I SHOOK MY HEAD. I prepared to argue with her, to tell her all the reasons for bringing my mother back—that she didn’t want to be dead, that she was waiting for me on the other side of the water, that she was fighting her way back up from under the ground. I tried to figure out how to explain the emptiness her absence had left inside me. But before any of the words came out, a huge shadow fell from the surrounding trees.
It was the Amarok, and it walked slowly toward Abra, baring its teeth and giving a growl that shook the earth under my feet, a growl that mingled with the thunder and the lightning. It felt different from when we had seen the Amarok on the road. At that point it had seemed curious. But there, in the shadow of the Tree of Life, the Amarok was different. It was angry, and it perceived Abra as a threat to the life of the Tree. Somehow it knew that she would destroy it if she was given a chance.
Abra looked tiny, staring at the Amarok approaching through the mist, its massive paws snapping branches and crushing leaves. She turned slightly away from me to face the Amarok, but I could still see her bright blue eyes flashing as they faced the east and the coming storm.
“You don’t belong here,” she said, and I was surprised at how little fear there was in her voice.
Even though the Amarok walked slowly, it covered a lot of ground with its long strides. Its eyes were black, two glittering pieces of coal, and there was a depth there, a darkness so deep that it didn’t have a bottom. The Amarok’s growl turned into a low, slow voice.
“That fruit does not belong to you,” it said, and I shuddered, hearing the words from my dream.
“I don’t want the fruit. I want to destroy it,” she said, gritting her teeth with determination.
It growled again, so close it could have reached out and put one of its massive paws on her shoulder. She bent her knees slightly and reached around behind her, and I noticed the bulge at her back. She pulled the sword out from where she had been hiding it and held it out in front of her. The tip of it trembled, and I knew she was afraid.
The sword was definitely longer than it had been before, or maybe it grew after she pulled it out, because it was more the length of a normal sword, and it wasn’t a dull gray anymore. It glowed a silvery white, like glass covered by a winter frost and lit up by the morning sun. The Amarok stopped moving for a moment. The sword changed things. It filled that early Saturday morning with all kinds of new possibilities.
The rain fell, heavy and clean. The drops disturbed everything, rustling the branches, causing the rocks to glisten, and making the dead leaves on the forest floor dance around. I guess that’s what made Abra, the Amarok, and me stand out so much—everything else was moving, twitching, yet the three of us stood there completely still, unwavering, waiting to see who would make the first move.
The Amarok circled Abra again, and I found myself worried that the animal might somehow damage the Tree. That thought brought to the front of my mind how far I had fallen. I was more worried about the Tree than I was about my own friend.
“That fruit does not belong to you, to keep or to destroy,” it growled at her, and I could barely understand its words. They were a combination of human sounds and animal growls. They spilled into being like vomit.
Without warning the Amarok lunged at Abra and she swung the sword, but the huge wolflike beast dodged her swing. It kept drifting around her from side to side. It darted at her, she swung the sword again, and the Amarok feinted to the side. She took one swing that knocked her off balance, and the massive black wolf plunged in and grabbed her entire body in its jaws, its mouth wrapping around her waist.
For one heartbreaking moment, I remembered the lamb, but for some reason the Amarok didn’t bite clean through. It shook her viciously and she went limp. I felt a numbness spread through me, disbelief that all of this was happening, and the numbness slowly turned to horror and fear as the Amarok tossed Abra at me, knocking me over. She was completely limp, lifeless.
What had I done? First my mom, dead because I had to have a stupid cat. Now Abra lay on the ground, dying because I insisted on regrowing the Tree. Was my dad next? Would I lose everyone I loved, one by one, because of my selfishness?
Abra’s body had knocked me onto my hands and knees, and the leaf I held from the Tree of Life was crushed. There was a stickiness inside it that oozed out onto my fingers.
“Now what about you?” the Amarok growled. “Whose side are you on?”
But the words came from a faraway place. The crushed leaf’s thick, sticky sap was like the gel from an aloe plant, and it had a strong aroma. In the midst of that smell, the voice of the Amarok faded off to somewhere distant, somewhere far away, somewhere insignificant. I had the clearest vision of my mother’s face that I had had since her death, and she was smiling at me. I realized that some of my visions had been true, that she actually was watching for me from the top of a tall white cliff on the other side of an eternally wide body of water, but she wasn’t waiting for me to bring her back.
She was waiting to see what I would do.
And the smell of the leaf from the Tree of Life brought back so many good memories of my mother, memories of her taking me to the pumpkin patch in the fall when the shadows were long and cool, memories of the flowers we had planted together and of sledding down the small hill behind the barn when I was young. I even remembered things I couldn’t possibly have remembered, like the way she looked at me when I was born, as if I was a treasure she would never give up, and how she fed me a bottle and sang me her favorite songs with her eyes closed and her voice clean and clear.
I remembered the songs, all the verses and choruses, the notes and the silence in between. They swirled around me in the fragrance of the broken leaf, and as those words and notes faded, the verse the preacher had read at her funeral service rose up through them.
On either side of the river is the Tree of Life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations.
“The Tree is mine,” I said. “I brought it here, and I grew it. Now I can do whatever I want with it.”
The Amarok moved toward me, sensing my doubt. I think it knew somehow that I wasn’t sure anymore, that I didn’t know what to do, that I was as likely to destroy the Tree as I was to keep it.
“That Tree is not yours.”
But I could see inside the Amarok, and in the midst of that darkness was a heart of fear and doubt. The darkness inside me was dying, withering under the influence of the broken leaf, and I could see clearly. I could see things for what they truly were.
I reached down and picked up the sword. There was no time to find something to protect my skin—I had to grab it immediately. It burned my hand, but I gritted my teeth and held it tight. The pain was excruciating, and I could feel my skin blistering, bubbling up and melting and sticking to the hot metal, but I knew I had to hold on. My entire arm went numb from the pain.
I cried out, a primal sound, as the physical pain mixed with my deep sadness.
Abra lay still on the ground behind me, and I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. The Amarok stared me down, growling, saliva dripping from its glistening teeth. The Tree was still growing, slowly, and the movement it made as it grew was like a tree in the midst of a breeze, its leaves rustling, its fruit swaying. Lightning tore through the sky, followed by an immense explosion of thunder. The rain came down heavier.
Two flashes of light fell down in the midst of all this chaos. Those lights pounded into the ground and took form, and I knew right away that one was Mr. Jinn and the other was Mr. Tennin and that they were the two cherubim who had been fighting over the Tree of Life since the beginning of time. They shimmered and were of human form but were also something more, as if all my life I had seen humans only in a cloudy mirror until that moment. What I saw of them when they slowed was beauty and strength and power.
They didn’t speak, but sometimes I could sense what they were saying to each other. It was as if their thought, their consciousness, was all around me, but instead of individual words, their communication was made up of streaming raw emotion and calculated movements. They streaked through the fog and the smoke like comets, and the sound of their rising was the screaming of jet planes or the roar of rockets.
They would stop for a moment, and that was when I saw their form, but mostly they moved and flew in a blur around the Tree and over the river, and sometimes their collisions with each other made loud cracks, like the snapping of an electric cable when it comes loose from the pole and strikes the ground. There were bursts of flame when they collided too, and the fire fell at the base of the trees on the far side of the river and licked at the broad trunks. Soon smoke from that fire mingled with the fog.
For brief moments I recognized them as two powerful men, and they wrestled there among the trees. Mr. Jinn’s face was desperate and determined. His mouth was a firm line of desire, and it propelled him, strengthened him. He pushed Mr. Tennin to the brink of the river, and then they were in it, Mr. Jinn holding Mr. Tennin under.
I found myself holding my breath, wondering if he would come up. But I didn’t have much time to worry about him—the Amarok roared, and the roots of the forest groaned in reply. It was like thunder in the earth, the sound of a thousand fault lines slipping out of place. I held the sword up again and glanced over at Abra.
Mr. Tennin rose out of the water, and when he did I recognized in him the quiet confidence of Truth. I could tell that he would stand not by the sheer power of emotion but in the conviction of someone acting simply out of love. I felt an ache for him, the same ache you feel looking out over a snow-peaked mountain range or walking through an ancient temple.
The Amarok came at me again, and I held the sword out toward it. It dodged off to the side and snapped at my face, but I moved and ducked and swung the sword like a baseball bat. The air around us crackled with the fighting of the cherubim, and the morning lit up as the sun prepared to rise over the eastern mountain, illuminating the back of the gray storm clouds. Abra still wasn’t moving.
I held the sword in front of me, my arm still numb with pain. The Amarok circled. Behind it, Mr. Tennin and Mr. Jinn flew straight up into the sky like fireworks heading for their apex. Through the trees, through the smoke, and up into the low, gray clouds of morning. I tried to watch, but the Amarok growled. I waved the sword at it again.
The blade grew brighter and brighter. I wondered if it was getting ready to explode. Then two things happened at once: I took a swing at the Amarok as it snapped at me, and one of the lights fell from the sky so hard and fast that it sank down into the earth. Everything seemed to go completely still.
I realized the top half of the glowing blade was covered in blood, a dark blood almost black, and I looked at it strangely, wondering if somehow it was my blood. Was I dying? Was this the end?
The Amarok looked stunned, stopped in its tracks, and fell over dead—my last desperate swing had cut clean through its throat. I threw the sword to the ground and cried out as it tore the burned skin away. I held my hands palms up so they wouldn’t touch anything, and I ran over to see which of the cherubim had fallen.
I think I was crying then, although I can’t remember exactly why. Maybe it was the terrible pain from my burns finally registering in my brain. Maybe they were tears of relief that come after a terrible fright—the Amarok, after all, was dead. The great shadow had passed. Or maybe I was crying because somehow I knew who I would find in that hole in the ground. Maybe I sensed, even without seeing it, that something deep had shifted in the world.
I fell to my knees, my palms still facing up, and looked down into the hole the fallen cherub had created.
It was Mr. Tennin. And while it was the force of his fall that had caused the ground to rise up around him, for a moment it seemed the earth had done that of its own accord—had swelled up, maybe to protect him, maybe to hold him. It was almost as if even the earth itself knew what was taking place and wanted to help, wanted to play a part.
He wasn’t bald and skinny anymore. It’s impossible for me to describe exactly what he looked like besides this: he was beautiful and strong and there was power there, even after he fell. But I also had the sense that what power remained was leaving him fast, that he had somehow sprung a leak and everything that was bright and magnificent about him was growing dim. I wanted to reach out and touch his face, but my hands were so badly burned that I simply held them out over him, as if I was trying to hold down his fleeing spirit.
“Mr. Tennin,” I said. “What . . . what happened?”
He turned a weary face to me, and all the words he said from that moment until the end came in a whisper.
“I fell.”
There was weariness in his voice, but there were also tiny strands of relief.
“But what does that mean?” I asked. “Are you dying?”
He shook his head slowly. “No. It just means I can’t stay.”
“Where will you go?”
He looked me in the eyes, and I realized that he somehow knew my thoughts, that he had seen my visions or perhaps I had communicated them to him unknowingly.
“First I will go across the ocean, beyond the white cliffs, and then, who knows?”
I felt desperation rise inside me. “What if you can’t come back?” But even as I said it, I knew what his response would be.
“Come back? Why would I care about coming back? Sam, if there’s anything you should know, it’s this: death is not a destination. It’s a passing, a transition into eternity, the rest of time. When you leave this place, everything you have known will seem like only a dream or the memory of a dream. Dying is the shedding of one cloak and the taking on of another. Death is a gift.”
I put my head down and wept. “I find that so hard to believe.” I felt helpless, as if everything that had ever mattered to me was passing through my fingers.
“Life is not only made up of what you can see. This is the beginning of belief.”
“It seems like so much,” I said in a whisper. “So much to believe in. So much to give up.”
“Samuel,” he whispered. “Always remember this.”
I could smell wood smoke drifting around me, the only slow thing in the midst of the gathering storm.
“Death,” he said, then paused before whispering the last three words, “is a gift.”
I looked at Mr. Tennin and had this sudden realization that he had been there for me all along. He had moved into our house to find the Tree, yes, but also to keep watch over me. He had protected me from the Amarok on the night we ran out of gas. He had helped me grow the Tree so that he might destroy it and keep me from yet another mistake. And now he was showing me that this path through death was one that could be traveled bravely, with dignity.
He shimmered like the flickering of a lightbulb nearly out. Then he was gone, and I stayed there, kneeling beside an empty hollow in the ground. I had so many more things I wanted to ask him.
A fire raged in the forest on the other side of the river. I thought it would cross over and consume all of us, leaving nothing. No one would ever know what had happened. The story would die with me and Abra. This was the end.
A shadow fell over me, the shadow of a person. I turned from where Mr. Tennin had fallen and looked over my shoulder. It was Mr. Jinn, not as the cherub who had just proven himself victorious, but as the dirty, straggly farmer still wearing that old brown overcoat, still walking with a limp.
“You killed my Amarok,” he said, staring not at my face but at my blistered hands.
“Your Amarok? It wasn’t yours,” I said.
He waved his hand at me. “We have more important things to discuss,” he said.
“Like what?” Pain shot through my hands again, and I let the cool rain fall on them, run over them.
“You’re powerful, Sam,” he said in a reluctant voice. “If, as a boy, you can kill an Amarok, well, there’s nothing you can’t do.” He paused, and his eyes searched my face, searched for any signs of weakness. “You could bring your mother back, Sam. Think about it. You could bring her back. And you could be a prince among men, wealthier than Solomon, because you could sell what everyone wants: life. Forever life.”
I shook my head, but the alluring smell of the leaf had faded and neither of us knew what I would do.
He pointed at one of the low-hanging branches above my head. “There it is, Sam! You did everything you had to do. You found the Tree, the stone bowl, the water, the sunlight. You did it all yourself. You even killed the Amarok, something no one else has been able to do, not for all of time. Now all you have to do is reach up and take a piece of fruit. Bury it deep in the earth above your mother’s coffin. You can bring her back with it. Life from this fruit goes down deep. It’s so close. Everything you wanted is here for the taking.”
I stood up and looked at the fruit above my head, noticing for the first time that it came in various shapes and shades of green. Some were shaped like pears, the color of dark green grass. Others were round like limes, but so light green they were almost yellow. Still others looked like apples, but smaller and softer. The leaves hung heavy and thick, and I imagined all of that beautiful sap in each one. What people would pay for such healing power!
I would never have to die. My father would never have to die. And in my naïve youth, it all seemed so good. Living forever seemed like a wonderful fruit to eat.
I reached for a piece of it, then glanced at Mr. Jinn. His eyes followed my hand. They were hungry and intent and scanned the Tree as if he was looking for something. His tongue flicked at the edges of his lips, and the hint of a smile turned up the corners of his mouth. His hands came out of the deep pockets of his overcoat, and they were round and heavy and trembling. I remembered those hands from the room at the antique store, the way they had pounded the table.
I realized he couldn’t see the fruit. He was waiting for me to pluck it and give it to him.
“Just imagine, Sam,” he said. “Your mother here again, in the flesh. Welcoming you home from school and making you breakfast and tucking you into bed at night. Think of it.”
Whether it was because of some special power he had or the recent sharp visions the sap had brought to mind, I could picture it all perfectly, what life would be like with my mother. I shook my head again, but my hand reached closer for the glassy fruit, and in each one I saw a vision of my mother’s face, smiling.
That beautiful fruit!
“No,” I said. “The Tree is mine. I found it. I brought it here. I grew it. It’s mine and I won’t give it to you.”
The desire for it was too great, and I couldn’t imagine sharing it, not even with Mr. Jinn, the one who had helped me find it.
“Yours?” Mr. Jinn’s voice grew terrible and strong, and rays of the same glorious power I had seen in Mr. Tennin shone through the rags of his clothing. He was rising.
“You won’t?” he asked, and this time his laugh filled the valley and the sky and made the trees bend away from us, trying to escape from some unseen power.
He shook his head, and I felt fear tremble inside me because something in his face switched from mirth to regret. He was about to do something to me that he didn’t want to do. He reached his hand out, and my entire body clenched tight in an unseen vise. I couldn’t move. It was as if he had drawn a circle around my soul. But then he dropped me in a heap and looked past me, toward the trunk of the Tree of Life, and surprise showed on his face, and disappointment.
I looked over at the Tree, and there was Abra. She sat beside the Tree, and the hilt of the sword stuck out from the soft trunk. A blackness had already begun to spread from where she had plunged the fiery sword into the Tree, and the branches had all begun to sink, as if it was deflating.
Mr. Jinn was overcome with anger. Multiple lightning strikes lit up the fog, shattering tree branches and exploding limbs, and were immediately followed by the sound of thunder. He ran at Abra, hands raised, coat billowing out and away from him, the light of a powerful, angelic glory streaking out in rays.
Abra stood up and pulled the sword from the dying Tree. It came out easily, like a knife pulled out of butter. She grasped it with two hands, raised it over her head, and threw it at Mr. Jinn. I was amazed at the force with which she threw it, and as it moved away from her, it seemed to increase in speed, as if it was obeying not only her physical will but also her emotional desire. It stuck into Mr. Jinn’s chest as easily as it had gone into the Tree.
He stopped. He stared at her. He ripped the sword out as he fell, and it clattered onto the rocks.
The fruit all fell in one dropping motion, one thousand visions, and when they hit the ground each piece shattered and a strong wind blew through the valley. Every single shard of fruit was blown away into the sky. I closed my eyes and imagined those shards spreading out over an eternal ocean, then sinking into the water and dissolving. I imagined the waves rolling in huge breakers against a perilous, rocky coast, each wave carrying tiny glass-like pieces of fruit from the Tree of Life. I imagined the beach made up of sand from that pulverized fruit, and I could see the white cliffs rising out of the sand. And there, at the top of the cliff, I saw my mother smile one last time, turn, and walk away.
She was gone, and I couldn’t bring her back.
Death is that ocean, filled with the dissolving shards of fruit from the Tree of Life. It is the sound of waves that crest but never break, a sound that rolls on forever.