Читать книгу The Book of Colors - Raymond Barfield - Страница 10

Trees

The trees were the first things I saw from a distance when I came up on Rose’s lot. They all looked like Ys. There were leaves on the trees since it was still summer and the row looked like the part in Jimmy’s hair. The power company had been the ones who cut the trees into Ys so they could keep their lines clear, which was probably important. But the trees were sick and gray and truth be told the leaves they made didn’t give much shade. Which made you wonder if trees could ever be more important than power lines and who decides. Or even whether if a tree is gonna be cut into some unnatural shape it might be more respectful just to cut it down and plant some flowers or a shrub.

But once this baby started growing I started looking at things as being the world a child would live in. And as I thought about why they had to cut the trees into Ys for lines that were so high up I came across one likely reason for such, that maybe it’s the Law, and at the very same time I saw clearly that the Ys would make a good place for a tree house.

In fact, a plank long enough could run through the Ys we had in the yard, and quite a little fort could be built.

When you are nineteen you don’t think about forts, if you ever did, which I didn’t except for a couple of times. Once was when I first heard the story of Robinson Crusoe. The other was when I had been sent to stay with an uncle for a while when my mother was sick and I rode with him on his business to pick up valuables that people left on the street for the garbage men. We always started in the rich neighborhoods early in the morning and it was amazing what people will throw out. Mattresses, barbecue grills, humidifiers, stereos, you name it.

So one day we were driving through the neighborhoods and he said, “There it is,” which is what he said whenever we came to a load that would give us in one stop as much as we usually found in a whole day. It was in front of a pretty brick house, big enough for three or four families easy. There was all kinds of things—toys, boxes of clothes, books, a bed, pictures, and all the pieces for a fort including a plastic roof and a little door. It was like Christmas except that I never had a Christmas like that. So we loaded up the truck but we didn’t have room for the fort and I would have cried except that I knew I was only staying there for a little while and could never take it back to Memphis anyway. But when we had loaded everything up and we were pulling away I saw this white woman staring out the window. And then before I even knew why I cried anyway.

All which is to say that when you are pregnant and you start thinking about forts again, you can wonder why you ever stopped thinking about them. I mentioned this to Jimmy but he saw too much room for extra work, though one night he took a break from his searches on the computer to find a site about tree houses. Everything was on that computer. Everything. If I had had the nerve I’d have gotten him to show me pictures of childbirth, but some things just need to be gone through and not thought about so much, I think.

So something catches your eye like three trees lined up and cut into Ys. Then the Y reminds you of the question Why and the trees look half dead like a lot of other stuff. One thought leads to another thought not like train cars, which are connected so that you know why they follow each other, but like ants who, if the first ant walks zigzag, every other ant walks the exact same zigzag, even though they are not connected by anything you can see. Then before you know it somebody who would not be around except you stopped and asked for a glass of water starts to grow inside you and suddenly you’re not thinking about why people like the power company ruin your trees but instead how the trees might look to a kid, other than Ambrosia. And that’s what made me wonder what else I was missing.

But this kind of thing is hard to say. Saying it is not really like the thing you want to say. It’s like a tree’s shadow is like a tree and also is the thing most not like a tree. Everything I’m saying is shadows. But what’s inside—Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.