One For All and Each for His Own

From the front porch, I can see the old Bartlett Pear standing like a silent, solitary sentry in the very center of the front yard. It's a study in contrast and peaceful coexistence, a blend of living and dead. Street side, it's green and growing, willingly offering up its branches to bluejays, robins, sparrows and even the occasional crow. It welcomes all. But on the house side, it's split and dead as dead can be, its branches leafless, gray and brittle. The birds don't land on the house side, the squirrels avoid it, and the sun can't restore it, yet it perseveres.

“Cut it down,” Michael's daddy advises him sourly, “Told you thirty years ago this'd happen but you wouldn't listen. Told you to plant somethin' that wouldn't split and die but you knew better. Thirty years and all you got to show for it's a half dead tree in your front yard. Boy, you never did have the sense of a nigger field hand.”

The stark racism and casual cruelty of the words sent a chill of shame and pity up my spine. The old man, his body a right angle of arithitis and scoliosis, was so bent and crippled that he could no longer stand upright or walk without some kind of support. His mind wandered freely these days - Michael liked to say his train of thought had been permanently derailed - meals were a chore, he could barely still dress himself, and at home, he spent most of his time going from his inside motorized wheelchair to his outside golf cart. The majority of his conversations these days were with the television or his dogs.

“He depends on me for everything,” Dorothy liked to say. This was usually accompanied by a weary sigh - they were both in their mid eighties, after all - but her proud smile gave her away.

“Jack!” she fussed, overhearing the field hand remark, “Don't say such things! What will dear Barbara think of us!”

What was she objecting to, I wondered, the racial slur or the slam at their son?

The old man gives me a cursory glance then shrugs indifferently. With some difficulty, he drags himself up the steps, through the gate, and settles heavily into the wooden chair Dorothy has brought along and set up for him. The dogs swarm around him happily. A sudden breeze sweeps through and the leaves in the Bartlett Pear lift and sway, rustling like sandpaper. The dead side stirs imperceptibly. A young boy on a bicycle comes free wheeling down the empty street and the dogs abandon the old man to protest. They collide and slam into each other in a frenzy of hysterical barking and the boy gives a cheerful wave and shouts “Hey! How ya doin'!” Dorothy and Michael both wave back but the old man scowls.

“Niggers still breakin' in?” he asks Michael. His voice is sly, raspy and raw with confidence.

Looking past him at the half dead, half living tree, I realize that the limbs and branches on the dead side look like a claw hand. Michael gives me an uncomfortable but helpless look and the old man laughs and goes back to rough housing with the dogs.

The two sides of the Bartlett Pear tree grew from the same roots in the same soil, matured and aged as one for years and then for no apparent reason, split and went their separate ways. Now, they are inextricably bound together and the death of either would be the death of both.