Harry's Trees

by Jon Cohen

  Amanda stared. She had seen this before, animals splashing in this very stream. Red foxes, deer, even a black bear once, dipping itself on a blistering summer day and shaking its heavy flesh and wet fur. Harry, naked and wildly alive, was one of them. A creature of the forest.

  He pushed his wet hands through his hair—thick tangles of black, his hair taking on a new wildness. Standing straight and tall, Harry looked like a different man. His body wasn’t heavy, didn’t possess the rural mass of Dean or Cliff, but it was surprisingly strong, lean, the triangle of his shoulders and back tapering to his waist, a good ass she shouldn’t be staring at, solid thighs, muscular calves. A body transformed by days spent struggling up trees. Amanda looked beyond Harry to the beech. The huge tree had not been an instrument of death, but its absolute opposite. A giver of life.

  The water parted around Harry. Sunlight filtered through the green trees set him aglow. Amanda continued to stare at him. She had been watching him for days. She’d watched him at night, too, looking for the orange flame of the distant kerosene lamp that assured her that he was there, in the tree house.

  If he turned around, he would see her. Harry, who thought he was alone, who needed to be alone. It would embarrass them both. But still she was compelled to watch, absorbing the wonder of what she was witnessing. For a widower’s year, Harry had been in a trance-like sleep, and the forest had kissed him awake.

  Harry froze. Cocked his head. He’d sensed something. Turning, he saw the rustle of leaves, fifty yards away, in a patch of stream willow. He was about to scramble for his clothes, when a doe and her fawn stepped into view. The doe eyed him for a long moment. And when she was certain that Harry was a fellow creature of the forest, she allowed the fawn to step forward and drink from the stream.

  18

  Simple would suffice. Beth liked simple. Harry, freshly bathed in the chill waters of the stream, shaved, put on a clean shirt, combed his hair and set off into the forest, ring in hand.

  The sun was bright through the green of the trees. He wondered about Amanda, what the moment had been like for her. She put her ring in a drawer, and that was that? No. And then, I just kept shedding his stuff, she said. Got rid of as much as I could as fast as I could. As if that would make it easier. It wasn’t easy for Amanda, it was doubly hard, because she had Oriana’s grief as well as her own.

  And now Harry had their grief as well as his own. Remarkably, the disastrous decision to buy the lottery ticket a year ago had one positive outcome. It led him here, to Oriana. I can return Oriana to her mother, he thought, and together they can move forward. And that, for Harry, was the gift hidden within the story of the grum and his gold.

  The less I have, the more they will have. I will dig away at the mountain of gold until Oriana emerges, free, released from her spell of grief. The Plan was a good plan.

  But first, a proper Beth farewell, the next step in his long goodbye. He would leave the ring at the base of the sugar maple because that’s where he’d reached for the Snickers—the gold that saved his life—and found a way into his future. He would return to the tree house. Okay, Oriana, he’d say, I’m ready.

  For a few minutes, moving through the ordinary familiarity of the forest, the world seemed to Harry like a reasonable place. Perhaps even straightforward, after the convolution of death-bringing lottery tickets, life-saving hawks, grums, willful little girls and very tall beech trees. Really, all he had to accomplish next was a mere financial transaction. There’d be four million dollars in his bank account, and then there wouldn’t. The Plan was a wee bit fancy, perhaps. Or hell, maybe not. No reason to be nervous about it, the Swiss do this sort of thing all the time, right? Ordinary Americans do it. Oriana had shown him the sites. Tons of sites. Big deal, Harry, gold. Everybody’s doing it!

  He stopped in his tracks. Stared. The forest an ordinary and reasonable place? He had reached the sugar maple and the stone wall. Sitting atop the wall was an old woman looking for all the world like...a witch. Frizzly white hair, wrinkly face spookily veiled in a cloud of smoke. Very witchy. The smoke swirled away, and Harry saw that she was smoking a large meerschaum pipe.

  “‘Are you a Being Natural or a Being Unnatural, O forest-dweller?’” she said in a raspy voice.

  Harry took a step back from her.

  Olive laughed, smoke puffing from her mouth in little bursts, like a steam locomotive. “It’s just a quote, dear, from a short story, a bit of Gothic piffle written by Washington Irving in 1838 entitled ‘The Midnight Encounter.’ The protagonist asks the question of a ghost. ‘Are you a Being Natural or a Being Unnatural, O forest-dweller?’ The action takes place in a cemetery in the middle of the forest primeval.”

  “Excuse me. Who are you?” Harry said.

  “Well, who are you, for heaven’s sake?” She examined him. “Wait, don’t tell me.” She relit her pipe, exhaled a plume of smoke and poked a finger into it as if in mystical analysis. She pursed her lips and nodded. “You are Harold F. Crane, forester, renting the Jefferses’ tree house for three weeks, though tricked into four.”

  Harry’s mouth opened and closed.

  Her laugh was a cackle. “I’m Olive Perkins, dear, local librarian, and Ronnie Wilmarth was bursting with the news of you. He has a gift for not keeping secrets. It’s practically a superpower.”

  “You’re out here looking for me?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question. Why have you come to my stone wall and my maple tree?” Her eyes fixed on the broken limb draped over the far end of the wall. She sighed deeply. “My poor old sugar maple. My poor, poor tree.” She burst into sudden tears and dropped her pipe.

  Harry’s hand went to his heart. He’d broken her tree. He hurried to the wall, got up beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. Her bones were bird-like. He was holding the saddest bird in the world.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “You were having a nice sunny walk in the woods. And you stumbled upon a scene of woe.”

  But why so much woe? The tree was old, yes, but still healthy, the wound would heal. “I’m sorry about your tree,” he said. And he was, although he did not admit that he was the perpetrator of the crime.

  “You’ve seen worse, I’m sure. As a forester, I imagine you’ve seen absolutely dreadful things happen to trees. Lightning strikes. Fires. Beetles and borers.”

  “It’s the nature of things,” Harry said.

  “True enough. And if catastrophe doesn’t get you, time will. The great scythe of time. An old tree, an old wall and an old woman. Limbs snap, rocks tumble, the flesh weakens and withers. Truly, it is the nature of things.”

  Harry patted her hand. “But look at the new green all around you. Spring comes, too, you know. That’s also the nature of things.”

  Olive smiled, tears shining in the wrinkles of her cheeks. “One is apt to forget, but you are absolutely right. Spring.” She leaned back from him. “This old hag before you, in the winter of her decline—can you imagine her in the spring of her youth?”

  “You’re not a hag. And yes. I can imagine it.”

  “Oh piss and pissle, you’re lying.” She pointed at the meerschaum in the leaves at the base of the wall, Mark Twain’s carved face scowling up at them. Or was it a look of amusement? “Be a dear and fetch the old hag’s pipe.”

  Harry got the pipe. She filled it from a small leatherette pouch, then eyed him as she tamped her tobacco and lit it. She tilted back and blew a great stream of smoke up into the heavy branches of the maple.

  “It’s difficult to imagine me young, I know,” Olive said. “But let’s try something. Since you know trees. Turn your forester’s eyes to the maple, and imagine how it looked sixty years ago. It was perhaps twenty or thirty feet tall, its bark smooth and gray. No broken limbs, no knotholes. It was young, Harry.”

  He saw it. For a dream-like instant, he saw the sugar maple, young and reaching for
the sky. Not a blemish of age on it. He turned and looked at Olive. And she, too, was suddenly young! Her skin smooth, her brown hair lustrous on her shoulders, her posture straight and strong. She smiled.

  The veil of pipe smoke cleared, and Olive returned to her old self.

  Harry stared at her in amazement.

  “You saw me, didn’t you?” Olive said. “The possibility that I was once young?”

  “How did you—?”

  “Mental nudge. A librarian’s trick. In the old reading-hour days, to get the children ready for a story, I’d say, ‘Close your eyes and imagine you are in a castle or a cave, and the voice in your ear is not mine, but a wizard’s or maybe the rumbling growl of a dragon.’ Got the little buggers every time. Especially Ronnie Wilmarth, who was a fidgeter.”

  Harry was still staring at her. “You were beautiful.”

  Olive smiled. “Well, well. You’re my kind of fella. Suggestible.”

  Highly, thought Harry.

  “Well, I wasn’t beautiful, but I was young. The old know that no matter what you looked like when you were young—even if you wore tortoiseshell glasses and had mousy brown hair—you were beautiful. Because youth itself is beautiful.”

  Harry closed his eyes. Unstuck in time, he saw young Beth perched on the handlebars of the three-speed bike they had just bought at a yard sale. Beth, beautiful and laughing as he pedaled down Kirlsen Hill toward campus. He opened his eyes at the sound of Olive’s voice.

  “Harry. I need a favor from you, a kindness. May I tell you a story? This old librarian is in desperate need to tell a story.” She patted the stone wall. “Come sit beside me.”

  Harry sat beside her. Together, they looked up into the sugar maple as Olive puffed on her pipe and told her story. In the swirl of smoke lifting into the tree, Harry saw every detail of every word she spoke.

  “It’s a love story,” Olive began. “Which is the most important kind of story there is.”

  Tight in his hand, Harry’s own love story, contained in a small circle of gold.

  Pipe smoke left Olive in a sigh. “But life being life, love stories don’t always end the way we want them to. The one I’m about to tell you is full of heartbreak and woe. And utter foolishness. And I won’t pretend it’s not autobiographical. I won’t fancy it up with ‘Once upon a time,’ although it is utterly a fact that in our moment of love I was a princess and he was my prince, and that when we were together in the midnight of this forest, the light cast from the moon was a shimmering light, and the air was a perfumed bower of bliss.

  “In other words, we were young and hot for each other and we made love. Multiple times.” She blew out a puff of smoke. “I did not get pregnant. That is not the woe of this story.

  “I see your look, Harry Crane. Hard to imagine, right? That the old were young, that they had sex.” She laughed and shook her head. “It was a lot of damn fun. Shimmying out of my underwear, rolling around on a blanket.” She pointed with the stem of her pipe. “Right over there, in that little patch of sunshine and grass. Good Lord, if I shimmied out of anything these days, I’d end up in traction in the hospital!”

  Harry laughed. Olive, too.

  “It was 1955,” she said. “I was eighteen. But an enlightened eighteen, I made sure the young man wore protection. He had a little box of condoms, got them in Scranton. Certainly, he didn’t buy them from Rognoff’s Pharmacy in downtown New Milford. Ha! No, down in Scranton. Trojans, ten to a box. Only one brand and one model in those days. They sure weren’t the lubricated, circus-colored wonders you see now at CVS.” Olive smiled and looked into the distance. “But they worked just fine.”

  Her face grew serious.

  “So, yes,” she said. “We would meet and make love in the night forest. Like Hester Prynne and the Reverend Dimmesdale. But my story is not The Scarlet Letter—except that of course, it is. Because at its heart lies a secret. Our love—that was the secret. Our love was a hidden thing. And no matter how you lie to yourself, how one sweetens the truth, secrecy is the worm in the apple. And what my love—my prince—hid, was me. He would not admit to me. He would not go to his parents and utter my name. There was nothing shameful about me, Harry. I was a good girl. A good, good girl. But I was not good enough. In an insurmountable way, I was not right. So we planned to elope.

  “He’d bought a ring, down in Scranton. A secret engagement ring, and each time we made love, he’d slip it on my finger.” Olive raised her left hand, knobby with arthritis, and touched the third finger, where there was no ring. “And when I would leave the forest and return to my parents’ house, I would take it off again and hide it beneath a floorboard in my bedroom.

  “Our plan was simple. We would elope, move away to a place where no one knew our names. It was the name, you see. The name was everything. He could not give his to me. Not here, not in this county.

  “On the moonlit night of June 14, 1955, I entered these woods with a little cardboard suitcase, and the engagement ring on my finger. I was so proud. I was so happy.” Olive’s voice dropped to a whisper. “My love was not waiting for me. In his place, upon this wall, was a note. I saw it as soon as I came through the trees. Lit up in the moonlight. Aglow with fate. I barely had the strength to raise it to my eyes. It burned my fingers. It seared my soul.”

  She held up her hand as if reading from the note, as if all of her life it was there before her.

  “Olive, I love you with all my heart. But I had to tell Father. I had to. I could not marry you without his approval. He did not give it. And what I now realize, thinking about it, maturely, is that my love for you is a betrayal of my family. Oh Olive, my name is our fate. Keep the ring. Hold it in your hand, sometimes, and remember me. I love you, but I cannot have you. You will find someone better than I, someone who deserves you.”

  Olive shook her head. “They sent him away. A grown man, allowing himself to be sent away. I never saw him again. And all that remained of our love was a diamond ring. A ring. That great symbol of binding love, and it didn’t protect me. In stories, the ring always protects, or has great power. I thought it would bind us forever.” She touched her ringless finger. “But there is no safety in rings. They don’t protect anything.”

  “No,” Harry said softly. “They don’t.” He opened his right hand, slowly, and revealed his wedding band to her.

  Olive’s eyes went from the gold ring in his palm, to the pale ring of skin on the third finger of his left hand.

  “Oh my. You have a story.”

  “It’s only five words long—she died a year ago. And I’m out here to say goodbye. Which turns out to be a long and complicated process. I’m not sure I’ll ever finish saying it.”

  Olive reached for him, and they sat for a long moment, Harry and the old woman, holding hands on the stone wall. “You never finish, Harry. I’m not finished with it either. Why does the universe allow love to happen? Against such odds—death, abandonment, and a thousand other misfortunes and ordeals—why would we risk falling in love? When it can be snatched from us at any time for any reason?”

  Harry looked away.

  Olive closed his fingers over the wedding band. “Because it’s worth it. Worth the risk and the pain. Of all the glorious enchantments of this world—spring, snow, laughter, red roses, dogs, books—love is by far the best.”

  She released Harry and got down off the low stone wall. She took in the sugar maple, the wall, the forest. Hugged herself and smiled sorrowfully. “By its very nature, though, love is tragic. You can’t protect it. No matter how tightly you hold on to the one you love, they leave you or you leave them. That’s what life is, loving and letting go. I am so grateful to those two young lovers of sixty years ago. I am so grateful to have tasted love. But all love ends tragically. Because, tragically, love always ends. What a heartbreaking and wondrous conundrum! Whether you have it just a few weeks, or years, or your entire life—al
ways, it ends.” She lit her pipe, drew deeply, pursed her lips and blew. She reached her hand into the hovering, swirling, slowly vanishing cloud.

  Love, thought Harry. Here and gone like a puff of smoke.

  Olive faced him. “I now turn this hallowed spot over to you. Come to my library sometime, Harry Crane. Pratt Public Library, up the road in New Milford. Get a book. Reading solves most things. Or at least assuages the heart.”

  “I don’t live here,” Harry said. “I don’t have a library card.”

  Olive clucked her tongue. “Damn, Harry. You are a rule-bound creature, aren’t you? Just like Ronnie said.” She thought a moment. “Tell you what. You’re in her tree house—I’ll put you on Oriana’s card. She’s the ultimate reader. And quite the opposite of rule-bound.” Olive tapped her pipe on a lichen-covered rock on the stone wall, considered the little mound of emptied ash, then considered Harry. “I must say—it’s quite fascinating. Amanda allowing you to stay in the tree house. Tough woman. Widow, you know.”

  “I know. I’m well aware.”

  Olive patted his cheek. “Well, I’ll leave you to continue your story then.” She smiled and winked, and started off into the forest.

  “Why did you wink at me?” he asked.

  She turned. “Because I love a good story. ‘The Widower, The Widow and the Child in The Forest.’” She disappeared into the enveloping green.

  “Is everything a story to you?” Harry called after her.

  “Absolutely!” came Olive’s voice. “I’m a librarian, dear!”

  Harry dropped to his knees at the base of the sugar maple. He brushed away the leaves gathered between two upheaved old roots and began to scoop away the loamy soil. The earth gave way easily. He paused and turned his head, looked through the trees in the direction that Olive had gone, then down into the little hole again. He scooped away another handful of dirt. There was a twinkle of gold. Harry gently brushed away dirt that had remained undisturbed for sixty years and uncovered a delicate diamond filigree engagement ring. Again, he looked into the forest. Olive was not near, but her presence lingered like smoke.