The View from the Tree

Sometimes, when I should be doing other assignments, I instead work on a little something I like to call The Great American Novel. I realize that thus far my blog has contributed nothing but mediocre humor and swear words, so if this small slice of literary amateurism offends any of my three followers, I apologize. Anyway, here's a passage, it's called The View from the Tree. Thank you and goodnight. 

I couldn’t show my face at the funeral because I’d killed her, but I went anyway. I had climbed up into a towering oak some few minutes after dawn and settled in amongst the branches that were thick enough to conceal me. Around eleven the sun was pinned high in the sky and shone brightly upon the dejected faces of my family. They were all there together but they all stood alone. Last summer at Paw-paw’s funeral Daddy and Uncle John had moved as one person, and they’d stayed by the grave all day with a fifth of Wild Turkey, talking and laughing and crying and remembering, but not today. Today they had all the space in the world in between them, and the boys were scattered on the hillside, and Ms. Andrea was alone, and Mama wasn’t even here. The destruction was gut-wrenching I just didn’t understand how it was my fault.

            But it was my fault. I knew because everyone told me.

            “How could you do this to me?” she’d said as she grasped her chest as if to keep it stitched together. “How?”

            I hadn’t said anything in response. I’d watched as her knees buckled and as she melted into the floorboards and struggled for air and it upset me, it slashed my heart, but the damage had been done and there was nothing more to say. On the ride to the hospital she’d sat in the passenger seat of the truck and cried. First she had sobbed so hard I thought she’d pass out. Then she’d screamed my name and asked why I’d done this to her. And the rest of the time she’d wept silently and stared at me through a mask of bewilderment, like she’d never even seen me before, and that was the most unsettling.

            It didn’t seem to matter that I’d cried tormented tears in the emergency room or next to her hospital bed. In that tiny square room crammed with people I had reached for her hand and she’d snatched it away, and everyone saw. Then as her heartbeats had grown farther and farther apart I’d whispered her name, and though I didn’t see it fit to apologize I’d said I was sorry that I hurt her. Her eyes had abandoned their glaze for just a moment in exchange for a stern clarity, and she’d looked me square in the face and said “Hurt me? Hurt me? You’ve killed me.” And everyone saw that, too.

            So I suppose it was true and I really had killed her, because she was dead in the ground and I was alone and in the tree. But there was still the rusty Chevrolet waiting in the gravel parking lot across the street. There was still the assurance that someone else wasn’t welcome here either, and that someone else didn’t understand why I was to blame, why it was my fault. There was still the assurance that someone else loved these people and hated this place as much as I did, and, like me, couldn’t possibly explain why we’d never be able to leave. There was still that.