The Birthing Tree

One 1964

ONE

My mother died pushing me into the world. Her blood, the very blood she had shared with me, spread out on the ground around her, the dirt a coppery red and the smell of lightning on the air. I don’t know if I saw her face or if she saw mine. Only that, by the first crack of thunder, she was gone.

“I was angry,” my grandmother told me. “The thunder shook, and the lightning flashed across the sky, but it wouldn’t rain.

The clouds refused to cry for my girl. And I was so angry.

She deserved their grief.” She saddened each time she told this story, which was every time the sky darkened from May to October.

It isn’t a particularly nice tree, the one where my mother died and where I was born.

The roots push out of the hard earth before retreating underground, hidden in their dark and damp world.

The tree leans and some of its heavier branches graze the top of the pond.

There are no golden leaves, no burning red in the autumn.

It gives no sap for syrup. But none of that matters, Kiju told me, because this tree holds our stories.

This tree presides over our entry into this world.

It makes mothers out of women and fathers out of men.

And those roots, the ones I once considered so ugly, offer a comfortable place to birth.

A cradle for the women to lean into. No one else can see it, but I swear, when the sun is creeping through the branches and kissing the ground, those roots glow red.

A monument to the lives begun and occasionally a life lost. It took me over half my life to understand the importance of that tree, of all it holds within its branches.

Of all it has seen and all it represents. So much wasted time.

I don’t remember my mother, the single most important person in my life, the one who brought me into existence, the one who provided a safe place for me to form.

I used to think that I was a simple child, because if I were clever, I would have at least a trace memory of her, a sensation even.

A hint of her voice, or her scent. Even the cord, the one that connected her to me, was gone.

It’s not buried under the apple tree out back where it was meant to be.

In her grief, Kiju forgot to save it, to bury it.

Sometimes I feel as though nothing grounds me, nothing holds me to this place.

And nothing reminds me of my mother except my own prominent nose and her given name, Margaret, Maggie for short, whispered in grief or reverence by my grandmother.

“Aliet, you are not supposed to remember things from the day you were born. Can you imagine how traumatic a trip that is for a new soul?” My grandmother laughed at her little joke.

I sat at the table, breaking apart a bread roll.

I pulled the soft bits from the inside and left the hard crust on my plate.

The animals would enjoy it later, mixed with vegetable peelings and the grease scraped from the bottom of the roaster, all that remained of that evening’s roast chicken.

Aliet wasn’t meant to be my name. At least, we don’t think it was.

My mother kept the name she’d chosen a closely guarded secret.

Sometimes I got angry with her for her secrets.

But it is hard to stay angry at the dead.

When she died, my grandmother was left to name me, the only daughter of her only daughter.

And she chose her own mother’s name, Aliet.

I think it’s a beautiful name, I love the way it rolls off the tongue, like a waterfall.

This is how I know it’s not my true name.

I am ill-suited to its beauty. I always felt more at home with a name like Gertrude or Constance. Kiju scoffed at those.

“Old white lady names. You can be silly sometimes.”

“Aliet is pretty.”

“It is. It’s my mother’s name and she was beautiful. Even after nine children, she still had those dark eyes that shone with such beauty. You sometimes remind me of her.”

“My eyes are green.” I sighed, my green eyes a constant source of agony.

I don’t know what she looked like, my mother.

A grainy picture of her as an infant tells me nothing.

There is an old black-and-white photo of her before her pregnancy.

The edges are tattered and torn, the result of Kiju holding it tight, trying to see her again, and me trying to conjure her for the first time.

Kiju said she was around twelve in the photo.

But she is turned away from the camera, her arms in front of her face, protecting her image from being captured.

Such a cruel thing, not to know your own mother’s face.

If someone had asked me my greatest wish, aside from having my mother alive and with me, it would have been to have at least one photo, something I could hold on to, something I could look at and find bits of myself.

But Kiju told me, each time I asked, that no photo existed.

No one has ever told me exactly how dark her hair was and if it went light under the summer sun like mine.

If her mouth was small or her smile wide.

My grandmother mentioned only the nose and how remarkable it was that I had the same one.

I liked to imagine that her eyes were green like mine, with the same gold flecks that everyone admired.

The green a result, my grandmother said, of my mysterious father, my mother’s other great secret, or maybe an Irishman or a Scotsman, from generations ago.

The gold, a gift from the Creator. But Kiju said my mother’s eyes were brown, like hers, like everyone else I knew.

“Never mind colour. There are better things to inherit. Good humour and a strong spirit are far more important than brown eyes.” She cut the tip off a cucumber and threw it out the open window then cut a thin piece and popped it in her mouth.

She sliced the rest and set them on a plate, adding salt and pepper before she placed it on the table in front of me.

“Was she dark?” I asked, as I took the thickest slice and licked the salt and pepper off before crunching it between my teeth. “Her skin? Like yours?”

“She was.” She sat down across from me. The condensation on our water glasses sparkled in the sunlight that crept through the tiny window above the wash basin.

We didn’t have running water or an indoor toilet.

Most people we knew didn’t, but it didn’t bother us.

Kiju said we had everything we needed—a roof over our heads, a fire in the winter, clothes and shoes and a garden that was the envy of the neighbourhood, maybe even the entire town.

A few chickens for eggs and a few for food and a fat pig who grunted and snorted in his muddy little pen.

Kiju wouldn’t let me name any of them. She said it only brought heartache when they were ready to reach their end for the benefit of our bellies.

In the fall, we sold the garden preserves we didn’t need to make money for the things we couldn’t make for ourselves.

The women from town sometimes came for Kiju’s medical teas, offering sweets or chickens, sometimes yarn to knit with.

Sometimes money. Those town folks ignored her at the grocery store but came to her when they needed medicines, trusting her tonics and salves more than their own doctors.

Which made it all the more upsetting when they turned against her.

“She was a happy child, like you.”

“And she didn’t have a father, just like me.”

Kiju winced. “No, she didn’t. But she had stories. Something I wish you had.”

“I have your stories.”

She smiled and placed her wrinkled hand over mine.

“He was a good man, your grandfather. I loved him very much. I asked him not to go. He didn’t have to, you know.

But he read the news and saw what was happening over there.

I never understood it myself, but he was determined to fight in a war for a country that wouldn’t acknowledge his humanity.

That’s the kind of man he was. Stubborn as a bull. ”

Mr. Armstrong’s bull was a grumpy old thing, penned all by himself on account of his violence, so when I was young, I nodded, never fully understanding the kind of person my grandfather really was. But somehow I knew that, despite the vision of a hateful bull, he must have been good.

When she told these stories, she looked sad, an emotion that was so rare for her that I hardly recognized it. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that I caused her to go to a sad place.

“It’s okay, Kiju. I promise it’s okay.” She smiled again, but there was something false about it. I felt bad, the way a child feels when they’ve disappointed someone they love as much as I loved my grandmother.

In 1939, my grandfather went to Europe, somewhere so far away as to be unthinkable, and lived to see the end of the war.

It was pneumonia on the ship back that took him.

Such a cruel fate. My grandmother stopped going to church once the military men stepped off her door stoop after handing her a notice and expressing their condolences.

The joy of knowing he survived such horrific violence and then losing him once the fear was gone was more than she could take, and she blamed a cruel and unmerciful God, and promised never to set foot in a place of worship again.

She had one picture of him, in his uniform, hidden away in a wooden box under her bed.

It sat with the marriage licence with their signatures, the only other evidence of their commitment to one another scrawled across the yellowed pages in slanted cursive.

She held on to those memories of him, and around the fire at night, when the snow drifted high against the walls of our little house and the wind howled so loud it threatened to drown out her voice, she shared those memories with me, and I hold on to them still, and to her through them.