Echoes of Green

I don’t know where stories begin. I imagine they grow from seeds of other stories. Perhaps if we could find the beginning of any story we could know what the story is really about, what it means. But maybe that won’t help us at all.

These stories are related in my mind. They seem to be a progression. But I can never tell where they started or where they are going. They change. They move. Maybe they don’t say anything. Maybe there isn’t a story or a moral. There is a theme. At least I think there’s a theme. But whether or not there is a theme or a moral, there are, at the very least, these stories.

I.

The first story isn’t even a story. It’s just an incident. A moment.

Picture a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen. She might be me. Or she might be any other girl who is awkward, but has a love for science and facts. And loves being right. But she also daydreams too much. Well, maybe not too much. If her life is strange and hard, if her parents fight too much, if she is expected, as the oldest of six children, to take on the responsibilities of a parent, if all of this is true, perhaps daydreaming is a healthy past-time for her. Who can decide?

So she spends time imagining. She reads Jules Verne. She reads Tolkien. But she also loves rockets and the moon and all of science. She loves facts that reveal secrets. She loves the search for secrets. She wants to know.

She imagines.

She’s good in her science classes. In her writing classes she sometimes gets in trouble for too many stories about bugs that talk. Or space ships. Or life on the moon. Her teachers want her to write about the real world.

That is the story behind the fit that takes hold of her in biology class one afternoon. She is, after all, just a girl. Just a giggly girl. The class is studying plants. And she loves the way plants work, the textbook diagrams of the structure of a leaf. Like a tiny cathedral. A little factory soaking up sun and making life.

This is the stuff she’s looking for. This invisible life of plants appeals to her.

These stories and these facts race through her mind one warm spring afternoon, and she begins to wonder. But she can’t keep her wondering to herself now. The question wants to bubble right out of her in class. She imagines all sorts of processes and secrets. She wants to ask a question. But she’s laughing too hard to even speak. She’s brought the class to a halt. The teacher has patience with her. He understands, at least a little, her curiosity, if nothing else.

He lets her catch her breath. Everyone is laughing now. And they haven’t even heard the question.

She gasps, and finds the space in her breath to squeeze out a few words.

“Would we,” she giggles. “Be green if we…” The laughter is a spasm now. She can’t control it. The teacher waits. She tries again. “…if we carried on photosynthesis?”

She collapses. Tears of laughter run down her cheeks. The question isn’t funny, but her amusement is. Her friends have to help her through the hallway after class, she is still so overcome.

But in that moment, in that class, something green and sentient is born.

This green person takes up residence in her imagination. Who is this person? Where did they come from? Where are they going?

She packs the question, and the idea, away for a long long time.

II.

A second story.

In a time neither now or then, in a place neither here or there, lived a girl.

She lived in a strange land. Perhaps on another planet. In another universe. Doesn’t matter. It was just different from what we know every day.

She was sent away to school. She loved school. And at this school she met new friends. And new kinds of friends. The students at this school came from many strange lands. They didn’t look like you look or like I look. Some were like strange plumed birds. Or like the dinosaurs in the museum. Or like frogs, or cats. Except that all the students were very smart. Sentient.

So this girl, who looked like any run-of-the-mill human sort of girl, was at this school with all these different kinds of people who she had never met before, and she was drawn to make friends with one shy girl who sat in the back of the class. The shy girl had shiny grey skin like the bark of a young tree. And her fingers were tiny flexible twigs. This tree-girl always kept her head wrapped in a bright red scarf and even in the warm weather she wore boots up to her knees.

The tree-girl’s voice was a soft breeze, and sometimes it was hard to catch her words. She had gentle greenish brown eyes. And her laughter sounded like the wind shaking a tree-full of leaves.

These two girls became friends, the way girls do sometimes. And once, when the weather was fine and warm, they went outside after class and found a spot in the sun. The tree-girl took off her high boots. Her toes were like the roots of plants and trees. She buried her toes in the soft warm dirt, and sighed.

“Please don’t let me stay too long,” she said sleepily. “Or I’ll get rooted.” She napped for a few moments, and when the supper bell rang, her friend woke her, and she carefully pulled her toes up out of the dirt and they went off to dinner.

Now the tree-girl never spoke about her scarf or her homeland or her life outside school. And no one but the girl in our story had ever even seen the tree-girl’s toes.

That summer, everyone went home, back to their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and cousins.

After a few weeks, the tree-girl wrote to her friend and said she wouldn’t be coming back to school. ‘Something’ had happened, and now she needed to stay in her own land. But the girl was worried. The ‘something’ in the letter sounded ominous and sad. She determined she would go and visit her friend, and see if she could help.

So she traveled, the bravest thing she had ever done. But after all, she was nearly an adult, and her friend needed her.

The tree-girl’s land was home to many tree-people of all sorts of strange shapes and sizes. They looked like a moving, living, forest. They lived on the sides of hills. Some were rooted and others, like the girl’s friend, walked and ran and played.

The girl went to the address on the letter, but the tree-girl’s parents said the tree-girl didn’t live there anymore. They looked sad, but wouldn’t help. The girl wept with exhaustion and frustration, and then she just sat down on their doorstep. Finally they relented. “Climb up very high, that way,” they told her. “It might not be too late.”

Too late for what, she couldn’t imagine, but she climbed the mountain very fast. It was rough and rocky, but the paths were well-marked. And finally she came to a large flat place, like a wide cliff on the side of the mountain, with a little cave behind it.

And there in that cave, she found her friend, now completely transformed. Heavy red fruit weighed down her head. Her body was pale and faded.

The two girls embraced as best they could. And through her tears, the tree-girl explained what had happened. When she had returned home, it was at the height of pollen season, and the air was heavy with pollen. Her parents had kept her head wrapped for many years now, to keep her safe. But she was out alone one afternoon, and was attacked by a rowdy bunch of birds, who plucked off her head wrap and pushed her out into the fields, into the open air. They chased her around and around until she was sticky with pollen, and then finally let her go home.

But there was nothing to be done. Her parents had hoped to protect her from the pollen, but it was not to be. As her fruit began to grow heavy and large, they sent her up the mountain.

Once the tree-girl was on the mountain, the birds brought her rich dirt to rest in and rainwater and made sure she was comfortable and well tended.

And now, she was as ripe as she needed to be. She told her friend she was glad for the company, since her parents couldn’t bear to witness what was to happen next.

The girl was terrified. What would happen next, she asked?

“In the old days,” the tree-girl, told her, “a tree would flower once, and bear much fruit, but that effort, to produce that fruit, cost the tree its life.”

“Monocarpic,” the girl said, remembering a word from her biology class.

“That is almost it,” the tree-girl said. “Then, someone discovered that if a tree bore one single fruit, it might live. These days, a great effort is made to assure that a tree produces just a single fruit. That tree is carefully tended. And that one fruit, such as the one that carried me, yields a special seedling. The mother never bears another fruit, but cares for that one seedling, carefully.

“But the birds hate this restraint. They are greedy and want all the fruit they can get. We share the pulp around every seed with the birds. But it is not enough. They always want more.

“And so, the birds found me one day, alone, without anyone to help me, and they tore off the scarf that protected me, and pushed me into a field, in the heavy summer air. And instead of one fruit, I became burdened with many.

“And now I am here, where the birds have tended me, while I wait for my time of ripeness.”

The girl wept. “Is there nothing we can do?” she cried. “Can’t I take you away from here?”

But the tree-girl just smiled. “No,” the tree-girl said. “I have grown to ripeness now, and the birds will feast. Watch and make sure they are gentle. But I can tell you this, they will leave a seed or two, after they have had their fill of my fruit. They will scatter many seeds today, and that is good, because I will awake all over this country next spring. But if you find a seed, perhaps you can carry it back to your home, and plant it in your garden, and speak to it and keep it safe. But I am done now and my life is over. It just seems to continue at this moment because I still know you and remember. But don’t be sad.”

The tree-girl begged her friend to help her onto the wide cliff, and they struggled out into the sunshine and waited.

After a little while, they could see birds wheeling off in the distance. And then the birds grew closer. They were enormous birds, brightly colored, and fierce in talon and beak.

The first bird settled next to the tree-girl, who looked at her friend for just a moment, and then nodded to the bird. The bird thrust its beak sharply into the tree-girl’s grey barky body. Clear sap gushed from the wound of this death stroke. The tree-girl’s eyes closed and she slumped back onto the fl at stone.

More birds came. They tore into the fruit of the tree-girl, greedily, and then the birds ripped the tree-girl’s body to shreds. Finally there was nothing left but a strange wooden carcass and a few seeds, each about the size of the girl’s fist.

As the tree-girl had asked, her friend gathered the seeds that had been discarded by the birds and placed them carefully in her travel bag. Then she searched for dry twigs and tinder. Through tears, she set a small fire around the wood that had been the body of her friend. She sat through the night, watching the stars as the fire burned down. In the morning, she gathered some of the ashes to carry with her, and began her journey home.

Of course this is just one story. And I still don’t understand it myself. Why the death? It creeps in, death does. It seems so inevitable. Well, of course it is, isn’t it. Look around you right now. We are all as good as dead.

III.

So that leads me to the next story. And here is what I imagined.

Picture an old woman. She is a widow, just widowed this past winter, living in a little cottage. Nothing fancy. A few rooms with fields and a forest nearby. Nothing like you would find today. Something from a storybook. A sweet cottage.

Now this woman’s husband was the love of her life, and this part might be true, this does happen sometimes, that people fall in love and love each other for years, for decades even. This really does happen.

So this man who had been the love of her life had died over the winter. Now she was a modern kind of woman, despite the fairy-tale cottage. So she had his body cremated, and kept the ashes in a nice wooden box on the mantle.

You might want to know that this couple, these two people, despite years of love, had never had a child. So there was no one to take care of the old woman now. And she was lonely.

The man, the husband, had been quite a gardener, especially in his later years. He had filled their little landscape with flower gardens, and fruit trees and a tidy vegetable patch. The woman had never paid much attention to the garden, that was his hobby. Now it was spring, and she was alone, and the snow had melted, and she sat in the morning light of the gently lengthening days, and she thought about the garden.

She wondered if the garden would ease her loneliness, and so she ordered some seeds from catalogs, and pruned the roses and the fruit trees just as the man had done all those years. And she planted the vegetable patch. And then she sat back and waited for the spring rains.

But one night, after everything was planted, and while there was still a little spring chill in the air, she built a fire and sat down to get warm, and looked at the box of ashes. And she wondered. She wondered if the man would want to be boxed up like that, or if he would prefer to be out in the garden, mixed up with the dirt and the seeds and the rain.

It wasn’t raining this night. No, the moon was high and bright and full. And the woman put on her gardening boots and took the box of ashes and went out into the moonlit garden.

She walked through every bit of that garden, spreading the ashes over all the seeds, and around the fruit trees and the rose bushes and butterfly bushes.

When she reached the end of the garden the ashes were gone and the moon was fading behind the clouds, and a soft spring rain was beginning to fall.

And she watched from her windows as a warm rain fell, and finally, the sun came out, and she put on her gardening boots, and walked through all the flower gardens and the vegetable patch. And she could see tiny little shoots of green already poking up through the soil. And the buds on the trees and the bushes were growing fat, and the garden felt eager.

The woman tended the garden. Although the garden didn’t seem to need much help this season. The vegetables and flowers grew, and the trees flowered and began to put out tiny fruit, and all was well. And every day, sitting in that garden, the woman could feel the presence of the man, and she marveled.

But deep inside her, she believed that she had only this one season to enjoy the garden and her memories. The ashes were all used up. The garden was glorious, and fragrant and fruitful, but she believed that it grew from the ashes, and—after this season—it would grow no more.

She began to fear the ripening summer and the fall and coming winter. And she regretted having spread all the ashes, thinking she had wasted them, and perhaps should have used just a little each season. But what was done, was done. There was no going back.

And the garden flourished.

One day, a little past midsummer, the woman thought she saw a shadow flitting through the corn rows. She rubbed her eyes and looked again but the shadow was gone.

But the next day, even though it was cloudy and rain seemed likely, she saw the shadow again. In her mind, the shadow took the shape of a little girl. Perhaps, she thought to herself, I’m just tired.

But the next week she was out walking through the vegetable patch, and there was no mistaking what she saw, a tiny little girl, no more than two feet tall, flitting between the stalks of corn. The little girl looked very greenish and plant-like.

Now the woman was a sensible and practical kind of person, not given to strange flights of imagination.

She left the garden, and took a nap, and when she woke up later she told herself she needed to stop letting her fancy get the best of her. She tried to avoid the garden for a few days. But the early peas were ready to pick, and the lettuce needed to be clipped before it bolted.

And while she was bending to pick some peas, she heard a little rustling noise and looked up, right into two greenish-brownish eyes. It was the little girl, but now she was about three feet tall. The little girl hid for a moment behind the snap pea trellis, then she peeked out shyly, and walked toward the woman.

The woman sat back in the dirt, dumbstruck. The girl was completely naked, and had a strangeness about her, as if she had been assembled from parts of the garden. She looked human enough, with smooth skin, and bright yellow hair, and those strange brownish-greenish eyes. But her hair was a tangle of flowers and leaves, and her skin was a golden brown color that didn’t look like any skin color the woman had ever seen. It was the color of sun-baked bark, or leaves turned after the first frost.

The woman, being practical, took a breath, and tried to talk to the girl, who didn’t seem to understand language, but wanted to be close to the woman. She crept up and took the woman’s hand, and the woman thought, I don’t know where you came from, but at least I can give you some clothes to wear.

The woman took the girl into her house, and made clothes for her. The girl was strange and wild, and wouldn’t sleep in a bed, and only drank water, and ate vegetables and fruit but no meat.

She ran freely between the house and the garden, and grew quickly as the summer wore on.

The woman, at first, had thought to call the police, or someone who might help find a home for the girl. But the woman began to believe that the girl wasn’t quite human. She just accepted the girl as a kind of fruit of the garden, and let her run through the garden and the house.

The little girl wore the sundresses the woman made, even though the little girl seemed not to care at all if she was naked or clothed.

And most afternoons, as the woman rested under the tall maple tree in the yard, the girl would curl up on the woman’s lap and take a long afternoon nap.

Now, in the woman’s imagination, she began to make a connection between this strange girl and the ashes she had scattered. And she wondered if somehow, in a way she would never understand, her husband had come back to her in the form of this little girl. She often dreamt of her husband that summer, and in these dreams, they were surrounded by children and grandchildren, who ran through the garden with noisy laughter.

And the woman wondered if this little girl, who was really almost a woman now, would stay and help her through the winter.

But as the summer wore on, the girl kept growing, until she was almost as tall as the corn. And her hair became even more yellow, and shiny, and waved in the wind. The woman grew fearful that the girl’s hair would gather the pollen from the ripening corn. The woman made scarves and turbans for the girl to wear, but the girl just tore them off, laughing, and ran up and down the rows of corn.

Within a few weeks, the change in the girl was startling. She looked like an ear of corn with legs. Her body had become a cylinder that was wider at the middle and narrow at the top and bottom. She was covered with winding leaves. Her hair had grown brown and scraggly and her eyes peeped out from a face that was being transformed into rows of tender little bumps.

But since the girl never learned to talk, she couldn’t tell the woman what was happening. The woman watched her grow and change, and the woman grieved, because she knew the girl wouldn’t last past harvest time.

And finally, the first frost came. The woman woke one morning preparing to go out to the fields for the final harvest, and she was horrified to see a flock of crows, thick and black on the body of the girl.

The woman ran out and chased the crows away, but there was no life left in the girl. Golden kernels clung to her, like kernels of corn on a cob, but her green leaves were dry and tattered.

The woman carried this strange enormous ear of corn into the house, and laid it carefully in the pantry. And there it sat for the winter, and the kernels dried.

The woman spent the winter as well as she could, first canning and preserving, and then sewing and sitting by the fire through the snows. And finally it was spring again. And she was sad indeed. Because the corn maiden was no more, and the ashes of her dead husband had been used up the year before, and she thought she wouldn’t plant a garden this year, but instead she might sell the cottage and the fields and trees and go live in the city.

And one fine spring day, as the garden sat waiting, the woman went into the pantry and touched the ear of corn that had been the girl, and one of the kernels fell off into her hand, hard and ready to be planted.

And the woman thought, well, this would be a waste, to let these seeds sit in the pantry.

And so she readied the field and planted the seed corn. And since the garden seemed lonely with just the corn, she also planted lettuce and tomatoes and peas, and she pruned the fruit trees and the rose bushes. The woman whistled in the garden as she worked, remembering her husband’s ashes in the soil, and the little girl who had filled her days the summer before.

And one day, not many weeks later, she was picking early peas and looked up, and saw two brownish-greenish eyes smiling at her from behind the snap pea trellis.

IV.

The last version of this story troubles me again and again. It slides around and changes every time I try to tell it. But there is always a fi re.

Once upon a time… actually not that very long ago … a family lived on a small farm in a place where corn, or more properly, maize, grew well.

They were not a happy family. The father didn’t love the mother anymore. The mother didn’t love the father. The father wanted to return to his family across the ocean. But the mother and father both loved their two little girls.

One night, very late, the father went into the room of the older sister, who was only four, and packed her clothes and toys into a suitcase. The father and the older sister went to the airport and flew away on a plane and went to live with his family across the ocean.

The mother was sad and missed the older sister. But the younger sister was just a baby, so she didn’t miss her father or her older sister. And in time, the two separate parts of this family found a kind of happiness. The younger sister had no clinging memories, so she just accepted her life as it was. But the older sister remembered. She remembered her mother, and she remembered never saying goodbye, and she remembered her younger sister who was just a baby in a cradle when they were last together.

It might seem like an easy thing to send a letter or make a phone call or even buy a plane ticket, and sometimes that is true, but sometimes it is easier to let people go, and live your life without them. And so it was with the mother and the father.

And many years passed.

And one day, while the father was out in the fields working, a tool used for the harvest snapped, and he was killed. The older sister, in her grief, begged her grandparents to tell her how to find her mother. After many tears, they relented and gave her the mother’s telephone number, and the older sister called.

That phone call brought back many memories for the mother, and her heart was sad, and she wanted to visit the older sister and comfort her. And so the mother said goodbye to the younger sister, and asked the younger sister to look after the house and the little plot of land. And the mother flew across the ocean to be with the older sister.

But only a few days after the mother and the older sister were reunited, the mother’s heart gave out, and she died.

Now the older sister didn’t have much money, but she did want to return the mother to her home and to the younger sister. So the older sister had the mother’s body burned, and she carried the ashes back across the ocean to the place where she was born.

The older sister expected to be welcomed by the younger sister. But the younger sister, in her grief, hated the older sister and blamed her for the mother’s death. The younger sister claimed the mother’s ashes, and kept them in a box on the mantel above the fireplace. But the older sister wanted to follow the custom of her father’s people and scatter the ashes over the fields.

The younger sister wanted to be alone in her grief, but their mother had left a piece of paper that gave the house and field to the sisters, together. The older sister stayed, although the younger sister ignored her.

Winter came and it was long and bitter for both sisters, and then spring followed. The older sister ached for the rhythm of the seasons and work in the fields, and one day she found a hoe in the barn and dug and weeded until the ground was ready for planting, even though she didn’t know what she would plant.

The next day, while the older sister was looking for a rake, she found an old dented tin, once used to store crackers, hidden on a shelf in the barn. The handwritten label on the tin was dated the year the younger sister was born. That was the last year the mother and father had planted the field together. Inside the tin, the older sister found four ears of corn. This was not ordinary yellow corn, but corn of all colors, brown and gold and red and yellow and blue.

The older sister carefully broke the corn seeds off the cobs until she had enough to plant the field behind the house. Then, late that night, the older sister took a pail of dirt from the field and crept into the house while the younger sister was sleeping. She took the ashes of the mother from the box on the mantle over the fireplace and mixed the ashes with the seed corn. Then she replaced the ashes with dirt from the field and sealed the box back up again. It weighed the same as before, and if the younger sister moved it to dust when she was cleaning on a Saturday morning, she would never know that the ashes were gone.

Now on this night, the moon was full. The older sister took the pail of corn and ashes and went into the field and planted, under the light of the moon, until the sun first glowed on the horizon.

And then the older sister crept back to bed and slept for the whole day.

The younger sister was angry when she learned the older sister had planted the field. The younger sister knew that the older sister would need to stay on the farm until harvest. The younger sister understood that a field—once planted—cannot be abandoned.

But the older sister was tired of living in the house, and she set up a cot in the barn and decided to live there for the spring and summer and fall.

And then the spring rains fell. These rains were warm and gentle, and the corn in the field grew green and soft and full. And although the younger sister never went to the barn to visit her sister, or out to the field to see the corn, she often sat by her bedroom window and watched the field in the sunshine.

And growing corn made the younger sister think of her mother, and the growing corn made the older sister think of her father. The two sisters sat alone through the spring and early summer, and their hearts were broken.

The corn grew tall. Both sisters thought they had never seen a field so lush. The older sister began to think that the ashes and corn had reunited some part of her mother and father. The older sister thought she saw shadows moving through the corn as the wind played over the field.

The younger sister also thought something dark and deep moved in her heart when she looked at the field. The younger sister hoped that after the harvest, the older sister would fly back across the ocean. Then the younger sister would let the field lie fallow and perhaps sell the house and move away.

One night, as the older sister was sleeping in her cot in the barn, she woke to the sound of the wind through the corn. The older sister imagined she heard a voice crying in the corn. She thought a coyote might have wandered down from the hills, or that a cat was lost and frightened in the field. The night noise terrified the older sister and she went and knocked on the door of the house, and the younger sister took pity on her, and opened the door to the older sister. A storm rolled in from the west, and sisters sat awake all night as they listened to the wind and the thunder and the sound like a voice in the corn.

But when they woke the next morning, the whole country around them looked washed clean, and the field was as green as ever, and the dirt was wet and brown and the sky was clear and blue.

And the younger sister told the older sister that they should live in the house together. They began to talk about the mother and the father, and learned, in a way, to love each other as sisters. But the older sister kept her secret, and didn’t tell the younger sister what she had planted in the field.

As the corn ripened, both sisters grew to regard the field with a sense of dread. The older sister told the younger sister that their father’s people believed that the ripening fields were host to the corn mother, and that she was both welcome, for the bountiful harvest she would send, but also feared, because the corn mother resisted the harvest. In the corn mother’s eyes, the older sister said, the harvest was a kind of death. When the grains were harvested each fall, but the corn mother needed to be captured in a sheaf or stalk or else she would prey on the farmers, seeking to take a life in exchange for the sustenance she gave them out of her own body.

The sisters looked down on the corn from the bedroom window, and the younger sister could see that the corn seemed to move on its own, against the direction of the wind. And they both avoided the field.

Finally harvest time was come. The sisters could not bring themselves to go out to the field. Crows came and began to feast on the corn.

The older sister saw the crows and she wept, because she knew this was the body of her mother, and she couldn’t bear to see the greedy birds tear and rip the corn. Finally, the older sister decided to set fire to the field, and burn the body of the mother again, and return the mother’s ashes to the earth, and deny the crows their greedy feast.

The older sister took kindling and matches and gas, and lit the field on fire.

When she saw the flames, the younger sister came running, and they both stood and watched as the corn burned. There was a great howling noise, like the voice of the wind, even though it was a still and quiet day.

The fire seemed to break the spell of fear that had troubled the younger sister, and she went into the field and gathered all the roasted corn she could find, and she made a feast.

The older sister smelled the roasted corn, and it drove her nearly mad with hunger, but still she refused to taste it. The younger sister begged her to eat, and finally the older sister relented, and she took a bite, and the corn was the most perfect food she had ever tasted. And the sisters ate and ate, far into the night. Every time they finished one plate of corn, they would go into the burned field and fill up again.

Finally, as the night was the darkest, and just before the sun showed in the east, the older sister told the younger sister what she had done, how she had used the ashes and corn to plant the field.

Now the younger sister wept, knowing that she had spent the night eating the body of her own dear mother. But the taste of the corn was on her tongue, and even as she wept, she went back into the fields for another platter of corn.

The older sister joined her. And they ate and wept and ate and wept.

And when the sun was fully awake, they went to the field and found a few stalks of corn that hadn’t been touched by the fire. They carefully hung these stalks in the barn to dry, because the sisters knew that the winter would come, but the spring would follow, and so would their hunger for the harvest and the corn.

Jean Ann Wertz

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