Emaline's Magnolia

I was separated from my older sister, Emaline, by nine years, making me around three when she planted the tree on our side of the wall. My father had two acres of backyard in Colliersville, near Memphis, entirely plush with treated grass, manicured and clipped to take on the mocked imperfections of Astroturf. It was as level as a ball field and lined on each side by pristinely groomed hedges grown to a sturdy six feet. "Nature's fence," as Dad would have put it.

At the back, a thick growth of trees too small in acreage to be considered forest stood tall and brooding over the expanse of the property, stretching the length of all the yards on White Owl Rd. but standing in stark contrast to the green tarpaulin of our yard. The others had trees of their own - bushes and shrubs, flowers and plants, birches and oaks. They were scattered meticulously by the landscape contractors hired to complete the aesthetic impressions of the synthetically constructed development. The landscape artistry smirked in judgment at the randomly dispersed woods from behind the protection of fences. White picket. Chain link. Log.

A rock wall fashioned the border at the back of our yard. My father built it up with his own hands, stone by stone, his tribute to the Mending Wall, only he need not worry about hunters making gaps or walking its line annually to mend it. These were different times. He used quarry stones and for security, sealed it together with mortar. A piece of New England carried south. He left the top uneven to lend to it the appearance of history or wear and tear. Next to the immaculate blades of sun-drenched grass, that effort seemed silly.

He built the wall to keep the wood at bay, to warn it, to say not so much to neighbor but to nature: NO TRESSPASSING. He sat out on his deck and looked down upon it at the end of the seamless field of green and beamed at the clean slate, the empty canvas of earth in front of him. He could do with it what he pleased when it pleased him. It was the one thing he had control over.

Emaline's quiet nature rarely broke form. She was steadfast in her devotion to acquiring the knowledge of new things. She cared more for the sharp point of a pencil than for the sharp look of the curls in her hair.She dressed modestly, even for 12, and hid behind a veil of thought not often penetrated.Her piers treated her with the kindness most notably associated with pity. Probably too much pity.

In April of her 7^th grade year, right about the time she turned 13, her teacher took the class to the far side of the parish rectory and had them stand in a circle around a hole in the grass, two feet down and three feet wide. Three boys volunteered and wheeled in a tree, standing eight feet in the wheelbarrow, tied up with string and planted in a burlap sack. The boys carefully lifted the tree into the hole and each class member took turns with a shovel, filling dirt in around its roots. They untied the string and its fragile branches were released, falling awkwardly like an infant foal on new legs.

"Today, we thank the children for this wonderful gift to celebrate all that God has given us on this Arbor Day," said Father Kilgallon. "May it grow tall and strong and help to keep our parish beautiful for many years to come. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen."

Emaline picked up the string that held the tree in bondage and kept it. With the permission of her teacher, she returned to class to look up information on Arbor Day. What was an Arbor? Where did this holiday, formerly unknown to her, come from? Her teacher, Ms. Willard, carried granola bars and talked regularly of eating organic foods and keeping the environment clean for children of the future. Come to think about it, she probably smoked a lot of pot back in those days. By the time she taught me, she was crotchety and beat down, like she had endured the proverbially rough paper route. But back then, she was more than willing to allow my inquisitive sister free reign with the encyclopedias at the back of the class.

Emaline busied herself researching Arbor Day, learning of its inception in Nebraska in 1872, reading up on its founder, a Mr. Julius Sterling Morton, who thought the national landscape and economy would benefit from the planting of trees. While she gathered up facts, the thoughts behind her veil drifted to the empty stretch of green grass in her backyard and all the trees beyond it. She wondered why our father would want to keep the trees out. She would ask if she could plant one within the wall.

"Dad, do you know what today is?" she asked that evening.

"Friday," said our father, a hurried man, stout and balding and ripe with middle age, forever feeling the weight, the burden of being a patriarch instead of basking in its glow.

"No, I mean, what holiday?"

"I didn't know today was a holiday. I had to work. You had to go to school. Did I miss Christmas again?" he joked.

"Funny, dad," she said, humoring him. "It's Arbor Day."

"The tree thing? That's nice. Did you guys do something at school?"

"Well, we planted a tree," she remarked sarcastically. "But I was kind of hoping that we could do more, like plant a tree in the backyard."

"Our backyard?"

"Sure, down by the wall, something to liven up the place."

"It'll ruin the lawn, honey."

"Dad, the lawn is already ruined."

"How so? That lawn is perfect, Emaline."

"That's just it, dad. What's the sense of having a yard if we can't even play in it? What's the sense of having land if you don't plant something in its dirt? It's boring."

Dad peaked up over the rim of his glasses. He was bent over a desk and busy with the house bills. Emaline was flush. She seldom got angry and although her voice carried no inappropriate tone, there was urgency in it.

"You might as well use it as a cemetery, dad," Emaline said. "I could be your first customer, or we could move mom down here. Otherwise, it's just wasted space."
* * *

My father skirted the line between stoic and dead, except when it came to his daughter. His heart softened like leather in linseed oil when it concerned Emaline. Not so much with me, but that was fine. He let me find my own way, as many boys do, and rendered suitable advice or admonishments as needed.

I thought for the longest time that he didn't have any more room in his heart. He was a good man, steadfast in his dedication to his work, to supporting his children the way he thought a man should support his children. He had no choices. He was alone in it. Our mother had been the victim of a wet, snaking, northern road after the road had been the victim of a wet, violent, northern winter night. I was an infant and Emaline had already been sick, so my father's heart had to have been filled with something, be it gratitude for the things that remained, or anguish and pain, blazing acrimony for the endowments bestowed upon him by the deity he placed so much of his faith in. He followed his faith as far as it would take him, sluggishly holding on to the hope that someone or something watched over us. But it often seemed to him that some of God's decisions bordered on sanctimonious, which would be the converse of what dad looked for in a higher power.

We moved to Colliersville, outside Memphis, after Emaline's tumors came back. I was too young to remember much else but I always thought the folks from Tennessee were nicer than the ones I remembered from Connecticut. They could have been from Mississippi though, or Arkansas, or hell, even Alabama. You could drive an hour in most directions and find yourself staring at another state flag, another beaten up southern motto. All the same, each dose of southern hospitality you swallowed generally left you obliged to those dishing it out. People's intentions were genuine. That's the way they ran things in the Bible Belt.

They were rare tumors, or so we were told. My father didn't care that they were rare. He didn't know any children with common tumors so in his mind Desmoid Tumors were as prevalent as the common cold. He had friends who had moved to Memphis years before and they told him about a place called St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. They said it was the best. They said if she could be cured by anyone, those were the folks that could get the job done.

She had a palpable mass near her throat. My father thought some Chloreseptic would take care of it. It was sensitive to the touch, making Emaline's eyes water and her teeth clinch and her shoulders rise up in defense of her neck. She had a hard time swallowing. It grew. Mom had just died. Was she living inside her daughter? Was she a palpable mass? Emaline visited doctors. The diagnosis sent my father reeling, but not all the way. It could be cured. "God damn it, it better be cured!" It could be removed, but only if it wouldn't effect any major organs.

They took it out. She came around, started living life with the conventionality of blessed youth until the inexplicable palpable mass came back for more. They hadn't gotten all the cells. There was life in her. Evil. Uninvited. It grew close to her trachea now. Surgery was no longer an option. Memphis had options. There was no hesitation.

There was chemotherapy. She lost for a while those sharp curls she couldn't have cared less about. A glow endured in her blameless eyes, a fight and a love so deep it carried my father through. I was all too young to understand any more than something wrong. There were nights when I would lay in my bed as my father sat with her in the bathroom, sick from the chemo, reeling from the brutal effect it all had on her body. But she would not be denied. The tumor receded, frightened like the cowardly diseases it caused. It went into hiding, and now my father had looked into his daughter's eyes and saw a little girl who wanted to plant a tree. He looked out onto that piece of earth; the one piece of this whole puzzle he felt he controlled.

"What kind of tree do you want to plant?" he asked his daughter as he poked his head into her room, a room he seldom poked his head into anymore, honoring the increasing necessities of adolescent girls. She had her nose buried deep in a book. She always had her nose buried deep in a book.

"We can plant one?"

"We'll go to a nursery tomorrow and pick one out. We'll bring it home and plant it down near the corner and we'll take care of it together."

"Oh, dad! Thank you!"
* * *

The Southern Magnolia tree takes its sweet time branching out to the peak of its existence. They had bought it at six feet tall.

"It will have a head start on the hedges this way," my father said to Emaline.

"Good idea, dad."

I got to help them plant it, which means I stumbled across the lush grass with spades and shovels and other tools I couldn't name and handed them to my father like a nurse in surgery. He smiled at Emaline throughout the day and kept careful watch not to ruin anymore of the lawn than he would have to. We made a circle with soil and mulch so that weeds would not disturb the tree's growth. It also made for the perfect way to cut out a line where the tree's space ended and the grass began.

They gave the tree ample room to grow. Fifteen feet from the wall. Fifteen feet from the hedges. They planted it in the corner. From the doors leading out onto the deck you could just see where its roots would spread under those hedges and that wall and that synthetic looking mat of a lawn dad took such bizarre pride in.

Emaline took to coming home from school and skipping down to the wall and her tree with a book in her hand. Through weeks and months she plowed through classics like Alice in Wonderland, The Tell-Tale Heart, Wuthering Heights, Moby Dick, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Separate Piece, Ethan Frome and The Red Badge of Courage. Some she studied for school's sake, some because she chose to stay ahead of the literary curve, and she knew many of these books would show up on reading lists as she moved into her high school life.

When it rained in the spring, summer and fall, she would sit with her book by the back window, staying as close to her tree as she could. During the first winter, she did her reading at the same window, but would at least walk down in the cold to visit her confidant once a day.

She noticed that the leaves of the magnolia began to fall off at the start of the next spring, and being originally from Connecticut, she was confused at this lopsided sign of the seasons.

"Dad, why does my tree shed in the spring?"

Her father didn't know, but being a father, he would do his best to answer her.

"It's trying to grow," he said.

He could see she didn't like this. Each day, he could see her cleaning up the leaves from the mulch below the tree, which was starting to spread out and form its canopy. He wanted her spring to be pleasant so he bought a wooden swing and installed it between the tree and the wall so that Emaline could be more comfortable when she read her books.

The tree came to its second summer in our yard and Emaline once again approached him.

"How long will it take for the tree to get as big as it can grow?" she asked.

"How long will it take for you to get as big as you can grow?" he answered.

He noticed her impatience, so he installed an ornate birdbath next to the tree, whose seeds were attractive to birds during the autumn.

The next summer, Emaline noticed, after reading up on magnolia trees, that hers did not have the brilliant white flowers that should blossom in the summer. She once again sought answers from her father.

"Dad, I think we bought a defective tree," she said. "Ours doesn't grow magnolia flowers."

"It takes time for things to become what they are going to be."

He feared that Emaline did not think the tree was pretty, so he built a path of brick leading to the mulch circle and her swing and lined the path with a flower garden on each side. The path cut a long divide in the two acres of pristine grass and led all the way to the steps of the deck at the top of the yard.
* * *

Emaline matured into a young woman whose youthful health problems couldn't derail the path her life was on. After six years, the leathery leaves that fell off the magnolia tree in the autumn crept across the line of mulch and invaded our father's turf at will. Their velveteen underbellies stood in contrast to the lime green yard. The wooden swing still creaked in the gentle Memphis breezes of spring with a bolt loose here and there and some deterioration where squirrels and birds had nipped and tucked at its wood over the years. The perennials still grew in the flower garden surrounding the brick path to Emaline's magnolia.

Her daily visits to the tree slowly became weekly as her own life began to take shape, grow, cultivate friendships and discover more diverse interests than leaves and literature. The weekly visits became monthly as extra-curricular activities took more of her time and the search for a college took more of her priority.

Our father now looked out on his lawn, down the path to a tree he resisted planting. It billowed, stretching out and reaching down to the ground like an umbrella. It shined against the backdrop of the wood he had defended against. Its swing added more comfort, more New England than the wall he had taken so much pride in building up. The path leading to it gave more character to his property than all the blades of grass that stood unblemished before his eyes.

He stared down at Emaline's magnolia, which had finally exploded with creamy, showy floral pyrotechnics across the corner of the yard. She was away at the University of Georgia, where magnolias blossomed freely, where she would continue to grow healthier in heart and mind, with no physical rarities or intense heartbreak to endure anymore. There had been healing for all of us. It just took time.

I was nine then, and I sipped at a glass of iced tea at the table on the deck after returning home from a Little League game. I was a bit shabby, a bit awkward. My knees were skinned and I had two teeth missing. Dad looked down on the other side of the brick path to where the lawn still grew unscathed.

"Did you ever hear of Arbor Day?" he said to me.

"I know it's some kind of holiday," I replied.

"Well, it's not really till April, but I was thinking that tomorrow, me and you could plant a tree."