman smiled, but sadly. "How? How can you change?"
"Find someone. I don't have legs yet."
The woman went through Pittsburgh, searching for crones and transmogrifiers, of which there were many. Yet none chose to talk to this desperate woman, or else they presented no solution to her.
At last, she found a lawyer who said he could do it. He didn't look like the other magicians. Perhaps, she noted, that was a good sign.
The lawyer scratched his beard. "Yes. I think I can get that done for you. But there has to be two conditions, just to make sure the i's are dotted and so forth."
Folding her hands in her lap, the woman in love told him to go on.
"One, when your lover dies, he must change back to a tree."
The woman said that was fair enough.
"Two, when your lover changes back to a tree, you must as well."
The woman stared straight at the wall. "Alone, then. Even if he goes before me I have to be alone as a tree, then."
The lawyer nodded. "This is the best that I can do, and is easily the best anyone can do. After he dies, you have three hours to say goodbye to the world."
"Why three hours?"
"Why does Goldilocks find three bears and three beds? It's just the way it is. Three."
After weeks of her futile searching, the woman sensed this to be true. Then she said, without wanting to think about it for too long, "I'll do it."
"Fine." The lawyer careful handprinted a bill for her, and a contract to sign. She read it, paid a check, and signed. After thirty seconds of the lawyer shuffling through his papers, she said to him, "What do I need to do now? Is there a potion I have to give him? A spell that I have to read to him?"
Chuckling, the lawyer said, "It's already done. I have a business to run. I don't have time for razzle dazzle."
By the word dazzle, the woman was already halfway out the door.
Dad wanted to be taken home. He knew the end was close and told me so, in no uncertain terms. I appreciated that he wanted no smokescreens, no diversions away from inevitable death. On the other hand, I was his son. Sons, as hard as they try, can't help panic watching their fathers die. Mine was a secret panic, sometimes cold, sometimes white—hot.
"You know what I always hated?" he said, looking out the window as we drove down the state highway, the clouds gray above us.
"What, Dad?"
"I always hated that kid's book about the tree that kept giving." He scrunched his nose. "What was that book's name?"
"Um, The Giving Tree?"
He snapped his fingers. "Yeah, that's it." He coughed, and was forced to speak more softly. "I thought I'd have Mom read it to you as a kid, but once I got a look at it . . ."
I vaguely remembered the book, which I read in school anyway, about a kid who grew into adulthood, having a certain tree provide for this boy throughout his whole life. Even as a doddering old man, the tree still gave a stump to sit on. I asked my father what the big deal was.
"That's not how trees work." He glared at me for an icy instant, and then his gaze softened. "You wouldn't know that, of course. But did the guy—"
"Shel Silverstein."
"Whatever. Did the guy who write it think anything about how the tree felt? Serve, serve, serve. Serve and sever." His voice croaked. His fingers moved up and down wildly. "There wasn't a question that the tree minded getting mangled. God damn it." He looked at the window again. "And what the hell did the boy give back? Ever?"
He looked at me, as if expecting an answer.
"I don't know," I said, swerving to avoid a deer that crossed the road.