Thirteen Crucifixions 13

     2001

 

The sun was setting.  Towering cumulous clouds were being touched with violent hues of rose and golden flame.  The air was chilly.  Sheila’s first husband had built and painted this white wooden bench they were sitting on.  Michael was seven at the time, just after the planting of the cedar hedge.  The trees were tiny shrubs that reached as high as his knees.  Now, they had grown into a tall, impregnable wall of aromatic green that surrounded and protected on three sides the back yard.  Glen couldn’t stop looking at the apple tree in full blossom growing in the centre.  Its pastel blooms scented the cool clean air, which held also the fragrance of early lilac, bruised cedar, and a discreet pong of cat spray and dog shit.

“A cold spring always produces the most beautiful flowers”, Sheila said, lighting a cigarette.

“Lots of luck being able to smell them”, Michael said, eyeing his mother’s cigarette.

“I was making an observation.”

“It’s seven and a half minutes off your life.”

“And no one else’s.”

“You’ve never heard of second-hand smoke?”

“You’re both upwind.  Get over it.”

“Billions of mothers on the planet and mine has an attitude.”

“That’s a beautiful tree”, Glen said.

“Yes, isn’t it lovely?” Sheila said.  “It predated this house.  It’s at least a hundred years old, and it’s still producing.  It was once part of an orchard.  This is the only surviving tree.”

“What kind of apples does it produce?”

“Golden.”

“Golden-Delicious?”

“No.  Golden.  The apples, themselves shine like they’ve been dipped in gold.  They’ve been examined by botanists and by horticulturists up the wazoo, and they still can’t figure it out.  We’ve even been the subject of a few magazine articles.  And the fruit—they’re almost too sweet to be apples!  Especially after a cold spring.  I’ve never had such wonderful apples in all my life.  And this is the only tree of this variety in existence.”

“They haven’t tried growing cuttings?”

“They’ve tried everything short of cloning it.”

“And?”

“Diddly.  Only one ever produced anything.  They were like yellow-transparents.  Good for pies and apple sauce, but otherwise disappointing.”

“So this tree is unique?”

“This tree is sacred.”  After a long drag on her cigarette Sheila said to Glen, “You used to be part of the anti-nuclear movement.”

“I used to go on the marches.”

“Do you ever see any of those people?”

“No”, Glen said.  It was Doris Goldberg, and Carol Hartley-Atkinson, whom he’d particularly associated with the peace movement.  But Doris, at just eighty, had been felled last year by a massive stroke.  This had been particularly hard for his mother, given the length of their friendship.  Carol had moved up the coast where she was the village pastor’s wife at a Baptist church.  At Doris’ funeral she informed Glen that she was raising his two children for him.  He otherwise couldn’t remember when last he’d seen her.

“Those marches were nothing short of spectacular”, Sheila said.

“It was a global phenomenon”, said Michael.

“Listen”, Glen said.  “The robins.  Do you hear them?”

Sheila listened hard.  She could hear a large dog barking somewhere—it sounded like Elmer and Janine’s Rottweiler.  A thoroughly nasty animal, she thought, since it seemed to fully vindicate that breed’s reputation for viciousness.  Then she heard a distant siren—ambulance, she thought—and the constant drone of motor traffic.  And then she finally could hear them, several from different perches, warbling and fluting their clear sweet music.  Usually she only noticed them at dawn, during her morning meditation.

“Yes”, Michael said, who had only just learned to hear them.  In a corner, beneath the cedar hedge, the Japanese azalea Sheila had planted on Michael’s thirteenth birthday blazed in a flaming bank of crimson.

“You do hear them?” Sheila asked her son.

“Yes.”

“It’s the same song”, Glen said, “and it has its own life, which it carries across the country, each robin passing it west to its brother, as the earth turns, so that it is the same song being carried from the East Coast, then slowly across the provinces, from Newfoundland, to Quebec, Ontario, the prairies, over the Rockies and across B. C. to the West Coast, ending somewhere near Tofino.  Then, in the early morning that is where the song begins anew, and it is returned east again to Newfoundland.”

As the birds’ song increased and grew louder in the fading light Michael got up silently and returned to the house, followed by Glen, leaving Sheila alone, on the white wooden bench that Frank had built, staring at the blooming apple tree, while the robins sang in the cool twilight and her cigarette was slowly burning out between her fingers.  Only when it became intolerably cold for her to sit out there any longer, did she go inside, leaving behind her the robins’ persistent singing, and even they would soon grow silent, as their brothers on the islands to the west would take up the song.  The rotweiller was barking again.  There were no sirens.