QUERCUS by Yelizaveta P. Renfro
There is some basic sympathy between oaks and humans. We both like the same things, we both have similar virtues, and we have both spread to the very limits of what we like. And wherever we have gone, oaks have become central to our daily lives. We invented a whole way of living out of their fruit and their wood, and by that token, they invented us too.
-William Bryant Logan
When I was just out of high school and thought I wanted to be a journalist, I spent close to four years working at several local daily newspapers in California. I wrote about hockey players and real estate agents, about preachers and bowlers, about criminals and mountain men. And often, as I gathered information for a story, I would feel the tug of those other lives that I glimpsed. For a day or an hour, I would mentally abandon my own life and imagine myself as someone else. I wanted to be a convert to another life.
For an afternoon, I dedicated my life to teaching pottery to senior citizens. I became a pyro-technician and wowed thousands with my stunning fireworks displays. I joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church to become a follower of the charismatic black woman pastor I interviewed. I married the young, God-fearing trucker I met at a truck stop chapel; he was from Pennsylvania and looking for, among other things, a wife. I became a classic car buff and renovated a 1952 midnight blue Chevy Fleetline. I spent a day at a monastery and wanted to join up, to become a nun and devote my life to ritual – if only I believed in God. I became a Master Gardener and lost myself forever among the forsythia. I trained to be a computer programmer and learned to design GIS programs for police to use in mapping crimes on a nationwide grid. When the Texan high school football players – whom I had come to interview to find out how much they ate – asked me what I was doing later, I became the kind of party girl who hung out late with athletes. I went to medical school to learn how to perform heart transplants on nine-year-old boys, like the one I wrote about, the one whose photo I took as he clutched a Winnie-the-Pooh doll in his hospital bed.
Daily I sought conversion: something powerful and sudden like a tornado to seize me up and shake me senseless, something to ravish me, to take me in its clutches forever and never set me back on earth. But working at daily newspapers, every day the view was different, the religion changed, the weather turned, the story was new. I never studied anything at length, I never knew anything in depth. I ran from one story to the next, my knowledge rudimentary, fleeting. I was promiscuous in my yearnings, my many aborted passions. I took cuttings from all those lives, lined them up on a windowsill, where they shriveled, and all that remains now are yellowing clips in three-ring binders.
Now I am a dozen years removed from that life. Now what I want to learn most is how to stay put, how to be a student not of the sensational and transient but of the commonplace, the everyday, the enduring. Now instead of leaves of newspaper print, I collect a different kind of leaves, the real deal. Now I have become the student of a tree.
Oak
This summer when we bought our house in Omaha, we became the owners of, among other things, a medium-sized, middle-aged pin oak in the front yard. To claim that we own a rooted creature over sixty feet tall has a strange ring to it. The tree does not admit to being owned, nor is it likely to know that it has changed hands. It requires only that those who control the land where it lives are generous – or negligent – enough to allow it life, not to cut it down or to damage it.
I sat in the tree’s generous shade through the muggy days, and I waited to learn something, to be told some news.
In Brief
Working at newspapers gave me the opportunity to live many lives vicariously. And, as it turned out, it also allowed me to suffer many deaths vicariously. A large part of my job was to report on crime. Twice daily – first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening – I would make a round of calls to the local police and fire stations, asking for the news. On my desk the police scanner chattered incessantly. I ignored the routine traffic stops, the chest pains, the shoplifters, the domestic disturbances, and listened for the things that mattered: injury accidents, structure fires, homicides.
When the news warranted a story, the editor would assign an inch count based on the perceived importance of the event. “Give me twelve inches on that fire,” the editor would bark. Or, “I want fifteen inches on the homicide.” Sometimes, as a story developed, its significance increased or diminished. It was important to get an ID on a homicide victim as soon as possible – to deem the importance of the death, and to seek out family members for comment. It wasn’t a science, and editors often made judgment calls, but the general system was followed by everyone. At a newspaper, the perceived importance of anything – even a life – could be measured in inches.
Often, however, an event wasn’t deemed worthy of a full story, and then the editor would say, “Make it a brief.” Since I was a junior member of the staff, I spent more of my time writing briefs – the small news – rather than bylined stories – the big news. The more senior reporters got most of the high profile crimes. I wrote two- and three- and four-paragraph briefs that ran in a daily column titled “Crime and Fire Reports.” I wrote hundreds of them; I have an entire three-ring binder devoted just to police briefs.
For example: I wrote about the body of a fifty-year-old homeless man that was discovered by garbage collectors when they emptied their truck at the landfill. He spilled out with the rest of the trash. His relatives said they hadn’t heard from him in over a year and as far as they knew, he was homeless. The police suspected “he was already dead when trash collectors unknowingly picked up the body from a dumpster in a residential area.”
Oak
The oak is the U.S. National Tree. There are more than sixty species in the United States, and somewhere between three hundred and six hundred species in the world. It is America’s most widespread hardwood and the most widely distributed of forest trees. It is ubiquitous and profoundly adaptable.
In his book on oaks, William Bryant Logan writes, “It was the great virtue of oaks that they responded not by specializing and narrowing their range, but by adapting, expanding, and radiating into more and wider-flung landscapes. There have seldom been creatures as tenacious as oaks, but their staying power is founded on their own ability to change.” He may well have been describing human beings. Oaks spread all over the world, and this one in my front yard landed in Omaha. I, too, have traveled far to settle here.
In Brief
There was often a fine line between a brief and a story. What might be a brief on one day would have been a story on another. There were a number of factors that the editor weighed in making the determination: Was it a busy news day? How much room was in the paper? Did the crime occur in our core coverage area or on the margins? Did it occur where we had a large number of subscribers or just a few? How serious was the crime? How much could the police tell us? How severe and exceptional was the crime? And finally, what was the life worth?
The dead man on the Greyhound bus was a brief. He was returning to southern California from Las Vegas. “When the bus stopped, everybody got off but him,” the investigator said. The seventy-five-year-old man apparently died quietly of a heart attack, and no one noticed. And now, reading over the brief, I wonder who that man was, traveling to and from Vegas alone on a Greyhound bus. I know nothing about him, and yet, what I do know makes me think he was profoundly lonely, that his fate was profoundly sad. The police claimed no crime was committed, but I am not so sure.
Oak
My daughter spends an afternoon collecting acorns in her bicycle helmet, and then she redistributes them, hiding most of them inside our house. In his book on trees, Colin Tudge writes, “Animals cannot afford to run charities, and they must have their quid pro quo. Sometimes they expect to eat a proportion of the seeds, and so squirrels typically consume at least as many acorns as they scatter.” I don’t know what, if anything, the acorns do for my daughter. She is not getting nutrition from them. I think my daughter is running a charity.
For weeks, we find them, tucked away in kitchen drawers and cupboards, behind books in the bookcase, in my husband’s shoes. He takes one out of his house shoe and puts it under our daughter’s pillow. Later, she is astonished to find it there. “I didn’t put it there,” she insists. “Who do you think did?” I ask. She looks at me for a long time. “A squirrel,” she finally says, and I don’t know if she really believes this or not. But I don’t set her straight.
In Brief
I wrote the briefs a dozen years ago, and I have forgotten most of them. I read them now like they’re news once again. And once again, I gasp at the wickedness and misfortune in the world. I wonder what’s happened to the people I wrote about. Did the criminals remain criminals? Does anyone remember the ones who died? I don’t remember them. I learned about most of them talking on the phone to a police sergeant or public information officer.
I scan the Crime and Fire Reports for April 29, 1997:
Infant not seriously hurt in wreck
Man pinned under truck
Woman set on fire
Fire at restaurant
Ex-boyfriend held in attack
The third headline catches my eye, and suddenly I remember it. I read the brief that I wrote:
A Victorville woman suffered second- and third-degree burns to 55 percent of her body Sunday after her ex-husband allegedly doused her with gasoline and set her on fire in front of children and other witnesses in the parking lot of a pizza parlor in the 17000 block of Valley Boulevard.
Police said Rialto resident Howard Streeter, 37, beat his ex-wife, 39-year-old Yolanda Butler, in the Chuck E. Cheese’s parking lot shortly after 3 p.m. Sunday. Streeter then got a can of gasoline out of his car, poured it on Butler and set her on fire. Streeter, chased down by several witnesses, was arrested for mayhem, infliction of injury to spouse and other charges. A witness helped extinguish the fire before firefighters arrived.
Oak
I sit at the base of the oak, my back resting on its trunk, and try to imagine its roots, spreading beneath the grass. I cannot. I have learned that a mature oak might have five hundred million living root tips, and that its roots might reach an area four to seven times the width of the tree’s crown.
I have now sat here right at the tree’s base where it meets the grass so many times that my son, not yet two, has begun to mimic me. He too sits with his back resting against the trunk, experiencing it, taking it in. He has learned from his mother: this is what we do, we sit with trees.
In Brief
I find a brief dated May 8, 1997 that reports that Yolanda Butler, the woman whose ex-husband set her on fire, died as a result of her injuries. And that is the end of the story of Yolanda Butler. I can find no more about her in my three-ring binder. The trail goes cold. I reread the two briefs. The preciseness of certain facts is chilling: 55 percent of her body, Chuck E. Cheese, doused with gasoline, in front of children. And yet I cringe at the paucity of real information, of emotion. Why was I not outraged and heartbroken? I was not, I am sure, for my life went on as before, without a hitch. I hammered out the brief, and then, no doubt, picked up the phone to call another cop, to jovially say, “Hey corporal so-and-so, anything going on today in your neck of the woods?”
Oak
When I lived in Virginia, I knew another pin oak. This one was on the neighbor’s lot but overhung our yard. All winter, it kept its brown leaves, shivering and rustling them, and I always thought, I am like that tree, or sometimes, that tree is like me. And then in spring, right before sending out its new leaves, it would finally, begrudgingly give up its previous year’s leaves, and they would scuttle and scrape, a final rasp of autumn before spring, months after all the other leaves were gone, raked up into leaf bags. This is a common trait of certain pin oaks, I learn. Though they are deciduous, they keep their dead leaves until the new ones appear. Though not evergreen, the leaves are persistent.
I wonder if my new pin oak is persistent. I watch its leaves, waiting for the first hints of fall color. I wait to learn more. I wait to know it better. It takes years to get to know anyone, even – and perhaps especially – a tree.
In Brief
The dearth of information, the bare-bones reporting is a common feature of briefs. We reported what the police told us, and we didn’t spend time contacting the families of victims or seeking out additional information. Some of the briefs are just a few sentences long.
Four sentences: A fifteen-year-old girl was shot dead while visiting friends; the shooter, who had been standing in the street, got in a car and drove away.
Two days later, another four sentences: A sixteen-year-old boy was arrested in the girl’s death; no other explanations are offered.
Four sentences: An eighteen-year-old man died in a gang shooting.
Four sentences: A sixteen-year-old boy was hit by a train and killed.
Oak
Every day I walk on the bright striped hearts of oak that gave up their lives over sixty years ago but that endure beneath my feet in the floorboards of my house. Indeed, oak is all around me. Our country is made of oak, not just the thousands of hardwood floors and woodwork in old houses, but our nation is, literally, writ in oak. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are written in oak ink. And the famed hull of the USS Constitution – nicknamed “Old Ironsides” – is hard not because it is made of iron – but because it is made of oak. “For ten thousand years oak was the prime resource of what was to become the Western world,” writes Logan. Acorn flour, houses, churches, ink, tanned leather, roofs, casks, and ships have been fashioned from parts of the oak tree.
In Brief
I learned how to write a hard news story from an old school journalist who believed his students needed to master the inverted pyramid before dabbling in New Journalism or features writing. We practiced writing one news story after another, distilling the key facts and placing them at the top, and then adding information in the body of the story in descending order of importance. The idea was to give the readers the most important information up front, in the lead. The idea was that readers aren’t likely to read the whole story anyway; readers will skim and take the big news off the top like whipped cream off of cocoa, and only a small minority of them will ever read past a jump or get to the end of a news story, that thick murky sludge at the bottom of the cup. This practice served me well when it came to writing police briefs, which were still mostly written in the old, hard news, inverted pyramid style: tell the reader everything important up front.
A man riding a motorcycle without a helmet was killed Monday afternoon after a police pursuit when he crashed into the concrete base of a bridge over Interstate 10 near Mt. Vernon Avenue.
The pursuit began when a Colton police officer tried to pull over the man for committing a traffic violation near Rancho Avenue and Johnston Street. The man began to pull over to the curb as instructed, then suddenly took off, police said.
The man, whose name has not been released pending notification of next of kin, reached speeds of more than 90 miles an hour on city streets. The officer followed behind but had to reduce his speed due to traffic.
As the victim tried to get on the I-10 at Mt. Vernon Avenue, he lost control and crashed into the bridge base. He was taken to Loma Linda University Medical Center with head injuries, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Perhaps the key information is contained in the first sentence, but by far the most interesting sentence comes in the middle: The man began to pull over to the curb as instructed, then suddenly took off. For that brief moment of hesitation, he becomes human to me. I can see him there, at that juncture where he made the decision, where the paths diverged: To surrender and be charged with a crime? Or to flee? To select this life, or that one? And he chose.
Oak
Our oak has anemia. We learn this during a preventive care appointment with an arborist. He has come out to simply look at our trees, tell us what he can. He points out the small holes that have been drilled in the trunk of the oak where it has been treated for iron deficiency in the past. He likens this to going to a doctor for a shot of vitamins in order to make up for a deficient diet. He doesn’t recommend such radical treatment.
We are to give coffee to the oak. This, apparently, will help with the anemia, but not in a direct way: coffee grounds spread around the base will encourage a wider spectrum of microorganisms, which will help enrich the soil.
We learn that our tree lost its central leader, possibly in a storm. It used to be an even bigger tree. There is a hole where the leader broke, and the arborist is concerned. He can’t tell how large it is from the ground. It might be superficial, or it might go deep into the tree’s center. He will come back later with his climbing equipment and take a look.
In Brief
In a brief titled, “Children removed from home,” I wrote about five children, ages three through eight, who had been found covered in feces and eating dog food. The police sergeant I talked to called the home a “pig sty.” I have seen pig sties, and I think it was something worse.
Sometimes there were just a couple Crime and Fire Reports, and on other days, as many as ten or twelve. Often the other reporters would add briefs to the column if they got a bit of news while pursuing other stories. It was a collaborative effort. When I left at five or six in the evening, the night cops reporter would check back in with the police departments and sometimes add briefs. What appeared in the paper the next day was often news to me. I would read the additional briefs, thinking, so that’s what happened while I was eating dinner, while I was brushing my teeth and putting on my nightgown. So that is the horror that was going on in the world while I was searching for the dental floss.
Oak
I cannot make use of the inverted pyramid to tell you of my oak. It bears no news, no tidings. Perhaps the earth whispers to it that autumn is approaching. The wind blows, the leaves prepare to crisp, the coursing of life in the trunk slows. When I write of the tree, my words are deflected by its corrugated bark. They fall short. The tree has no need for language, and yet I try to invent it and reinvent it in words.
I have known the tree for only a season. This is not nearly long enough.
In Brief
When we learned that a homicide was gang-related, it became a brief. But why? I wanted to know. I once asked the editor this question. “Because those people don’t read the paper,” he said, meaning the gang members, and the gangs’ families, and anyone who knew the gangs. We had an audience, and it dictated content. And it cared about rich white college boys who died in bar fights, about department store heiresses who were dragged to death during car jackings, about mansions that went up in smoke, but not about dead gang members, dead homeless, dead nameless.
A worker sweeping a parking lot found a body wrapped in a bedspread Friday morning in an alley behind an apartment complex in the 1100 block of Mount Vernon Avenue. The man, a young Hispanic male, who has not been identified, had been shot once in the upper body, police said.
Why did I believe it necessary to collect fat binders full of these fragments of ruined lives? Why do I keep them still? In most cases, the two or four sentences I wrote was my entire tribute to a human being to whom something atrocious had happened. If the police never learned more, if another reporter did the follow-up, if there was nothing to add, I was finished. The trail ended. Rarely did we run another brief to say: the police still know nothing, the killer is still at large, the victim is still dead. But sometimes we did.
Police are still trying to identify a young Hispanic man who was found dead last week in an alley in the 1100 block of Mount Vernon Avenue.
The man, who was about 5 feet, 8 inches tall and weighed 140 pounds, was found wrapped in a bedspread early Friday morning. The man, found wearing only a pair of blue jeans, had been shot once in the upper torso.
Police believe he was killed in another location and moved to the alley between 6 and 10 hours after his death. The man was between 19 and 25 years old and had a thin mustache.
He also had a tattoo on the upper left portion of his chest. It was about 10 inches high and showed a person’s face in profile with a tear on the cheek and the words “El Ruben.”
And in the case of this unidentified man, we ran a third plea for information, a month later. We repeated the same information, though the police had revised his size to 5 feet, 6 inches, and 120 pounds. I quoted a police lieutenant: “We’ve gone nowhere with this. We have nothing. . . . We need someone to come to us and say, ‘Hey, that looks like my old neighbor.’ We’re looking for any leads at this point.” We even ran a police sketch of the dead man: the generic face of someone I might have passed on the street, indeed, someone who might have once been my neighbor, if only I paid attention to my neighbors. I think he was my neighbor, in one sense. And I never came forward to claim him as my own. And as far as I know, no one else did either. His trail ends here in my clips.
Oak
In some forests, Logan writes, oak trees of the same species graft their roots together and “become one flesh.” Through their shared root system, the stronger, dominant trees provide the weaker trees with nutrients. In this way, even the roots of dead trees can continue to live and contribute to the forest: “The grafted roots may go on acquiring water and nutrients for the surviving trees long after their parent tree has rotted away.”
In Brief
Two men stole six cases of baby food at gunpoint at a local grocery story. The details in the brief are as spare as always, and yet the subtext aches with its own life. The untold story is bursting at the seams of those three compact sentences that tell you who, what, when, where, how – but not why. I can almost hear the baby’s wails, the mother’s pleas from between the sooty lines of newspaper text. And instead of saying, catch these criminals and put them in jail, why don’t we say, please come forward and we will help you. There has to be another way.
Oak
One morning my daughter sees the neighbor girls standing by the trunk of the oak and poking it with their fingers. She charges outside, shouting, “Hey, that’s our tree! Don’t hurt our tree!” even though the girls are her friends. She is protective of the tree, has claimed it as her own. I know she has probably learned this attitude from me, though I have not yet been shouting at the neighbors, about trees or anything else.
In Brief
Danger and violence and death were all around me. Every day I walked through a minefield, and miraculously, I had avoided all the mines. It was a matter of time, of luck. I had to be vigilant. The criminals were everywhere. The man walking across the parking lot was likely a car jacker, so I hurried up and started my car. The man in the Taco Bell was a rapist, so I’d better not stop there. My life would end in an accident on the interstate, so I’d better not drive there. Better to take the surface streets. But maybe that would be my mistake: maybe I’d wrap my car around a eucalyptus tree. Maybe an elderly woman would run a light and kill me. Safer to take the interstate after all. Safer yet to call in sick. But what if an intruder came to kill me? What if I fell and hit my head on the kitchen counter in a freak accident? Safer to go to work, to be lulled by the static of the police scanner. Safer to learn of the misfortunes of others. Because if I knew about all the crime in the world, maybe nothing would happen to me. If I paid enough attention, wrote enough briefs, I wouldn’t become a police brief myself.
Oak
The squirrels pelt acorns at us out of the tree. They bury them in the grass. Acorns are beguiling; I can see why my daughter and the squirrels collect them. I can see why they are compelled to move them from place to place. My husband etches a face on one with his fingernail, the cap serving as a beret, and says with a bad French accent, “I am zee Frenchman Jean-Claude Pierre.”
The acorns keep turning up. I find one in the pocket of my old fleece sweater that I wear around the house all fall and winter. It is small and striped, unlike the larger, monochrome acorns that our pin oak produces. A vagrant has made its way into my pocket. I don’t remember putting it there. The trees are doing their work.
Later, once I have grown attached to my pocket acorn, I reach in to feel its familiar smooth shape, and it’s gone. The trees are doing their work.
In Brief
One time a seventeen-year-old girl was pulled over and given a ticket for following behind a highway patrol car too closely. “Eight minutes later,” my brief reads, “she lost control of her 1986 Toyota Corolla, hit the center divider and rolled. She was pronounced dead at the scene.” At the time of the accident, she had been driving in excess of 100 miles per hour.
And I can see it all, thanks to those eight minutes. I can imagine the sudden anger that spread through her limbs like a disease, the erratic thoughts – how dare he give her a ticket? – and perhaps the fear – what would her father say? I can feel her stepping hard, and harder yet, on the accelerator, her adrenaline rushing, going faster and faster, perhaps not even glancing at the speedometer, weaving in and out of traffic. She would show him. She would drive off the face of the world; this was her way of flipping the bird to the trooper who pulled her over, to authority. I could have been that girl. Maybe I once was that girl. Actually, I had once driven my car 100 miles per hour, just to see if it would go that fast. Actually, I had, as a teenager, had a run-in with the police. Actually, I think I was that girl. But I was luckier.
I couldn’t continue being all those people. I couldn’t lead all those lives. I couldn’t keep dying so many deaths. There had to be another way. And writing those briefs – those sound-bites of bad news, those sudden, unrelenting jabs of destruction coming from all sides – I just couldn’t see another way.
Oak
The arborist recommends we plant another oak in the front yard. The root systems of the two trees will meet, grapple, cohere. The younger, more vigorous tree will help support the older oak, prolonging its life. And later, when the older oak is dead, the younger tree will continue to benefit from its affiliation with the gone tree’s prolific root system. They will help each other. They will both live longer in companionship. This can be true of trees as well as people.
In Brief
A thirteen-year-old boy accidentally shot himself while watching the Super Bowl. I could picture him all too clearly, watching the game, twiddling the gun, like a toy, in the nervous way that some boys have, their hands always needing to be active, engaged. I have known boys like that. I have known that boy.
Death was coming out of the woodwork. Who are all these people dying and being murdered? I developed a low-grade daily terror of going to work, of what I might learn there. I developed a terror of speaking to the families of victims. Once I had to approach the mother of a young man whose throat had been slashed. Intruding into her grief seemed morally wrong, an outrage, and yet in my line of work, I knew I would be asked to commit it, again and again.
One day I was sent to the hospital to find the family of children who had been badly burned in a fire and were being treated in the burn unit. For half an hour, I just sat in the hospital parking lot. Finally I walked into the lobby and then turned around and walked out again because, simply, I could not bear to talk to the family of these children, to peer into their sorrow like a Peeping Tom, creeping from one window of grief to another. I returned to the office and told my editor, “I did not find the family,” which was true. I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t even looked. I should have known then, but I let it continue. I went to work and cringed at the scanner noise and wrote more briefs.
Oak
There is news today: the leaves have started to change, the green beginning to marble with yellow. The oak is preparing for winter, and so should I, whatever that means in the twenty-first century. Find the Polartec fleece, make sure the storm windows are shut, buy a jug of lotion for dry skin, replenish the Earl Gray tea, set the thermostat to 68, plan soups, press leaves in books for winter crafts, put flannel sheets on the beds, take the car to the mechanic for winterization, make some hot chocolate and learn to sit still indoors with a book.
In Brief
Hell was the unending mutter of the police scanner. Hell was the dozen phone calls I had to make, asking again and again: What’s going on today? Translation: Who has been murdered this time? What heinous crime can you tell me about? Hell was walking up to a woman whose son had been murdered and asking her what her son was like. Did he like sports cars and golf, mystery novels and mountain climbing, single malt whiskey and walking his dog? Was he kind and funny, smart and affectionate, devoted and handsome, gifted and outgoing, clever and strong? How could he be otherwise?
One time a burglar entered a house through a sliding glass door. A woman who was asleep on the living room couch said hello to the intruder. The man was so startled that he ran away.
Annie Dillard wrote, “What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello?”
I like to think that an energetic, friendly voice shouting out “hello!” to the burglar made the hair on his neck stand up. Here was another human being who recognized him as human, worthy of a greeting. She didn’t leap up in fear or scream or shout what are you doing here? or I’m calling the police! She said: hello, a greeting to life, the universe. Whatever or whoever you are, she said, I recognize you as worthy of a hello. Hello!
And all of my police briefs: just shouts of hello! And there are better ways, I think, to greet the cosmos.
Oak
The leaves, spotted yellow and brown, have started to fall, though most still cleave to the tree. Glenn Keator writes that an oak leaf has its characteristic indentations between lobes to “allow bits of light to pass through and be absorbed by a lobe on a leaf just below, like a jigsaw-puzzle.” Even the leaves look out for one another.
My daughter brings me handfuls of leaves plucked out of our lawn, but some are aberrant. One is the glossy green of summer, another is cardinal red. I can’t believe they’ve come from our tree. All I can see are yellow and brown in its canopy. But the jigsaw-puzzle lobes are unmistakable. My daughter asks me to save all the leaves for her. Later, she brings me more. We have leaves scattered all over the house. We slip some into books, at random. Others wither and curl on the kitchen counter, on the bookcase. She asks me for the leaf she found yesterday. I offer her one. “Not that one,” she insists. “The one I found in the afternoon with Gramp, not the one I found in the morning.” She keeps tabs on her leaves. The missing leaf is never found, and is, apparently, irreplaceable. “There is no other leaf like it,” she insists. And, of course, she is right.
Most of the leaves still cling tenaciously to the tree. I watch them. Every day, I take stock. I wait for the tree to show me what will come next.
In Depth
I once wrote a story about a young man named Homero Vargas who was found stuffed in a 50-gallon trash can behind a house. He had died of a gunshot wound. I think one of the reasons he was not just a brief but worthy of thirteen inches and a mug shot is that he had played football at a prominent high school in town. I talked to his former football coach, who called him a “solid boy,” and the crime “a sad waste of a good boy.” He might have been a brief, but for that. And had he been a brief – worthy of just four sentences – what happened next would not have followed.
Several weeks after the story ran, a man came in the newsroom and asked for me. He walked to my desk and he looked at me. I had never seen him before.
“My name is Jesus Vargas,” he finally said to me. “You wrote a story about my son, Homero.” He sat down across from me, took my hand, and held it. He looked at me intently and paused to control his voice. “I want to thank you so much for this wonderful story about my son,” he said. I saw that he carried with him a creased copy of the newspaper where the story appeared.
I didn’t know what to say. I could see that what he was doing – in coming to see me – was both very difficult and very important.
“Homero was a good boy,” he said. He spoke with an accent. He went on to tell me about his son’s strong faith, his dedication to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He spoke about his son playing football and working at a construction company after high school. Mostly, I listened and waited for the man to leave. I didn’t do your son justice, I wanted to say. I didn’t know him. Homero Vargas had been twenty, and I myself had just turned twenty-three. And this life was about to end, but I didn’t know it then.
Before he left, Jesus Vargas stood and held the newspaper tightly to his chest. “I just wanted to say thank you for this,” he said. “I love you for this.” And before I could respond, he was gone.
I love you for this. I cringed at the words. I did not deserve love for this. This was not what I wanted to be loved for, not even close.
Homero Vargas might have been a brief, and had he been a brief, I wouldn’t have talked to his football coach, and my name wouldn’t have appeared on my story. And his father wouldn’t have come to see me. How much of the world was I closing off to myself, writing those dozens upon hundreds of briefs?
After Jesus Vargas left, I saw that I could have written a better story about his son after talking to him, but I also saw that it wouldn’t have been good enough. I saw that my attempts – the attempts that newspapers made in reporting the news – were inadequate in really knowing a person and the meaning of his death. I could ask Jesus Vargas a thousand questions. I could write fifty inches, a hundred inches. It would never be sufficient.
Instead, I wrote a column. I wrote about Jesus Vargas coming to see me and the difficulties in maintaining empathy as a police reporter. I wrote about the challenges of compressing a life into a tight news story. My editor chose the title, “Bringing Homero Vargas back to life,” for my column, though that is not really what my column was about. If only words had that power. They fall short of the mark. Homero Vargas was and is forever beyond their reach. He deflects my attempts. I cannot reinvent him.
At the end of my column, I wrote that I could still be moved by others’ grief. And I concluded: “May I never lose that.” A month later, I left newspapers for good. And I hope that I haven’t lost it.
I love you for this, he said to me, baring himself before leaving. He meant the words as a blessing, and they have followed me for years. But at the time, they did not feel like a blessing.
I love you for this. I watch my children run under the tree. We wait for the arborist to return. He will climb into our tree and peer into its heart, see the damage there. He will tell us how deep the wound is. I love you for this.
Yelizaveta P. Renfro’s work has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, Witness, Blue Mesa Review, and the anthology A Stranger among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection (OV Books/University of Illinois Press, 2008). This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.