The Tree Borers

The clearing with its soft grass opens your mouth. You tell me about your son’s death. It happened the morning of his high school graduation. When he didn’t come down, you went upstairs to wake him. The household in an upbeat mood.

The two older girls, your stepdaughters, had been easy. But this child, the one you’d known from the beginning, whose thin body was honed from defiance, you’d kept him close. Put a pool table in the basement for the boy and his friends. Sat upstairs with the TV off, reading by a single lamp, an owl listening.

Even as you followed the 911 operator’s instructions, you knew. Even as you watched your own hands press on your son’s chest, heard yourself counting.

Tell me, tell me, you say. Could it be that all the pain in my family condensed into this boy? Potent as heroin. That everything we survived lingered in the airless corners of the house waiting for this child?

You speak in the language of soft grass. Our voices, our little group of words. You dream of carrying your son to lay him in the ground. Counting shovels of dirt.

Of the boy standing in front of the summer sun, invisible.

The oaks are witnesses. The hard vest of their bark cracked open, leaf-less limbs waiting to fall. Tree borers have traveled across the country, not enough frost to hold them back.

You and your son enter the woods. Oaks throw the long forks of their shadows on the path. Your shadows walk side by side. The familiar shape of his short cowlicked hair and narrow shoulders. Your thicker shape slopes along. You will drag the dead limbs out of the woods. Load them onto the truck. You’ll stand them on end, split each one open with an axe. Stack them neatly for firewood.