THE TREE TOWERED OVER EVERYTHING IN MY SMALL WORLD. My father and I sat on the porch. It was early spring, but the setting sun lit the tree like autumn.

"How old is the tree, Pa?" I asked, and my father knew, among the two dozen trees that ringed our house, which tree I meant.

"I remember asking just such a question of my father, and he replied much the same as I'm answering you." He leaned back in his chair, tipping it onto two legs, his feet planted firmly and his hands behind his head. I imitated him and we sat like that for the longest time, contemplating the sole ancient we had ever known.

The only two sounds in the world were the great sighing of the tree as the leaves rose with the wind and fell again, and the crying out of my mother.

Here on the porch we two were cut off from the death that practiced its art inside. The plank door was closed. Behind it, my sister, Emma, ran a groove with her heart from our parent's bedroom to the kitchen stove. Doctor MacIntosh performed his senseless magic. He'd told us there was little hope. Tommy was asleep in the loft. And Grandma Stern held the baby near the fire ... rocking ... rocking ...

The man had been hiding near the tree. My father was in town forty miles away and we didn't expect him back until the following morning. Our horse, Bruin, was old and we never pushed him.

It was late evening. Mother and I were passing the tree, her apron full of September apples, my ten-year-old female arms straining proudly under the weight of a bushel basket.

His hand must have clamped down over her mouth, for the only sound I heard, as I walked ahead, was the tumbling thud of a hundred apples hitting the exposed roots. I turned.

Two bodies were dissolving into the tree, and I saw disembodied arms, a white leg with gingham at the knee, and my mother's pale face as it struggled into the moonlight.

"Run! Run, Junette!" she cried, and she was pulled back into the tree.

I dropped the basket and ran, falling once as apples caught under my feet.

Fourteen-year-old Emma burst from the door. She screamed as she looked past me to where the light from the doorway illuminated the man and our mother struggling.

"Mother!" Emma ran past me, slipping on the apples, stumbling and crying out as they held her back like the arrested run of a nightmare.

"No, Emma. Go back," Mother cried. The man held a knife to her throat.

"You children git in the house, or I kills your Maw."

"But Mama," Emma pleaded. She walked slowly back, turning every few seconds. When she reached me she grabbed my arm and ran the rest of the way to the house, dragged me up the loft ladder and shook our six-year-old brother, Tommy, awake.

The door was still open and we could see, as we peered from the small loft window, what the man did to my mother under the tree.

There was no wind that night, but I had never seen the tree stand so still. On the calmest night the tree moved with its own inner life. Now, like us, it held its breath, frozen in a strange combination of fear, anger and fascination. The only movement was the man hitting our mother with his body while she lay like wood.

We listened to the sounds of the man violating our house: stealing food from our icebox, breaking glass and china when he found nothing of value to take from us.

Our mother was leaning up against the tree when we crept out to her. We came as if up to a stranger, not knowing if she was changed by some alchemy of violence.

Emma knelt down beside her and our mother stretched up an arm and put it round her shoulder, comforting my sister, and pulling her down beside her. Tommy lay down with his head in our mother's lap. I stood. I leaned against the tree near where they curled on the ground, and placed my ear against the thick, channeled bark, to hear the heart beat of the tree, a rhythmic grinding sound.

Emma told our father.

He rushed past her, pushing aside the arms she had innocently held out for him.

His voice in the bedroom was surprisingly loud, and Emma and I stared at each other, for she too had seen in our father's distorted face the face of the man who had raped our mother.

Mother was exceptionally quiet for weeks after and Father barely talked to her, but as the weeks passed into months, and the snows came and went, their old selves came almost back to us.

It was in March that they caught the man. The tree was swelling with new life, and our mother also, and like the tree, she often stood perfectly still, just staring into the fields. She hadn't been well. She was forty-three and no longer meant for childbearing.

Sheriff Johnson, two deputies and four local men came to the farm with the man.

"We picked up this vagrant," the sheriff said. "He the one, ma'am?"

He was.

Tommy, Emma and I watched from the small window of the loft. The man fought the men as our mother had once fought him; they placed the rope on his neck as he had once held a knife at hers.

The sheriff led the way, the end of the rope in his hand. As they hauled him, a pitchfork piercing his shoulders, he arched his muscled back and pulled his arms so it took three men on each side of him to control the terrible twisting of him. My father replaced the deputy with the pitchfork.

And now there was nowhere for the man to go but to the tree. The pitchfork was a relentless serpent; the men at his sides like ropes already tight around him.

The sheriff swung the rope up over the largest branch, and one by one the men left the man and took hold of the rope. And one by one they pulled and over-handed until the man hung suspended from the tree, thrashing his legs and clawing at the rope with his hands.

Tommy turned to me. "Why don't Paw do it, Junie? Why don't he grab the rope?"

"I guess he's not deputized," I said, but I knew the other men weren't.

Emma said, "If it was me, I'd have ahold of that rope. And I'd pull, and pull ..."

She was watching the man's death struggles intently, as our mother would watch the summer jam. Concentrating on the roiling and violent bubbles of fruit. Waiting for that second when all the turmoil would set.

We watched as the man's face turned dark, and his eyes bulged, and his tongue, dark and swollen, slipped from his mouth. His body stiffened, jerked, stiffened again, and finally hung limp as a dark stain spread across his britches and slowly down one leg.

The men controlled the rope for a time and then let go. We could hear no sound as the dead man, suspended only a foot from the ground, fell.

Our mother went into labor the night they took the body away, and our father had rushed off on Bruin to get the doctor, and then again to get his mother, Grandma Stern, when the Doc said it looked pretty bad.

Doc MacIntosh came out onto the porch and placed his hand on my father's shoulder. "Sorry, Samuel. Wasn't much I could do. She'd lost a lot of blood." He sat down on the top step and rubbed his eyes. He looked very tired. "Your mother have a name picked out for the baby, Junette? You know you and Emma will have to be more than sisters to him. Your grandma will have to go back home soon."

He looked over at my father. "You do plan on keeping it, don't you, Samuel?"

My father didn't answer.

"Of course he does. Don't you Paw?" I said.

"Yes ... of course, Junie."

"I've got to get back. It's awful late," Doc MacIntosh said, and pulled out his pocket watch. He didn't look at it, but looked past it at the tree, holding the watch unopened in his hand and rubbing it absently with his thumb.

"I hate this part of medicine. Fine woman like your Madeline ... Shouldn't have happened." He turned to where my father still sat, staring at the tree. "You want me to make arrangements, Samuel?"

My father shook his head. "Thanks rightly, Doc, but we're burying Maddie right here."

He saw my father looking at the tree with such concentration. "If I was you Samuel, I'd cut that there tree down."

My father's chair came to rest on the porch floor and he leaned forward, head resting in his hands. "That tree's the oldest thing I know, Doc. It was here when I was born, and here when my father was born. It could've been here when my grandfather was born, for all I know. It's seen more death than you and I have seen Doc, and still it's standing. It's not for men like us to tell it when to die. And anyway ..." He pulled me onto his lap. "Junie and I are thinking Maddie would like to be buried there, so the little one inside will always know where his maw is."

[ Story copyright © 2000 Joy Hewitt Mann. All rights reserved. ]

    Another Stoy by Joy Hewitt Mann:
    Three White Chairs

A writer for ten years, Joy Hewitt Mann has seen her work appear in such print journals as Whetstone and The Malahat Review. New to online publication, her first electronically transmitted story, "Teller," appears on Storyteller.UK. She has stories due in March 2000 on Jackhammer and The Danforth Review. Joy is presently the editor for The Valley Writers' Guild (Ottawa, Canada), producing its bimonthly newsletter and annual literary anthology. Her first short story collection, Clinging to Water, is due out this year from Boheme Press, Toronto. When not writing, she runs a large junk store in Spencerville, Ontario.

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