Thursday, August 25, 2005

Dad and the Apple Tree


I have been thinking a lot about place and memory, so here is one place, and one memory.

***

Dad actually followed me into the apple tree once. And I guess I deserved it, but it wasn’t anything I’d done on purpose.
The cabinet below the stove erupted in a big white belly bursting out of a bigger, more or less whiter t-shirt. The bottom of the belly had a tic tac toe scar where Dad’s umbilical cord had continued to grow on the inside. They gave him morphine for the pain, but eventually had to open him up and take a look around in there. Below the scar, a black leather belt cinched down on the belly, making the landscape rather like rolling hills. His work pants were brown and he had on those white canvas slip ons that are kid of the hush puppy versions of keds.
Anyway, he was in the way. Freddy’s water was a disgusting mess of fur and floating chunks of swollen dog food and god knows what else, so I put her water bowl on lip of the sink. Then I pulled one of the tall bar stools over from the orange countered bar, and climbed up it. Splash went the water down the sink, and from there, I now realize, it emptied out all over Dad’s face as he tried to wrench the pipes back together. That explained the “Jesus Chr--” and the loud thunking noise that made the silvery sink leap in its place on the counter. I thought it best to wait for Mom to get home before I tried to explain what happened.
The kitchen door whined as I sailed out of it, and I didn’t know if the series of bumps and cussing I heard was Dad getting out from under the sink or the barstool toppling over on top of him or both. In seven steps I crossed the porch and jumped the two tiny steps to the back yard. It was a long sprint, but above the hill that sloped to the street, I reached the shade of the apple tree.
I grabbed the lowest greenbrown branch and swung my feet flailing up the trunk. They caught in the hollow there and I pulled myself first over, then up. And kept climbing hand over foot over hand. The summer leaves were a strong almost underwater green, and almost ripe apples huddled in knots of ripening yellow and the barest palest pink. Past these huddles of becoming, up the very slenderest fingers of the old tree I climbed until my head breached the crowning round of leaves at the very top.
Dad was already at the bottom. His t-shirt was wet with sweat and clung to his softened barrel chest. He had lost his glasses between here and there, and on the great expanse of forehead between eyebrow and line of hair, there was and angry welt beginning to brood. The welt was not the only thing angry.
“Git your (ass) down here now.” The words were slow and steely as pain and rage could make them. He only breathed ass through clenched teeth, but still he had said it. I felt my eyes go wide and the corners of my mouth tuck into a frown. I tightened my grip on the willowy branches. A slight wind nuzzled the leaves in the growing silence. A car passed.

“If that’s the way you want it,” and he came. Not as I had come in tiny squirrel steps. He put his foot right in the hollow and straddled tree and earth before he pulled himself in. He came steady, tearing twigs and leaves in his path. Closer still, to where he could stretch out his and and grab an ankle. Then a thunderous crack. A report almost like a gun. And it was the tree he grabbed and grappled with as he plunged a foot, then five until he caught both hands where two of the uppermost branches came together. There was a heavy breathing silence, a sigh in the wind until the branch that bore me was bent back under his man’s weight. I felt myself arcing slowly downwards and out. I wrapped both feet around the branch and held its slender fingers in mine as the world turned round and upside down and the tree dipped me down like a panoplied offering to my father. I could see only blue sky, then green grass as I was swept down, and the world was full of a heavy, staggering breathing. Whether it was mine or my father’s, I still do not know.
“Don’t move, Brian. Just hold still.” His voice was soft again, but unsteady. In my fear I tightened every joint I could around whatever I was holding onto.
I don’t remember getting down from the tree. I don’t remember if I was in trouble or not. I don’t remember if we even told Mom when she got home. All that I remember is the tortured moment --the breathing, the grass and the sky--in which Dad must have decided whether to make a grab for me or to retreat down to the earth. He chose the later, lowering himself smooth from branch to branch. And as he descended, the limb that carried me was released from her burden, and slowly bore me up until I could look down at my father now below the blithe upper branches and resting the solid heart of the tree. We looked at each other for a time in silence. There was no wind, no cars, nothing. Then we both began to breathe.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

hehehe...

Anonymous said...

Wow, is that tree still there?

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