The Day the Angels Fell

by Shawn Smucker

  The fire grabbed at the paper and the leaves first, and a small stream of smoke rose. I blew lightly on the baby flame, and it reached up to the twigs and crackled, sending one or two sparks toward the sky. I scurried for a few larger twigs and small branches. At that point the fire was about three feet from the cave.

  The Tree of Life started to look a little more withered, as if the fire was melting it, so I nudged the flaming branches a few feet farther from the cave with my foot and added some more branches. Light danced all around me, and I turned off my flashlight and put it into the backpack. I checked on the Tree again. It looked suddenly sturdy, and the small white flowers weren’t drooping. They turned slowly, the way sunflowers lean toward the sun, and faced the fire. The blossoms opened wide, drinking in the light.

  I sat down with my back against the stone cliff and stared into the fire. Every so often I glanced over my shoulder and into the cave, checking on the Tree, and each time it seemed a little healthier.

  The warmth made my eyes heavy. The dancing light put my mind at ease. I leaned my head back against the stone. I had done it. Now all I could do was wait.

  The shadows shifted like a hypnotist’s locket. It was me and the fire and the stone behind my head and the Tree of Life and the changing shadows. I imagined there was an ocean on the other side of the trees, an ocean instead of a river that stretched out into eternity. And maybe, just maybe, if I sailed long enough and hard enough and didn’t let the storms sink my ship, I could reach the other side, where I’d find my mother waiting, standing at the top of white cliffs, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun glaring off the crystal sea.

  Because it was only me and the rock and the fire and the trees, it felt like the beginning of time. It felt like I was the first person and that all possibilities and hopes began and ended with me and that small Tree of Life in the cave behind me. The fire wasn’t a fire anymore—it was our planet’s sun, young and new. The trees weren’t mature trees anymore—they were moments old, newly created. Even the shadows shed their strange nature and became young shadows, playful and harmless.

  All of these thoughts swirled through my mind and I fell asleep, dreaming of the beginning of the world.

  I woke up once in the night and the fire had grown low, so I threw on some more branches. As the fire rose back to life I thought I saw the Amarok moving among the treetops, its dark outline swaying with the movement of the highest branches. I ducked down and held very still, hoping it wouldn’t see me pressed up against the rock. While it didn’t come down from the trees, I thought I saw it stop and look at me, waiting for something to happen.

  I saw the outline of a man as well, or something like a man but taller and somehow more beautiful, even though it was only a shadow. But as I threw more branches on the fire, the shadow man dissolved in the light.

  I fell back to sleep.

  I’m not sure what woke me. It could have been that my back had grown stiff from sleeping against the rock wall. It could have been the dim fog lit by a gray light that filled the forest or the distant rumble of approaching storm clouds. It could have been the realization that the fire had gone out, its dying breaths blowing smoke in my direction, a smoke that swirled and combined with the mist. It could have even been that I sensed someone approaching from the Road to Nowhere, their light footsteps snapping tiny twigs and breaking last fall’s leaves.

  Or it could have been the brief sighting I had of the Amarok, far off in the trees and the fog. I could barely see it, its black coat moving silently through the green. It padded off in the opposite direction, disappearing once again.

  The sound of footsteps grew closer. I looked into the trees. The fog revealed only the outline of a person sneaking here and there through the shadows. A voice called out.

  “Sam? Sam! What are you doing here?”

  It was Abra, and I was filled with both relief and anger. Relief because I was scared of being there alone, with the Tree and the Amarok and the fog. But I also felt anger, because what was she doing there without me? Had she come to steal the Tree, only to find that I already had it?

  Thunder rolled again, loud and close, and I could almost smell the rain.

  “What am I doing here?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”

  My accusation didn’t bother her.

  “Everyone’s looking for you!” she said. “They’re all nervous after what happened to the lamb and the tracks they found. Your dad came to our house not long ago and said you were missing when he went out to do chores this morning. Everybody in the whole town is on the move, looking for you. My dad went searching in the mountains along the river . . .”

  Her voiced stopped as she came closer. I saw her staring at the coals, still warm on the ground in front of me. They shone like small pieces of wet fruit. Smoke rose, a confession. She looked behind me and her face gave in to a weary sadness.

  “Sam, what have you done?” she asked.

  Various realizations flooded through my mind in that moment. My back wasn’t resting up against the cliff wall anymore, although I hadn’t moved. My hands, down at my sides, were holding on to massive tree roots so gnarled and twisted and large that they had to be roots from a tree that was thousands and thousands of years old. And even though the smoke from the fire still drifted toward me, I couldn’t smell it. Instead, the sweetest fragrance surrounded me, the smell of new things, the smell of hope.

  I turned and looked behind me. The Tree of Life had taken root, and it was huge. It had completely taken over the cave and grown up the side of the cliff wall until it stretched nearly as high as any of the surrounding trees. Branches spread out in every direction, each one drooping heavy with white blossoms the size of my fist.

  Time seemed to stop as I examined the Tree. I stood up and touched the bark, surprised to find that it was soft like felt, and when I pressed on it my fingers left indentations. The leaves were large and almost oval, sort of like magnolia leaves, and they grew in an alternating pattern on the branches.

  Some of the blossoms had yielded a lime-green fruit that blended in with the leaves. In fact, it was so close in color to the leaves that at first the fruit was invisible. But as soon as I saw one piece of it, I realized the entire Tree was covered with it. There was so much fruit that it weighed some of the lower branches down to where they almost touched the ground.

  Lightning struck somewhere up in the mountain, and a few moments later it was followed by the growl of thunder. I walked over to one of those low branches and stared at the fruit. I could almost see inside it. Each one was like a tiny crystal ball, swirling with images and dreams and years. I reached up and touched the fruit, and it was as smooth as glass. I pulled my hand away, worried that I would shatter it, and that somehow the shattering of one piece would ruin the entire tree. When I pulled my hand away, one of the leaves caught in my fingers and stayed in my hand. I stared at it, stared into its waxy surface, but it didn’t have the same quality as the fruit. There was nothing there to see, except perhaps the deepest green in the universe. I held it tightly in my hand.

  Abra seemed to be staring at all the same things I stared at, and her eyes went from disappointment in me to wonder at that impossible Tree. She walked to a different branch and did the same thing I had done—touched the smooth fruit, felt the soft bark of the branches.

  “This is it,” she murmured. “This is the Tree of Life.”

  “What did you expect?” I asked.

  “What did I expect? Sam, I helped you because I realized that if I was going to be your friend, I had to help you. But I didn’t actually believe it. I didn’t believe this would happen. And I thought that even if it could happen, you would still do the right thing.”

  Her blue eyes stared desperately into mine. “I never believed it,” she whispered.

  “And now what?” I asked. “Now that you see it’s true?”

  She pulled her hands away from the Tree reluctantly. “You can’t do this, Sam,” she said. “It’s not right.
You can’t bring your mother back.”

  When she said those words, I felt that old darkness rise up inside me like a fire that had been fanned.

  “Can’t?” I pointed toward the branches above us, as if every single piece of fruit stood as a reason it could be done.

  “Shouldn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Shouldn’t. She’s at peace now! You want to bring her back to this?”

  “What do you think I should do?” I asked, trying hard to control the anger I felt. “This is it! This is what everyone wants, isn’t it? Death, gone! No more sadness! No more loss!”

  My pleading anger grew into a rage, fueled by the more frequent lightning strikes and the pattering sound of the rain beginning to hit the highest leaves of the trees. A storm was brewing.

  “Sam, you have to destroy it! This is the story Mr. Tennin was telling us about! This Tree isn’t meant for us.”

  “Destroy it?” I said, almost laughing. “Destroy it? How could we destroy it now? Even if I wanted to, how could we—you and me, two kids—keep this from happening?”

  She answered quietly, “With fire.”

  31

  I SHOOK MY HEAD. I prepared to argue with her, to tell her all the reasons for bringing my mother back—that she didn’t want to be dead, that she was waiting for me on the other side of the water, that she was fighting her way back up from under the ground. I tried to figure out how to explain the emptiness her absence had left inside me. But before any of the words came out, a huge shadow fell from the surrounding trees.

  It was the Amarok, and it walked slowly toward Abra, baring its teeth and giving a growl that shook the earth under my feet, a growl that mingled with the thunder and the lightning. It felt different from when we had seen the Amarok on the road. At that point it had seemed curious. But there, in the shadow of the Tree of Life, the Amarok was different. It was angry, and it perceived Abra as a threat to the life of the Tree. Somehow it knew that she would destroy it if she was given a chance.

  Abra looked tiny, staring at the Amarok approaching through the mist, its massive paws snapping branches and crushing leaves. She turned slightly away from me to face the Amarok, but I could still see her bright blue eyes flashing as they faced the east and the coming storm.

  “You don’t belong here,” she said, and I was surprised at how little fear there was in her voice.

  Even though the Amarok walked slowly, it covered a lot of ground with its long strides. Its eyes were black, two glittering pieces of coal, and there was a depth there, a darkness so deep that it didn’t have a bottom. The Amarok’s growl turned into a low, slow voice.

  “That fruit does not belong to you,” it said, and I shuddered, hearing the words from my dream.

  “I don’t want the fruit. I want to destroy it,” she said, gritting her teeth with determination.

  It growled again, so close it could have reached out and put one of its massive paws on her shoulder. She bent her knees slightly and reached around behind her, and I noticed the bulge at her back. She pulled the sword out from where she had been hiding it and held it out in front of her. The tip of it trembled, and I knew she was afraid.

  The sword was definitely longer than it had been before, or maybe it grew after she pulled it out, because it was more the length of a normal sword, and it wasn’t a dull gray anymore. It glowed a silvery white, like glass covered by a winter frost and lit up by the morning sun. The Amarok stopped moving for a moment. The sword changed things. It filled that early Saturday morning with all kinds of new possibilities.

  The rain fell, heavy and clean. The drops disturbed everything, rustling the branches, causing the rocks to glisten, and making the dead leaves on the forest floor dance around. I guess that’s what made Abra, the Amarok, and me stand out so much—everything else was moving, twitching, yet the three of us stood there completely still, unwavering, waiting to see who would make the first move.

  The Amarok circled Abra again, and I found myself worried that the animal might somehow damage the Tree. That thought brought to the front of my mind how far I had fallen. I was more worried about the Tree than I was about my own friend.

  “That fruit does not belong to you, to keep or to destroy,” it growled at her, and I could barely understand its words. They were a combination of human sounds and animal growls. They spilled into being like vomit.

  Without warning the Amarok lunged at Abra and she swung the sword, but the huge wolflike beast dodged her swing. It kept drifting around her from side to side. It darted at her, she swung the sword again, and the Amarok feinted to the side. She took one swing that knocked her off balance, and the massive black wolf plunged in and grabbed her entire body in its jaws, its mouth wrapping around her waist.

  For one heartbreaking moment, I remembered the lamb, but for some reason the Amarok didn’t bite clean through. It shook her viciously and she went limp. I felt a numbness spread through me, disbelief that all of this was happening, and the numbness slowly turned to horror and fear as the Amarok tossed Abra at me, knocking me over. She was completely limp, lifeless.

  What had I done? First my mom, dead because I had to have a stupid cat. Now Abra lay on the ground, dying because I insisted on regrowing the Tree. Was my dad next? Would I lose everyone I loved, one by one, because of my selfishness?

  Abra’s body had knocked me onto my hands and knees, and the leaf I held from the Tree of Life was crushed. There was a stickiness inside it that oozed out onto my fingers.

  “Now what about you?” the Amarok growled. “Whose side are you on?”

  But the words came from a faraway place. The crushed leaf’s thick, sticky sap was like the gel from an aloe plant, and it had a strong aroma. In the midst of that smell, the voice of the Amarok faded off to somewhere distant, somewhere far away, somewhere insignificant. I had the clearest vision of my mother’s face that I had had since her death, and she was smiling at me. I realized that some of my visions had been true, that she actually was watching for me from the top of a tall white cliff on the other side of an eternally wide body of water, but she wasn’t waiting for me to bring her back.

  She was waiting to see what I would do.

  And the smell of the leaf from the Tree of Life brought back so many good memories of my mother, memories of her taking me to the pumpkin patch in the fall when the shadows were long and cool, memories of the flowers we had planted together and of sledding down the small hill behind the barn when I was young. I even remembered things I couldn’t possibly have remembered, like the way she looked at me when I was born, as if I was a treasure she would never give up, and how she fed me a bottle and sang me her favorite songs with her eyes closed and her voice clean and clear.

  I remembered the songs, all the verses and choruses, the notes and the silence in between. They swirled around me in the fragrance of the broken leaf, and as those words and notes faded, the verse the preacher had read at her funeral service rose up through them.

  On either side of the river is the Tree of Life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations.

  “The Tree is mine,” I said. “I brought it here, and I grew it. Now I can do whatever I want with it.”

  The Amarok moved toward me, sensing my doubt. I think it knew somehow that I wasn’t sure anymore, that I didn’t know what to do, that I was as likely to destroy the Tree as I was to keep it.

  “That Tree is not yours.”

  But I could see inside the Amarok, and in the midst of that darkness was a heart of fear and doubt. The darkness inside me was dying, withering under the influence of the broken leaf, and I could see clearly. I could see things for what they truly were.

  I reached down and picked up the sword. There was no time to find something to protect my skin—I had to grab it immediately. It burned my hand, but I gritted my teeth and held it tight. The pain was excruciating, and I could feel my skin blistering, bubbling up and melting and sticking to th
e hot metal, but I knew I had to hold on. My entire arm went numb from the pain.

  I cried out, a primal sound, as the physical pain mixed with my deep sadness.

  Abra lay still on the ground behind me, and I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. The Amarok stared me down, growling, saliva dripping from its glistening teeth. The Tree was still growing, slowly, and the movement it made as it grew was like a tree in the midst of a breeze, its leaves rustling, its fruit swaying. Lightning tore through the sky, followed by an immense explosion of thunder. The rain came down heavier.

  Two flashes of light fell down in the midst of all this chaos. Those lights pounded into the ground and took form, and I knew right away that one was Mr. Jinn and the other was Mr. Tennin and that they were the two cherubim who had been fighting over the Tree of Life since the beginning of time. They shimmered and were of human form but were also something more, as if all my life I had seen humans only in a cloudy mirror until that moment. What I saw of them when they slowed was beauty and strength and power.

  They didn’t speak, but sometimes I could sense what they were saying to each other. It was as if their thought, their consciousness, was all around me, but instead of individual words, their communication was made up of streaming raw emotion and calculated movements. They streaked through the fog and the smoke like comets, and the sound of their rising was the screaming of jet planes or the roar of rockets.

  They would stop for a moment, and that was when I saw their form, but mostly they moved and flew in a blur around the Tree and over the river, and sometimes their collisions with each other made loud cracks, like the snapping of an electric cable when it comes loose from the pole and strikes the ground. There were bursts of flame when they collided too, and the fire fell at the base of the trees on the far side of the river and licked at the broad trunks. Soon smoke from that fire mingled with the fog.