We planted grandpa a ways up from the creek at the ranch. When he's full grown, my mother said and pointed to the gap in the treeline, he'll shade us from the sun in the morning and we'll always be able to see him from the kitchen window.

I did not particularly care to see a giant looming tree of my grandfather. I did not especially enjoy the time I had known my grandfather when he was still alive; the anxious holidays, time in the hospital, the visits to the hospice.

But why, I asked, why did we plant grandpa?

So he can live on, my mother said.

Isn't that what heaven's for?

My dad snorted, There's no way that man's in heaven. What?

That isn't helpful, Roger.


So we planted grandpa by the creek, and while he did not spring up overnight, it certainly felt like that. Every morning my mom would stand at the kitchen window and remark on the progress. Having been a woman who could kill a cactus, as my dad said, she took it as felicity.

Doesn't he seem happy, she asked us.

And neither of us knew how to answer.

The tree had crept into more and more of my dreams. I dreamt he grew fruit like pomegranates, but with teeth inside. I dreamt he grew around us until we were living inside my grandfather-tree. I dreamt he ate our cat. Although we didn't have a cat.

I'm not sure why my father couldn't answer. We haven't talked about it. We don't have that kind of relationship.


My grandpa grew beautifully all that next year, but the trees around him began to fail. They dropped their leaves and then stayed barren. Some of their roots were exposed, and then one of them toppled over during a storm.

He started to talk to us, my mother and me.

When strong gusts would come in off the hills he spoke to me in tall tales and to my mother with advice on how to raise me right. The wind would rush out and he was all fury and indignation about perceived slights from my father, opinions about my mother's life choices, and obsession with the news. In the dry heat and stillness of the summer, he apologized sorrowfully, wondered if anybody cared about him at all, why we didn't visit with him more, and there was an acrid taste in the air.

I took more and more to staying in, and my father refused to talk about the grandfather-tree. That is, except in those times when my mother was out by the tree, when my father would stop for a moment at the kitchen window and then grumble to me something about an ax.


We had a hard few years then on the ranch. When the grass didn't survive the summer, my dad started selling off the cattle. He picked up jobs on other ranches or took the long commute into the city. Sometimes he was away for weeks. And in his absence my grandfather-tree rooted himself in our home.

His voice, I mean, came into the house.

I was an awkward child, am probably an awkward adult, and at that age I couldn't do anything right. My posture was terrible, my grandfather-tree told me. My schoolwork was embarrassingly bad. If I kept eating the way I did, nobody would ever love me. His voice could find me in every corner of the house at any time.

Sometimes his voice came into my room late into the night, sat at the edge of my bed, and woke me up to yell at me and hit my legs.

And his voice came out of my mother's mouth.

And in the morning my mother would cry and apologize and tell me that she'd never let it happen again. And again.

Until one day my father took me and we left.


There was no final confrontation. My grandfather did not swallow me up, and my father did not hack me out with an ax. He didn't say to my mom, some stormy night, 'it's him or it's me.'

Once, when I asked him why we left, he didn't mention my grandfather or the tree. He told me that he and my mom had been talking for months about him moving to the city for work after he'd finished selling the cattle. The schools were better in the city, and that's why I moved with him while mom stayed to look after her family ranch. And then they grew apart, waiting to divorce until after I'd gone off to college.

Which makes a kind of sense. Except I still remember my dreams, the taste of my fear of that place, and the guilt I felt escaping down the ranch road as I looked back at my mom, swaying on our front porch, thinking that I had lost her forever.


This was all when I was very much younger than I am now, when I didn't understand about disease and death and the difference between dream and fantasy and experience. And I still don't. When I make the occasional trip out to the ranch, I hardly recognize it. The creek has gone dry and the soil turned to dust. My childhood home, which had seemed so large, is little more than a bungalow.

All of the other trees are gone, but grandpa is still there. He's lost most his leaves and broke most his limbs, is moss-grown and bug infested. I don't hear him anymore, but I know my mother does. His health complaints are a matter of great concern, even as I tell her that she needs to be thinking of her own brittle bones and aching joints.

She worries, more and more, what will happen when she dies. Almost every time I talk to her now, she asks me if I will take care of grandpa when she's gone.


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