The Wife Tree by Dorothy Speak Page A

my collection of epistles rustling in their folder like dry autumn leaves in the wind. Then I’m tricked into believing that snow hasn’t yet fallen and that autumn is still with us. But once, my tossing and turning so disturbed my store of letters that, awakened by their sighing, I was frightened into thinking it was the sound of my soul escaping. I do promise to fold up the letters soon and slip them into envelopes. I’ll affix rows of stamps bearing the cold profile of the young Queen Elizabeth and shoot them off across the oceans. I
will
send them, girls, as soon as I’ve collected the courage…

November 10
    Dear girls,
    …I was looking tonight at the picture of the Sacred Heart on my church calendar. There’s a tiny wooden cross engulfed in its flames and a thorn piercing the heart, which is red and fleshy as a piece of prairie beef. This Christ looks so much like the young effeminate men I see now in television comedies: their slenderness, their hairlesschests, their benign smiles. I recall the pictures of St. John with his head in Christ’s lap at the Last Supper and it makes me think: Despite all the Catholic Church’s rants against gay men, would it not be ironic if Christ — if he and those twelve apostles, if the whole pack of them — turned out to be homosexuals?…
    Tonight when I arrived home I heard a chopping noise coming from behind the house. Going round to investigate, I saw a figure toiling in the far corner of the yard. The snow back there is now a foot deep. I made my way slowly across the lawn. My feet broke through a granular crust to the powdery accumulation beneath, which was soft and dry as soap flakes and insulated from the winter by the brittle surface skin. It wasn’t until I got closer that I recognized who it was.
    “Conte!” I called. “Conte!” But he couldn’t hear me because the sharp blade of his axe was slicing into the belly of the Wife Tree. I felt a pain in my own gut as the metal struck the live wood. Just then, the tree began slowly to tilt. As it went over, it gathered momentum and came down with a crash, sending out a gentle wind and clouds of snow.
    “Conte!” I repeated when the tree had stopped quivering from shock and come to rest. Against the snow, its black branches looked charred. I smelled the fruity perfume of the injured wood.
    Conte, his arthritic joints all bundled up in brown wool, leapt with surprise at my voice and wheeled around to face me.
    “Conte, what on earth are you doing?” Dismayed, I looked around at the meaty wood chips scattered like flesh across the snow.
    “Morgan!” he said, catching his breath. “Morgan, William and I were supposed to cut down this tree together. Don’t you remember? Didn’t he tell you? It was to be this autumn. But he hasn’tcome home from the hospital, has he? So, finally, I decided to go ahead on my own. I wanted to do this for him. It’s one thing less he’ll have on his mind.”
    Should I have told him that possibly William didn’t remember his neighbour any more or even know what an apple tree was?
    “William wanted her down,” Conte said. “She wasn’t giving any more apples.”
    “But she showed herself spectacularly this fall, Conte. Her leaves were brilliant as fireworks. She was still enjoying life. She was still strong.”
    “No, Morgan.” He picked up a branch and showed me the termites, the powdery wood. “Look at the rot. She was hollow and crumbling inside.” He looked down at our feet, buried in snow, his expression full of regret. “I’ve left this job too long. You kept telling us, Morgan, that William was coming home. I pictured us cutting the tree down together.”
    “I do think he’s coming home, Conte.”
    “Vivien and I live in such terrible silence,” he confessed, shuddering with sorrow. “You’ve no idea how lonely that can be. It was such a relief and a pleasure for me to be able to come out here and talk to William.”
    I thought about all these men in their