Lambsquarters (21 page)

NATURE HIDES DEATH,
conceals its horror under blankets of flaming leaves, thatched grass or feathered snow. Nature lofts ashes skyward or floats them away on liquid currents to dissipate, dissolve, transform. Nature offers refuge too, places that draw us at times of stress, soothe us in any weather, absorb the evil humours and give us back our selves. My solace is the magic beech tree.

Architects call what can be seen beyond our own borders “borrowed landscape”—that expanse of view over the fence or across the street or beyond the back lane. In the country these boundaries are already blurred. Line fences have no signposts, and we are usually welcome to stray across them.

Realtors indicate farm boundaries from the road and point to fencelines. A sweep of the arm encompasses forest or field. But no agent walked us over the
farm. We owned it before we saw it all. Perhaps we haven’t really seen it all yet. Certainly not learned it all. The Pie-shaped Field, the Hayfield, the Meadow. The Swamp and Bush. The Sidefield.

The cedar fences that bound the farm are snaked old and tight, their rails weft for geriatric trees that first poked through as sapling warp. They herringbone the underbrush, the elms and maples and chokecherries, the apples and mountain ash and lilac. And the wild grape entwines a triple helix around the twill.

After carefully walking within our property, we ventured across to the neighbours’ for our first trip over the fence. A rock-pile corner at the high spot, back beyond the Hayfield at the northeast boundary, makes the fence accessible in the tangle. But with no trees for support, the rails slant to the north, pushed by the snowload to tilt down the hill.

Once we get over the fence and through the trees, we view a scene that resembles a Renaissance painting. Hills and trees frame the space, drawing the eye to the middle distance. Permanent pasture falls away, with no particular paths to follow, but the direction is clear. Forest and hill off and away, water in the middle of the canvas, rolling fields to the left, dipping to flat grain-land, then wafting up to the coagulations of glacial moraine. To the right more valleys and hollows, where the ice lingered then charged, scraping and gauging and leaving granite calling cards. A perfect elm beckons
on a height, and a sea of fall colours contrasts with the few white pines still standing. Mystery in the patches of forest beyond. We go that way. To wear a path.

Down through the field dotted with purple fall asters, thistles and teasels, we climb over a sagging fence in the far corner. Below is a spring, gushing from the bank like Niobe’s tears. It pools, hesitates, narrows and falls to swamp below. Wild watercress still green amidst the dying edge grasses. Water clear and cold as ice wine.

A lane levels the rise above the stream and leads upward to the next field. The grand vistas suddenly enclose and become contained spaces bounded with hillside, wood, swampy bush and fencerow. At the gate, scrubby pasture undulates to the south and east, broken rails sharing lichen with carbuncular rock piles and dried raspberry canes. But the lane, the tractor path, the cattle walk, whatever this track is, leads through a wild orchard. Hawthorns, bare-leafed now, expose empty birdnests and vicious thorns, fruit cemented to branches. Long stiff grasses and starched Queen Anne’s lace, burnished goldenrod and faded chicory, its blue flowers clouded by frost. The track leads down towards a wood, then up, to shaded space.

And without any warning it is there. Off to the side. Magnificent. Alone. Enormous. The magic beech tree.

The atmosphere instantly changes as we are drawn off the track. The crown is so dense that even leafless, it filigrees the sun. The beech owns the high point.
Refuses neighbours. Like royalty, it demands distance as if cordoned off with gold underbrush. Nothing grows under the spread of its boughs. Clad in the palest grey leather, bark without nap, it is elephant, sleek seal. Its knots are elbows, heels and the puckered orifices of breathing things. Its limbs are animate, waving and stepping and fingering the earth.

High on a natural pedestal, the tree demands the reverence of an upturned eye. Praise almost. Druids may be charmed by oaks, but I am compelled to the beech cult. Beech. In German,
Buche
, from the word
Buch
. The tree was named for the books made with slabs of its wood. I see a lifetime’s reading in its leaves, gathered at my feet now, but the beech is poised to bud again with endless new chapters as the seasons turn like pages, faster and faster with time.

The tree should not seem so remarkable. Virgil gave the beech homage in his
Georgics
, so I’ve been warned. But the massive trunk, short but thick, gnarled but smooth, sends branches that dance from its body like arms from a Hindu deity. The curve of its bark makes muscle of wood and sinew of twig, and fecund bellies erupt on all sides. The tree demands to be circled, checked for
trompe l’oeil
. Exotic already, it soon reveals an anomaly.

One of the largest branches has grown off to the west and then somehow formed an umbilical line back to the trunk. It is a living, growing, connecting thing. Or has
the trunk reached out to the branch? It is impossible to tell. The trunk seemed all of a piece until we found this flying buttress of bark stretching like a strut. Or a guy wire. Or a lifeline.

From that first day to this, the beech remains an enigma. Slate blue, it swims in a sea of its own. Far from a line fence, park, village, or mooncalf with a penknife to enclose initials in a heart, the tree stands alone. Looking out over some private demesne. And I am a supplicant.

If sometimes, as Frost claimed, life is too much like a pathless wood, where an eye weeps when hit by a twig, there are also rewards for struggles through the bush. There are those who do not care to forge new paths. The magic beech is not for them.

But this tree is both ore and lore for me. I’ve climbed its branches, stretched on its boughs. I carried my children to see it when their eyes were just newly cracked, then later helped them climb it themselves, small booted feet sure on its silver limbs. Countless picnics, successive dogs, triumphs and sorrows were all marked by the ceremony of this tree. Special friends taken to it alone and severally. In through the wardrobe. Part of the secret. Hidden knowledge, like that of the leaves themselves, which were valued by early settlers for mattress stuffing, prized for their springy comfort so superior to flattened straw.

Were leaves gathered from this magic tree? And
drawn by horse and wagon in burlap bags back to the farm? Did women rake and stuff them into waiting ticking covers, striped blue and white, shyly stained and noticeably bleached? Pack mattresses full to coddle backs stiff with winter milking, sore from recent harvest, flexed with cold? Use them as soft shelter to conceive magic children or sweetly scent a sick bed?

Each season the path changes, and with it the magic beech. In winter, I glide over the Hayfield, manoeuvre the fence with my skis in the air, or trickily sidle up to the rails, straddle them with one ski over and to the east, one still to the west, make a quick turn of my body with the second ski aloft and I’m across. I telemark down the hill and, in a good snow year, sail over buried barbed wire to the spring, carry on up the rise, pause at the top and search for that snowshoe hare, so well blended and difficult to spot. I ski downhill through the orchard and herringbone up the hill at the end, or skirt around the knoll and along the ridge. The latter gives me a longer view, but the former gives the sudden shock of the tree, white capped, iced, like a Florentine figure released from marble.

The beech holds my attention each time I visit, but I get chilled and must keep moving. I make a snow-plough turn down the hill to the pond, check on the open water, then set off through meadow lanes two farms over, passing field after field to the forest where I’m under cover of sleeping maples. I get to the road
and then home for hot wine or cider or buttered rum. When I’m on skis the magic beech is too close to be the end of the path. The beech is the beginning. It draws. It beckons.

In February, the first thaw. Rain making mud. Dogs sniff sleepy coons, brown and rank, from their lairs. Crows gather: black on a grey sky. From the slick stride of the ski to the slog of the boot. Black on brown. Field stubble dead and buried. The magic tree looms outwards, its branches fanged. A cartoon tree, haunted, sinister, sleek and black in the wet. Inhospitable tree, too slippery for muddy children to climb, but not to be ignored. Magnetic still.

Finally spring. The wild leeks take their chances under the beech’s branches. The air is pungent and fresh, warm hints on the wind. Buds furled and bulging are coloured like anachronistic businessmen in polished brown brogues with light grey suits. There’s time to linger. The children hang like lemurs from the branches, each trying to outdare the other. The path’s end. We spread an anorak as ground sheet, unfold a mouse-eaten table cloth, and open the hamper of food. The first picnic of the season, to be followed by feasts among the trilliums, the wild violets, the marsh marigolds and the harvests of hay, then grain.

Late summer, after the barley is off but before the corn is ready, when the cicadas sing and the jays gather and the geese begin to
ka-ronk
and fly east and west,
west and east, thinking of the trip south (picking their marshals and testing their feathers) we set out again, knowing that the neighbour’s bull is safely in the barn and the grain is in the granary. Our last beech lunch of the year. Sultry day of September, grasses dry and scratchy, crickets looking for scraps. The children, bigger now than I am, still climb to their favourite spots while Thomas and I lie back with our hats on our faces. The old dog sleeps, the puppy waits at the base of the tree. All of us are refreshed by its strength and are drunk on its magic.

PLOUGH AND HARVEST

FIELD WALKS COME TO A HALT
until after harvest, which drones on well into the autumn. We must keep to the edges of the fields and with summer’s full growth on fencerows there can be little space for travel. Then, before the last cornfields are combined, deer season begins. The hunters herded up from the south don’t know our migrations and peregrinations. I stay inside and watch from a safe distance.