The Hanging Tree

The Hanging Tree

It had come to the point at which I was beginning to question my role in the game, having stood for a considerable time by myself, on the windswept fringes, as my friends battled for possession in raggedy shorts. ‘Pass’ was my prayer, but it pained me to say it. I chanted it out under breath: ‘just once, just once; please God pass to me once.’ My days were spent fixed to one spot or another, always waiting, like a stone on the riverbed, shifting clumsily downstream. The sound of play had become cold for me, each laugh and exalted cheer an aberration, filling my belly with a curdling passion that only time could still. I yearned to feel the sting of their scuffed knees in the dirt, medals of action and intimacy for which I was seemingly ineligible. It was always like this; occasionally I would turn from the pitch altogether, with my hands fiddling impotently in their pockets, and my mind climbing the walls of its containment. I cast hungry eyes from my desolate hilltop, to the valley far below; I could hear the church bell rocking absently in its cot, and almost smell the market stalls. The spring of 1808 was the warmest and saddest and longest I ever lived through. Time wasted in speculation, and soddened with despair.
In those days my four friends would appear on a whim, and leave just as quickly, so that often I was unsure where they found the motivation; to wind the skinny trail to the spear crowned gates, and saunter about the grounds which were once so-strictly maintained, but now grow tired and bedraggled. They would throw stones, smashing windows. The dilapidated Servants’ quarters stood apart from the house, with broken doors flapping on restless winds, almost as if - on those most haunting of nights - the quarters were revisited by the ghosts of the old ways.

The game stopped: I heard the crack and rustle of falling leaves. The ball was nestled firmly in the tree and Harry stood scowling at his obvious culpability. So when they looked to me, smiles stretched out as if happy to find me still there, my heart leapt. I smiled back; it seemed my chance to shine had arrived, and my pack of friends looked up into the tree longingly, like a bull thistle thicket craning its many heads towards the sun. After all the football was mine, and brand new: made especially for me by a friend of my father’s who lived down in the village with everyone else. A retreating amber sun stretched the evening shadows out across the lawn, and the gnarled bark was cold and black on the souls of my feet.
‘The Hanging Tree’ my father used to call it, a lone silhouette at the edge of our land, hunched over in the strangest way, not stretching to the sky but leaning as if injured, or bowing towards my Father’s house with its back to the valley. I began to edge along the bough, which creaked like old leather and undulated horribly; my eyes were on the prize as they say, not the monstrous house, and certainly not my friends, who sniggered below. As I crept closer to the ball, bound in branches like a bird between long, skeletal fingers, I imagined myself as a cat, or some other agile-impressive thing; I imagined Dale, Pete and Harry… even Harper, beaming with pride as I pounced up the tree and saved the game. Yes, they would look on, and my sleek form would hold me aloft, with no fear of falling, or death.
Then of course I fell: my hands fumbled… a flurry of colours: sky blue and fresh green to dirt brown. Black…the flux of feeling. My friends ran. Snakes. They were gone before I knew, with the chances of regaining my precious football dashed, or perhaps some other pressing business that was just plain unrelated. Perhaps.
It knocked the wind out of me, I thought I felt blood run from my head, but with it, all of the embarrassing nonsense that spurred me up there in the first place was fractured, and dismissed. The ground was cold in the dappled shade, and I felt it, but through the blurring tears, above and beyond the spidery branches, I could see the film of darkened clouds course capriciously across the face of a true blue. I lay there in silence for a while.

The last thing I can remember hearing was spring birdsong, and the wistful breeze whispering amongst the rushes as I fell from the tree. Those sounds surround me now; their echoes haunt my world, everywhere and nowhere, like ghostly reminders that I will never again experience them. Not the congratulations of friends, or even the squealing wheels of the hospital gurney; I cried as they wrote down the prognosis for me to read. My Dad wandered from the side of my bed to the door after hearing the news, I was meant to understand that my Grandmother, or some other female would be visiting later. It was implied. Then everyone was gone, and I was scared to leave my bed incase it was against the rules; wintry blue walls and cool metal handrails were indicative of a strictness which I thought myself lucky to have noticed in time. All of the deaf patients were housed in the same room at the end of a second floor corridor, as if our conditions put us out of the picture, denied our rights to language. We were left alone there, silent as sheep in a field.
Staff were scarce, and those that did appear exited swiftly, with a slight smile designed to pacify any anxieties I might be feeling. During the first few days, the change to my ears was unconvincing; there was a movement of sorts, as if I were underwater, at sea somewhere. And I was skeptical, just waiting to emerge from the muffled depths into the clean light of yapping seagulls.

But time meanwhile flies, never to return.

Now, if I care to look, I can still see the hilltop. And while from down here it looks smaller… inconceivably distant beyond the Palladian rooftops of the town hall, the bank, the crematorium; it still makes its presence known on an evening time when the sun falls prematurely behind its frame. Just out of sight, I imagine the house, and its great portico looking down on the valley. I see the Hanging Tree nursing its broken back.
Sometimes if I find myself walking a busy street - women wearing dresses, men carrying big boxes - I begin wondering what they think when they see me. How would they compare me, and to whom? Would I be the deaf man, or the handsome one? How would they judge the things that I am? Mere moments of weakness of course, but it does make me mourn the time that must be wasted in speculating, the pain born of interpreting those fleeting moments between acquaintances - a smile, a shrug – and the deep impressions that are made instantly. I realize now that my old friends could never have provided that solid ground; that certainty I craved. The new ones neither.
I told my first son: ‘Enjoy the world as your own,’ and it scared me, sounded like something my Father would have said. But little Jamie touched his head in agreement, and his four year old eyes told me he understood, told me not to worry.
As I recline in the light of my bay window, with the smell of the bakery floating, I picture the rest of our land, his land, stretching far back from the house like a cloak cast by my Father and the men. Over abandoned fields grown wild, and streams and old abandoned farm buildings with yellowing grass and climbing weeds, stretching to overthrow the structure of dusty bricks and mortar.