by Lynn Darling
9
The Wolf Tree
And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye.
—TED HUGHES, “Winter in the Village”
That fall I made frequent trips to my mother’s house. For years, longer than any of her three children were willing to admit, she had been losing ground, following the usual progression of dementia, from the increasing number of misplaced objects to the day she couldn’t find her way home to the neighborhood in which she had lived for nearly fifty years. She had taken a taxi to the airport to visit my brother and his wife in Florida. But the crowds at the airport confused her, and she turned on her heel and went back home. Or tried—she couldn’t remember how to get there, and the cabdriver spent hours driving her around the neighborhood before she finally spotted a familiar street.
That’s when my brothers and I began to talk to her about making some changes. At first we thought that perhaps she was simply too isolated, that she was becoming depressed—she had stopped going to church or participating in the choir or attending the Polish culture classes into which she had thrown herself with such gusto in the years following my father’s death; maybe if she spent more time out of the house, she would feel better. Holly, my sister-in-law, took her to visit a community center that provided day care for the elderly. It seemed a pleasant little place, offering activities for every degree of lucidity, and we thought my mother, an intensely social being, would enjoy the respite from her isolation. Mom didn’t say much during the visit, apparently, but afterward, in the supermarket, she gave Holly the slip in the meat section. Holly found her three aisles over, in canned goods, talking to a startled young woman with a small child in tow. Help, she was saying. Help! My children are trying to put me in a lunatic asylum!
Holly and my younger brother Chris lived about forty minutes away from my mother, and to them had fallen a disproportionate share of the task of maintaining the illusion that my mother could take care of herself. It was getting to be too much; I came down that fall to provide some backup. I had the time—the treatment was over, and Zoë was spending a semester abroad in Africa.
Together we tried to suggest to her that perhaps she could use a little part-time help, someone to do the things that increasingly were left undone. Like what, she demanded, and in truth, the items on the list, taken individually, sounded rather trivial at first. But over time they had begun to mount up. We mentioned the bathroom toilet that never got fixed, the bills that occasionally weren’t paid, the dishes that went back into the cupboard unwashed. We mentioned how angry she became when we tried to do them for her. Leave that alone! she would shout. Get out of my house! We talked about the minor traffic accidents, the possibility that she should no longer be driving.
Anyone who has been through the experience knows the black humor, the surreality, and the guilty, pointless anger of these conversations. We were using logic in a land where logic had fled, we were holding on tightly, unconsciously to the parent who had for better or worse been the towering author of our lives. It seemed desperately important to get our mother to recognize what was happening to her, because if she could still do that, then the relationship was still intact. But, of course, for her, it was an admission she could not make without the very ground beneath her feet dissolving.
By November, it was clear that something had to be done. We tried a part-time solution, in the form of a gentle young Ugandan woman, a recent émigré. But Cecilia’s endless patience and limitless Christian forgiveness were no match for the torrent of abuse and epithets, and finally physical attacks, my mother hurled at her, nor for my mother’s tearful pleas for forgiveness when she was told what she had done. My brother and I began to visit places where she could live full-time.
I came back from one of these trips to find her sitting on the gold brocade sofa in the living room, staring out the window at the silent cul-de-sac. She had lived in the house, a traditional suburban Colonial, for over thirty years, since my father had retired from the military and I had gone to college. She spent most of her time there now in the living room, surrounded by the treasures she had fought so hard to acquire as a young army wife, the painted screens and hand-carved teak furniture, the porcelain vases and ivory statuettes that were the usual booty of such postwar tours of duty in Asia. The meat might be rotting in the refrigerator, and outside, amid the dead leaves on the unswept patio, a line of scorched pots and pans now bore witness to the loss of her cooking skills. But the brief and sudden sunsets of late fall always fell in this room on a scene of spotless perfection.
She smiled when I walked in—a rare occurrence in those days. We couldn’t make her understand that we wanted to help her, and she eyed us, fearfully, angrily, as the enemies who would take her away. She was trying so hard to pretend that nothing was wrong. Her paranoia and distrust were part of the disease. They were also well founded, of course: we were trying to take her away from the place she said she would only leave feetfirst.
Don’t try to reason with her, said the elder-care experts we consulted. But selfishly, I wanted my mother back, the embattled, abrasive, intrusive mother I knew, not the frightened, failing woman she had become, and so I tried again to tell her about the places we wanted to show her, about how worried we were.
We fell off the usual cliff, of course. Before long she had grabbed a section of the Washington Post and a pen. Tell me, she said. Tell me everything I’m doing wrong, so I can fix it. By then I was sick of all that couldn’t be said or, once said, was immediately forgotten, so I tried again. Okay. You don’t change the lightbulbs! I began, as if it were a felony offense, and as the words left my mouth I began to wonder who in fact the crazy one was.
She looked bewildered. Really? Okay. She wrote in the margins, next to a movie review, I don’t change lightbulbs.
Chris took you to the doctor, I said, seeking firmer ground. You have vascular dementia. Your memory is being destroyed. You ask the same questions over and over again, you can’t remember what you did an hour ago.
I still have the yellowed newsprint on which she took her notes of that conversation. She wrote in the wavering but still graceful longhand she learned from the nuns at the Polish Catholic grammar school in Pittsburgh. The words, clutching at a present that had already escaped her, crawled along the headlines for a recent photography exhibit on the front page and curled like smoke over the golden anniversaries announced on the back of the paper.
1. Memory Depose Defective.
2. I ask same question over
3. Never.
4. MRI. Long term memory destroyed
5. Cannot drive because broken.
What else? She yelled in the hoarse, strained voice that was all that was left to her. What else. I found myself idly wishing that I could go to Zoë in Africa, to sit her down and read a storybook to her then and there, the one that was her favorite. Once there was a little bunny, who wanted to run away. If you run away, said his mother, I will run after you, for you are my little bunny. The memory of those long-ago evenings calmed me, reminded me that I was both mother and daughter, just as the woman in front of me was both mother and child, one who also needed reassurance, as she drifted further and further away to a place I couldn’t go.
What else? yelled my mother. What else?
I wanted to pull her frail body close and stroke her balding head and ask for her forgiveness, but there had been none of that in her family, as she put it, and so there had been none of that in ours. Never mind, I said, never mind, let’s just watch a movie. I bought ice cream.
So we sat and watched something old and black-and-white and my mother dozed. Finally it was late and I woke her to make sure she went upstairs to bed. By then I had turned off the TV and we were sitting in semidarkness. She noticed I was holding her hand, and she tugged it free the way you do from any kind of trap. You know, she said as she set herself to the task of forcing her arthritic knees up the stairs. Someone should really change those lightbulbs.
Eventu
ally we found a place for my mother. It was a two-story house set on a quiet street in Alexandria, where a maximum of eight people lived out their days provided for by some of the kindest women I have ever met and presided over by an indefatigable former gerontological social worker, Pearlbea LaBier, a thirty-five-year veteran in the field who had come highly recommended by several elder-care specialists. We knew from our own visits that the house was clean and smelled of good home cooking and the residents looked well cared for. There were weekly music sessions and crafts and a shady front porch with white rocking chairs at the ready and the last of the summer roses flowering in the garden. We told ourselves she would be happy there.
We were lying: my mother had never been happy for more than twenty minutes at a time. She ran on fury and worry and the neediness that children who have never been properly loved carry with them for the rest of their days.
She would have been happier if we had taken her into our homes. That needs to be said, because that is the source of the guilt, of course. But none of us could take care of her without that care consuming the rest of our lives. And because we couldn’t give her the one future she wanted, I think she was right: she would have been more content if she had been left to her misery in her own home, surrounded by her own things, until she finally fell down the stairs or developed an infection that went untended. But such a course was never an option: instead she would live a longer life in a place she didn’t want to be, and that was the best we could do by way of kindness.
I went back to Vermont. I would return to help with the move, just before Thanksgiving, and to prepare the house to be rented; the money would help to pay for her care.
I had time on my hands when I got back to Castle Dismal. The knowledge that the next time I went back to my mother’s house would be the last time short-circuited my resolve to get back to work in the intervening days. Instead I waited. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for, though sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon, when the wind was shaking the trees, as if time itself had become tangled in the branches, and energy drifted out the door, I thought I was waiting for the phone to ring. It was the time of day my mother used to call. It had reached the point where she would call a dozen times or more, one call right after another, because she forgot each call as soon as it was made.
Those weren’t the calls I was waiting for. I was waiting for her the way she was, when the thread of patience snapped ten minutes after I picked up the phone and the conversation snagged on old rusty pins hidden deep in the fabric of our long, long struggle. When I would end the call speechless with exasperation at how little she understood me, or she would hang up furious that I had failed to understand that all she meant by her criticism was concern, that I never listened to her. But I had listened too well, until finally, when it came time to take the full measure of my shortcomings, there was no longer a difference between her voice and my own.
The fall colors had been muted that year. The leaves had turned to brown without much ceremony and a hard rain had brought most of them down early, exposing the beauty of the bare black branches and the fact that the apple tree needed pruning. It was an old tree, which produced fruit every other year, good tart red apples, until this season, when the few that appeared were sickly looking, wizened, and small.
At least the apple tree was still standing. I had lost one tree the winter I was sick, in the aftermath of a terrific ice storm. It stood to the right of the house, on the edge of the septic field, an old, bent, broken, gnarled, hollowed grotesquerie of a tree that nonetheless always sprouted a few green shoots in the spring at the top of the blasted escarpment that had been its crown.
The fallen tree was a wolf tree—an old wide-crowned tree with a scarred and gnarled trunk and bent and broken branches twisted into fantastic shapes by decades of fierce storms and lightning strikes. Wolf trees begin benignly, sometimes as sole survivors in a cleared meadow, left behind by a farmer to provide shade and shelter for his animals after the other trees are reduced to stumps. Their solitude protects them for a long while, their size and the width of their leafy crowns, their enormous root systems, stealing sunshine and nutrients from would-be competitors.
No one really knows where the term wolf tree comes from, though there are many theories. All I knew was that it suited the grotesque beauty of the tree that stood near my house, and I loved it. I owed it a debt of gratitude as well—when I was new to the woods, it had been the one object I could recognize, the one that told me I was close to home. For me it still stood, much the way the World Trade Center still stood when I searched the southern skyline from the windows of my old apartment in New York. Some landmarks embed themselves in the cartography of the soul of a city, a village, a people. They live as long as memory lives.
I asked a young arborist to come to the aid of my ailing apple tree. Jon Hartland was a diminutive man, with craggy features and a beard that made him look like an elfin Abe Lincoln. He took a look at the apple tree. It needed pruning and nutrients, not to mention better drainage, all of which sounded expensive, and I wasn’t feeling too sanguine about its chances.
But the tree was something of an excuse. I was more interested in what Hartland saw when he looked at the trees that surrounded the house and composed the woods in which I walked, what history surrounded me.
Mine was a small patch of northern hardwood, he said, a mixture for the most part of white and yellow birch, sugar maples, and American beech. The forest was young, a mere sixty or sixty-five years old. One hundred years ago, the hills in which my house was tucked were probably home to small sheep farms; when the wool industry failed, the occupants might have turned to dairy farming, or small crops, but gradually the land had been abandoned, and the places where the sheep had grazed were taken over first by goldenrod and asters, which killed the grass, then by brambles and the first wave of pioneer trees, poplars and birches, fast-growing, short-lived trees that gave way to the hardier, slower-growing maples and oaks.
The process was not nearly so decorous as it sounds. In a forest, Hartland said, each tree fights for survival: the trees you see are the survivors of an epic contest, a ruthless struggle for light and air, water and space. It is no wonder, then, if a small current of unease accompanies even the most benign forest walk; around us a battle rages. Hartland pointed to strange twisting branches that veered in sudden verticals or serpentine curves, struggling to reach the light. Some of the trees had even divided against themselves, forming secondary and tertiary trunks, short-term solutions that would betray them in old age when the fissures and fault lines of the past exposed them to wind and weather.
I asked Jon Hartland about wolf trees. After the old tree died, I had gone looking for others. I was drawn to them, to the idea of their ruined fantastic beauty, but another had been hard to find.
Hartland wasn’t surprised. Wolf trees are always large, he said, with thick trunks and widely spreading crowns, defined as they grow older as much by what they have lost as by what they retain: the limbs sheared away by wind and ice, the blackened holes gaping like wounds, and the sharpened point of broken branches. The wolf tree’s size, its strength, is also its downfall. A wolf tree survives as long as it does because it stands alone: at the top of a hill perhaps, or near the remnants of an old stone wall. But over time, the tree grows old and weakens, and the forest once again encroaches. The huge tree is slowly surrounded by the younger, stronger invaders, whose limbs are supple against the heavy snows and whose root systems are more efficient. The old tree, no longer alone, cannot survive.
A tree dies from the top down. The crown withers, the branches become fragile, the center dries up and hollows out. Still, the tree will stand, to all outward appearances alive, like an ancient warrior brandishing his weapons against all comers. But not forever: eventually it surrenders, to a hard summer rain or a biting nor’easter that knocks it down, and the enormous root system nearly as wide as the tree was tall shuts down.
I wouldn’t find wolf trees on the
ridge where I had been looking, Hartland said, because the forest itself was still young, although its character had been formed eons ago.
When Hartland drives down U.S. Interstate 91, where it parallels the Connecticut River, New Hampshire on one side, Vermont on the other, he can trace a catastrophic tale of two broken drifting worlds. About 420 million years earlier, he said, New Hampshire and Maine had been a part of the African tectonic plate while Vermont formed a part of its European counterpart. Just east of Vermont 100, the old road that runs roughly down the middle of the state, the African plate crashed into the European, obliterating what was then the coastline, and creating mountains that were eventually worn down by ice and storm and time to the present-day ridges and hills.
Because they had come from different continents, the bedrock and the soil in Vermont were very different from those in New Hampshire a few miles away. New Hampshire had the sandy soil of its African origin and became home to oak, white pine, and hemlock. Vermont, formed at the bottom of an ancient ocean, contained limestone, which was itself the detritus of sea creatures; the higher pH levels of the soil made it home to different species, to beech and birch, sugar maple and ash. Because the soil was fertile in Vermont, things grew and grazed there; because the soil was not in New Hampshire, that state turned to the mills and the canneries.
The mountains and the glaciers that pushed down from the north shaped history, determining the direction of commerce and culture that settled in the valleys and followed the rivers down to the sea. The glaciers sculpted the lakes and carved the mountains, pushing boulders and the remains of exploded volcanoes ahead of them, shaping the topography in an asymmetrical direction, the south side steeper, darker, denser than the north, determining the steeps and flats of the trails I now walked.
