Hector

I always gauge the real arrival of spring by Hector. Hector is not a person, or my neighbor’s crazy parrot (that would be Eugenia). Hector is a tree; the oldest and largest tree in the woods by my grandmother’s farm. When he starts to bud and finally shrugs off his dark winter coat and bursts open with huge bright green leaves, spring has finally arrived.
I found Hector when I was nine, traipsing through the woods on one of the days that I should have been curled up in bed. I was wandering down a game trail, probably made by deer and wild dogs. I walked into a clearing and there he was; so ancient and so huge that his root system had forced out all the younger plants and created an almost perfect circle radiating twenty feet around his trunk.
He reached so high overhead that I couldn’t see his top branches. His outstretched arms intertwined with the branches of all the smaller trees around him. The carpet of short soft grass, bright green moss and sticks looked like a blanket wrapped around his trunk. Hector’s roots shaped the ground around him and pushed through in several places, making it a tricky to get close to him.
I struggled up to him, tripping several times on the rough bark hidden under the velveteen moss. I couldn’t look up at Hector while I approached him; I had to concentrate on my feet. When I finally reached him and lay my thin hand against his rough age-darkened bark I could feel his heartbeat. I’ve never told anyone about Hector, I don’t think anyone would ever understand.
That clearing has come to mean more to me than any other place I have happened upon. My grandmother can’t, and probably will never, understand my insistence on running around in the woods all year. She will never understand how the feel of bare earth against my feet makes my heart pound and clears my head. She thinks I should be at home all the time, wrapped up in a blanket with a good book.
I’m also fairly certain that if she ever caught me barefoot in the woods she would beat me until I couldn’t grow anymore. My grandmother is a dark oak furniture, pink silk embroidery kind of woman. She’s formal in her bearing and manners and she never ever looses her temper. She used to be a free spirit, back in the 60’s; a veritable hippie. My mother used to tell me all about it before she died.
I have a picture in my sock drawer, which I know my grandmother searches regularly. It’s an old yellowing photograph of my grandmother with my mom sitting in her lap. My grandmother has long straight brown hair that hangs well past her waist and one of those thin braided leather bands around her head: a few beads and a feather hanging in her hair. She’s wearing light brown corduroy bellbottoms and a maroon paisley shirt with huge flowing sleeves. My mom is sitting in her lap wearing a white strapless sundress with orange trim and has blue beads woven into her braided hair.
They both look so happy; my grandmother is smiling huge, showing her sparkling teeth. My mother is laughing like a maniac, her head tossed backward and the beads flying, just a bit of sun glinting off of them. They are sitting in a field of sunflowers and the heads of the flowers seem to bob and weave; they’re yellow so bright it almost hurts. I don’t know who took the picture, or exactly how old it is, but it’s the single happiest photo I’ve ever seen of the two of them together.
I know my grandmother takes it out of my drawer and looks at it. She caresses the edges and outlines my mother’s laughing face with one spindly finger. I know this because I once watched her do it. She thought I wasn’t home and I watched, through a slightly cracked door, as she stared at her past with tears in her eyes. I wasn’t aware before that day that Grandmother felt longing. She never showed it, not to me or anyone else, but it was there.
My mom didn’t really get along with my grandmother when she was growing up. After my grandfather left, Grandmother lost her “twinkle,” as mother put it. My grandmother became a rigid square: a conformist and traditionalist. My mom was a real flower child. She was like me; running barefoot through the woods until well after dark. She associated with a crowd that Grandmother didn’t approve of and that caused more than its fair share of tension. My grandmother and she butted heads until my mother was nearly 17. Then she ran away from home.
I think that it broke my grandmother’s heart. She would never admit it, the old battle axe, but she never got over that failure. Mom moved away, got married, and had a fairly normal and productive life. When my mother turned 25 she finally summoned up the nerve to call my grandmother. She once described it to me as the biggest risk she’d ever taken in her life.
She called her childhood home and my grandmother answered on the third ring, the way she always did, with a crisp “Hello.” My mother just started talking to her. She told me that she babbled endlessly: starting with how she was pregnant and married and then talking about her job and her new home and her husband. When my mom finally paused for breath, Grandmother just replied with “That’s nice dear.”
And that was that: they made up and my grandmother helped to deliver me. After my father died, my mother moved closer to Everbrook. Grandmother was thrilled to have family so close to her. When I got sick the first time we moved in with her. She had her basement renovated and we set up a little apartment down there.
When I got really sick, we bought a hospital bed and moved it into the living room and then, when I got better, we never talked about it. My hospital bed is kept out in the barn somewhere: in storage until I get sick again. I’ve been ill six times since I was seven years old. Every time the bed comes out into the living room until I’m better, then it goes back into hiding in the barn.
And Grandmother never talks about my illness. Not with Mom when she was alive, not to the neighbors or friends. She hides it the same way she hides my hospital bed, as if by putting it in a dusty room and tossing a sheet over it she can make it all go away. She most especially doesn’t talk about it to me. I’m the one dying every day a little bit more, but she won’t speak a word to me about it.
I think that my grandmother believes, truly, that if she doesn’t acknowledge my illness, it has no power over me. If she can just push it into the back of her mind, lock it up with all the cobweb covered artifacts of her past, lay it under a thick, muffling layer of dust then I simply won’t get ill anymore. If she can deny to herself so utterly my condition then it will go away. She feels her will is that absolute and I thought so too.
When my mother died three years ago, my grandmother all but shut down. She locked herself in her room for the first two days. I could hear her wailing through the door and hear the sound of crystal shattering and wood splintering. When she finally emerged, she looked as starched and stoic as I have ever seen her. Her black blouse and skirt were pressed flat and smelled of crushed roses.
She moved through the funeral without a tear tarnishing her finish, but I could see it, hiding there just under the surface. She had so much rage and anger and pain that I could almost see it writhing under her skin, trying the tear a hole and break out. She held it down with her will of steel and bent it into submission. Grandmother forced grief to become a contortionist and climb into a very small box. She placed this box on the shelf near the knowledge of my illness and she never touched it again.
I was in a wheelchair during my mother’s funeral. It was a beautiful day. It was midsummer and the air was hot and not terribly humid. The sun glinted off the brass handles of my mother’s coffin as it perched over the dark brown pit where she would spend eternity. I remember thinking that Mom would have loved that day. She would have dragged me out of bed to jump rope and play with sidewalk chalk.
We buried her in the family graveyard that’s still on Grandmother’s land. She was sown into the ground between my great-grandmother and my great-aunt. She lies several feet away from her younger brother. The plot is fenced in and well tended. On one side the wheat field was pushing up its golden bounty. The other side fell away into untamed flowers and thick woods. I could smell wood smoke from the neighbor’s. I was entranced by the dancing heads of wild sunflowers that played hide-and-seek with me through the tree trunks.
Once the old preacher started talking my mind wandered away from where we were. It was hard for me to focus on anything through the haze of drugs. I could feel the raw, jagged edged pain lying just beneath. The preacher spoke about the sanctity of life and how God loves all his children. All I could think about was how my mom and I should be trying to catch butterflies in the back field.
I was vaguely angered by the preacher. He spoke as if he knew my mother and he didn’t. He said things that she would have frowned at, or gently chided him for. He was a man of God and he spoke with authority, but it was as empty as the crystal flower vases Grandmother had shattered in her rage. I told the preacher that I wanted to do the internment speech. My grandmother simply nodded.
I spoke while two men poured shovelfuls of dark brown earth onto my mother’s simple coffin. I talked endlessly about the beautiful things Mom cherished, about conversations we had, about long walks in the woods and dancing in our bathing suits in the rain, about my father and about my grandmother. I don’t remember everything I said and no one else probably does either. I spoke until my throat ran dry and the last bit of dirt had been scattered across her grave. My grandmother’s eyes were brimming with tears that never fell. I had an avalanche of tears rolling down my face.
I asked the grave diggers to lift four inches of dirt back up and then, with Grandmother supporting me as I stood, I spread seeds across the grave. Every spring my mother’s whole grave is covered in a bed of perfect white daisies. My grandmother took some of the sprouts and planted them in her flower garden near the house, where we can both see them from our windows.
Today, when I came home from school, there was a vase of white daisies on the table in the living room. And my hospital bed was planted in the dark burgundy carpet. Grandmother was sitting in the kitchen with a tight little smile arranged on her face. She looked like a poorly mended porcelain doll: like any little vibration might shake her apart. I could tell, without asking, that it was back: my black monster. The devil had come to torment me again.
All I could think of as I settled heavily into a chair was that I didn’t know if I could do it again. I didn’t know if I could survive another round of this battle. I knew how this would go. I would get weaker. I would be up all hours of the night, with my grandmother rubbing my back, as I vomited until my throat bled. I would grow thinner and paler and loose interest in everything around me. Exquisite pain and drug induced catatonia would be my only two states of being. I pulled the manila folder from the hospital, my test results, across the table to me.
I searched all the medical mumbo-jumbo until I found the section titled “Prognosis.” The next paragraph is what sent me hurtling out of the house. It sent me running down the hill and racing into the woods. I have to find Hector. I have to figure this out.
I tire easily now. Just a short sprint and I feel as if I need to sleep for a few hours to get my strength back. I slow down and shove my hands into my jacket. I’ve been cold a lot recently. Another sign pointing me into the doctor’s office. Toward needles and tests and cat scans and x-rays. I knew I was sick long before that manila folder sprouted on my kitchen table.
I know, as I walk, that my grandmother is probably going to worry about me. I also know that she understands that I need to be alone. I need to take this in and let it settle in my head and in my gut. If I don’t get this time alone, she knows I won’t submit to the game. I may not submit anyway. I have no fear of dying, the only reason I fight so hard is for her. I can’t stand the thought of her being left alone again.
The wind rattles the bare branches of the trees as I walk purposefully toward Hector. The sound makes me shiver, reminding me of wind chimes made of bone and leather. There are no animals in the piles of dry brown leaves, no rustling noises to soften the creak and whispers of the small oak trees. I see no birds, no specks of flitting color. Everything alive within the woods is dormant, awaiting the return of warmth and the sun.
When I reach Hector I put my hand to his rough bark, and crane my neck back to take him in. The vast systems of blackened branches stretch above my head, intertwining in untraceable patterns. The cool sunlight filters down through his bare arms, lighting but not warming my face. I climb easily into his upper reaches. The handholds and toeholds are second nature to me. I’ve climbed this tree in the dark, in storms, and in the snow. I could scale Hector blindfolded wearing wool socks on my hands.
I curl up in the hollow at the base of all his powerful branches. I begin to sob. I can’t stop the tears as they course down my face and puddle on my neck and in the hood of my jacket before the fabric absorbs them. I turn my face toward a large branch that, to me, has always been Hector’s face.
“I won’t be here next spring. You’ll have to show your new green buds to someone else.” I curl into a tighter ball and let the sobs rack my body until I’m so exhausted that I can barely think.
I fall asleep in the crook of Hector’s branches and if I ever wake up it’ll be to the first cold, hard frost of winter.


Theresa Bullington