THE CIRCLE
The murmurs began the day after the storm. “Did you see…?” said the man who lived across the street, jutting his chin toward the tree man’s house. His neighbours nodded, frowning. But at first, none of them spoke of what they had witnessed. The three men kept their thoughts to themselves. It was the kind of thinking that could cause embarrassment.
At first, they merely grunted their greetings as they dragged fallen branches into piles between their homes. They gathered splintered bird houses and other items that had blown across their yards. Bins for the recyclables. A child’s pink tricycle. A cashmere jumper, found clinging to a berberis hedge. This was to have been the last big storm of the winter, but they no longer knew what to expect of the seasons.
Finally, the neighbours crossed the road together, to the soggy edge of the tree man’s lawn. They eyed the damage to his property and turned questioning gazes on one another. Did you see?
They knew the tree man would not be home. His daughter had come to fetch him before the storm. She was still a child when they’d first started calling her father the tree man. The nickname had made him smile. Back then, he was a youngish widower, and they were still teenagers. They would watch him picking at a tree trunk, or turning a low-hanging leaf this way and that, his daughter by his side.
The tree man’s daughter was turning into the lane, now, her children in the back seat of her Rover.
Father and daughter climbed down from the vehicle, their mouths falling open at the sight of the damage. Their tallest tree, the ash, was scorched and split along the full length of its trunk.
“Oh, no!” shouted the children.
Year after year, the tree man had checked the ash for fungus and borers. He had added mulch around the cedar. Cleared the apple trees of woolly aphids. Told his younger neighbours that everything was connected, everything was a circle.
“Give and receive,” the tree man liked to say.
It was the tree man’s devotion to his giant wards that gave his neighbours courage, now, to tell him what they’d seen from their windows during the storm.
“The strangest thing…” one of them began. Then they were talking all at once. They told the tree man how, as the winds topped ninety kilometres an hour, the trees seemed to form a circle around his house. Their limbs, reaching toward one another, even against the wind. The cedar and ash to the north. The maple and apple to the south. Their branches quivered and stretched, as if to protect the home.
Then came the lightning. The men lowered their voices. They swore the ash cried out, as a flash of fire cut through its canopy. The other trees tipped their crowns back, away from the house, as if recoiling, before folding in again around the building.
The tree man and his daughter nodded, wet eyed, and cleared their throats. They did not seem surprised, at all, and each of the neighbours felt his shoulders relax.
They walked toward the injured tree, where the children were patting their small palms along the scarred bark. If it hadn’t been the tree, it might have been the house, they agreed.
The tree man had the ash cut back, but refused to remove it altogether. Two years later, he called to his neighbours and pointed upward. There was no doubt. New leaves had come in, their skins a tender green. They quivered, stretching toward the springtime sun.