Blood: Solitude

Jazz Green, Oak Tree, 2009

24

...and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. 

Job 1:15

1949

A magnificent oak tree stood in the back yard of my grandparent’s house. My grandmother did not think that I should be allowed to climb the tree, but my grandfather told her that boys would be boys.

The trick was to get up on the first branch, because it was seven or eight feet off the ground, maybe more. That wasn’t too hard since for a very long time chains had been wrapped around the limb to hold a swing. The chains had been there so long that the tree had grown around them like the scar tissue that now threaded its way through my eyebrow. I could stand on the seat of the swing and, with a little hop, get my arms around the limb. Then it was a simple matter to get a leg over and scramble around until I was sitting up in the air.

Seated there I could look directly into the kitchen and watch my grandmother and Juanita at work. I could go further. The next limb was about a third of the way around the trunk and only a little bit higher. My tennis shoes gripped the rough bark easily and the tree was rock-sturdy down this low. A few branches higher and I could look into the screen porch on the back side of the second floor. That was where we all slept on hot summer nights with the door open to the house and the attic fan pulling a breeze across us as we lay on top of clean sheets and lumpy old mattresses on enameled iron bedsteads. At that height I could sometimes hear the Electrolux vacuum cleaner whirring across the carpeted bedroom floors behind the porch, or the flushing of a toilet. I could see over the fence into the neighbor’s yard and the house vaguely like my grandparents’. Sometimes I stopped there and rested in the joint between the limb and the tree, but more often I went on higher, finding limbs within stepping distance or sometimes putting my arms and legs around the trunk and shinnying up using the insides of my arms and thighs to grip the bark.

The next good resting place was on the side away from the house. There, sitting on the limb I could feel a faint tremble when the wind blew and I could look out through the leaves and toward the bluffs along the river. There were caves in those bluffs, another place I and my cousin could go to play, and another place my grandmother disapproved of. Sometimes this was as far as I would go. Other times I kept on until I reached a point where I could look down on the roof of the house and out over it to the river far, far below.

Up that high the trunk swayed in a decent breeze and there was a fork and a hollow where I once discovered the broken eggs of a nesting bird. There I was up in the tree, part of it, swaying with it. It was as if the tree were holding me, cradling me, rocking me. When I was very still I could hear a bird chittering near me and once a squirrel came right up to the toe of my sneaker, his tail flipping up in the air, his black eyes snapping with curiosity, his incredible hands — they seemed to be more hands than paws — casually gripping the bark. The squirrel heard me breathe and was off in a chattering scamper from limb to limb and away. Up there I was alone, perfectly alone with the tree and the sky.