The House on Cherry Tree Lane
By Kassandra Alvarado
Copyright 2015
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My mother rarely used to talk about her childhood growing up in different houses. The family paid rent, sometimes ran out during the lean times. In each photo album from the successive years, there were photos of the family's chosen abode. Some were small cramped cottages, others ramshackle hovels on poor city streets. The photo album from my mother's eleventh year, a year they spent in the Californian countryside, was bare. I hadn't noticed the lack of photos until her sudden illness last year.
She had asked to be taken home, my house in the suburbs of Chicago where I'd lived most of my adult life. The attic was full of remnants of my childhood and part of her inheritance after my grandmother died. I still remember the day I climbed up the pull down staircase, ascending into the heights of the peaked roof dormer attic, musty with the scent of memories.
Mom had wanted to be surrounded by her memories, her pictures of growing up and others of her first marriage. I didn't think much of it, at first, climbing up and down; hefting sagging boxes of cardboard to a small unused bedroom off the third wing. It was there that I'd begun sorting through the piles, going through them in chronological order. This was done on my days off from work, the process taking far longer than I expected.
On a rainy Saturday afternoon, I was leafing through art assignments, smiling at the crayon drawings of flowers and trees when a smallish paper slid out from between two folios. I wasn’t surprised as many such photographs had been jumbled up in the initial packing. It turned out to be a photo, black and white with a border stained greenish one side as if something corrosive had leaked onto it. It was of a house I'd never seen before. One that dominated a small clearing surrounded on the left hand side by thick greenery with a small slice of lawn overtaken by longish grass. The house itself was a small two-story cottage, weathered white clapboarding, a peaked roof with a weathervane perched high.
Script ran across the top border in my grandmother's sparsely elegant hand.
The house on Cherry Tree Lane.
I blinked at the name, dredging up a plethora of stories I'd been told throughout my years. I didn't recall such a name. I recalled Leighton Street, San Diego Street, Elmco Ave and many other addresses that bore no resemblance to the one I held. "This place...," something about the photo struck me as wholly innocuous.
Mom sat in a white wicker chair on the veranda overlooking the tree-lined street. On the table beside her, a pitcher of iced tea sweated in the summer heat. Her glass of ice and amber liquid created small staining rings on the pale green octagonal side table. "Mom," I let myself out the sliding glass door from one of the bedrooms.
"Yes, dear?" My mom had a kindly, weathered face surrounded by snow white curls. She wore a green pantsuit and small patent leather Mary Janes. She looked up at my approach, affixing her glasses on the prominent bridge of her nose.
"Was this one of the places where you lived when you were younger?"
She sighed, peering intently at the photograph. They say the human eye has linear sensitivity, capturing one in fifty photons of light. Pupils contracted, the fold of her eyelid creased and lowered rapidly. Somewhere a footfall sounded, a baseball crashed into a neighbor's car window splitting glass with an ear-shattering sound. I gasped and she fixated a hardened look on me.
"Where did you get this?"
"It was.... above in the attic." I offered.
A box fell upstairs; I heard the noise as it struck the hardwood floor.
"Where?"
"In a child's toy box along with other things. You never told me about this house before."
"Rightly, I shouldn't have." She gestured to the seat opposite the table. "My mama destroyed the photos a long time ago. I don't know how one survived the immolation."
"But, why?"
"That house...," she seemed to collect herself from the depths of memory. "That house was built on a spread of land in the San Joaquin Valley. Thereabouts in California, a place known as the breadbasket of America. The land took its name from the acres of Cherry trees surrounding the house, let out in the picking season to field workers. My daddy was hired in the Spring of the year I turned eleven and as a family we moved in there, two girls to the room here," she pointed to the second story window that gleamed a dark glassy reflection. "The downstairs had a back den that my daddy reckoned could be used as a Master bedroom on account of the upstairs having only small rooms. There was an outhouse down a tiny path," her finger traced an imaginary arc through the dense undergrowth I'd noticed before.
She stopped speaking for a time, lapsing into silence. I decided to prompt her gently. "Seemed to me a nice place, mom."
"It...It was, every day the foreman would come down the dirt road with another pickup full of workers from the town beyond the trees. They'd come and my father would join them, sometimes rising from dawn 'til sundown. We were used to this, his being gone, mama kept a right good house and made sure all our chores were done 'fore we were let out to play. Now, your Aunt Emmy, bless her heart, she was the one who found It."
At the name, my memory conjured up the withered face of an elderly woman surrounded by the white bedclothes of a hospital. Aunt Emily had wasted away five years ago; my strongest memories of her remained those of a young girl and teenager in warped old photographs. "Found what?" The sentence struck me as odd.
"Why the body of course....it was lying out there in the soil of an old cherry tree. Old moldy bone fingers poking up through the dirt, ragged clothes half-eaten and torn. We yelled for mama and she came running out of the house, thinking we had hurt ourselves."
I could picture her shock, disbelief.
"The corpse had straggly black hair still rooted to the scalp by a few jagged pieces of dry flesh. We could see the remnants of a suit. Recent rains had plagued the area and run off appeared to have loosened the soil. Mama warned us to stay away from it, taking our hands as she led us back to the house. She promised us she'd tell our father about it, he'd know what to do."
"And did he?" To me, the most logical answer was the authorities.
"He did. He buried it on the southern edge, in a little plot where my mother had been allowed to set aside as a garden. He didn't want the police sniffing around there, you must understand, things aren't the way they are now."
I could see it all in my mind; hastily spaded earth, the bones clanking against themselves as they were tossed in. My grandfather would've stamped the newly turned over dirt twice then grunted and spat brown streaked tobacco juice. He would've glanced up at the setting sun and wiped his large hands against the dusty blue coveralls.
"How could anyone rest in peace forgotten there?"
My mother folded her hands together like a prayer said but never heard. "Although silently it passed, we vowed never to speak to one another about the body Emmy and I'd found. Emmy was always a very imaginative sort of girl. I suppose it bothered her more than it should've. I certainly had no difficulty in playing with my doll and at other small children's games. Emmy grew wan, thin. She took to long walks by herself when we were let out to play. Mama used to think we were playing hide and seek, I didn't tell her at first...not when everything seemed to innocent, but Emmy used to go to the southern edge where a falling picket fence gave way to neatly tilled earth. I caught her there once, staring down at the ground where the dirt had been disturbed. I got the feeling she was talking to it. Now, that's not so strange for children to develop morbid sensitivities. But, she had me, her sister and well, I was jealous." My mother's face screwed up tightly, wrinkling into a round, quivering surface of a tho
usand wrinkles. "Emmy was my sister. Even so, I was the one who took her doll.
Oh! It was bad of me, I know. Emmy went nearly crazy looking everywhere for the doll and I pretended to help and look for it. Mama knew it was me all the time. After supper, she cornered me in the tea rose patterned kitchen and made me confess to the whereabouts of the missing doll. I'd put it nowhere special...an old steamer trunk with a broken lock that served as the table in the den."
I could see them the shadowed figure of my maternal grandmother, perhaps sighing, hands on hips swathed in a large homemade apron while my mother knelt down and sheepishly opened the trunk. Perhaps Aunt Emmy tugged on her Gingham skirts. Maybe she let out a cry and flew at my
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