When it was all over they walked off alone, hand in hand, and sat down under a fine dogwood overlooking the valley. The dogwood was just coming into flower; from where they sat they could see the whole valley spread soft and cool beneath them, turning green even as they watched. The girl stared down into the valley without seeing it. She was very young and blonde, and the mourning in which she was dressed did not become her. She was too young for black, too young almost for the husband beside her, who himself was not much older.
They sat silently together, still holding hands. There was nothing to say. Her father was buried and the tears had come and gone. There was only this long last pause on this warm afternoon, and then they would go down again to their own home and this part of their lives would be over.
The husband watched the girl quietly. He knew that to heal the wound she had to talk, but he was patient. He had loved the old man himself and he could imagine what it must be like for the girl. The old man was all the kin the girl had ever had. Her mother had borne her late and died of it, and the girl had grown up alone with her father on this little farm. She took care of him in that fine, fussy way a daughter has, and though he shaped her gently but with great care to want a family of her own, she insisted she would never leave him.
When she was nineteen and she met this young man, the torture began, The old man insisted from the first that she leave. He said he could take care of himself very well and that it was a shameful thing for her to waste her life as servant to such an old man. But she would not go. She argued, she fought, the young man appealed, a year passed.
And then she came down one day and met the young man in town and married him. Exactly what had changed her mind the young man never knew. Or cared. He was enough in love to believe love had done it, but he also felt grateful to the old man. They went out to see him often in the fall and winter of that year, and then in the spring he died.
So the young man thought now that his wife was blaming herself for leaving. He wanted to talk about that but he did not. He waited.
After a while the girl leaned back against the slim bole of the tree. She stared up at the white flowers and he saw her face begin to crumple, as if she would cry. But she did not, and in a moment he saw that her face was soft and still again.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“About the dogwood.” She went on gazing up at the tree. “This was my tree. Did I ever tell you that?”
He shook his head.
“It was always my tree,” she said softly. “When I was about twelve my father took me to a nursery, and while we were there the man gave me this tree, a little seedling in a can. He told me to take it home and give it shade and I was—oh, I was delighted. It was my own little tree. My father loved trees. That one there—you see that huge oak?—that was his tree, and this was mine.”
The young man looked where she pointed and saw a great old oak standing alone on a small knoll. He looked back to the girl and she was smiling.
“I remember I planted it as soon as I got home. I put it right up close under the oak, almost against the trunk. My father warned me that it wouldn’t grow well there, but I wanted it close to his tree. And besides, the man had said to give it shade. It did very well, though it’s a wonder I didn’t kill it; I used to put fertilizer on it about once a day. But my father would come out afterward and take care of it, and he was very good with growing things. Everyone said he made this little farm produce more than any man could have.”
“He grew you,” the young man said. He squeezed her hand.
“But I never should have planted it there. It did well for a while—I remember the first time it bloomed. I used to do dishes and look out the big kitchen window and see both trees, the great big one shading the little one and the little one all in bloom, all white, and it made me feel very good. My father liked it too, but most of all he loved that oak. It was the biggest tree for miles around, and every now and again the lightning hit it. That always made my father mad. Lightning always strikes the highest point and so it hits the biggest trees first, and my father said that was a terrible shame—the price a tree pays for outgrowing its neighbors…”
The girl turned her eyes down into the valley. The young man sat still. After a moment she looked at him.
“You won’t think I’m silly?”
He smiled.
“I never told you this before. About that last week before we were married. I—you mustn’t think I’m silly.”
“I love you.”
“Yes, but it was never anything—to talk about. It was very bad, that last week. I wonder if you ever really knew. I couldn’t leave him, I couldn’t, and yet I loved you so much and he wanted me to go. He kept explaining all the time that I hurt him by staying, made him feel terrible that he was keeping me from a life of my own. And yet even in that he was gentle; he never forced me. And I couldn’t leave, not until that one last day—because of the tree. You see?”
The young man waited.
“Well, that day two men came up to our house and my father went out to meet them and I saw them gather around the oak. I went to find out what they were doing and my father said they were going to move the dogwood. Well, I was on edge anyway, but I loved that tree and I was badly shaken. I hated to have them move it but my father said, ‘Look at it; it’s in too close to the oak. The roots are all grown together and they’re robbing each other. The dogwood needs more sun now, and the old oak has had too much lightning and needs nourishment from the ground. If they stay here together it will ruin them both.’
“And he was right; of course he was right. The dogwood was already twisted and out of shape, straining to get away from the oak, and the old tree was tired. Even so, I ran away to my room crying because I saw that too many things were changing; nothing was the same.
“And then later that afternoon I looked out and saw the dogwood on this hill where it is now, all alone and looking strange, and suddenly it wasn’t my dogwood anymore. It wasn’t—the same. And the oak was different too, scarred in front by the hole they’d dug to life the dogwood. And then I saw what my father meant—that we couldn’t grow that way, neither we nor trees nor anything. And looking at the dogwood I knew he was right and I had to go. And that day I came down to you.”
She stopped and stared at him, her eyes filling with tears.
“He was such a fine man,” she said. The young man reached out and held her silently, soothingly, stroking her hair; but looking down past her shoulder he could see the great oak, and he felt a massive chill. He was a man who knew something of trees, and he saw that though the other trees had begun to bud, the oak had not. And he thought: The old man knew that. He must have known it. When he transplanted the dogwood he had to take a great ball of earth with it, all the young roots, and many roots of the oak had to be cut and torn away. But it was an old tree scarred by lightning and it could not stand the loss. And so it died, and the old man knew it would die—blessed old man. But he went ahead and dug up the tree and send his daughter away, sacrificing the oak for the dogwood and knowing it, sacrificing himself for his daughter and knowing that, too, for neither tree nor man could survive the loss.
The young man thought for a long while. I must never tell her that, he thought. He kissed the blonde head. No, the old man would never have wanted her to know.
First published in Redbook magazine, May 1957 and Co-Ed magazine, December 1958