The Brotherhood of Trees
Michael Jasper

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[Insert Pic brotherhood.jpg Here]
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“Just a few hundred yards from where my wife, son, and I live is a lake surrounded by land owned by the Army Corps of Engineers. The protected land around the lake is covered by dense forest that, fortunately, won’t ever be razed to make room for more subdivisions. Hiking in those woods, you can forget about the mundane patter of reality for a while as you dodge freshly strung spiderwebs and kick up squirrels, birds, and the occasional deer. And if you stop and just stand in silence for a moment, you can feel the age of the trees around you. You realize that each tree is its own mini-universe: bugs and worms down below, bark and sap and more bugs in the middle, and squirrels and birds and spiders in the branches. Each tree has its own story, as well. 

And sometimes, out of the corner of your eye, you may just catch sight of something more than trees there...” 

* * * *

EVERY MORNING THAT WINTER, just as the black night began to melt into the first red fingers of day, I went running in the forest behind our house. Fred was still snoring and twitching in his light, carpal-tunnel-induced sleep, and his eyes would be red when he woke after too much dreaming about line after line of code. Me, I’d be refreshed and sharp and focused, thanks to my new routine of jogging with the hounds.

We’d never wanted kids, Fred and me, not back in the days when our love was still athletic and young. So we got dogs instead. Not a bad tradeoff, in hindsight, due to how hard Fred worked and the long hours I’d started to keep after fifteen years at the firm. We loved our nieces and nephews, and we ignored the awkward moments as the kids adjusted to having two uncles living together in one house.

We always got the dogs in pairs—first we had greyhounds (former racers, docile and loyal), then lap dogs (Fred’s choice, not mine), and even mutts (from the pound, always grateful and at our heels).

But these two, Boris and Cloris, were something else. They were beagles. Forget lethargic Snoopy lounging on top of his doghouse. When I took these two running through the frozen woods behind our house, it was all I could do to keep them from pulling my arms out of their sockets, one leashed, furry ball of energy per arm. They tore up and down the trails, baying louder than all of our previous dogs together could’ve mustered. God help me if they saw a squirrel or caught scent of a deer.

Boris was light brown and white, while Cloris was dark brown and spotted, and they were the ones who first saw the young boy standing next to the cave half a mile from the house I shared with Fred.

When they saw him, they didn’t bark like they usually did—all throaty yowl and frenetic gasping for air. They simply turned toward him at the same time, hard, tripping me in mid-stride, and then they padded off the trail up to the pale, shirtless boy.

“You okay, son?” I asked as I clambered up the incline toward him. I was gasping for breath, sucking the frigid air into my aching lungs, and it wasn’t just from my previous ten minutes of running. The young man was beautiful: porcelain skin, jet-black hair falling over heavy-lidded, light-blue eyes. His perfection was marred only by what looked like dried blood on the tips of his slender fingers.

“Son?”

Don’t ask me why I kept calling him that. My voice felt raspy and hoarse, too loud in the chill, early-morning air, surrounded by the whispering of the branches above us.

The dogs kept staring at him, quivering and pawing at the cold ground. Usually they were all over people, nipping at their ankles and barking with maximum volume. But Boris and Cloris refused to get too close to the slim, silent boy. He appeared to be in his teens, not nearly as young as I’d thought at first.

Just like the dogs must have gotten earlier, I smelled his scent: wet dirt and something smoky, like aged tobacco tapped from a pipe. When he turned his scintillating blue gaze from the dogs onto me, Boris and Cloris immediately began to whimper for the return of his attention.

I wanted him to say something, but in the warm light of his gaze, I felt like any words would be meaningless. We just stood there, me hunched and huffing for air and shivering, him standing straight and patient and still as the trees all around us.

Then his gaze left me, and I knew how the dogs felt, as if a shadow had just been cast over the sun. He was peering at something deeper in the forest, close to where the trail veered off into the gray darkness still clinging to the trunks and branches like fog. Something crackled off in that direction, possibly a squirrel or a bird. Boris and Cloris never batted a canine eye.

I was about to ask the boy if he was lost, but the question stuck in my throat when I looked back at him. He was standing up now, thin arms raised to shoulder height like a crucifixion. I could see his veins through his pale skin, and they looked greenish-blue as they pulsed with life. His breath clouded the air around his head in a halo. He seemed to be waiting for me to break the silence.

What the hell, I figured. Why not?

I inhaled cold December air, felt it sting once more inside my chest, and started to talk to him.

* * * *

In spite of the coldness in our house, I had no problem waking up early the next morning, or the following week of mornings. Even as snow dotted the forest floor, the boy remained outside the cave, shirtless, and waiting to hear me talk.

With Fred so busy and stressed out with his work, I found talking to the boy—who refused to even answer me when I asked his name or tried to take him to our house for shelter—much easier. And addictive.

So addictive that I never thought to ask him about how he came to live there, or why he never seemed cold. I wanted to talk to Fred the way I talked to this boy, but with our competing schedules, we never seemed to find the time. At some point we’d become more like housemates than lovers.

On top of that, the dogs were infatuated with the boy, and they didn’t seem to mind missing our morning runs. I think they preferred sitting at his feet and licking the dirt from his hands and nuzzling the wounds on his fingertips until they began to fade. His fingers were not stained with blood, I discovered, but they’d been burned. Each morning the wounds would return, as if he spent his afternoons and nights abusing himself with fire.

Again, I had no luck when I asked about these things. No response other than the turning away of that achingly blue gaze. I told myself that the boy needed to keep some things to himself. God knows I’d learned that in the past fifty years.

I would sit and rub my arms and tell him about my day, my clients at the firm, and the old days with Fred and our other friends, before they broke up or settled down or moved away or—a handful of us—fell ill. I cried a couple mornings with him, bringing up these old memories, but he neither drew back from me, nor did he try to comfort me. And somehow, that felt right.

While I felt the old, unhealed wounds inside me heal, abrasions on my heart that I’d tried for so long to ignore, I realized I was getting soft in the belly again. Too many skipped runs. I wondered if Fred would notice.

The strange young boy didn’t seem to notice. Though without fail, each morning, just as I was about to check my watch or glance at the rising sun, he would simply turn and wander off without a word. He headed deeper into the woods and entered a clearing of broken and burnt tree trunks bordered by leafless oaks. When he dropped to his knees, I would fill with guilt, watching him like a voyeur as he tried to push his hands into the frozen ground. I tried to breathe through my mouth so I wouldn’t inhale the burnt smell filling the morning air.

I would turn and run then, hot with shame as the dogs led me back home to Fred, still tossing and turning in our cold bed. I ached to join him there, to tell him all about the boy out in the cold and alleviate my guilt. But instead I fed the dogs and drank my coffee on the back deck, watching the forest and shivering, alone.

* * * *

The next week, winter hit us with a day of snowfall and wind that drifted the snow around our back deck and painted the trees white that lead into the forest. For Fred’s sake, I still kept up my pretenses at running, dragging the dogs out from under their musky, chewed blankets and leading them onto the crunching layer of snow covering the dead grass and undergrowth in the forest.

The boy was there each day, always outside his cave waiting for me, always shirtless and silent. I knew of course, by that time, that he wasn’t human. I figured it was a trade-off—I felt all too human with my back acting up along with the ten pounds I’d gained since first meeting him. I’d lost all interest in running, living instead for my time with the boy, aching for his undivided attention and the serenity it brought me.

I felt something begin to melt inside of me—something I’d never even known was frozen—as I told the boy about events that I thought I’d forgotten forever. From the day I tried to tell my brother about the way I felt about the other boys at school, to the long nights in the hospital with Alan in the late seventies, a good five years before I’d ever met Fred. I talked about my life’s adventures, like the trips around the world, the friends I’d made who were more blood to me than my own family, the mad rush of meeting a new man whose body fit mine as we danced, kissed, and made love.

But the boy seemed most interested in the hardships. He would nod along, as if agreeing with how much it all hurt. As if he could relate, at such a young age.

One morning after talking for an hour, I tried reaching out to him, but he simply pulled away and seemed to fade into the trees around us. The following morning was even colder, and I begged him to come back to our house, not caring about all the questions Fred would ask. But the boy just shook his head at my invitation and gazed deeper into the forest, touching his blue-tinted lips with the burnt fingertips of his hand.

* * * *

On New Year’s Day, Fred woke in the darkness at the same time I did, even though I’d stopped using my alarm months ago. To my surprise, he rolled out of bed and began dressing. I’d even slept an hour later than usual, thanks to our late night at an old friends’ place, and I was nursing the last vestiges of a hangover from their cheap champagne.

I winced, remembering how Fred had bragged to our buddies Mikey and Anderson about how I went running every morning, even on the weekends, and how proud he was of me. 

“I want to go running with you and the dogs,” he announced, rubbing his round belly with his old mischievous grin. He slipped on some sweats, a thin sweatshirt, and his ancient Nikes. “It’s my New Year’s resolution—I want to get fit, sweets. Just like you.”

“It’s freezing out there,” I said, reverting to mother-hen mode in my desperation, afraid of getting caught. “Put more than that on, then. Another sweatshirt, at least.”

“I’m good, Matthew.” Fred gave me one of his old grins, all sparkling teeth and crinkled eyes, and I couldn’t say no to him. “Let’s go.”

I struggled to think of an alternate route for our run as he followed me outside, even more excited and yippy than the dogs. But Fred had Cloris, and she took off down the packed snow leading to the forest trail that went right past the boy’s cave. Betrayed by my own beagle.

I tried to comfort myself with the thought that Fred would get winded before the cave, but he was running with the enthusiasm of a beginner who’s forgotten what shin splints and aching hamstrings felt like. Sweat glistened on his forehead, catching the morning sun, and he wasn’t slowing down yet.

I tried sprinting ahead of him, leading Boris. Don’t ask me why I didn’t want Fred to find out how I’d really been spending my mornings; probably it was for the same reasons I’d never told him about the boy: partly out of a sense of shame, and partly because I wanted him all to myself. I loved the boy in a way I’d never love Fred. It was a simpler love, far less complex than dealing with someone who had needs of his own.

With a final burst of crazed barking, Boris and Cloris both slowed to a stop by the cave, and there he was, in all his pale glory, naked from the waist up, arms reaching out to either side as he stretched.

“We really should go,” I began, but Fred was already wearing his patented Sherlock Holmes look, all squinty eyes and pursed lips.

“What in the hell?” He ran a hand through his wild gray hair and blew out a steamy breath of air. “What are you doing here, son?”

Fred’s eyes, I noticed, were the same shade of intense blue as the boy’s. Why hadn’t I realized that sooner? I forgot about the cold and felt—for the first time in a long, long time—warmth fill me from my toes to my fingers to my head.

“That’s a long story,” I said at last, when it became obvious the boy was not going to answer.

“The kid needs help,” Fred said, stepping off the path. “He’s got to be cold.”

I waited for the pale young man to step back and drift off into the trees in his usual manner, but he didn’t flee this time. He simply let his hands drop to his sides, hitting his faded, green-tinted jeans with a tiny slap.

“Are you who my Matthew has been visiting out here?” Fred murmured. Somehow, he’d managed to approach the boy and get his arms around him, his big hands rubbing warmth into the boy’s limbs. “I knew it had to be someone special.”

Jealousy and guilt fought for control inside me, but I didn’t even try to concoct some sort of cover story. Fred was too quick for that; he’d figured out more about the boy in just one glance than I’d ever uncovered in a month of talking to the lost young man. Fred could read the boy, just like he used to do with me, before work and the daily grind wore down us both.

“Why are you stuck here?” Fred was asking the boy. “Is it the forest? Has it got some sort of hold of you?”

The boy’s gaze traveled to the same spot deeper in the woods. Now that I was free of those unnaturally bright blue eyes, I could think more clearly, and something clicked in my mind. The boy was looking at the patch of forest where, back in late October, the rangers had held their last controlled burn of the season. The burn that had gotten away from them for close to a day when the wind made a sudden shift. Close to an acre of old-growth oaks and pines had been lost in the fiasco.

“It’s over there, isn’t it?” Fred said, looking from the boy to me. I was still warm, and I realized the heat wasn’t coming from the boy, but from Fred. That warmth had been there all along.

“My tree,” the boy said. The timbre of his voice was so musical and sharp that I wanted to stick a finger in my ear to make my eardrums stop vibrating. Not even Fred’s state-of-the-art sound system in his home office had such clarity.

“Your tree?” I began, needing to hear that voice again.

“Lost in...the fire,” he said, his voice growing more clear, though his words came slowly. “Along with many of my brothers. So many lost....”

We moved down the snowy trail toward the lumpy patch of stumps and divots that had once held old-growth trees. The boy stopped at the edge of the patch, and I could see black cinders sticking up through the snow, as if they still retained heat enough to melt anything that came too close.

“The trees,” the boy whispered, “are just like you....” He looked from me to Fred, then back again. “A brotherhood.

Fred turned toward me, eyes wide. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he asked, and then, without giving me a chance to answer, “And why didn’t you ever ask him why he was here?”

I couldn’t answer either question. All I could do was think of all the bad memories from my past I’d been able to exorcise with the boy, and all the while he’d been looking for some trace of his lost tree. Whatever that meant.

“Why did you let me talk on and on,” I asked him, “when you needed my help?”

“That’s what this forest is for,” the boy said with a shrug. “We’ve found our peace. We’re here to help others find theirs.” He paused, removing his gaze from me for a painful moment. Leaves rustled all around us. “Listening to you made me remember what it was like, to be, to be me again.” He gestured at his pale, slender body with wounded hands. “Not this...rootless me.”

I motioned at Fred to bring Cloris closer, as I led Boris up to the boy. The young man was already hunched over the burnt ground, hands poised to dig once more at the earth.

“Wait,” I said, letting Boris and Cloris get a good sniff of the boy’s earthy, smoky scent. “I think my dogs can help. They like to dig, you know.”

As if spotting a hare in the brush, the dogs were suddenly alert and yowling, pulling at their leashes. I undid the clasp at each of their collars, holding them as long as I could, and then I let them loose.

Sending cold ash and dirty snow flying, the two beagles raced into the clearing where mighty oaks once stood. The dogs circled around, noses to the uneven ground, until they found a blackened spot in the middle. They began scratching in the dirt and yipping in earnest. They didn’t stop until their paws had unearthed a trio of bright green acorns from the cold ground.

At the sight of the acorns, the boy let out a long sigh that was as soft as wind through the limbs of a leafless tree. He reached out for the acorns, then stopped, fingers curled once again with pain.

Fred, meanwhile, gave me a confused look with his red-rimmed eyes. I could tell he’d about suspended the last of his disbelief on this New Year’s Day. I took his warm hand in mind and squeezed it as hard as I dared.

“Matthew?” the boy said, his voice tentative and soft.

“Trust me,” I told them both as I picked up all three of the acorns.

I led him and the dogs up the trail back to our house, and I only looked back once. The boy followed us at first, as if unable to resist anymore. But when I paused to catch my breath up on our back deck and look back at him, he was gone. I caught a whiff of old smoke and wet earth, and with it came a pang of sadness mixed with relief.

Maybe it was all just a dream, shared by Fred, me, and the dogs.

Nevertheless, Fred and I planted all three acorns deep in the winter ground that day, right where our land met the first trees of the forest.

* * * *

I never took the dogs running through the forest again that winter. Instead, Fred and I took time off work in the spring and talked about retirement and traveling to all the places on the world map in our hallway that were still missing push pins. We grew a little fatter on good food we cooked together and bottles of wine that we drank to wash it all down.

It’s almost summer now, and most evenings Fred and I sit on adirondack chairs in our back yard with the dogs, talking about the future and keeping our eyes on the forest and the three tiny mounds in front of it. The beagles don’t bark so much anymore, though they do watch the trees as well, gazing into the depths of the forest with what could be longing, love, or loyalty. Or all of the above.

As we sit there, chatting, something moves deep inside the forest. The dogs leap to their feet, inhaling a gust of air to prep them for a round of baying. But they are stopped in mid-breath by a miniscule rustling sound, much closer than the first.

The tiny sound comes from the edge of our lawn. As we all watch, something green pushes its way up from the mounded black earth, a shoot that is soon joined by its two brothers on either side. I take Fred’s hand, and we enjoy the show as, in the background, the fading fingers of day begin to melt into night.