Excerpt from Part VII. The Soda Creek in Tony D'Souza's short story "The Man Who Married A Tree" published in McSweeney's Quarterly Issue 20:
He was a good man, he left the fish alone. That is to say, he took one once in a while,without game or folly, the ways bears do, ospreys. I like running through the hair of his legs, his toes, he was clean even when he came to me to be cleaned. It's about the spirit of a man, cleanliness. I praise it in men as much as they praise it in me.
That first year, he took stones from my bed to build the foundation of his house. The deep spaces he left in me I filled, and the fish came to nest in those spaces in turn. He would come to me in the evening and smoke a cigarette and listen to me and mull over the things me like him have to. All he seemed to do at that time was think. Think and smoke and listen to me as he looked at the evening. What advice did I give him that I don't give to any man? Once in a while he would bury his feet in the dirt on the band and close his eyes as though to grow, to become a tree himself, and I would eddy up and rinse the dirt away. If he had been a child, I would have had a heart for that. But he was old enough to understand well that it was his sentence to be a man. What would it be after all if the squirrels began leaping out of the tall pines as though they were jays, if the jays used their wings to climb?
And her? I knew her from a seed. Knew her whole stand, generations of them. Sturdy trees; they held and died and made that bank. A fire came through one dry year and we all had to learn that even when life has seemed to stop, it will start again. What a fine rough tree she had been, standing in a riotous clump with her brothers and sisters, taut in the wind, graceful as a wand. After the fire, she was the only one who came back, hardened.
He'd seen some things. She had seen plenty, too. It happened slowly, befitting their natures. This pleased me because what do I have but time?Though those first years he would not admit to himself his love for the tree, he came to sit at me where he could see her out of the corner of his eye. It was as though he wished at all times to know how she fared, without admitting to himself that he needed to know. He'd scratch his arm and look at me, as though she was just another stick to him. For her part, what was the man to her? What was anything? She had lost much; her kin before the fire, the landscape that had held her before the logging. She had survived to see the mountains dressed again in sturdy trees she'd watched sprout. The man sat and smoked on the bank until he knew my lie, every stone that riffled my run,the new currents I'd form when I'd grow restless and shift. All the time he was looking at her without turning his eyes. He was wondering, I imagine, if he had the strength to approach her, to he turned away by her, too.
Who determines these things? Winters came and went. The turtles burrowed beneath my knowing to dream their unknown winter dreams, emerging again after the ice had dripped from the tree branches and every part of me awoke. She was in full bud, glorious; of course he had seen it before. But perhaps he'd had a whisper of death that long winter, certainly he had streaks of winter in his beard. He approached the tree, finally, an evening when I was full of nymphs hatching into yellow clouds of newly winged damsels and causing the rough to leap from me as if for joy, and crossed that short expanse of stone and shade and soil that had separated them. He did not move on my bank in the stumbling, heedless stride of a buck, but in the measured pace of one with the age to know he cannot afford to fall again. With life awakening all about them in the world, he lay down at her roots and rested his head gently against her base. As simple as that. What a moment that was! I would have stopped myself in my eternal trickle if only to let them know how tense I was, how much I needed, then, to know. All the woods fell silent for everything in them, too had all been waiting for this moment. It seemed, suddenly, that so much depended on this when we all knew that nothing depended on it at all: bird and otter and rock and moss. And as we held ourselves to see what she would do, even the wind paused her coursings. What did that tree do? What did that fine tree who had no need of anything from a man to prove the success of her stubborn existence do? She rustled her branches to cast her soft bud casings on him like down.
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