The Language of Trees (2 page)

M
AY
2000

A
T DAWN, A TORNADO
hits the Shongos' cabin window like a fist. Broken glass pierces the sky before piling up in the grasses at the foot of the two largest willows on Canandaigua Lake. Grant Shongo runs out onto his porch, imagining this as the sound of his own heart breaking. He recalls Susanna's words as she left him just over one year ago:
I love beginnings
. She had told him these words on their first date and repeated them on the night she left. There was nothing more after that but the sound of her car disappearing down the rainy street.

An amethyst sky bleeds up from the bank as he scans the homes that ring the 36-mile shoreline, the old summer cabins built from wood and cobblestone, and new lakefront mansions covered in stucco and brick, with lavish front lawns that are an unnatural shade of green, next to gleaming boats resting tentatively by their newly christened docks. It is early, he guesses. There is no working clock in his cabin and he threw out his watch when he left Rochester three weeks ago. Though he hasn't been back here in five years, he can still tell time by the color of the water, which changes from rose at dawn, to
dark gray-green in the afternoon, to a rusty golden patina in the evening. It's about five o'clock in the morning, judging by the water's hue. The lake is still in motion. Its restlessness has always calmed him. He looks out at the trees, the way they seem to be pulling the dew across the uncut grass. Felled branches crisscross the lawn. The scent of destruction that tore through them last night is still in the air. The oaks are breathless.

All night, the wind kicked up glassy leaves that stuck to the porch screen like wet paper. Grant had sat on the twin-size mattress, listening as torrents twisted through the reeds, tossing skeletons of driftwood back toward land. But even the sorrowful whine of the oldest oak being ripped from its roots couldn't stop him from grabbing his knife. The cry of the splitting branches and the wind's moan didn't let up. Even the wolves' howling couldn't loosen his hands from the wooden statue he held in front of him. Although he hadn't picked up a knife in several years prior to his return to the cabin, he carved the entire night through without stopping. Even though sweat burned into his eyes, his fingers and palms chafed with wood dust, he just slicked the knife faster, carving the statue of a Seneca warrior in quick precise movements until his hands felt like claws. At thirty-three, his hands remembered the shape of the statue by heart, the warrior's wide face, long straight nose and sharp cheekbones, the head shaved for battle except for a lock of hair at the back; a cap, with one eagle feather sticking straight up in back, distinguishing it from the other Iroquois tribes. The leather breechcloth, and leggings that went from ankle up to mid-thigh to protect the legs when running through brush. A belt wrapped around the waist where a knife was kept close to the body, the pouch filled with arrows, and the thick powerful hands that held a bow. Even the physical
ity of carving couldn't cut his guilt away. He had thought that leaving Rochester would dull the painful memories.

Grant had stayed in the old Victorian on Park Avenue for a year after Susanna left. Rochester was a far cry from New York City, but compared to the sleepy town of Canandaigua, it was bustling. Their gentrified neighborhood was thriving and replete with distractions: trendy bars, restaurants, and sidewalk cafes, where Grant liked to sit alone for hours on Sundays reading the newspaper and grading papers, drinking shots of espresso, and losing himself in the latest educational dilemmas facing schools. There had been comfort, not loneliness, in the routine.

But once Susanna left, the emptiness had hit him hard. Their charming house only haunted him, the bright green shutters and the elegant bay windows, the garden patio that he meticulously constructed to her design, brick by brick. Even with all the noise of city life, the house held the silence of their marriage. Susanna told him she would never return, but he hadn't believed her. He had always been the one who had doubts, not her. So he waited for her in the house for a year, angry, impatient yet unwilling to leave. There were nights he thought he heard her footsteps on the patio. He'd lie still, one minute wishing it were her, and the next, praying those cries he heard were only the wind. Her leaving was right, he felt. But he did not know what to do without her.

There had been miscarriages. Three, one right after another. Susanna first blamed herself for the three souls that came and then left, each following the other to the spirit world. Their stays had been brief, but each had left an indelible mark. Their few months of life had made her a mother. And just as quickly, their passing had made her something else.

One night, he had found her kneeling in the backyard, her dark hair smeared across her cheeks with tears as she clutched the ultrasound pictures to her heart. She blamed the losses on her teenage promiscuity—how she had prayed for negative pregnancy tests back then, on her inability to complete any project, on the Camel nonfilters she occasionally snuck in the garage when he was up all night grading papers and writing lesson plans. When she could no longer bear the weight of the grief, she blamed Grant. He never truly gave her his heart, she said. He hadn't ever let her in. She had felt it throughout their four years of marriage. Their babies had, too. That's why they didn't survive, she said.

He wants to tell her she deserves none of the guilt.

If Susanna believed in fate, she'd realize that some souls know beforehand that they're going to leave, their purpose having already been fulfilled.

He would never admit that he has been skipping rocks to send messages to them through the water.

Strands of long black hair fall in his eyes as he turns the wooden statue on its side. He squeezes the knife in his fist, letting the hot metal bite at his skin, and then he watches a few drops of blood fall. Pain is a signal that he is awake and alive. It is because an uncomfortable numbness has come over him, not unlike how he imagines death to feel: one day fading into the next, the hours blurred, merging waves lost in the lake.

Time is different here: the minutes, hours, and days tracked by a set of different colors, smells, directions and strength of wind across the water. At night, Grant counts the hours by the direction of moonlight on the shifting water.

And the days, by the number of statues of Seneca warriors. Twenty-one statues fill the cabin, one carved each day since he's been back to the place of his childhood. He needs to con
nect to his ancestors this way, through this language of mourning, a language his father once shared with him on summer nights after Grant's mother had gone to sleep.

Grant would watch his father's skilled fingers work the knife as though it were a part of his hand, quickly carving a beaver or a bear, which would then be packed in a cardboard box and taken back to Rochester in September to be placed in a bigger box and carted up to the attic, never to be seen again. Even on nights when there was little moonlight, Ben Shongo would sit on the porch and carve these figures so easily and with such swiftness and detail that Grant believed his father had the power to see in the dark. His father had told him this was good exercise for the mind, that if he had the right attitude and focus, he wouldn't ever need to actually see the wood, that the picture he held in his mind was enough. After he had been sent to bed, Grant would hear his father out on the porch, and he knew his father was carving other things that Grant would never see. In the morning, there would be nothing but wood shavings and dust.

This morning, Grant's statues stand on the keys of the antique organ, on the mantel of the old cobblestone fireplace, and under the railing of the side porch that slants at almost 40 degrees. A few balance precariously on the arms of the rattan furniture, and on the fence posts of the abandoned garden that will soon be filled with his late mother's wild orange tiger lilies.

He knows that fighting emotion only creates dangerous pockets in the mind. Things can be brewing deep inside, unknown, until one day, the body is filled with wrenching uncontrollable sobs. Or a person can find himself racing along the highway at midnight in his sky blue Fleetwood for no apparent reason, the gas pedal pressed to the ground, hitting a patch of black ice and flipping the car before it explodes into fire, just as
he had done one night when he told Susanna he was going out for a newspaper and instead totaled the car. And yet, he had escaped with only a few scratches. But the sight of the burning car left him with the distinct impression that it was better to sit in one place until he had a better handle on himself. The three children were losses for him, too.

There is nowhere else he could have gone but to the lake. Canandaigua is the place where he feels God in the trees, a place the Seneca call the Chosen Spot, where the Seneca say the earth split its seams and the ancestors emerged, a people for whom nature dwarfed all else. The willows here grow to enduring heights of one hundred feet, their narrow leaves and long branches bent toward the ground, never forgetting their home. During his boyhood summers, Grant would press his cheek against the thick, fissured bark and listen to the life rattling inside, just as it had in the years since the seedlings first tumbled down Bare Hill to settle at the shore, where their roots would one day climb over the stones to hold the shoreline in place. For years, folks in Canandaigua have called the oldest and biggest willows the Diamond Trees. They have been growing on the Shongos' property near the foot of Bare Hill for more than a century, their girth wide, the bark thick and craggy to protect from water and ice. At night the wind spun their flickering leaves, making it look like diamonds shimmering over the water. All lit up in the moonlight, folks said you could see them from every part of the lake, that they were a beacon for nighttime swimmers, sailors, and lost spirits.

It was here that Grant first tasted the thrill of diving into the cold water and discovering the large white stones, and the small spherical rocks, which contained crystals that tossed strange shapes of light after he'd break them open. He liked to pretend they had come from another world, that his Seneca ancestors
had scattered the treasures of their loved ones across the water, hoping one day, they'd be found by a boy just like him.

Grant knew about the white stones, the ones geologists called
septaria
. Folks said these smooth white stones were the skulls of the Seneca people, expelled from the mouth of a snake monster that had devoured a Seneca village at the top of Bare Hill before being shot by the arrow of a little boy, and then rolling down the hill in a death struggle.

The monster is still out there, some people say, dwelling in the depths of the lake, the pet of a lonely giant that lives on Squaw Island, where no one is allowed to go.

As a child, Grant would climb one of the trails marking the snake's path to the top of Bare Hill just to feel the rough wind rushing past his face. Looking out over the gold-gray water returned him to himself, time and time again. When trying to will away the resentment over his mother's death or his confusion over his father's distance, he'd squeeze his eyes shut, trying to invoke the legendary Peace Maker, a Huron prophet who taught negotiation instead of violence to five warring tribes and united them as the Iroquois Confederacy. Still, the area continued to be filled with bloodshed. In 1687, in a battle over fur trade, French soldiers decimated the Seneca village of 4,500 people, at a place now called Ganondagan, at the north end of the lake. A period of darkness crossed the land after that. The earth there was once swollen with artifacts, but many had since been stolen from the site, including a rare silver tomahawk from the 1600s. Grant knows the spirits here don't like it. And that they still won't let go of this place.

 

A
CROSS THE LAKE, WHAT'S
left of the moonlight is turning the water a smoky lavender. Grant gets up from the porch and wipes the sweat from his forehead. Tying his long braid back
with a piece of twine, he walks into the living room to check out the damage to the window.

He rubs his eyes in case he's imagining things.

Pieces of broken window glass form a perfect circle on the carpet. He's not easily shaken, not by the pull of lost spirits. But the circle of glass in the middle of his living room has him a little worried. Then, something catches his eye—one small soot print, then another, then a whole trail of tiny prints leading from the broken window to the basement door. If he were crazy he'd say these were footsteps.

Grant has tried not to think too much about the blithe spirit that has moved into his dreams each night since his arrival three weeks ago, rousting him out of bed to float over the brambles lining the lake. Grant knows who the boy is even if he won't tell anyone about it. He remembers the midnight house calls his father made to the home of a sick child named Luke Ellis. And the old dugout canoe and paddle his father had made from a birch tree, and had carelessly left out under the Diamond Trees one winter, the one the Ellis children found that rainy spring night twelve years ago, when they managed to paddle out to Squaw Island. No one will ever forget the accident, the tragic loss of the boy, and the subsequent rumors of a terrible giant that loomed from Squaw Island, hacking the moon apart with an axe.

The men dragged the lake for a month, all 15.5 miles of it, down to its 276-foot depth. The water was so cold Luke's small body didn't rise to the surface for almost a year. Then, on a particularly warm May morning, it floated right up to the shore of Squaw Island almost exactly where Luke had disappeared. The eyes a shocking moonstone blue. The golden curls uncommonly smooth, as though they had been freshly washed and combed.

Grant doesn't know why Luke Ellis has moved into his
dreams. But he doesn't mind being taken up by the little boy. He doesn't mind the company.