We returned home a week later and found the tree in our back yard was a burgeoning umbrella of lime-green feathers, the roots now a complete hairy claw clutching at the foundations under the house. I sensed apprehension in the long grass that knocked in the wind against the paling fence. A hoop of climbing rose had fallen from a rotting trellis that arched from the side of the house to the fence. The overgrownness had made the garden come alive. Dad didn’t bother to enquire about our absence. There was no mention or inkling of any interest in where we’d been.
I could still feel the cushion of his affection holding me in the cup of the tree, but I felt the elastic between us was stretching and pulling us further apart. Also I felt he was more eager for my mother, and I was eager for him to want my mother. Or impatient for my mother to behave as she had when she first found him in the tree, when she had slept with the mattress of foliage by her side, when she had paced the base of the tree, when we had found her asleep by the trunk. I wanted to see that longing again because it had made me feel safe. My mother walked out into the back yard. She had just seen the hairy claw under the house. She thrust her face up to the tree. I could feel her eyes searing through the leaves. The tree breathed, I felt it. It sighed and she ran up the back stairs, forgetting how lethal they were, and she shut the door hard.
Then I saw the mule-like legs of Gladys, step-stepping down the drive, like a donkey picking its way along a stony path. Over her arm was the communion dress, the white of it muted by the dense green light radiating from the poincianna tree. Down the driveway she kept pick, picking. She stared up as she came into the back yard, into the realm of the tree, because the tree was a sight to behold. It was like another life form multiplying. The tap root ran its reckless course towards the house and a smaller vein snaked away from the trunk towards the clothes line. Each finger of the tree’s roots looked as if it could rub out any part of us, push out a wall, lift the clothes line, pluck us from earth, curl a tentacle around us. It felt so thin, the house and its walls, like it would only take one surge from the tree to consume it. The tree had power and weight and it was going to destroy us. Gladys looked shocked, amazed, furious and satiated all at once.
I wanted to stop her going any further, but too late, she donkey-stepped across the cracking path, and I knew if Gladys saw the hairy claw under the house we’d be doomed. There was complicity between us and the drain man, even, but if an outsider witnessed the damage, it would exist properly. I only then realized the severity of it as Gladys’s nose turned to the ground and followed the roots towards the house. I knew then we were done for. She step-stepped closer to the house and dared to stretch her neck through the opening that led under the house. I could tell by the way her shoulders flexed back that she had seen the gnarled hand of the tree grabbing for the foundations. She had seen it all right and made it real.
By the time I got to the bottom of the tree Gladys was gone. Mum caught sight of her tail as it disappeared around the edge of the garage. ‘What’s that old hawk up to?’ she said. Standing below her at the bottom of the steps, I pointed under the house to the evidence that proved our collective madness. The unbelievable sight of the tree’s roots strangling the wooden stumps of the house.
‘She saw,’ I said.
‘I don’t care,’ Mum replied, but I knew she did and she would when Gladys took whatever action it was I knew she would inevitably take.