The Red Tree

And I must have fallen back to sleep then, because that’s all I can recall of the film. My cell woke me sometime after dawn, and there was a Buster Keaton movie playing on the television. I answered my phone, and the call was from the hospital, from a mutual friend who’d gotten the news before me. Amanda had been dead about two hours.

I have no idea what the film was, and possibly it was nothing but a dream. The night my grandfather died, my grandmother told us she was awakened by a very small bird, like a sparrow, beating its wings against the window. She’d been at the hospital for days, but she’d been convinced to go home and get some rest, because everyone thought my granddad was out of the woods. It was the dead of winter, and my grandmother knew the bird must be freezing, but she couldn’t remember how to open the window and let it in out of the cold. She swore she wasn’t dreaming, though my mother suspected that she was. A few hours later, the phone woke her with the news that Granddad had died in the night.

Grandmamma said that the little bird was a psycho-pomp, and that she should have understood.

I’ve been awake maybe an hour. I woke to find a very large dog standing at the foot of my bed, watching me. But when I sat up, startled, it was gone. I saw it very clearly. Its eyes were the same reddish brown as Constance’s eyes, and it had a mottled tongue, gray and pink. Its fur was dark, but not quite black. Not quite.

It could have been the same dog that John Potter shot that summer day in 1724, shortly before both his daughters died. Charles Harvey described the dog very clearly, quoting from Potter’s journal. I don’t remember all of the story now, but it was broad daylight, and Potter had been sitting alone near a window, reading the Bible. He heard a noise and looked up to find this dog staring in the window at him. He said that it was standing on its hind legs, its forepaws propped against the sill. He called for his wife, and it ran. The dog ran. He said it had eyes the color of chestnuts. He said a lot of things, John Potter did, and I don’t know if any of the stuff that Harvey put in that manuscript is true.

I never learned the name of the film, or the year that it was made, or who the actresses playing the woman at the window and the woman in the swing might have been. But then I never tried very hard. I’ve never mentioned it to anyone. My grandmother once told me she wished she’d never told anyone about seeing the sparrow.

I have to leave this place today. I can’t stay any longer. She’s not coming back.

“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, “It was a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; it’s getting late.” So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.

I went up to the attic again, to get the paintings, Bettina Hirsch’s paintings, and to bring them down. I meant to burn them all, because I could not bear the thought of them, of leaving them there to be discovered by someone else. So, I went up the stairs, and the door was still unlocked.

There are no oak leaves carpeting the floor, and there are not seven paintings arranged on seven easels. Everything that Constance brought here with her is gone.

No. Just this once, stop lying. It’s worse than that.

The attic is the same as it was the first time I set eyes on it, that day I went looking for a yardstick. There are boxes and a few pieces of furniture, and everything is covered with a thick coating of cobwebs and dust. My hand-prints are still clearly visible on the lid of the old steamer trunk in which I found the yardstick. Otherwise, there’s no sign whatsoever that the dust has been disturbed for a very long time. No one’s been in the attic since I was up there in June. I stood there for almost half an hour, waiting to see through the illusion, desperate to find that it wasan illusion. Like the blank canvases had been, before they became paintings. But no matter how hard I stared, or how many times I looked away, or shut my eyes, nothing changed. If I were to call Blanchard and ask him about his attic lodger, I think I know what he’d tell me.

I’m very tired, Amanda, and I need to rest.

I shouldn’t be this tired when I try to find my way back to the tree. I’ll rest for a while, and I’ll drift back down to the orchard, and the stone wall. I’ll lie in my bed and wait. Someone has turned the ponies out again.

Excerpt from A Long Way To Morning(Sarah Crowe; HarperCollins, 1994):

Andrea lay very still, staring up at the ceiling, what she could see of it by the flickering candlelight. She lay staring at the high ceiling of the whore’s bedroom, warmed by the afterglow of sex, and by the woman’s naked body, so near to Andrea’s own. It occurred to her that Michelle’s sheets smelled like apple cider, which made her think of autumn. And it also occurred to her that it had been a long time since she’d felt this content.

“You promised you’d tell me the story,” Michelle whispered. “After we fucked.”

“You won’t like it,” Andrea replied, wishing silently that she could go back to the quiet, undemanding moment before.

“Isn’t that for me to decide?” the whore asked.

“It’ll only leave you with more questions than answers,” Andrea said. “And just when you think it’s one thing, this story, it’ll go and become something else entirely. It’s fickle. It’s a fickle story.”

“The whole wide world is fickle, and you promised,” Michelle insisted.

“It’s not even a real story,” Andrea continued. “And it’s populated with fairly reprehensible people.”

“So is life,” replied the whore.

“It really doesn’t make a great deal of sense, this story. It’s filled with loose ends, and has no shortage of contradictions. It shows no regard whatsoever for anyone’s need of resolution.”

“Just like life,” the whore added, and she laughed softly and nipped lightly at Andrea’s left earlobe.

“I doubt I’ll be able to finish the whole thing before sunrise,” Andrea said. “In fact, I’m almost certain I won’t be able to.”

“Fine,” said Michelle. “Then I will have to call you Scheherazade, and you will have to think of me as the king. I will be forced to grant you a stay of execution until you’re able to tell me all of it.”

Andrea didn’t respond immediately. She kept her eyes on the ceiling, and tried not to think about the antique straight razor in the pocket of her coat, draped over the back of a chair on the far side of the bedroom.

“How the hell did I wind up with such a literate whore?” she asked, and Michelle laughed again. “Anyway,” Andrea continued, “you’d make a better Dinazade.”

“That’s dirty,” the whore snickered, then added, “Vice is nice, but incest is best.”

“Sure. Besides, the king has lots of other concubines to keep him occupied.”

“Odalisque,” Michelle said. “It’s a prettier word.”

“Fine, then. Odalisque. Regardless, you’ve been warned. This story, it has a lotgoing for it, as long as you can live with the questions it raises and never answers, and with a certain lingering inexplicability.”

“I pays my money, and I takes my chances,” said the whore, whom Andrea was unable to think of as either a concubine or an odalisque. Michelle was just a whore, and Andrea was just a trick, and the razor was just a razor.

“You don’t get to whine about it afterwards, or ask for your dollar back.”