The Language of Trees (6 page)

Echo thinks of the pillaged burial grounds and the stolen Indian artifacts each time she sees it.

Echo heads toward David's Barber Shop but she does not make a wish when she passes the gold dome of the town hall. All the children in town make wishes when they see it, but Echo never did. She is not a person who believes things happen because of a wish. Wishes are dangerous things. They can get lodged in a person's mind, and passed down through generations. The Tiffany lamp in the window of the Garlock house is still on, as it has been for decades, a tradition begun by the mother of a boy killed in a plane crash, and continued by every owner thereafter.

A gift shop has moved in next to the wooden fence painted in the facade of an old storefront. Then there's Pizza Hut, its signature red roof absent in the white Victorian-era shell. Echo turns off the main drag and onto East Lake Road, where the roots of hardy weeds writhe under the ground, sprouting up in potholes on the road. She passes four large lakefront houses hidden from the road by the trees. She's memorized the list of last names burned into wooden signs, nailed along the tree trunks. Kornegger, Loomis, Bray, O'Reilly.

Despite the drizzle, a brilliant orange sun emerges, flickering in streams across the highway as she speeds by. After a few minutes, Echo turns onto the old dirt road. She cannot wait to throw her arms around Joseph O'Connell, and she once again steps on the gas.

T
HE EARLY AFTERNOON DRIZZLE
starts and stops as the flies swarm in smoky clouds that seem to dip and curve through the air. The Feed & Grain disappears into the distance as Grant heads home. He picks up his pace each time he passes a burial ground, taking care not to slip on the roadside gravel. To avoid the possibility of meeting anyone on the road, he takes a shortcut, running fast across the grassy slopes, and jumping across the small creek beds, taking comfort in the light rain, the soft pad of the wet grass, the slight slip of mud under his feet. He almost doesn't see what comes next. He almost runs right into it, but catches himself just in time to miss the large gray wolf dodging across his path, its fur blurring into the mist as though it were a patch of moving fog.

Grant stops to catch his breath, watching as the wolf emerges from the haze and comes closer. It's around ninety pounds, thin and angular with long legs and a thick gold-gray coat. He can tell this animal is not pure wolf. It is one of the lost hybrids of Canandaigua, reminiscent of a German shepherd with its pointed ears and long muzzle. But its head is larger than a dog's, its tail bushier, its feet longer and paws heavier. The wolf
slinks away and waits under a nearby flowering dogwood tree, watchful, as though taunting him. Grant kneels, examining the tracks. The hind foot has been placed in the track left by the front. Overlapping tracks are singular to wolves, not dogs. He has not come across this in years. He remembers his father telling him that many years ago, packs of wolves were just as commonplace in Canandaigua as Indian burial grounds. The wolves acted as the protectors of the graves. When the graves began to be robbed and the artifacts disappeared, so did the wolves.

A wolf had been shot dead the night Two Bears was murdered in his cave decades ago. But only the wolf's body had been found, not Two Bears. The Seneca healer's body had disappeared. His silver tomahawk was gone. It was highly prized because of its silver cutting edge on one end and pipe on the other, symbolic of both peace and war, given to an Indian leader named Cornplanter by the Europeans during King Philip's War, in the late 1600s.

Some people believed that an archaeologist was behind Two Bears's supposed murder, but there was no proof and it never went further than suspicion. What was left behind was the bloody body of a lone gray wolf that had obviously fought its murderers to its death. A ripped bloodstained piece of cloth and a patch of human hair had been found in its teeth.

For years, every time a parking lot or a swimming pool was put in, arrowheads poked up from the dirt. Once in a blue moon, a pack of sorrowful wolves would appear quite suddenly on the excavated land, more like ghosts than living creatures, maddened, thin, and howling. Some said it was Two Bears's ghost showing his disapproval. Although the wolves disappeared, the progeny is still out there: a shaggy mix of dog and wolf with ice blue eyes and a tail that wags incessantly, a breed friendlier than it should be yet content to be strays. Trailing
the roads and the sweet clover. Howling at the fog lights. Only coming out in the quiet.

 

R
IGHT NOW, IN THE
swirl of bugs, Grant hears a howl unlike anything he has ever heard before, a low dull cry of this sorrowful wolf that has been following him for the last one hundred yards. After skulking across the muddy creek, about ten feet away, it has reappeared, snarling at Grant, its fur stuck with prickers. It circles him hypnotically, baring its teeth, squinting its yellow eyes. But the loose jowls and sorrowful howl belie its ferocity. Grant stops and walks him down. The animal backs up. But Grant keeps coming despite the possible danger. Grant circles the animal, feeling momentarily victorious when the animal lies down. He edges closer, crouching. The animal does not recoil, only whimpers.

“Go home,” Grant orders, as the animal begins to beg at his feet. The rain is coming down harder. Grant looks up. He can see the impatient moon already high up in the sky. The rain clouds ebb and flow across it, causing the sky to change from dark to light and back. At this time of year the weather is fickle, sunlight interrupted by light rain, which dissipates into fog. When Grant looks down, the wolf has disappeared. Grant continues his run, but he knows the animal is tracking him. “Get lost,” he yells back, though he cannot see him. He can only smell the heavy scent of sweat and mud left in the air. Grant sprints down the dividing line headed for home.

Grant uses the bag of duct tape to wave the bugs out of his eyes. He picks up the pace but suddenly the animal reappears, trotting alongside him. A green Jeep whizzes by, blares its horn. Massachusetts plates. That figures. Grant has to practically dive off the road to keep from becoming roadkill. He looks around but the wolf has disappeared once more.

The wolf re-emerges, nipping at Grant's heals in the breakdown lane. Why do only the most desperate creatures want to cling to him? Susanna had said that it was his compassion. Grant thought it something far more ominous, something karmic and dark known only to the most tortured of spirits.

Grant knows he's got to get back inside the cabin soon, otherwise his clothes will be full of the tiny bugs. If Grant didn't know better, he'd say the petals of the morning glories near Hobson's Bay were folding up in self-protection. If he squints, out there in the distance it looks like there are shadows diving into the black water.

The scraggly animal is trying to lick his hands, trying to get his attention by running straight into his legs. “I can't help you,” Grant says. It stares at him with its watery bloodshot eyes, and then turns around as though it disapproves. Grant watches as it bounds up the center of the road until it's little more than a gray speck on the dusky horizon.

Grant continues his run. As he makes his way to the top of a hill, he recognizes the green Jeep speeding along the highway. He notices something in the middle of the road. At first he thinks it is a boulder. As he gets closer, he knows it is the wolf. Its fur looks almost white under the hazy sky. The Jeep is speeding faster and faster toward it. The wolf does not move. “Run!” calls Grant. A horn blares. The driver of the Jeep suddenly brakes. Then he hears the screech of tires sliding across gravel and the sound of metal as the Jeep skids and crashes into an oak tree.

 

T
HE WOLF TROTS OFF
toward the woods, head hung low, fading into the fog.

Grant could turn a blind eye. If he just started running, no one would ever know that he was a witness to a crash. It
doesn't look like too much damage, just a fender, maybe some dents, and a new paint job. Amidst the swarm of mayflies, his eyes are fixed on the long auburn hair beginning to spill from the window. As the Jeep's broken door opens, brown leather clogs hit the ground, then the pale figure of a woman in jeans and a white T-shirt emerges. She stands, one hand resting on her forehead, the other on the door. She looks up at the sky, her pale freckled face wet with rain. Then she collapses.

As he lumbers toward the Jeep, he feels his legs moving of their own accord. The future is competing with the past, speeding through time to catch up.

He'd know her anywhere, the way she's struggling to get up, pushing her hair out of her eyes as she stares right through him into the rainy countryside. The woman reaches up and grabs the door handle of the Jeep and tries to pull herself up, but her long legs fold underneath her. Grant thinks this might be a dream, maybe just an illusion thrown in by the spirit of the little boy. More than once over the last fifteen years he has thought he saw Echo O'Connell crossing the room in a restaurant, buying groceries, driving fast with her windows down. He's been wrong each time. Now he wonders if lifelong yearnings are always fulfilled, sooner or later.

C
LARISSE
M
ELLON, WHO HAS
lived next door to the Ellis family for over twenty years, is standing at her screen door, a crowd of orange cats gathered at her feet to watch Grant Shongo jog along the side of the road.

She hasn't told anyone how she often sees the spirit of Luke Ellis crouched in the crook of Leila's lilac tree, or how many of his yellow paper airplanes appear out of nowhere, littering her gutters and landing in her open windows. She knows grief can make you see and do odd things. If people in town think Grant is crazy, locked away in his family's haunted cabin for three weeks, she knows what they'd say about her. That she is just a lonely old woman who has spent too many years watching other women get married and have families. That she is just trying to get attention. If they only knew the truth, that her solitary situation is the result of a choice she made a long time ago. A conscious choice. Clarisse might be nearly blind without her glasses with the emerald rhinestone frames, her skin might be as mottled as a potato, her fingers as knotted as ginger root, but her mind is as clear as a bell.

That is why the first thing Clarisse did when she woke up
this morning was scrub her face with extra hot water and soap until her skin shined. She has not applied lipstick, or powdered her nose. Instead her long ivory hair unravels down her back. She is wearing her white nylon jogging suit and her Michael Jordan sneakers, the ones that make her feel she could float right above the ground and get away if she had to. She is trying to free herself from all of the sticky lies. And there's a warm north wind, the kind good for truth telling.

Without the glittering costume jewelry, without the cast of hair spray, Clarisse knows she looks plain but not embarrassingly so. It is high time that she liked what is real. She has become accustomed to the liver spots—beauty marks, she calls them—which have landed on the tip of her nose and the tops of her hands. Don't both men and women eventually end up with sagging breasts and beards? She has that sense of freedom, or of wanting to be free, she's not sure which.

Leila Ellis has been a neighbor for all these years, but when a friendship is based on secrets instead of kindred spirits, how long can it last? No one should be weighted down with another woman's trouble for this long.

Clarisse knows all about the Shongos' cabin at the foot of Bare Hill. She even knows that the mischievous group of boys who live along the lake would never go inside, curious or not. The fact is that the adults around here tell ghost stories about Luke just as the children do. But the children are braver. They play truth or dare, nighttime games. They double dare each other to run and touch the Shongos' dock. Then they tear back to their houses shouting Luke's name, the wind slamming the door behind them.

 

S
UDDENLY
, C
LARISSE CATCHES SIGHT
of another yellow paper airplane in her window box.

It has been as strange a day as she can remember.

The dance of the mayflies occurring on the twelve-year anniversary of the little boy's death. A dozen years have passed. Clarisse hobbles across the green kitchen to the window overlooking the Ellises' backyard. She stands, eyeing the little boy's frosted tombstone half hidden under a spray of flesh-beaten lilacs. Leila had wanted him buried right in her backyard but the town ordinances wouldn't allow it. Luke had a proper burial in a cemetery, but the next day, Leila went right ahead and had another tombstone put in under the lilac tree so he would never be far from her thoughts, she had told Clarisse. Leila had held a private funeral there, only the girls and her, with the girls dressed in their long black coats, just as they had been the day before.

Since Melanie disappeared two days ago, Clarisse finds herself fixated on the tombstone. It doesn't help that Leila's lilac tree has now grown so out of control that it is bumping against her kitchen window, its blossoms, bruisy and swollen with truth. This morning when Clarisse woke up and looked in the mirror, her lips were a haunting pasty white, as though the lilac bush had sucked the color right out of her skin.

She pours herself a glass of milk and then thinks better of it. “Lactose,” she says, shaking her head. She pours the milk into a bowl and a crowd of cats quickly gathers at her feet. Clarisse scoops up her orange Persian, Ella Fitzgerald, and cups her hand under the stomach, where the sixth litter of babies is waiting inside the tummy. Today, she will line the guest room closet with old green pillows, towels, and newspaper. Cool and dark, it's the mother-to-be's favorite place for birthing.

Clarisse remembers how all those years ago Grant and Echo O'Connell delivered Ella's mother to her doorstep. They had found the kittens in an old barn and delivered them right to
Clarisse. Perhaps it was her reputation for collecting things, or her soft spot for children and animals. She had indeed kept most of those kittens. Now her house is overrun with feline children and their grandchildren. Clarisse has always been a collector of things, especially items other people don't want to keep. Her kitchen backsplash is covered with decorative plates. Statues of ceramic frogs are positioned in all four corners of the kitchen. The walls, done in ochre and olive green, are covered with collectibles: old frames, antique plates, and pictures of her ancestors. Her prized green velvet couch and chairs are worn but still regal, piled so high with needlepointed pillows that there is hardly room to sit. And now, Ella Fitz is due any day. There will be no room in this place for any more collections.

Clarisse is also a collector of secrets, and this is the most troublesome part.

She would run to the phone to spread the news of Grant Shongo's emergence if the lines were working, but the storm has pulled them down and twisted them into shreds. She keeps the folklore of the many strange things that have happened in this town, and more than a handful of them she has witnessed with her own two eyes. Clarisse recalls everything that happens here as easily as she remembers the names of each of her six cats. How, in the spring of 1988, the Ellis children stole the canoe out into the icy lake.

How, two years after the tragedy, Grant's mother fell ill and never recovered. Emily Shongo would tell anyone who asked that she would never give up her cigarettes, not for anything, including her own life. They say that she knew she was dying long before she told anyone, including her doctor husband. She even paraded around town with her lit cigarette in hand as though she had a vendetta. By the time Dr. Shongo found out, it was too late for him to do anything; the cancer had progressed
too far. No one challenged Emily Shongo. It was as though dying was her way of punishing someone, Clarisse has often thought.

Dr. Shongo never got over his failures. After his wife's death, he embarked on a seemingly endless project of redesigning their house. It was rumored that he was going to flatten the old cabin in Canandaigua and rebuild, and during one particular spring, a couple of fancy architects from New York City were flown in to survey the area and draw up plans. Of particular concern was the old coal bin in the basement, which leaked dirty soot that left smudges on the walls and the rugs. Dr. Shongo never settled on a plan, and closed up the place. But the details of his bereavement traveled all the way through the phone wires from Rochester. Some say, up until the tragedy of the little boy and then his wife's death, he had thought himself a god. Infallible. And this, thinks Clarisse, is a fatal ingredient in the recipe for living.

Grant inherited the troubled life, Clarisse thinks. She walks outside to her garden and imagines she can still see Grant running even though the air is thick and hazy with flies. She walks to the end of her driveway, aware of her aching knees. All morning she has been removing old broken branches, twigs, and white stones from her garden and depositing them in the woods.

She wants to shout, to say something, to tell him that solitude doesn't automatically bring serenity, just as noise and clutter don't automatically abate loneliness. Though Grant has not told anyone in town about Susanna, everyone knows about her. Three miscarriages are enough to make anyone run away—from themselves, from a loved one. Clarisse often says that word travels in the water here. Others say it is whispered in the rustling of trees. She is not the only one in this town
that has secrets to keep. Everyone does. People here lock their doors at night even though this is the country and everyone is supposed to be hospitable. But too much has happened here. Even the nonbelievers question the unbelievable bad luck of some people. Leila Ellis and her three children, in particular. What can you expect, with a husband as troubled as Victor? Right now most people are talking about Melanie Ellis, who disappeared two days ago, abandoning her boyfriend Lion and their son.

Nineteen, they all agree, was too young to have a baby. Isn't that what Doris Loomis told Clarisse in the cereal aisle of Wildman's supermarket yesterday? How was it, Doris wondered aloud, that Canandaigua's former Harvest Queen had made such a mess of her young life? “Couldn't she have gotten married at least, to redeem her family's good name?” she asked Clarisse.

“Do people still do that?” Clarisse had wondered aloud.

“You're right. I suppose it was never a good name to begin with,” replied Doris.

Still, nothing explains why Melanie would have left her boyfriend, Lion, and their son. She had disappeared without a trace. Without a note, or anything. Clarisse had actually stood up for the pair when most folks clicked their teeth, shook their heads, saying mixed-race relationships were doomed from the start. But Clarisse had been the Ellises' next-door neighbor for years, and this did give her somewhat of an expert opinion on the matter. Truth is, Lion wasn't the one that Clarisse was worried about. She knew Lion and she respected him. His arrival in town had coincided with her house falling apart: A leaking faucet, a washing machine on the fritz, a gutter swollen with leaves and wet paper airplanes. Lion was earnest, capable, wanting to be helpful. She hired him to do odd jobs: installing a slip-safe bar in the shower, fixing a broken window, moving
her refrigerator so that she could clean behind it. Whenever she called, he arrived at a second's notice. Clarisse trusted him completely. There was an air of sincerity in his yellow-brown eyes. And Lord knows he knew how to listen. What a gift that was. Someone who wanted to listen to her stories and to her complaints. He was good company, always polite unlike most young folks, and he wouldn't leave a job unfinished. She was certain that if the romance failed it would not be due to Lion.

Lion had told her some things, too. He talked openly about his life. He had lived through five earthquakes and one of the worst riots to ever hit California. He told her about a regular guy named Rodney King who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and changed the face of Los Angeles when four police officers beat him silly because of his skin color. When they were found innocent, the riots that followed were worse than any earthquake, Lion said. He explained how the streets turned into a crazy river of people. Rocks and bottles fell from the sky. People grabbed drivers out of cars, threw televisions into liquor store windows, and took whatever they wanted. Helicopters buzzed over street fires. He could taste the anger, he said. It wasn't he who had been beaten by those cops, but he felt like he had, and even though he was in a crowd of strangers, he felt connected to all of them by that feeling.

At some point during the riot, Lion noticed that half of his arm was split open because someone had cut him. He almost fainted from the surprise of all that blood as the crowd knocked him down and trampled his body. Even still, Lion said he believed he had a lucky angel named Matrina. “It was Matrina, doing her thing,” he'd often say. Clarisse didn't know where the name came from, but it comforted Lion to think this way.

Clarisse could see that Melanie was moved by his story. Melanie would sit with her sketch pad in her lap, listening closely
while Lion was working and recounting his history. Occasionally, she'd get up and rub his shoulders, asking him if he was okay. He was her hero, an unassuming knight in shining armor, unknown to most people who crossed to the opposite side of the street at night when Lion walked toward them, dressed in his black sweatshirt and knit cap.

Once, Lion confessed to Clarisse how he had gotten Melanie clean. It had been the hardest thing he had ever done, sitting outside the bedroom, which he locked from the outside, listening to her scream about smoke coming out of the walls, and not being able to breathe as she pounded the door and ripped the hair from her own head. It would be the kiss of death if he went in. He had always given in to her, whatever she wanted. But not this. He loved her so much he hadn't broken.

Only after Melanie had fallen asleep had he gone in, removing the sweat-soaked blankets, washing them, and leaving them folded at the foot of the bed. He'd bring buckets of ice and a bowl of soup, praying that Matrina would see them out of this thing. Even after he was suspended without pay from his job at the garage for missing work three days in a row, he remained solid at the kitchen table.

Clarisse is not like the less sympathetic types. They cut no one any slack.

Melanie had been struggling for a while. But then she and Lion had a son. Her sudden disappearance wasn't right, didn't make sense. Trouble just follows some families, Clarisse thinks, as she walks inside and sets out a few more saucers of milk. Suddenly, that incessant tree is scratching against her kitchen window.

“Go away, Luke!” orders Clarisse, and then she thinks better of it. “Please, go away,” she whispers.

As she stands at her kitchen window, she tries not to look,
but her eyes fix on the frosted gray tombstone. The smell of the flowers is so sweet it sometimes gives Clarisse a headache. It trickles in even though her windows are kept tightly shut. There are no boundaries when it comes to that family. All those years ago, little Luke's paper airplanes would soar right through her kitchen window. Once they had landed on the belly of her oldest and most patient ginger tabby that had rolled over, just moments before, stomach up like a landing strip. Clarisse could hardly keep from laughing, even after she had marched outside with the intention of reprimanding Luke Ellis.