Wildwood

by William Woolfitt

There was a beech tree on Turkey Bone Mountain in West Virginia that I visited often when I was twelve. I thought it might be all I had left of my father. Standing near the beech, I watched the crew of track-men working nearby, tipping their dumpcarts, spilling out dirt clods, chunks of tree root, and knuckles of shale. I was living with Stewart Hayes, my father’s brother, and Aunt Alfie, Stewart’s wife. He had been selling pieces of my parents’ farm to the railroad, to the loggers, and my desperate, useless wish was that I could stop him, undo what the track-men had done. After they cut the grade and built more tracks, it would be easier for other men to come on trains and take down more trees from the farm—maybe the beech, too. I could picture a day when it would be nothing be stumps and brush and fire cherries, and my uncle would be richer, fatter, and still he would want more.

I liked to think that the beech tree—hollow but still alive—brought my parents back. When I visited it, I sometimes got a trace, a whiff, the deep of my father’s voice, the color of my mother’s eyes. My mother had been in a box in the ground for more than a year—she died in nineteen and ten, right before the railroad got to Seneca Flats. My father had been locked in the Weston asylum since Christmas—suffering from melancholia and neurasthenia, my uncle’s doctor said. 

Uncle Stewart had swooped in and claimed their cornfields and white-painted frame-house and the trees they loved. He started selling their possessions right away. Inside the beech tree, twenty feet from the newest section of tracks, I could see plenty of damage: land that was cut over, messes of dumped dirt, jagged stumps. My uncle would have no sympathy if I asked him to save the beech for me; he might say nothing, or he might purse his lips like he had a bad taste in his mouth and say, we need to pay the debts your daddy owes. The beech was my favorite tree: tree that the track-men spared because it was too far from their grade, tree that was riddled with woodpecker holes, tree I had hidden inside more than once, tree that I knew like a second skin. 

I remembered the day my father showed me the beech. I was nine or ten. He had told me, the land knows things. The holes in the ground are full of stories. The trees here have secrets. Study this beech awhile, get closer to it, and see what it might say to you.

I had nodded at my father, wishing that I understood what he said. To please him, I brought my hand near the beech’s smooth bark, let my hand hover there, wondering whether the tree might groan a little if I leaned on it as hard as I could. My father’s eyes widened, and he held a finger to his lips. I moved closer to the beech, pressed myself against it. After a while, I thought that it was pressing me back. That I could hear a faint stirring, the whispering of a word. A true word, an old word. I told myself that maybe it was sap running inside the beech. Or the crackle of its roots as they stretched down into the earth.

Sometimes when I visited the beech, I rested my hand on its trunk, and then my ear. I listened for the tree’s whisper, its crackle, for my father talking to me about his land. I kept holding my ear there. Mostly, I heard nothing. A few times, I thought I heard a low drumming. But it was only the throb of my blood where my head touched the bark, and even that faded when the black crew-men swung their spike-driving hammers again, when they sang on the Red Sea shore, Moses smote the water with a two-by-four. 

Uncle Stewart was good at swooping in, squeezing out, taking advantage. Before my parents’ farm, it was the Rashid Brothers Feed and Produce Store in Seneca Flats that my uncle got his hands on. My father had sold hemlock bark there, sometimes goldenseal and deerskins, and he became friends with Joe and Isaiah, the Syrian brothers who owned the store. They taught him backgammon, went fishing with him. Sometimes, when they invited him, he slept in the shed behind their store. 

Then there was trouble. While locking up one night, Joe was pelted with eggs and beer bottles and hot coals by the White Caps, a gang of white lumbermen who thought there were too many foreigners in town. The Rashid brothers supposedly wanted to come in and take all the money out of the county, if you believed what the White Caps said. They hogtied Joe and threw him in the Cheat River. He escaped, got back to the store, found the show windows smashed, turpentine and lampblack poured all over the bolts of cloth, Isaiah cut up and bleeding to death by the grocery counter. After that, Joe was eager to sell and move away, and my uncle was eager to buy.

My father found Joe shaking and weeping. He told my mother and me he had seen the body, the bloody axe, the overturned barrels of oats and mash, and then he could say no more. I thought seeing that might have made him unwell. He refused to work for my uncle as a clerk, and disappeared for a while, said that nobody should look for him. He must have gone to the woods, found his solace there. I liked to think that’s when he first became acquainted with the beech tree, that maybe it listened like a friend while he told it unspeakable things.

That summer I was twelve, my uncle said that I was undersized, loose-mouthed, drifty, that my parents had overindulged me and let me run wild, that he would straighten me out with garden chores. That summer, I was always trying to get more of my father. One day, although I thought he might say things I didn’t want to hear or might say nothing, I asked my uncle to tell me a story about my father while we ate breakfast. Aunt Alfie gave my uncle a pleading look; she said, Henry should know what they were like.  

He loved to trap when he was a boy, my uncle said. Made a muskrat scarf for our father, made from spotted fawn skin a pair of gloves for our mother. 

I said, where did he get the traps?

My uncle said, that’s the end. Work more, jabber less.

But by mid-morning, it was too hot for me to fight the witch-grass and Spanish needles that choked my uncle’s corn patch, his truck patch. I heard coonhounds yipping, his rooster screeching. Sweat ran down my back. My hands were starting to blister. When my uncle sent me to grub his gardens, I seldom lasted long. 

Flinging the hoe into a snarl of thistles, I ran past the barn, and over the bare hill where the sweet apple tree grew, and into the woods, where I felt closer to my father, where old leaves and sticks crunched beneath my feet. I thought my aunt would peel an ironwood switch; my uncle would vow a beating, a thrashing, a hide-tanning, and he would follow me into the woods, tracking me. I picked my way over the rocky pine ledges, stepped carefully near the beds of moss, the rockhouses and boulder overhangs where I had squatted with my father when it rained. Then the ground was even again, and I sped up. I could see certain earth-folds that had concealed me. I ran through the deep woods, past a boy-sized wallow in the laurel-hells. That day, it was the beech tree I wanted, my father I wanted. Its hollow closed around me the way my pocket held my treasures. An arrowhead, a button from my mother’s dress, a curl of her gray hair, the bone dice her father took from the Rebel he shot. 

Hiding in the beech tree, I tried to picture my parents, to call up their faces, the way they moved their hands. My memories of them were fuzzy, as if I was looking through a skin of ice, through torn webs. Through the beech’s knothole, I could see a patch of sky as it changed, a cloud breaking from another cloud, little brown birds bringing grass-spears to a poplar branch. 

At supper-time, I decided that Uncle Stewart wasn’t going to find me, that I should head back, and so I left the beech tree, left the laurel-hells and woods, crossed over the hill. And then I worked the hoe free from the thistles and took it to the barn, where I bumped into my uncle. I froze; he didn’t say anything, just stood there glaring, taking deep breaths, letting the dread build in me. Finally, he pointed his finger and said, you know what comes next. I followed him into the house; I was hungry, already ashamed, trying not to cry. Aunt Alfie came out of the kitchen and said to me in her soft, sad voice, he hates this part. You drive him to it.  

My uncle whipped me in my bedroom. Your head’s up in the clouds, he said. Either that, or you’re full of secret aims. The grapevine zinged against my bare skin. Henry, are you hearing what I’m saying? 

When he punished me, I liked to hold in my fist a walnut shell, or pebble, or dead bee. I wished I was some small harmful thing that could sting him or chip his teeth.

My aunt came in five minutes later with a cup of water. She said, I made your favorite things for supper.

We ate beef stew and pudding. Your daddy’s got the shakes, my uncle said as he swabbed a napkin over his mouth. He liked to remind me of my father’s miserable condition, his confinement. He’s fallen out of bed so many times, they’re having him sleep on the floor at the lunatic asylum. 

I wished I could rescue my father, but I didn’t know how I would take care of him. 

Have some floating island, my aunt said, and she offered me the bowl of pudding. 

My uncle was barrel-chested, big-hipped, and his gold-streaked eyes prowled around the table, seeking what he might grab. He smacked his lips when he ate, and his teeth looked crammed together, as if he had too many in his mouth. 

His hands tremble so much he can’t use them anymore, my uncle said. Can’t dress himself. Can’t bathe.

Somebody has to feed him with a spoon, my aunt said. I hate to bring it up. She was a restless woman who started her work early each morning, and sweated a lot, and fooled with her stringy hair when it slipped loose, wouldn’t stay pinned. My uncle bought her perfume and rose water that she dabbed on her neck, scent bags that she kept among her clothes. Always trying to twist her hair back into a knot, wiping her sweaty hands on the front of her dress.

Never was right after he saw the Arab butchered and the blood smeared everywhere, my uncle says. 

I tried not to cry in front of them. My father seemed so distant to me, so pitiful, so lost. 

‘The beech was my favorite tree: tree that the track-men spared because it was too far from their grade, tree that was riddled with woodpecker holes, tree I had hidden inside more than once, tree that I knew like a second skin.’

The next day, alone in the house, I searched each room, peeked into my uncle and aunt’s bureaus and trunks. I rooted around for whatever remained of my parents, my mother’s thimble in a drawer, a scrap of my father’s best shirt in my aunt’s rag bag. They were fading fast, nearly gone from what had been their place. My uncle had made me empty it of their clothes, and dishes, and the rough furniture my father had made with wood he salvaged from brush piles; we loaded their things into my uncle’s wagon. My aunt had made me help her sweep and paper every room, told me to polish the stove and soap the floor with lye. 

After checking the house, I did what I could to remember more of my parents. After garden chores, I went out walking over the cattle-grazed hills that had been theirs, stopped to sprawl under the trees they knew so well, trees my uncle had sold or would soon sell. He had said that morning I should read to my aunt from the blue-back speller or the big green geography book instead of roaming the hollers, but I’d told him I would bring home a load of sourwood, and carve it into merchandise for his store, and that appeased him. 

When I got to the sourwood trees, they were heavy with white blooms, full of bees. Angel fingers, my mother had called the blooms. I sat down. I tried to look through the veil of time, tried to catch glimpses. When I worked at it, strained and squeezed to make them appear, this is what I came up with: my mother pulling a scarlet oak branch down and gathering leaves and pressing them in her shabby Bible with the broken spine. My father showing me how to make bark rubbings, how to brush my teeth with a black gum twig. My mother introducing me to certain trees like they were people. My father said that when he felt low-down, he talked to the beech and some of the other trees. When she sang ballads, my mother sometimes took out the knights and the ladies, put in sycamores and silverbell trees and weeping willows with their long green tresses. 

My father sang the old songs too, sometimes turned those songs into stories. My mother said that it was my father’s voice, happy and carefree and booming in the greenwoods, that made her run away with him on Aronatus, his coal-black mare. She had already agreed to marry another man, but then she met my father, and he twined a lily in her raven-black hair, and he made her cheeks glow. She said that the other man wanted to spoil her, give her a feather bed and shoes of Spanish leather. She said my father gave her things that were far better: the trees, and himself, and her only child. 

And now my uncle was parceling away their woodlots. I made some lengths of sourwood with a crosscut saw, and then I visited other trees and remembered more of what my parents had told me. From my mother talking to me while she crouched and fed the woodstove, I knew that hickory was for fires that burn longest. Beech for calm fires. And a certain wind-shook hemlock tree if I wanted to see a screech owl sleeping on a branch. And catalpa tree for bait: my father used the yellow caterpillars that ate up its seedpods when he fished his favorite creek near the pine ledges. Maple for the old sow-bear’s den tree. Elderberry for the dye my mother called Queen Esther purple. Sourwood for honey, and for the sled runners, toy whistles, clothespins, limberjack dolls, and stocking stretchers that I carved with my father’s drawknife and shaving horse, that my uncle sold to the Italians on the log train, to customers at his store in Seneca Flats, to shopkeepers in Winterburn and Osceola. And the woodpeckered beech for hiding from my uncle. There I watched the singing crewmen and horse-teams laying rails at the edge of what had been my parents’ land. There I watched them spike down the crossties that my uncle had made me hew from locusts and rock maples.

When I got home, I looked for my father’s drawknife  and found that my uncle had locked it up in a glass-fronted display case. 

He was always figuring out new ways to separate me from the things I loved. 

I fiddled with the latch, accidentally shattered two panes—enough for me to slip my hand in and take the drawknife. I didn’t even clean up the busted glass; all I could think about was getting away. I ran past the overhangs, the rhododendron slick, the beech tree, found a big rock and sat there while I carved a toy soldier. After that, I cooled off in the creek, returned to the beech. As I sang my mother’s songs, “Marching Around the Levees” and “Raggle Taggle Gypsies O,” I watched the track-men working with their carts and hammers.

At suppertime, I headed back, found my uncle outside the house with my clothes in a canvas bag. I’m giving you away, he told me. You can forget this farm, your trees, forget all of it. You can work for me in town. And then he would say nothing more. We rode on horses to Seneca Flats; he left me with his brother Quentin, who clerked at Hayes Produce Store. Left me for good, as far as I knew, and I was afraid that in town I would lose even more of my parents. Uncle Quentin was neatly dressed, ruddy-skinned, tall, well-built, but not imposing—he could be soft-edged, even shy. He shook my hand, smiled, took me to a sleeping porch above the store, then woke me at dawn and handed me a broom. For days to come, I swept, I wiped the scales and cabinets and counters, I put up crates, took them down; I wiped the green hides in the hide room, and although I did not linger there, I absorbed its stink of death. I measured beeswax, feathers, flax seed, lard, sausage, snakeroot, tallow, vinegar. Although he worked me all day, Uncle Albert gave me plenty of food, a few kind words, friendly glances; he said that he wanted to give me wages someday. 

Help me get to my father, I said. Give me that instead.

Quentin ran his fingers through his hair, looked past me, looked down at his hands. He said, where do you think your father is? That’s for Stewart to say. He gets letters from your father, not me.

I thought that was a strange choice of words, thought he was wrong about my father sending letters. I tried to get him to explain, but he shook his head, refused to say anything else.

Maybe store life would not be a bad life for some people, but I wanted no part of it. I hardly saw the sun. I had nowhere to go, no trees. Soon, even after I tried to wash myself clean, I smelled like coal oil and blood and fat. 

Sometimes, I told myself that my father was blameless, had done only what was right, that he must have told me why he was leaving and what arrangements he had made with my uncle. Maybe we were at the beech tree when he made it all plain. And surely I would have that knowledge now, if I had listened more closely, and looked into my father’s eyes, and measured each word.  

More likely, he never had a chance to explain, or maybe he had some reason for leaving me without saying goodbye. There was a morning when I woke up, and both he and my uncle were gone. Alfie said my uncle was taking him to the doctor because he’d been having the dismals, the blue spells. At a rest-cure that might take a few weeks, my uncle said when he came home three days later.

Sometimes, I believed that the beech had more it wanted to tell me, that it would give me another chance to listen, that it might be a holder of secrets. That it might greet me with a quickening that I would be sure to miss unless I paid attention. 

Even when it told me nothing, the beech offered me a hiding room. And saw-toothed leaves that cooled blisters. And branches that I climbed to, and spread flat on until I vanished again, as if I was suited in leaves and the smooth blue-gray bark. 

I confronted my uncle while he was trimming stubs and lacy white funguses from a fallen tree, while he was working near a stack of logs.

I know my daddy’s not crazy, I told him. I know he’s working hard every day, and he has not forgotten me.

My uncle squinted at me and said, your daddy was haunted when he lived here, and that’s the same thing as crazy. 

I said, you’re a liar.

My uncle put down his axe and raised his hand as if he might slap me. Instead of crying, I pretended I was inside the beech tree, safe from his blows. For once, he lowered his hand, stared at me with his strange gold-speckled eyes. He finally said, your daddy can tell you who the liar is, if he comes for you like he said he would.

On the day Uncle Stewart returned me to the farm, I told myself that I must not anger him, that he might do worse to me the next time. But I had not forgotten what Quentin had said, and soon I started snooping again. In the parlor, I found what I never dreamed I would find. I saw an old book that looked like my mother’s Bible. I pulled it from the shelf, and rectangles of folded paper scattered from it, fell to the floor. They were letters from my father, written by his own hand—I was sure of it. His handwriting was still neat and tidy, nothing ill-formed about it. I read through letters that had been hidden from me, that he had mailed to my uncle over the last few months. I started to believe he was no longer in the asylum, not infirm in any way, as my uncle and aunt had said many times; I wondered if my father had ever been confined there. 

In the letters, my father said he was a skidder at a high timber camp in Pocahontas County, said he was sending the money that he owed my uncle, a little at a time. I read sentences like these: we swamped the laurels today. Dragged another five thousand feet of spruce down the skipper road. The bull cook feeds us well, smoked ham and fox grape jelly, fried holes and white line. The Poles and I smoked our pipes until the air was blue. In the oldest letter, sent seven months ago, in January, he asked my uncle to give the letters to me when my uncle was done with them. And my father said that he would come for me this Christmas, and we would move away and start over, far away from here, maybe out west, maybe the Idaho territory.

I ran to the beech tree and grabbed a low limb, pulled myself up. I tried to untangle my uncle’s lies, to figure out his tricks and his greed: he had both my father and me believing we must work for him. It meant more gold for my uncle; for my father, banishment; for me, the loss of another parent, and the ache of that loss hollowing me out. Branch-sprawled, leaf-shaded, I screamed at the ugly stumps, the scars the track-men left behind. And I cursed the wasted dirt that looked like grave mounds, parched and cracked by the August sun. And I howled at the new beds they had smoothed over, the earth meek and ruled. I clamped my hand to my mouth, bit my knuckles, and then I screamed again. 

Once, I would have worried that I’d give myself away if I cried out, that my uncle would find my beech tree. Now, I hoped he heard me. I knew he made a game of discovering my hiding places. If he found me, I would ask him why he told so many lies.

Inside the beech tree, I stopped screaming, took a deep breath, told myself there was a way to start over. I tried to hear the word the beech whispered.

On Sunday after church, somber music washed through the house. Stewart and Alfie had made me attend the service and then join them in the parlor while she offered gingerbread to their Sunday guests. While the preacher, the elders, and their wives sat on horsehair and gossiped, while their rowdy sons grappled in the yard, fell onto my mother’s snowball bush and trampled her blue-eyed tulips, I sat on a stool near my aunt. I wished I was visiting the beech tree. My uncle had slicked his hair with macassar oil, wore his watch and chain, puffed his chest, trying to impress the men from his church. 

One said, crazy as a bedbug.

Another said, thought he was talking to Chief Cornstalk.

Crashing through the woods, sobbing like a baby.

Slept on his wife’s grave.

I wondered if any of them knew where my father was, or the truth about my uncle, whatever it might be. 

My uncle flashed his big jumbled teeth. The preacher banged his foot against the floor and banged hymns from my mother’s pump organ that was silent as her grave the rest of the week. He favored all the vain things I sacrifice to thy blood and gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord. Between hymns, the preacher took out his dirty handkerchief and mopped sweat from his forehead and from my mother’s organ keys. 

I got up to leave the room, tired of the elders, the pump organ, and my aunt’s glass elephants and sunflower wallpaper, and my uncle’s animal heads and furs, his whale bone engraved with a pirate and a cannon and a dancing woman. My aunt put her hand on my arm. For once, I yanked my arm away.

One said, he’s getting some height. Must be eating better. 

Another said, soon he won’t be so delicate. 

My uncle said, might work better if there was meat on his bones. He eats like a bird. He squawks like a bird. Canary-haired like his mother was.

My aunt said, don’t be too hard on him.

They carried on as if I was not there. As if I was fading from the house as my parents had done. As if my body was still inside the beech tree and no part of me had been with them in the parlor. If they noticed me slipping out the door, they gave no sign.

‘Sometimes, I didn’t have to work at remembering. Sometimes, what I could recollect about my parents came easily, as if it had been sent to me.’

When I talked to the beech tree, I said what I knew for sure. My uncle got my father all wrong, didn’t know the man my mother and I knew. My mother was sick for most of a year; she had pneumonia, and then a lump on her chest that grew like a burl on an elm. My father never left her side if he could help it, went for short walks with her on her good days, sat with her in the parlor, rubbed her arms and legs and feet. My uncle came to help him with his farm work. Then my mother was buried under the walnut tree in the pasture, and my aunt set out a headstone with glittering specks in it. I saw my father’s tears, his shoulders heaving, and heard him slipping out at night, and later I saw my uncle lock him in the smokehouse. 

When my father got loose, he roamed the woods in a breechcloth. He said that his Shawnee grandmother talked to him in his dreams, and that he was going to weave a basket from ash splints that could take him to the stars. My uncle sent my father to the Weston asylum, or told me that he did. 

When he gets cured, my aunt said, he’ll come back and thank us. We’re improving his property and his boy. 

She had said it more than once, as if trying to convince herself. 

I told myself this: if my father owed my uncle money, it must be because my uncle had found a way to swindle him. My uncle was trying to get me too, but I wouldn’t let him. I wished I could tell my father that I hated what my uncle was trying to make of me. And that now my uncle was haggling with the railroad barons, with Roaring Creek Lumber Company; he’d been selling my father’s stands of hemlock, and red spruce, and white oak, and now there were more stumps than I can count, and my father’s favorite creek was choked with mud.

My aunt also had plans for me: she came to me with the speller and told me to recite the vowel sounds, or she came to me with her pincushion and shears, held a string to my arms and legs. She took my measure and made work-clothes for me; she told me to wash my feet before I went to bed; she cut my hair, and she busied my idle hands. When my uncle had no garden work for me, no rock maples he wanted me to make crossties from, my aunt told me, Henry, you’re not done. There was manure in the chicken coop, or water to carry from the spring to the iron washpot, or briars in the zigzag fence, or streaks on the windows that I should wipe away with vinegar and brown paper.

I thought I should read my father’s letters again to see if he said anything about his return at Christmas that I might have forgotten. I knew I wouldn’t find the book they were tucked into, wouldn’t find the letters anywhere, but I looked anyway. 

My aunt caught me eyeing the shelf where I had found them, and said don’t act crazy, and from then on she locked me out of the house after breakfast. 

I didn’t know the name of my father’s timber camp, or what would happen if I tried to get there. I had no horse, no money, no map. I thought my father must be sad if he spent his days cutting up the trees that he loved. I told myself he would come for me. 

Sometimes, I didn’t have to work at remembering. Sometimes, what I could recollect about my parents came easily, as if it had been sent to me. I remembered my mother showing me the pale glowing veins of foxfire that fed on decaying poplar logs in the damp bottoms. Fairy fungus, she called it. 

And I remembered the flicker of lightning bugs my father and I caught, sputtering like embers in a blue mason jar. I wanted to take them to my mother, who had been sicker than ever that day, but he made me twist the lid off after a few minutes. He said the lightning bugs wouldn’t live long if I kept them trapped inside a jar. 

And I remembered standing in the pasture later that night, its rye-grasses waist-high, and seeing something I would never see again: the shape of my mother as she moved to the window—lamp-lit for a moment, she’s a bright picture—then moving away, a shadow again. Maybe she was looking for me. 

When my aunt told me to beat yolks for her transparent pie, I cracked eggs and glared at her. I said, you must know things about my daddy returning. About where my uncle sent him. I want to hear all of it.

My aunt jerked her head as if she was startled. She said, how do you still not know? Your uncle only does for you what your daddy would want. The two of them are thick as thieves. When it comes to men, one is a lot like any other. 

I don’t believe you.

I shouldn’t say this. She reached into the flour-sack, grabbed a handful, tossed it onto the molding-board. You shouldn’t repeat it. It’s not my place to tell you what all of them have chosen not to tell. 

If she was right, my father heard Joe struggling with the White Caps outside the store and wanted to stop them. How? There were six White Caps, all of them lumbermen—husky, hardened, boisterous, spoiling for brawls. My father followed them to the Cheat, and when they had pitched Joe in and ridden away, my father kicked off his shoes, shed his clothes, held his knife between his teeth, swam that cold water, cut the ropes that bound Joe’s hands and feet, and pulled him to shore. Later that night, while my father was riding to Saint George to summon the high sheriff, the White Caps returned to the store to finish Joe off. And there was another brave man who hid with Joe in the back office and held his own body against the door when they tried to break it down.

It was your uncle, she said. He was willing to fight for Joe.

I said, so he could get his hands on Joe’s money. That’s all he ever thinks about.

My aunt wiped her floury hands on her apron, pushed the hair out of her eyes. He’s not as wicked as you think, and your daddy is not as righteous. Before his Syrian friend got hacked to pieces, your daddy was ruthless with the deer and the beavers and the hemlock trees. You know why he wanted the skins and the bark? It meant money in his pockets, and land he could spread out on.

Tell me the truth about him, I said. Tell me where he is.

If he got out of the asylum, maybe he went to Cloverlick. He likes to pal around with the lumberjacks there and drink moonshine and brawl. Is that what you want to know?

It was another place where I would look for him.  

My aunt filled a pie pan with dough, pressed it thin, and stamped the edges with a fork, and I reached for my father again, tried to pull close to me whatever part of his life was sturdy and keepable and unchanging, but all of him that I could grab onto was the snakeskin he wriggled out of as he vanished under a pile of field stones, and all I could taste was the jug-handle creek that gave me one fast drink before it turned and ran another way, full of currents, and stories, and things it had washed away.

Best was the cavity of the beech. I strained, worked myself through the gap in the bark, tried to squeeze inside the sapwood. At last, I passed through. I moved a little more freely when I was in the hollow at the middle of the tree. 

Later, I would see that to enter the hollow, I had to scrape my skin, get a bruise on my shoulder, bleed a little. 

I had grown taller since the first time my father brought me here, but there was still room inside the beech for me, and my thoughts, and those old voices again, the littlest pieces. The beech tree held me, eased me. It smelled like rain, like moss, like newly mown hay. The track-men had moved on. I could hear the beech whispering its true word, the cicadas singing pharaoh, pharaoh. My father had told me, let the trees show you things. That was the day before he went to the asylum, or the day before he left me. He had told me to do the same with a bee gum I was about to steal the honeycomb from, a rabbit before skinning it: go soft, go slow. 

The beech’s hollow space was dark like a hand closed around a seed. It was the shape of me if I tucked one arm like a wing, if I stretched the other overhead.