The Language of Trees (4 page)

“Feels like a different life completely,” Grant says, leaning up against the railing.

“That's where you're wrong. Same life, boy. Different you,” Joseph says, anxiously. Then, Joseph begins to cough. A high-pitched wheeze seers the air. He holds his side. Squeaky looks at Joseph, worried.

Grant takes Joseph's arm. “You okay?”

Joseph nods, eyes tearing, waves them away. “I'm fine, fine,” he chides them as he hobbles off by himself, leaning far too heavily on his cane. Squeaky eyes Joseph nervously, reminded of his own fragility. Grant stays where he is, watches as Joseph's chest heaves with each laborious breath, and realizes he
is not the only one who suffers. Left alone, Joseph composes himself.

Just then a police car pulls up in front of the store. Detective Charlie Cooke gets out, smoothing back his wet gray hair. “Need to talk to you for a minute, Joe,” he calls, slamming the creaking car door a little too hard.

“Sure, Charlie, give me a minute then,” Joseph calls, taking a deep breath. “Fresh coffee on the counter inside. Help yourself. I'll be right in.” Charlie nods a hello at Grant and walks inside.

“Why's Charlie here? Kids still stealing from you, Joe?” Grant asks.

“No, the Ellis girl disappeared. Run off again,” Squeaky interjects, hedging on the last step. “Leila's oldest, Melanie.”

Joseph shoots him a look.

“Well, none of us believes it, no sir,” Squeaky adds quickly. “That she's run. I mean, why would she run, now that she's staying clean? You know, being a mother and all.”

“Hearsay,” Joseph says. “She didn't run. I know her.”

“She worked for Joe on and off for years,” Squeaky tells Grant.

“Know her very well.” Joseph packs his pipe. “Good-hearted, honest girl. Know Melanie like my own daughter,” he adds, lighting the pipe.

Joseph stubs out a fallen ash with his sandal. He tugs at his collar, his neck damp and itching hot just as it was the day little Luke Ellis was buried. No one had seen a day as hot in May. A record heat wave in Canandaigua at 85 degrees. People packed into the church and the ones who couldn't fit inside lined up half a block out. Women in puckered nylons held crying children who pulled their own hair. Their patience was coming undone like the ribbons that fell from the long blond ponytails
of the two Ellis girls, who stood on either side of Leila in long black coats, their faces moist, reddening as the service went on. Melanie's hands shook so badly she had dropped her bouquet of lilies four times that he counted, leaving tiny white petals on her shiny patent leathers. By the end of the service, she stood in a halo of white petals. But her eyes never left the casket.

“Melanie. She made the paper years ago, I remember. Harvest Queen? Long blond hair? Lives in that apartment with the bright red door and the purple trim?” Grant asks.

“Blond, black, or pink hair, who can keep track?” Joseph answers, staring out at the serpentine clouds moving in and out of the trees. “Wait a minute. How did you know about the red door?”

“Well, I mean, how can you miss it? It's bright red.”

“But how did you know it was
her
door?” Joseph stares at Grant. He won't meet Joseph's eyes.

A momentary silence passes between the two as Grant picks up a broken branch and tosses it into the trees.

Joseph glances at Squeaky, then continues. “Well, she was at the top of her class, too. Quite a girl. Wasn't but a few years ago she was the town's pride and joy, riding up on that float, waving at the parade. Then, so sudden, she fell into her trouble because of that good-for-nothing boyfriend.”

“Neither girl ever got over their brother's death,” says Squeaky.

“But she has done a lot of work on herself since her baby was born. To be a good mother,” says Joseph. “Only twenty-one years old for God's sake. Folks don't let you live anything down in this town. Always fighting their opinions. Folks just had high hopes for her, that she would redeem her family's name.”

“Got a nice tattoo on her arm. Almost as nice as this one
here.” Squeaky pulls up his sleeve, revealing a black heart that says “Doris.”

“Who's Doris?” Grant asks.

“My first wife,” Squeaky replies. “Melanie's got a bird. Says ‘Luke.'” He leans in toward Grant. “The dead brother.”

“Right,” Grant tells him.

Joseph shakes his head. “Tears me up. You'll see a whole lot of books in there, stacked 'bout so high.” Joseph holds his palm about two feet off the ground, and then notices the dark liver spots. He pulls his hand back.

“School books?” asks Grant.

“No. Self-help books. She could break your heart, the way she was trying so hard. She planned to start college next year. Kept saying her life was about healing now. She wanted to heal things in the past, with her sister, too. See, damnedest thing. She was just beginning to remember what happened the night the boy died. Said she blamed herself. That she'd been trying all these years to get the picture straight.”

“She remembered seeing the giant out on Squaw Island,” Squeaky says. “But she was just a kid of nine, so who knows.”

“Maybe she was remembering a ghost story. I don't ask, never needed to know,” says Joseph, “but she needs to know.”

“Staying clean frees up all kinds of things from the mind,” says Squeaky. “I mean, that's what I hear.”

 

G
RANT WAS TWENTY-ONE WHEN
Luke Ellis drowned. But this is not the memory shifting through his mind. He remembers how the three Ellis children once left footprints of coal dust on the yellow shag carpeting in his cabin. How they had stood in his mother's kitchen years ago, their ice blue eyes glowing against blackened cheeks, rosebud lips quivering, clutching each other
so tightly that they became one trembling mass of blond tangles, as though trying to disappear into each other. Melanie had stepped forward and told Emily Shongo that they were hunting for diamonds in the basement coal bin. She had learned in school that diamonds came from coal. She said they would collect the shiny pieces that were changing into diamonds, just before the Diamond Trees could pull them up through their roots and into their leaves. She promised that they'd only take enough to make their mother rich. Melanie spoke so clearly, her hands moved so gracefully through the air that she seemed a very adept storyteller even at the ripe old age of eight. No taller than the kitchen counter.

“Goblins, that's what my mother called them. Blond goblins,” Grant remembers. “Said they were afraid of their own shadows. One minute they were explaining and the next, they took off running like cats out of a bath.”

“Ah well, Leila's got her hands full now. Melanie's boy's almost two years.” Joseph removes his glasses again and rubs his bloodshot eyes before taking the photo from his wallet. “Here's Lucas. Near five pounds at birth. Almost didn't make it. Get a look at those eyes, real watchful.”

Grant takes the photo. From outward appearances, Melanie's past has done little to harden her. She's smiling in a black bikini top and purple shorts, kneeling in the grass and holding a toddler in red overalls. Her blond hair is swept back from one side of her face revealing dewy skin that would make her look more like an Ivory girl than a drug addict, if it weren't for the deep red scar at the corner of her left eye.

“Who's the father?” asks Grant.

“Lionel Williams,” says Joseph. “Good man. Works down at the garage. Rough around the edges, you'd like him probably.”

“Fixed my car last year,” adds Squeaky, now seating himself on the step. “Saved me two hundred dollars.”

“Christ, Melanie looks so young to go through all that,” says Grant.

“Ah, not for us to judge. We can't know, can't even try to guess the Creator's plan,” Joseph says, motioning toward the trees. “Who can say what they'd have done in her situation? She's stronger than she knows. I tried to tell her that every day, too.”

“Was that the truth?” Grant asks.

Joseph smiles. “You ever see a tree that's dying, it's nothing but a bunch of dried-out branches? You can talk to this tree, tell it all about how its leaves are growing green and healthy. Then you sit back and watch how it changes.”

Grant looks at him, interest piqued.

“You don't believe it?” Joseph says. “Well, you should have seen Melanie's face light up when I said that to her. Most beautiful thing is to see hope come back into a face. That's all she wanted. People to believe in her without wanting anything back. People don't need much else.”

The sky is incandescent, like the pearly inside of a shell. An explosive cough cracks the air. Joseph doubles over. His pipe rolls across the porch. Squeaky dives toward him, helps him to a chair. “I'm fine, I'm fine,” Joseph says in a low voice, but this time he'll not send help away.

Instinctively, Grant rests his hand on Joseph's back, right between the shoulder blades and waits. After a moment, he removes his hand. “You should get to a doctor, Joe. Have those lungs checked,” Grant says.

“Maybe one of these days,” Joseph says, stunned, staring at the crown of mayflies that have gathered around Grant's
feet, their forked tails twitching. He's not sure why there is a tingling sensation between his shoulder blades. As Joseph watches the clump of live tobacco burn like a miniature smoke signal in front of them, he feels better, more alive somehow. He zips up his coat. Joseph gets up without using his cane and crosses the porch, once, then back without the slightest limp.

Shrugs make their way around the porch of the Feed & Grain. It could be the air, they ponder silently. The fresh spring air on the lake is like that. It can do things to you, can make you dizzy and throw you off balance.

“Grant, what's that you're doing?” Joseph asks.

“Sometimes dirt makes a man feel clean,” Grant says, rubbing his hands in the mud. He climbs the stairs as the tobacco smoke slithers away across the floor.

“Let me have a look at those hands, boy.”

Grant reluctantly holds up his right palm. Joseph touches Grant's fingertips and short square nails. The two men face off for a few seconds, Joseph's knotted fingers pushed against Grant's broad palm, thick with calluses. Just then, the sheriff emerges from the doorway, and Grant pulls his hand away.

“Hey Joe, I hate to break this up but I don't have much time. Folks are crazy today, calling right and left about these damn white stones everywhere,” says Charlie Cooke, spilling his coffee into a nearby section of grass. “Tornado took them right out of the lake and dropped them all over town. Anyhow, Melanie Ellis is why I'm here, so let's get to it.”

“I'm coming in, Charlie.”

Grant can feel his chest muscles tighten. He doesn't have to involve himself in every ounce of trouble that comes his way. He needs to get back to the cabin, needs the cool meditative compass of the water to rein him in. He thinks about a thing
like perfect timing, about how the heron takes slow deliberate steps as it scans the water for minnows or crayfish, waiting, one leg held in the most tempered expectancy. Then it tilts its head, and flash. Snags its prey. And the dance repeats.

 

“B
EFORE YOU GO
,” J
OSEPH
says to Grant, taking out his wallet one last time. “I thought you might like to see my kiddo. The picture was taken at some fancy lunch for her work. She lives in Boston. She's got a very big job now. Copywriter, you know. It's a lot of pressure, but of course she handles it.”

Despite his better judgment, Grant reaches for the photo. He smiles at the wide brown eyes ringed with soft coal.

“She still has freckles,” says Joseph.

“She finally got her braces off.”

It was his fault. Grant remembers that fateful bike ride to Naples a week before she turned fifteen. She hit a rock and flew right over the handlebars, landing on the pavement, blackening her left eye, breaking her nose, and knocking out her two front teeth. By her own account, she looked like “a drunken sailor after a fight—hideously awful.” He knew then that he didn't deserve her because of his one despicable thought:
Now, she won't leave me
.

He had sat with her all night in the hospital, holding her hand, hardly leaving her side. Her recovery was deemed miraculous. The doctors couldn't explain how her nose had healed overnight. The bruise around her eye had disappeared by the next morning.

“She should have been more careful. Only by the grace of God that she didn't lose her sight. Well, she just gets more and more beautiful all the time,” Joseph says. “She's still wearing that uniform of blue jeans and T-shirts. You remember, it was all about comfort. She hasn't changed her ways.”

“She always said she'd never work in a place where she couldn't wear blue jeans and T-shirts.”

“She won't change. Not for any amount of money.”

When they'd met, Echo wasn't what most kids their age considered beautiful, with a tornado of long red hair, and thick pink plastic-framed glasses. But each day, he'd see her reading behind the counter at the Feed & Grain, and Grant was transfixed by the wave of her lips moving silently, forming the shapes of words. It was just fine with him that Echo rarely looked up from her book. Back then, he hardly spoke to anyone but his mother. Terrified by his father, too afraid he would be teased for his clumsy speech.

On the day of reckoning, he had stood at the counter for a good five minutes in his uniform of sandals with black socks, T-shirt and tan shorts, pretending to decide what to buy. The shelves were brimming with delicious jars of jellies, vinegars, dressings, and sauces. Horseradish and jalapeño pretzel dips, Three-oak aged balsamic vinegar, and a slew of homemade jams.

“So, I guess it's you,” Echo had said, looking up, closing the book, as though Grant was a long lost friend. Her dark eyes were large, sensitive and clear. He thought her beautifully human. At twelve, she was gentle with the world but not afraid of it, a quality he lacked.