by Jon Cohen
Wolf noticed something, the little corner jutting from behind the photo. Another photo tucked behind the frame. He tugged it into view. And felt, like the sear of a harsh chemical, the anger burning into his eyes as he studied the revealed photo. It was a snapshot, in the same spot, taken moments before or after Wolf and Harry had happily posed. It was blurry, like a kid had taken the picture. Wolf closed his eyes and saw himself holding the Kodak Instamatic to his eye, looking through the lens at Harry and his father, Jeffrey Crane.
Wolf blinked at the photo. Little Harry, with his father’s arm around his shoulders. Harry smiling. His father smiling, too. Wolf checked to see if there was another hidden photo. One that he wanted to see, and did not want to see: Dad with his arm around me.
But there were no more photographs. Wolf closed his eyes, and tried to remember. Was there ever such a photograph? He tried to feel it, the embracing weight of his father’s arm around his shoulders.
He snapped out of it. Furious. “Why’d you fall for that shit, Harry?” Can’t you see it in Dad’s eyes? It’s right there. He’s looking into a distance he can’t wait to escape into. And are you doing that, too, Harry? Is that what I see? Wolf held the cell phone light right up to their faces. They looked like conspirators, the two of them. Dad ran...and you’re a runner, too, Harry.
I hate it when people run.
And it doesn’t help when they have four million dollars. Dad took my life, and you took my money.
“Wolford, you’re being overdramatic. Calm down.” Wolf hated when teachers and counselors told him that, in middle school. Calm down, Wolford, calm down. Frightened of him, so large. He didn’t even like it when he said it to himself. So he kept saying it. “Calm down, calm down, Wolford.” Because that’s the kind of guy he was. A beeline kind of guy. Beelining himself straight to the only emotion he understood. He felt the flare of his anger, and saw it, too. The spark, the flare, the flame—Wolf held the cigarette lighter under the photo of Harry and his father. It smoked, caught fire and burned. He grinned as his father curled and blackened. And then Harry went up in smoke, too.
A little stunned, Wolf dropped the smoldering black ash into the kitchen glass and sucked on his burned fingertips.
“Calm down.” And this time he meant it. You don’t calm down, you’re going to have a fucking heart attack.
And he almost did have a heart attack when the smoke alarm above his head broke into an ear-piercing string of amplified chirps.
Wolf bolted for the front door, spun around, ran back into the den and scooped up the photo of him and Harry, then bolted for the front door again and ran into the predawn Waverly dark and leaped into his car, parked in the shadows two blocks away.
17
It was five in the morning and Harry was asleep, dreaming of the beech tree. It was speaking to him in Amanda’s voice. No, wait. The tree wasn’t speaking—Amanda was speaking, very softly. There she was, perched on a low branch like the Cheshire Cat, whispering as the wind might whisper through the leaves of a tree, “Spring has come. Wake up, wake up.”
And then she raised her arm above her head and pointed. Up.
* * *
Harry woke with a start.
Where was he? It was very dark, but also very bright. The full moon cast its light through the multicolored windows of the tree house. Moonbeam through colored glass is the light of dreams, so it took Harry a moment to understand he was awake. He closed his eyes and revisited his lingering dream. Amanda sitting in the beech, telling him to wake up. Spring has come. Swinging his legs over the side of the cot, Harry scrambled into his clothes, pulled his Forest Service cap firmly on his head and went out onto the deck. He looked up into the dark center of the beech. Up seemed infinite and unreachable. But it was the only way he was going to get to the light.
He trembled once, a full body shake, like a racehorse at the starting gate, then narrowed his eyes, swung up onto the roof of the tree house and grabbed hold of the first limb. He pulled himself up easily, hooked his leg over the thick limb and stood. The effort of climbing no longer hurt. He wasn’t panting for breath. His body had changed since he first climbed the bitternut hickory two weeks ago. His arms and legs were strong. He flexed his shoulders and shrugged his back, felt the smooth glide of muscles—nothing popped or crackled like in those first days. The forest had changed him. Even the way he breathed was different. Longer, calmer breaths, the forest air reaching a deeper place.
He looked down. In the moonlight, he could just see the mossy roof of the tree house. He reached for another branch and pulled himself up. Once he got beyond these heavy lower branches with their wide vertical spacing (a few of them were just out of reach, and he had to spring into the air like a lemur to gain the last few inches) the branches would become more abundant and dense. A beech is a tree with weak apical dominance, so it produces an abundance of lateral shoots and a compact canopy—it’s very branchy. This made it a good climbing tree—but a tall one. Harry guessed the beech was 160 feet tall. Yesterday’s sycamore was 130.
He climbed, leaped, swung himself up. As he ascended, the tree house roof began to shrink—to car-size, then toy-size, then to the size of his thumb. Below the tree house, the forest floor turned into a distant moonlit blur lost in a spidery tangle of dark, leafless limbs. Up he went, forty feet, fifty, sixty.
As he approached the secondary canopy, the air grew thinner (or so he imagined), the branches less substantial (true). The sleepy creatures living in the tree were not pleased to see the moonlit interloper, grunting and sweating his way past their homes. Raccoons growled. Squirrels chirred and skittered by, across his shoulders, down his leg. When he gripped the rim of a damp knothole to steady himself, an opossum poked into view, bared its yellow teeth and hissed. Startled owls dipped and swooped around him. A pair of bats shot out of a dark V-crotch and flapped jaggedly past his head.
Harry leaned back against the smooth, gray trunk of the beech, breathing in the heady oxygen of a million trees. He looked to the east, toward the low rolling mountains. The light was changing. He was 110 feet off the ground, he guessed, had been climbing for almost an hour. Fifty more feet to the top.
When he reached for the next branch, his hand jostled a nest of twigs. A high screech, and a pair of wood thrushes suddenly dive-bombed him, swooping and buzzing like angry bees. Swatting them away, Harry slipped. As he fell, he grabbed hold of a long, secondary scaffold branch, thin as a rope. His plunging weight snapped it, but not completely. His knowledge of trees saved him. He jerked his body clockwise, twisting the long fibers of the branch, adding a fleeting moment of tensile strength. Instead of plummeting to the forest floor, he rappelled safely down to the next big branch, five feet below.
He hugged the beech trunk, panting like a frightened dog. But there was no time to be frightened. Up. He had to get up. Because the stars were fading, the moon was gone and the black of night had begun to lighten.
He climbed faster. Sweat dripped off his nose and fell into the void. Attuned, Harry could hear everything—his sweat falling; animals rustling in their knothole nests; birds lifting their eyelids, preparing for the coming dawn. But most of all, he heard the beech—the sap coursing through its veins, the tips of the branches quivering as though touched by a cosmic tuning fork. Only one element was missing. Harry pulled himself through the canopy, gasping as he strained upward, as fast as he possibly dared. One element, due east, just behind the rolling swells of the Endless Mountains.
A purple finch chirped.
A second finch chimed in.
A sleepy pause. A yellow warbler warbled. Then dozens of finches, warblers and thrushes began to call from all the trees, the chorus of the forest tuning up.
Harry reached the very top of the beech. He pulled himself up the tapered central leader, crooked an arm around it like King Kong clinging to the top of the Empire State Building and looked east, toward the barel
y visible dark lumps and bumps of the Endless Mountains.
There, right there. It had begun. First, a faint glimmer at the tip of a cloud. Then a thin, bright crescent peeking into view. And finally, rising into full splendor, the sun, igniting the scattered clouds, overwhelming the night, dimming the stars.
Harry shimmied even higher, as high as he could, a human flag on the pinnacle of a flagpole. The leader creaked and swayed, and Harry swayed with it. He reached into a ray of light as it touched the highest tip of the beech. His fingertips glowed.
Awakened by the sun, the terminal bud on the beech opened. A hint of green—the beginning of the beginning. Harry heard it happen—the apical husk unwrapping with a dry scritch, denticulate margins and resinous leaf hairs rasping apart, sap racing like heart’s blood through the microscopic xylem and phloem. A second bud opened. A third, a fourth, dozens, thousands. A wave of sound cascaded from the top of the tree to the bottom, as the sun rose and the beech tree came to life. The chirping birds, hidden within the green of the forest, erupted as one.
Harry looked north, south, east, west, directing his sweeping gaze on the hills and dales of the Endless Mountains. He saw at the base of them the sinuous snake of the Susquehanna River turned into glittering mercury by the sun; saw a wavery cloud of birds rise up and scatter; saw a train crossing a far distant bridge; saw old mining sites and scattered towns and the tops of millions of trees.
“Look at all the trees, Beth,” Harry whispered.
And he knew what she’d say. Harry’s Trees.
“I’m going to do something crazy,” he said.
Your eyes are smiling again, Harry. At last.
“There’s this kid named Oriana. And she has this plan for me and the money, Beth. And I think I can do it.” Because once you climb this high, you keep climbing.
Harry waited for Beth to speak to him again. But there was nothing more for her to say. He clung to the tree in the dawn light. He breathed in and he breathed out. And he understood: this is how it would be. Beth was inside him, but he could let her go, too. It was a wonderful, heart-rending sensation. It was life. He breathed Beth deep inside himself, held her for a moment, then breathed her out over the spring forest. And all the new leaves took her in and became a little greener, and then they, in turn, breathed her back to Harry.
“Skreeeeee,” cried a distant hawk, circling high overhead. It was the red-tailed hawk. Harry watched as it flew west, straight over Amanda’s house. It kept on flying until it disappeared into the dawn light.
The sun rose and shined on Harry. He absorbed the light and breathed the forest air. After a time, he took off his Forest Service cap, undid the adjustment strap and attached it as high on the leader branch as he could reach.
The mountain wind shifted the hat right and left, fluttered it back and forth like a flag.
Harry watched for a while and then began his descent.
* * *
Oriana was at school. She’d argued, but Amanda sent her off. “Mom, you’ll text me when he climbs it, right?”
If he climbs it, Amanda thought, standing alone now on the back deck. She raised her binoculars to the beech tree, lit by the early-morning light.
Why hadn’t Harry climbed it yet? A day had gone by, two—and he hadn’t climbed any trees. Was she wrong about the beech? Was he done with climbing?
And then it hit her. This morning, the beech tree was different.
His words came back to her: One by one, like slow-motion fireworks, tree after tree will burst to life. And the very last tree will be this big guy, the American beech.
This was the day. The beech was green, bursting with life. It was leafing out.
That’s what Harry had been waiting for—the perfect moment to climb the tallest tree in the forest.
“Harry,” she whispered. “You’re climbing it right now.”
But where was he? She scanned up and down the tree, looking to see how high he’d gotten. It was hard to see through the new veil of green.
How can he possibly make it to the top? she thought, her heart racing. The beech was so incredibly tall.
“Harry. It’s a crazy idea,” she whispered.
How many times in the ER had she had patients who’d pulled some crazy stunt—plowed a too-steep hill and overturned a tractor; taken an ATV out on the ice; stood on the top rung of a rickety ladder, reaching out with the paintbrush to get that last bit of trim, way up. So many tumbles and falls, so many accidents, she’d seen it all.
But Harry wasn’t crazy. Not like the guys around here always pressing their luck, doing dumb stuff. He’s careful.
Early-morning light poured through the palette of emergent green dappling every tree in the forest, a crayon box offering a thousand shades of a single color, all of it between her and a good view of the beech. She moved from one end of the deck to the other, looking for a good angle.
There. A clear view. She scanned the wide gray trunk of the beech, panning out to the lateral branches, now awash in green. Her gaze swept from the roof of the tree house upward, looking for him. No, Harry definitely wasn’t crazy, he was careful. He was methodical. He’d studiously prepared himself over the last two weeks to climb this particular tree.
Again she remembered his words, remembered the night he’d removed his wedding ring, when they were standing on the tree house deck, looking out over the leafless forest.
“So when the buds open, two hundred thousand of them all at once, it sounds like the tree is giving a great big, raspy sigh of relief,” Harry said.
“Because spring has come,” Amanda said.
“Because winter’s over,” he said.
Remembering this made her blush, and that surprised her.
She focused the binoculars, raised them slowly up and up, scanning the mid canopy, with its denser tangle of branches. She looked for the jiggle of branches that would reveal his presence, or the white of his Forest Service cap.
“Where are you, Harry?”
And then at the top of the tree, a flash of white! She leaned back and focused on it...
It was his cap—his cap was attached to the top branch of the tree, fluttering in the wind.
He’d planted his flag atop his mountain.
“Because winter’s over,” he said.
“Spring has come,” she said.
She smiled. “You did it, Harry!”
It looked amazing up there, Harry’s cap atop the world.
In a rush of excitement, Amanda thought, He’s probably just gotten down from the tree. I’ll get some stuff together for pancakes and go over to the tree house and make breakfast for him. He deserves something, he—
She was still looking at the beech through her binoculars when something caught her eye. A clutch of branches shaking, about twenty feet below Harry’s fluttering cap. The shaking stopped, started up again. Harry coming down the tree?
More shaking, and when she finally fixed on the spot, going up on her toes, leaning into the deck railing—it wasn’t Harry. Two raccoons were chasing each other around and around the trunk.
She relaxed, about to lower her binoculars, when she saw something else. A raw wound on the beech—the jagged stump of a freshly snapped limb. A sudden sick feeling in her stomach. No. The raccoons snapped it, chasing around. It happens all the time, she thought, raccoons, opossums snapping branches. And sometimes they fell—these animals born to climb—tumbling through the air. Walking in the forest, you came upon them, dead at the base of a tree. It was the precarious nature of life.
Amanda gripped the deck railing. Because she knew. Harry had snapped that branch. Harry, descending in triumph, had gone too fast, done something stupid, something unsafe. After climbing so many trees—so many!—his luck had run out. He’d fallen to his death. He had put his foot down too hard on a weak limb and it snapped and he fell—oh God, from such a h
eight—to the forest floor. This man who had come into Oriana’s life, who had begun to right her daughter’s world, was dead. And Oriana would know forevermore: there was no righting the world.
Amanda stumbled down the stairs of the deck and across the backyard into the woods, her heart pounding because she was so angry for Oriana. That Harry would do this, that he would do this to her.
But if he were dead, why was she running? What was the point of running, the laurel bushes scraping her legs, pine branches whipping at her. She was running because she was terrified, because she didn’t want Harry to be dead. Amanda was so scared that for a fantastic moment she thought she might be able to get there in time, in some miraculous manner she might hold out her arms and catch him.
It was the craziest thing she had ever experienced, running through the forest with her arms out, prepared in some impossible way to break Harry’s fall to earth. So that when she came suddenly upon him, stopping short, her arms extended, she thought for a startled instant she had saved him. Even though he was fifty yards away from where she stood.
Amanda slowly lowered her arms and stared in wonder. Harry was alive. Incredibly alive.
He hadn’t heard her crashing through the forest because he was standing in the middle of the rock-strewn stream, the water rushing noisily around him. He was naked, his back to her, splashing water on himself, bathing.
Harry had come down from his tree, sweaty and triumphant. The stream was a few hundred feet from the tree house. He bathed in it every day, neatly piling his clothes, wading into the cold water with a towel around his waist in case Oriana came sneaking into view. He always carried a bar of soap he placed on a mossy rock in the middle of the stream. His routine. But this morning, he had shed his clothes exuberantly and tramped into the waters. He cupped the clear water with both hands and tossed it into the air, leaned back and let it splash down onto his body. He did again and again. The sun turned the water droplets on his skin into glittering jewels.
