The Exposure of Trees

[1]
“Mother says if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it didn’t fall. Maybe if I hadn’t heard father die, father’d still be standing.”

But he heard his father fall. He heard the snapping of a twig. He thought he could hear the breath of the deer behind the bushes. Breath. And another. A snort. And another breath behind the bushes. He heard the click of his trigger and gunshot echo off the hills and when he heard the grunt he knew it was his father breathing behind the bushes, not the deer. He heard the cracking of decaying leaves and locust shells under his feet as he ran to get help. And the engine’s snarls as the help he got raced back into the forest. He heard it all and his father fell because of it. Maybe. If a man falls in a forest and his boy doesn’t hear it, did he really fall?


[2]
“Mother, mother, mother. Does a tree have a soul?” asks a boy at his father’s funeral.

A boy can’t stop asking questions of his mother any more than the roots of a tree can stop pulling water from the earth. Even when his mother is trying to cry, but just dry heaves instead. Even when the earth wants to rain, but just dries its leaves instead.

“Mother, if a tree falls in the forest what happens to its soul?”

A mother sighs and kneels to meet the eyes of her child. “Your father was a good man.”

“I’m not asking about father, I’m asking about trees.”

“Maybe you should be asking about father.”

“I know about father. I don’t know about trees.”

“You’re going to need to grow up. Your father fought wars when he was only a few summers older than you.” Her son frowns. The mother sighs and stands and runs her hand over the wooden casket that held her husband. “Yes, trees have souls.”

The boy’s mother has family in a whistle-stop on the other side of the mountains. They come for the funeral, in white and black and gray. The ash of coal has been wiped from their boots and hands and has been replaced by the dust of roads. Their religion is tradition and their tradition is embedded in soils far below the lowest roots of oaks. These people believe that a photograph steals their souls, incarcerating them in graven images. The boy tugs on the hem of one of their dresses.

“What happens to the soul once it’s stolen?”

The woman knows about the boy’s role in his father’s death and decides it’s best not to answer.

[3]
The boy grows up on his diet of questions and answers and there comes a day when he makes his way to the shed where his father kept his things. In a cardboard box, along with a hunting knife and war medals, the boy finds an old camera. There’s a roll of film still inside the camera. He waits some time before taking it to be developed. They are portraits of this world of speed and brilliance from the eyes of his father that fell in the forest. The boy thinks that maybe photographs can save souls instead of stealing them.

The boy cleans out the shed where his father used to prepare the deer he shot. The first things to go are his father’s guns. Then the ropes, the buckets, the saws. The boy can’t bring himself to throw away a box of antlers and hoofs and buries them instead. Once the shed is clean, he patches up the cracks in the wooden siding and hangs an old towel over the window.

Now his mother asks the questions.

“What are you doing out in the shed?”

“I’m not forgetting about father.”

He buys a roll of film and goes into the forest where his father fell, and within days he’s hanging pictures of trees on the line in his darkroom, souls slowly developing. His mother asks another question.

“Who said the souls of these trees need saving?”

“You did.”

[4]
Years later, on the anniversary of her husband’s death, the mother asks her son.

“Will you come with me to his grave?”

“I can’t, mother. I have somewhere to be.”

“Son, it’s his anniversary.”

“That’s why I have somewhere to be. Why don’t you come with me?”

“I’m going to plant flowers and clean his gravestone.”

“Mother, there’s trash in the forest where it happened and I have to go clean it up.”

“You should go with me. Why won’t you go with me?”

Her son shakes his head. “You go to celebrate his death.”

On the way into the forest, the road folds on itself, again and again, a mobeus strip that smells of earth and tastes of wind. There's no direction here and the only thing the boy is sure of are the two pieces of asphalt beneath his feet. Even then, reality leases him that space for a moment's breath, and for a moment's breath only. But that's enough. One inhale-exhale is about as long as the boy can stand still; he's already signing his name on a lease for a new plot of land, just inches in front of the other.

[5]
This was the forest where his father fell, but the trees have been cut down by a man in orange with metal teeth. Like the branches snapped under the weight of a falling tree, the boy is crushed.

“Mother, mother, mother. A tree fell in the forest and the man who cut it down heard it so it must have really fallen. But don’t worry. The man couldn’t take its soul because I have it. It’s just a photo in a glass frame in our living room, it’s just a picture of a tree, it’s not in focus and the exposure is wrong, but mother, it’s still a soul.”

“Mother, mother, mother, father fell in the forest, but I didn’t have my camera then.”