Beneath The Hawthorn Tree

It began with a letter—or, perhaps it is more accurate to say it was a note, a gallop of lines strung out on the page, quickly done, but by a confident hand, with a swollen cursive unabashed at the swallowing of space. The edge of the sheet was uneven, crumpled, quickly gathered up and torn, and on turning it over, I found it to be the contents page of a book, a translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Inexplicably I felt a flicker in the back of my mind at this, like that of an old memory yawning—a light flaring on in a dark window. Flipped back over and smoothed, I read:

“Proposition for you—a trade.

Very lucrative.

Must meet immediately At your earliest convenience.

Tomorrow afternoon suit? Hawthorn street corner—

1400 hours, if yes.”

Perhaps the most puzzling of all of this, was the signature of simply “old friend,” as I could not think who I knew or had ever known with a proclivity for propositions, tearing up perfectly innocent books or making appointments by handwritten note.

I suppose I could apprise you now of the battle, for and against, that waged that night. On one hand, I possessed an armoury of doubt, of “this is utter nonsense,” fortified by a hundred other thoughts denouncing the very idea. But, if we are speaking honestly, I think I knew the moment I rolled out that rumpled paper that I would see where it led me. There was something there, something I could not name, something that took hold of my hand and pulled me back. Something lingered in the style of handwriting, in the proposition itself, in the sign off of “friend” that set off a chorus of bells within me. To appease my caution, I rationalised that a walk down Hawthorn, a street I knew like the back of my hand, in the middle of the afternoon, was harmless enough.

I was jittery the next day, all unbottled nerves—tapping tables, spilling coffee. I left early, slipping a collar on Valkyrie, my Wolfhound, more beast than dog but sweet as honey for me. We reached the corner, early by quarter of an hour. I hadn’t realised what an odd choice that particular corner was until I was approaching it. It was largely empty, flat fields with far sat back houses, with largely nothing to recommend it but for an immense Hawthorn tree in the Southeastern corner. Broad and thick in trunk, it’s canopy expanded flat and wide all about it, creating a ceiling over the sky, a dark hush beneath. Lingering, I strained my eyes into it’s shadow, utterly unsure of what to expect, yet simultaneously certain that whatever waited here was known to me.

In response to my suddenly languid pace, Val began nosing the ground for some scent, padding toward the great Hawthorn determinately over the last of the melting slush, the earth below sodden in a way that can only mean an early spring. Gradually, the trunk before me split, became two distinct opaque shapes, one clearly the sturdy, stark base for the awning of innumerable leaves, the other leaning—waiting.

“Ah, good” a voice emerged from the shadow—dry, scratchy and pert. I stopped where I was, waited, as the form moved closer. Suddenly the grey daylight slipped through the thinning branches, and I knew him.

I realised later that I had never known his name, so that the signature of “old friend” made perfect sense, as any name given would have meant nothing to me.

When I was still in school, in between my 8:30am classes and my three hour long evening ones, I worked in a small bakery that was really the backend of an old print shop. The shop had gone out of business, in fact no one seemed to remember it ever running, and the dusty, sweeping windows that peered into the wide, empty dark within juxtaposed the tiny, bright carnival revels going on around the corner. Comparatively, we had only two small latched panes on either side of the door, and managed to squeeze in just three tables and some extra chairs with piled pillows before the sloping, oak wood counter. So the door was always open, people were always half way in or out, the scent of coffee was always billowing down the street, every conversation was always overheard by everyone else and the small space heater was always huffing along in accompaniment. It was here that I had met my illusive correspondent.

He would limp in mid morning, slide heavily into the table most squished into the far corner and pull out his glossy painted chess set, unpack his pieces, each individually wrapped in a rich red velvet—rook and queen and pawn. Each was polished before arranged, and then he would play. I think perhaps once or twice another customer would stop to chat, offer a game, but otherwise, he played alone, never switching seats to properly see the other end of the board, always playing black, and always making notes at the end of a game in a small, worn notebook he kept in his left shirt pocket.

It was an unspoken rule that anything he wanted was on the house, though he never actually ordered. So I would bring him coffee or tea when it was quiet, or we would split pastries that had broken on the tray coming out of oven. I never knew what he liked, as he would always reply “Oh yes, that’s fine” when I asked him how anything was. Eventually I realised he would hum lowly when he really enjoyed something, and that was how I discovered orange ginger tea, with a drizzle of honey and the lightest squeeze of lemon to be his drink of choice. He taught me about chess, more about the strategy than anything else. We never played together, but he would talk me through his games, draw maps of the plays in his little black book like the most cunning of battle strategies. He saw me reading Ovid at the counter once, and so we realised our shared love of the Greeks. I would read a book for class or for pleasure, he would wait for me to finish with varying degrees of patience, and then we would delve into it—Homer and Aeschylus and Hesiod, from the true motivation of Odysseus, to the hubris of men, to the cruel divinity of the gods. Some days we became so engrossed in these debates that the bell dancing on the door signalling a new customer was like waking from a dream, a dream that left the sea spray of the Aegean on my lashes, the taste of ripe fig bursting on my tongue.

“I assumed you would not ignore such an invitation, but still, I was not altogether certain” he wheezed at me. In the light I could see how the years had wrapped themselves around him, his hair finer, whiter, less obedient to the laws of gravity.

“I...didn’t know it was you, you should have said” I replied, still thrown by this unexpected crossover of two parts of my life, like seeing a sailboat in the mountains or a snow shovel in August.

“I’m glad to see you,” I added hastily “you seem well”

He raised one silvery eyebrow “Do I?” He inquired drily. He waved a withered hand at me when I opened my mouth to respond, “No matter, I have no interest in social niceties, and frankly, they do not become you” he said, giving me the same piercing look he would whenever I defended Odysseus or even mentioned Heraclitus, and the memory had me grinning, despite his reproach.

“So, down to it then” He said briskly. Fumbling to his shirt pocket, I saw him pull from it the same little black notebook he had kept by him everyday, the one that housed the chess battle plans, the one he would reach for humming whenever I made an argument that gave him pause. It had always made me proud whenever he had interrupted our debates to scribble something memorable, or rich, or new in there, and it warmed me to see it again now, like yet another old friend returned.

“First,” he said “your compensation” and pulled from within the book’s worn, cream pages a folded cheque, which he promptly handed to me. I hesitated, watching him, still unsure what was transpiring here. Unfolding it, I gaped at it’s contents—$20,000, scrolled across it, written to me.

“What—what is this?” I asked, my eyes flicking back to him, and down again.

“It’s the trade, your payment, obviously. I always remember you being a bit quicker about things” he mused. I rolled my eyes at that, but otherwise ignored it.

“Right, for what exactly? What is this trade? What am I offering that is worth this?” I asked. I had looked the cheque over several times at this point, still certain I was misunderstanding something crucial.

“For this, I want the truth” he said “If you agree to part with it, of course” he added hastily. Again I was hesitating, again I was confused. I felt Val looking up at me from where she had sprawled over my feet, noticed the breeze pick up, far more blustery than promised. I inhaled deeply, the air about us caught with the damp bark of the Hawthorn, the faint smell of ginger enveloping him, and the heavy wet of coming rain.

“The truth?” I asked, as levelly as I could muster. I wanted to be clear for this, focused. “What truth? And why me?”

“The truth” he exclaimed, gesturing a little wildly now “The same truth that binds us all, holds us all, the same truth we will one day return to and remember.” He paused now, his breathing a bit laboured. “The truth of what becomes of us, of what it was all for” he added now, and I heard beneath the bluster a thread of desperation, a tendril of fear, and I felt pity swamp me.

“As for why you, I should have thought that obvious” he continued on, “You—you because you don’t look away, because you never looked away.”

“From what?” I murmured, shaking my head

“From any of it” he whispered, reaching for my hand and squeezing it, hard, his skin as papery thin as the note he had left for me. “From me and my chess games, from the fellow with the dirty bare feet and the plastic bags, from that little stick of a lad who never paid, from the best of the Greeks who climbed over anyone to ensure his name outlasted him—you never pretended, never painted them rosy, never looked away. So tell me, what is the truth?”

I searched his face—for a crack in the pavement, for a laugh that could bubble up. But everything I found there was earnest. I glanced down at the folded cheque in my hands, and back up at him. He closed my fingers over it and whispered “A small enough price, for the life you brought back to me. I can imagine no better use for it, than to give it to you...and I, I just thought, maybe you could tell me...” His voice faltered, but I heard the fear that lay beneath.

“There is a change approaching me, I feel rather certain. Whether it is an end, or a beginning, I cannot tell.” He sighed this last part, so lowly I had to strain to hear him.

I looked up to the enormous sky, wondered what it was I could offer.

“Well” I said, deciding, “If you really want the truth, if you are truly ready to meet it’s eyes—well then, I suppose I shall tell it you, as it was once told to me.”