“WAIT,” I SAY TO JERRY. “Keep driving.”
He looks over at me, confused. “But there’s nowhere to go from here,” he says.
“Just keep going. Please.”
The word “please” sounds strange coming out of my mouth. I can’t remember the last time I used that word. Jerry drives straight past the lane to my farm, past the old cemetery on the right, the one that used to have a church right beside it. He drives all the way back to the Road to Nowhere, as we used to call it. He passes the lane to Mr. Jinn’s old farm, then stops the car when he can go no farther.
“Okay. Thank you,” I say, getting out of the car with my cane and the box Abra’s husband gave me.
“Should I wait here?” he asks.
“No, no, I’ll manage.”
“Where are you going? There’s nothing back there. No road. No path. Nothing.”
I push the cane down into the soft ground and look over my shoulder through the open car window. “Things aren’t always the way they appear. I’m going to see an old friend.”
Jerry and Caleb glance at each other, and I know that look. They think my mind has wandered off without me. But it is the privilege of old age not to care when people look at you as if you’re going crazy. And anyway, who knows, maybe I am. I turn away from the car and pick my way through the trees, my cane in one hand, the box in the other.
The old path is gone. It’s as if it never existed. But I know the general direction, even after all these years. Everything is green and overgrown, and it makes me feel old that I have been alive long enough to witness the regeneration of an entire forest, one that was, in my lifetime, charred and lost. It says something, I think, about the heaviness of patience, the power of waiting.
The ivy snags at my cane and it’s slow going. I push branches away from my face and walk through spiderwebs.
Eventually I come to the cemetery where my mother was buried. The old iron fence still surrounds the small space, though it’s rusty, like an orange weed, and leans over so far in some places that it looks like it might topple. The gate is stuck open. Someone must have opened it a long time ago and never closed it. Some of the headstones have fallen over—broken teeth—but others are still in one piece, drowning in weeds.
My mother’s gravestone still stands, and I wonder why it has been so long since I’ve come this way. I remember her funeral. How long ago that day seems! It feels more like something I read about in a book than something I saw with my own eyes. I place the box on top of her grave, then put my hand on the stone and close my eyes. It’s warm in the summer heat.
I have never forgotten the verse the preacher read in the church. I looked it up many times as a child until the words were etched in my mind.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
How I hope that is true.
But I haven’t come here to stand at my mother’s grave site all day. No, this is not my destination. I turn away and walk through the narrow gate and continue back through the woods. The going is even more difficult, and for a minute I’m not sure if I can make it over the rocks and the roots, through the weeds and the soft earth. But I get there, my black shoes pinching my feet.
I see it. It’s still there.
The Tree of Life.
The outside of it is smooth like worn leather, and it’s the color of a cloudy sky, a slate gray that’s just beyond white. The bare branches are tangled in the leaves of other, living trees. I sit down with my back against it and lay my cane down on one side of me, the box on the other. I lean my head back against the old trunk and close my eyes. I can still feel the amazement I felt that morning when I looked up into its branches and saw all that glistening, almost-clear fruit. I feel a burning in my hands, or imagine I do.
I wonder what would have happened if I had taken a piece of that beautiful fruit and planted it in the loose earth of my mother’s grave.
Would she be with me today?
Would we have been able to save the Tree?
Would she go on to live forever as I wasted away and eventually died, leaving her here alone? Or would I have eaten from the Tree too, sealing our fate, forcing us to roam this old world forever, never to see the other side of that vast water?
In the midst of all these thoughts, I hear the river.
I open my eyes and lift the box up onto my lap. I remember the other box, the one from the attic, the one I had kept for so many years without looking inside, the one that is now inside Abra’s coffin and will soon be buried under the ground. And now another box, another mystery.
What could Abra have left me?
I lift off the lid and am not surprised.
The small sword is sitting over to one side, the same dull gray color of unpolished metal. I reach toward it carefully, but when my finger glances against it, it is still terribly hot. It would burn me again if I held on to it. Again, the burns tingle in my hands. I can see the Amarok again, and the fire raging in the forest, and the angels streaking through the sky.
I look beside the blade and see a kind of leather journal tied closed with a thin leather strap. I lift it out and untie the knot and gently ease it open. A breeze blows through the trees and flaps the pages. A few leaves drift down to the ground. It’s the sound of fall in the middle of summer.
Then, there it is—something like a title page, written in Abra’s childhood scrawl.
The Adventures of
Abra Miller:
My Many Quests to Destroy
the Tree of Life
I sigh. So many years have passed. So many things have been lost. Where will we find the courage we need?
I turn to the first page, and I can almost hear her voice reading the opening sentence to me.
After the death of the Amarok, I went to New Orleans. It is a city surrounded by water, a city full of magic. The sword took me there.