Laura Walker holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University, where she was editor in chief for Thin Air Magazine. She writes both poetry and fiction, and teaches writing classes at Southern Utah University. She comes from Southern California by way of Flagstaff, AZ, and always finds herself wishing for a little more snow and a little less sun.
Not all figs are for eating
By the time the tree turned 100, its past was so fractured that no one knew how old it was, let alone where it came from and what was now buried, wrapped in cloth of molder and decay, at its roots. A succession of private owners of the house, all strangers to one another, ensured that legends of the tree died well before the tree itself did. Some of the children who once lived there carried the myths away to new locations, told them as scary stories at campouts or sleepovers or—more often—kept them locked away in hearts that still beat in fear at tree shadows cast onto ceilings on windy, moonlit nights. But no one stayed close enough to the tree for the myths to hang on and create the legends that, in an earlier time had clung to its branches and warded off prospective buyers.
The first half of its hundred-year-life, on the other hand, had been fraught with legend and myth. Neighborhood kids back then knew that it had been planted by the Widow Maureen whose husband had died in the First World War, and who, desperate for the family fate had robbed her of, stole a baby from the county children’s home. When the child died of malnourishment after only two days, the neighborhood kids also knew that she had buried it in her backyard and planted a fig tree over its grave. The fig tree.
Kids who told the story embellished wildly, claiming that the Widow killed the child on purpose and planted it like a seed, hoping it would sprout into her own child; that the Widow was a witch whose spells went wrong and gave life to the tree itself instead of the remains that lay buried beneath it; that the Widow, years and years after she’d done her murderous deed, hung herself from a withered branch of the tree with a note clutched in her hand requesting that she be buried with her stolen child among the snaking roots of the fig tree. But who can say what portion of legend contains truth, and who can read the intentions of a heart shattered by grief?
So children made up jump rope rhymes about the Widow and her tree (Old Witch Maureen/She was snoring/one-two-three, I touched her tree/four-five-six, it started to twitch/seven-eight-nine, it grew a spine). They retold the stories to scare younger siblings, and avoided it like all children do to all haunted things.
Yet, like all haunted things, the tree still had its victims.
Mostly they were children from the neighborhood, and mostly they just… disappeared. Many of them were troubled, and so it was easy for the police to say runaways, make the perfunctory gestures, and then let the forgetting begin. Others, though, died in their sleep, so it was harder to forget, but still impossible to understand the truth. No one thought of the tree because how could anyone know that each child died swathed in waking nightmare? How could they know of eyes wide-open in the dark, watching paralyzed as tree limb shadows danced on the ceiling of the bedrooms? Or the way the shadows, with a house-shaking gust of wind, would peel away from the ceiling, catch at the souls of the children, and leave their bodies lifeless?
And, of course, no one noticed the strange fruit that grew on the tree—out of season, even—how the flesh twisted and the skin split like little open mouths.
Then, gradually, gradually, the stories from the past twined themselves into the tragedy of the present. Old memories stirred themselves awake. Parents who had been children when the Widow Maureen planted her tree remembered the fear the whole town felt back then, remembered crossing the street when passing the house, peering over the fence on a dare to get a glimpse of the gnarled tree.
This was in the 1940s, and the Widow, though a recluse, was still alive—at least according to legend. Any sympathy the people in town might have had for the Widow and her broken-down life had died with their children. Angry parents threatened to rout the Widow from her home, to burn it down along with the accursed tree—but the truth is, they were just as terrified as their kids, clinging to sweat-damp sheets at midnight, had been.
And so the Widow died of her own natural or unnatural causes, and her house lay, desolate and unsold for a decade or two afterwards. But then time passed, neighbors moved away, and the old stories lost their hold on the town. Someone bought the house for dirt-cheap from the bank, renovated it, sold it at a profit. Families moved in and out through the decades. Another handful or so of kids died or went missing, and no one made the connection. The small town had become a large one filled with busy people with disconnected lives.
And this is where Heather comes into the story. She was only nine when her parents bought the property where the fig tree, ancient and immense, grew and thrived. They bought the house from a pair of grandparents whose own kids, grown and far away, were safe from the tree, and whose grandkids bound as children are to the schedules and demands of their parents’ lives never came to visit. That was what eventually caused the owners to sell—they tired of always being the visitors, never the visited, and so they packed it all in and moved to be closer to the grandkids just at the same time Heather and her parents moved to this Texas town.
From the beginning, Heather hated the tree. With its twisting branches reaching into the air like a dozen outspread arms, and its roots thick on the ground like fat snakes, the tree seemed to be composed somehow of living parts. It creaked and groaned and whispered through her window at night. It even breathed like a living thing.
This she noticed one morning when she was playing in the backyard a week, maybe two after moving into the new house. She was dragging around a stick she’d found, inspecting all the trees in the yard. She wanted to build a tree house, a massive construction that would bring in other kids from the neighborhood, earn her some friends. Some ambitious homeowner, somewhere along the line, had turned the backyard into a virtual orchard, spacing fruit trees a few feet apart stretching from one side of the fence to the other; but these were barely more than saplings, and would never support her weight, let alone the wooden masterpiece she was already building in her imagination.
Only one tree on the property would do, Heather knew, and it was with something like fear that she went to check it out. By the time she got to the dark, ugly corner of the yard where the fig tree grew, she was walking on tiptoe. Sneaking. The tree loomed. Heather hesitated, then stepped into its shady grasp. She moved around under the branches, looking up. Shadows shifted up there among the fuzzy leaves and wizened fruit, and she whacked her stick against the trunk, watching for squirrels or birds in the branches above. Listening for them too, but instead, she heard a sound coming from the air around her. A ragged, uneven sound, like someone trying to get their breath back after a run. Quiet-like, but not quite under control. For just one or two seconds she thought it was her own breathing, but when she sucked in, held her breath, the sound went on. Cold fingers seemed to grip her lungs then, and she ran back to the house like a wild thing was after her.
It wasn’t long before the tree started creeping into Heather’s dreams. The dreams never really made sense, never seemed scary when she thought them through the next morning, but they felt scary somehow, the sense of them if not the detail. She’d be playing in the backyard and she’d hear something moving. Looking over her shoulder, she’d see the branches of the tree whipping around like a tornado was settling down on it. Then, with the sudden surrealism of dreams, all the trees would be moving, thrashing around, and a wind so strong that she couldn’t fight against it would begin to push her backwards, towards the tree. Relentlessly. That was a new word for her then, and she felt it, that relentless force in the pit of her stomach during those dreams.
She never told anyone about the dreams or about the real fear that caused them. It seemed like such a little-kid thing, to be afraid of a tree. So she kept it in through the spring months and into summer, through the growing season, ripe with baskets of figs brought to the table and baked into treats she refused to even taste—not all figs are for eating, she knew. The summer harvest led into monsoon season, with its storms and storms. Even with her curtains closed, even on moonless nights, the tree shadows still danced their frenzied dance on her ceiling. If she closed her eyes, they crept closer, so she stared, her eyes open and bleary to keep those shapes at bay. But there’s only so much a kid can do against the wrath of storm and the desperation of a century-old curse.
One night, Heather woke to crashing and flashing, and it was like the summer tempest had broken in to her bedroom. The tree shadow danced madly, its twiggy fingers beckoning, and Heather, against every muscle of her straining will, answered. The dreaded and familiar dance cast onto the walls and ceiling, Heather got up from bed. She paused at the window and watched the frenzy of the storm. It was wild in a way she’d never seen before, tornado-wild, all lightning and thunder and slashing winds. She slid her window up.
If she could have watched herself from a distance, if some shadow version of herself could have stayed behind, she would have seen her own small form swing one leg over the sill, then the other, and drop down into the mud-slick flower bed outside. She would have seen how the tree shadow slid out of her room then and curled around her shoulders like a comforting arm. She would have watched and been powerless to stop herself, just as she was powerless to control her own movements, her legs walking her across the backyard, toward the fig tree, backlit strangely against the storm-lashed sky.
Lightning flared and thunder cracked like boughs breaking. Standing at the trunk of the tree, Heather looked on as a fork of lightning split from the clouds and struck—boom!—the crown of the tree. She stood without flinching as the tree trembled, shrieked, and fell to the ground, a final step in its twisting dance. Its roots, clinging still to the earth that had cradled it for 100 years, erupted into the air, flinging clumps of dirt onto Heather’s unmoving form. Hot, scalding hot air rushed out of the pit the tree roots opened up. “Heeeaaather…” the air hissed, the tree hissed, the stormy night hissed.One minute Heather stood at the crumbling edge of the hole, looking up, and the next minute—flash!—she was gone.
The tree isn’t there anymore. Another family lives where Heather’s family used to live, and they know nothing of the hole bulldozed over where a woodshed now stands. The tree is gone and now its stories are gone, too. They fell into the hole the toppled tree left behind, decaying and breaking down like everything else in that dark space. Maybe Heather is down there, too, with only a dead baby for company. Maybe Maureen and Heather and the baby make up new jump rope rhymes together. Or maybe Heather survived that night, Maybe she and her family moved away and she forgot all about the tree or maybe she never forgot. Maybe she never got over that night and never talks about it to anyone ever. Or maybe the tree that isn’t there anymore still casts shadows on the ceiling and kids still huddle under blankets watching them move. Maybe there was no Heather, and no Maureen, and no tree, or maybe the tree still stands, unscathed by the storm. Maybe it’s all just a legend.