Photo © Steve Woods
If Trees Could Talk
In La Chigoloo, Mexico, there was a time when it was common practice to walk along the dirt path out to the main road and hold your breath as you hurried past one particular spot that had a grotesque old tree growing on it. Everyone said the tree was haunted. It seemed to dominate the area; it allowed nothing else to grow nearby.
It may also have been sacred, since it was paid decent respect by the children in the village. As we know, small children know a lot of things, here. They listen to their grandmothers who have long memories. And as the ancient ceiba tree was believed to hold up the four corners of the world, this could have been the ancient ceiba, for all I knew.
And if it was, watch out world.
Every locale on earth has such a spot known by the children. And Chigoloo—a tiny Mexican village in the desert valley of Oaxaca, not far from the ancient Zapotec ruins of Monte Alban, whose adobe houses were hidden, like all campesino Mexican villages, behind barricades of organo cactus with cackling hens and boastful roosters—had at least one of those spots. It was also a village whose hardpan dirt streets melted into mud during the rainy season and made walking difficult.
So I’d sit on the petate and listen to the rain dripping off the roof techas, and to Carlos, who’d come by the house with another story. He was my barefoot twelve-year-old friend who never once let his imagination stop working overtime. Or his mouth either. Out on one of our walks over these pathways, he’d first pointed out The Tree.
Carlos always put me into a mood of remembering. When I was a child, one especially spooky tree grew out in a pasture near a stone wall where its roots gripped the ground like fingers with arthritic knuckles. Spooked trees were always hollow, of course, and always stood out alone. In my neck of the woods, we didn’t have such informative grandmothers with long histories, and plant life wasn’t sacred. But we kids did have plenty of instant lore that we made up as we went along, and we loved to pass on the best and the creepiest.
The tree stood out in the middle of nowhere, a gnarled ancient thing, the ghost of a demented hag with flesh stripped off her bones, who was always tearing her hair when the wind came by. She’d lived many years ago and had come back to haunt the living, always gliding over the ground at dusk, and was stopped by the stone wall. That was where she was found waving her thousand arms back and forth, appearing in a tattered ball gown wrapped tightly around her thighs. And rather than acting like a healthy, growing member of her species, she dropped bark and limbs onto the buttercups around her foot—as though she was trying to shimmy out of her dress, discarding girdle and prosthesis (perhaps as gifts or perhaps in honorable memory). Certainly in relief. What the tree did was deliberate. The half-hidden gnarled roots were to trip us up if we went anywhere near her, and those scattered limbs were really fossilized cow bones. But it was as though she meant to keep anyone she could around her feet just a little while longer in order to nod and whisper them into her sad story.
Of course a tree can’t talk. It suffers a worse fate than humans with their voice box removed, because even a fallen log has a lot to say, and wishes it could—especially after a human goes and sits down on it airing his thoughts. Trees stand as silent witnesses to all sorts of inhuman activity, but they can only shake their leaves and make moaning soughing sounds, and folks say, if it’s not human, it’s . . . well . . . dumb, you know?
Since we can’t hear it speak or see it trying to form words (and we know a tree’s not even at the developmental stage of wanting to “learn” anything like a cat or a dog), it becomes too dumb a thing to bother about. So dumb, it is not even aware it’s alive! You can kick the trunk when you’re angry, cut it up and burn it when you’re shivering, or just remove the darn thing because it’s in your way—it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t protest. Even if it did protest, what’s it gonna do? It can’t hurt you. Certainly it’s not a conscious witness to murders. . . .
But some trees do speak out . . . in their own way. Carlos’ tree did.
This ragged plant life here in Chigoloo had been stuffed with bad money by a lady who sold bananas in the market. The Banana Lady was a stout peasant Indian woman with wide, flat feet who wore on her head a large woven-grass basket filled with bananas, instead of a sombrero. Each morning she took the family crop to market, and each evening she came home, carefully counting each and every centavo, putting it in a jar until she had saved a small fortune, all thanks to the yellow fruit.
Her husband was a lazy lout, a good-for-nothing drunken bum. He’d spend the money if she didn’t hide it. He went out each night and only came stumbling home around dawn, and did very little work during the day. So she had plenty of years of savings, and plenty of time to worry.
One day she had him murdered. Fearing she’d be discovered and sent to jail for the rest of her life, she quickly wrapped all those family pesos in a dirty rag, knotted it, and stuffed it down a gaping hole in the old tree’s sides.
When she returned to the village to get it out some years later—never having spent so much as one night behind bars--some say the tree had deliberately swallowed the deposit, and it was—(her good fortune, I mean)—somewhere down underground, undigested. A lump of coins trapped in a knotted old rag and suspended in the vast vast night of roots, stones, and dirt; which, of course, was now way too hot to handle, being down under in that hideous place where things and people are always burning. Whereupon, that poor old tree heaved and howled with the pain of indigestion and shook its stiff arthritic branches in the slightest desert breeze as though it had something it very much wanted to confess.
And so the tree seemed to shift its weight and shake its branches, pointing its fingers, whenever the Banana Lady walked by, until all the villagers came to know that location was the spot where the money was hidden. And they would nudge each other, hopping from foot to foot in the predawn chill as they waited for the bus, whispering, See? This here tree knows something.
Only no one ever dared to disturb that ground to find out.
So the Banana Lady never worried again. She began to ride the bus to the market every day like nothing had ever happened. Even up to the time I was living there in Chigoloo, according to Carlos. And I would wonder at that stop along the dusty highway, especially when I looked out the window and saw the old tree and all those ladies chattering and waiting to board, wearing wide-brimmed baskets with bananas in them. Which one? Which one? They were all stout. They all had flat feet. And any one of them could have done the crime and covered up the evidence under their wide banana smiles.
Copyright © 2008 by B.B. Smith
