The Tree of Forgetfulness Read Free

fatten him up until he fits into his old cheerful self again. They’ll start with pecans, good old Gloria Grandes from their backyard trees, roasted in butter and salt, the way he likes them. Her aunt’s peaches will ripen, and every Sunday evening he will churn peach ice cream on the back porch. “Look at him smile about that ice cream, Miss Doubting Thomas,” she says to Cecile, raising her voice so that he can hear. This is her last gift to him: trusting as she’s always trusted that what seems to be happening is not.
    â€œYou won’t believe it, Howard,” she says. “But Minnie’s back. Just for the time being, of course, but never mind.” She has come out of the goodness of her heart, Libba says, to answer the door and keep track of the food in a notebook that Libba keeps on the table in the foyer. “Minnie’s coming to see you, Howard. She promised,” Libba says.
    Minnie. Hearing her name, he hears another—Zeke. Fear comes up in him like thick black smoke, and he runs through it, flailing and thrashing. “Help me up,” he shouts, but no one hears. He needs to get back to his office and start another fire and burn the papers he saved during the terrible autumn of 1926, when three colored people were killed and a New York reporter came down to accuse them all of murder.
    Just before sunset Cecile calls the priest. She and Lewis have been raised Catholic, as their Presbyterian mother had promised their father’s church they would be. Cecile knows every Holy Day of Obligation. She recognizes Satan himself, father of lies, in the snake crushed under the cool marble heel of the Virgin Mary’s statue. She knows the meaning of all the vestments and bells and candles. She knows when and why they kneel and stand during Mass, why the bishop slaps your face at Confirmation, and how mortal sin destroys the soul. She needs no book to guide her through her examination of conscience before Confession; she has memorized the list of sins against every commandment. She knows when to call the priest.
    When he hears the priest’s voice, Howard opens his eyes long enough to see the purple stole, but he doesn’t know where to start. A voice scribbles away inside him, but it speaks so quietly he can’t hear what it’s saying. How to confess that you were one man in a swarm of men whose time had handed him easier words than sin or evil to name what he had done or failed to do? How to confess to the silence in which he has wrapped himself for seventeen years? He closes his eyes, moves deeper inside himself, and from that place he sees the room and the bed and himself on the bed. It is strange to feel his body crumble while his mind stays clear and full of light. To feel time move as in a dream, where a day passes in an instant and a whole story flashes by.
    At first he thinks the mockingbird has flown into the room. The light flutters as though disrupted by wings, but there is no bird, only a woman who sits beside the bed and looks at him calmly, her long, light hair scattered over the collar of a deep green coat of an unfamiliar cut. “Lewis?” he almost says. With her long, narrow face and imperial nose, she looks so much like his son. His sadness is in her face too, and also his brightness, the brightness of life. She has Lewis’s eyes and chin, her grandmother’s full mouth, but tugged down at the ends, unlike Libba’s. She has her own way of holding her shoulders, but her hands, with their short, competent fingers and thick palms, are Libba’s.
Hello, Granddaddy
, she says.
    As though by remembering the autumn of 1926, then wishing it away, he’s invited or conjured her. The curious grandchild, the one he’d feared, the one who might feel the pull of that history and believe she has the right to collect the fragments and scraps he should have burned and make another story from them about how it was, and who he was and