Our Father Who Art in a Tree

Chapter 1 It was simple for me, the saints were in heaven and guardian Angels had extendable wings like Batman and my dad had died and gone to live in the tree in the backyard. Weeks he'd been calling out, imitating the way I called over the back fence to my friend Megan. I didn't get the joke though; there was my dead father trying to get my attention and talk to me in a way I might understand, and every evening was the same. I thundered up the garden past the tree and sped up the back stairs, humming a mad tune all the way, trying to block out his voice. The first time I heard him call was the evening after we'd been to the cemetery. I'd stood at his grave and watched the ants crawling across the dry earth; their pinhole nests perforated the red soil. It was too scary, I'd said to myself, meaning the ants. "Don't worry about the ants." That's what I heard him say. I replied in my own mind. "They're everywhere, why are there so many?" Meaning, "Is that you I'm talking to?" "They're busy," he'd said. "Yes, it's me." I hated thinking of him underground. I'd dreamt one night he pulled a rope and a light turned on in his dark coffin. The dream was a cross section of earth. There was a thin green line of grass, then a weight of brown earth, then my father lying in the coffin, with a bare bulb by his head illuminating the box. That afternoon I stood at the back fence. Between me and the house was the great tree, enormous and dark with hanging branches dipping so low they brushed the carpet of coarse couch grass. It loomed above me, looking down on me like a giant. A circle of leaves at the top of the tree moved. I bolted across the grass on my pin-thin legs, holding my breath and running like billy-o past the tree. I could hear it calling to me in much the same way I called to Megan when I lamented by the dry paling fence. "Me-gan," I would call, dragging the word out for up to fifteen seconds. It drove the neighbors mad. Mrs. Johnson, who lived on the other side of the tree, protested to my mother. "Does she have to call out like that? Sounds like a wounded animal." "Me-gan," I called the second time. Starting with "Me-," then sliding down a note to "-gan," dragging out the n, annoying the suburb with my migrating goose call. The tree calls, "Simone," with the emphasis on the "-on." The second time it calls, it extends the "-on," as I do with Megan's "-gan," much longer than I think it needs to; trying to get my attention. The third, more desperate plea always comes as I reach the back stairs, and it lasts all the way up the twenty-two steps until I have slammed the back door too hard. I flop down at the kitchen table. My mother's back presents itself as her front, married as it is to the electric frying pan. Although, in the last three months she has barely cooked and it's been my brother's back I've become more familiar with. Her pores widen in the heat from the sizzling meat. Three festering grins in various states of disinterest watch as I sit at the kitchen table. Christ hanging from what appears to be like a great plus sign looks down on me, the eternal victim, and the orange seersucker tablecloth mixes with the fluorescence of the bar light above to color my tanned skin tobacco yellow. Much later, after fifty spelling words revised halfheartedly at the kitchen table in the pools of dampness left after it had bPascoe, Judy is the author of 'Our Father Who Art in a Tree' with ISBN 9780375507991 and ISBN 037550799X.