The Tale of The Tree, and Its Death

Once I lived in a little blue cottage behind a big blue house and under The Tree that grew over the backyard fence. So big was that tree! It held the nests of most of the birds in the neighborhood. The mockingbird who lived in its branches sang exactly at one every spring morning—for almost an hour. First, he rehearsed the scales and little studies. Then he practiced his full repertoire, loudly, for the rest of the hour. Each night, after his concert, I fell asleep.

The woman in the front house and I often admired The Tree—how supple it was for its size, and how, in a coming storm and at the height of it, each of its branches danced as though to a different wind, the heavy limbs the adagio against which the allegro of its twiggy shoots flailed.

And then one day I came home and it was gone.

I found the woman in the front house in tears. The hole the missing tree left in the sky was huge, and I cried with her.

She had spent the morning trying to save its life. She’d run to the back fence to ask the choppers and trimmers and haulers-away on The Tree’s home plot what the hell they were doing. She’d called City Hall, traced the little lines of diminishing hope from desk to desk, voice to voice. No one was able or willing to stay the execution. And so she had watched the fall of The Tree, its dismembering. She’d seen it on loaded, in pieces, to the bed of a waiting truck, which drove to the street and around the corner and was gone.

That night, I fell asleep at nearly two, in the silence of the treeless mockingbird.

Once, not long before, a thousand birds had lived happily in the huge tree, scrapping only occasionally over a nesting crook or a sunny limb on a cold day. The songs they sang were many and various, as individual as their feathers. Some—the mockingbirds and thrashers--tried to learn the whole songbook, which only The Tree knew by heartwood. I’d hear a little tittering in the branches when the divas, those mimics, struck a wrong note in an aria—added a warning call in the midst of the trills of a warbler’s seduction, or a jay’s insistence to a song sparrow’s flurry. Yet those virtuosos, in spite of their mistakes, were to carry on the oral history of the entire flock, to remember all the music and all the singers and their mythologies and to repeat and repeat them so they would never be lost.

And then one day in this revolving future, when their home was felled, everything went--nests, sleeping perches, leaf rustle, star shine broken by the branches that went swinging in the wind, even a few unhatched eggs. Nestlings, who had never yet considered flight, flew on wobbly wings. And the elders lifted off in every direction, looking for other trees. After a few nights most had nearly forgotten The Tree. They had winged their way into the smaller oaks and Chinese elms and tall firs in the neighborhood—or even farther away. And the singing mornings, the wakeup calls, were still, and the night’s town crier no longer singly shouted the news in all the voices of the flock.

One night not long after the fall, that chattering historian returned to a tree near the vacant place in the sky and continued his nightly rounds through the legends and witticisms and challenges and griefs of the flock, remembering everything as perfectly note-by-note as he could, and the night sounded, from my cottage, almost the same as it always had. And then the songs grew shorter, a note or a phrase lost. And the music dwindled into a mere medley of the leitmotifs of the full symphony. The pauses at the now-forgotten bars grew longer, and the scrambled plots, confused. The inheritance so carefully rehearsed each night became a gesture, more silence than song. The sorrow in the voice of the bearer of the tales became a tattered requiem, as memory and instinct failed him. Finally, one night, the maestro flew away mid song, his white bars brilliant in the moonlight, and he was never heard again.

I became, by default, the keeper of the legends, if not the music, of the Tree, because I had lived a long time under its branches. Only now am I writing what I can remember from so long ago—more silence than song, more generic than each of the stories was. And I, too, am losing the traces--the last memories of what The Tree always recognized: that all the legends were telling the same story of how things are and then, at last, are not.