The People in the Trees Read Online Free PDF Page B

soft explosion as the artery burst, saw the coil of soggy, flaccid tissue, the black blood staining the brain the shining, sticky red of pomegranates. (Later, as a teenager, seized in an odd moment of guilt, I would think, How young! How unfair! And later still, when I was an adult and old enough to give serious consideration to my own death and the circumstances I’d prefer, How dramatic! I’d picture shooting stars, fireworks, glorious drops of light falling from the sky like thousands of glittering gems, each shard no larger than a seedling, and almost envy my mother her last great experience.)
    “She didn’t feel any pain,” Sybil wrote to me. “She had a good death. She was lucky.”
    A good death. I thought about that phrase often, until I became a doctor and saw for myself what Sybil meant. But as a child, the words were as mysterious as the concept of death itself. A good death . My mother was someone who was given a good death. A dreamer, a ghost, she was given the greatest gift nature can grant. That night, she slipped under her quilt as quietly as she slid her feet into the pale, murmuring stream and closed her eyes, unaware and unafraid of where she might go next.
    For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout’s gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Muellers’ property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realizethat death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.
    And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death—but kindness?

    After that, it was Owen and me and our father. I have spoken briefly of my father, and while it would be inaccurate to say we liked him, he was certainly more tolerable than our mother, although they shared a similar maddening refusal to remain anchored in the world of practicalities. If my mother had found her share of luck in death, my father had long ago accepted luck as his birthright.
    My father had been born and raised in a nearby town called Peet, another place of which you will have heard nothing. Today Peet is all but deserted, the sort of place that grows sadder and sparser with each passing year, as its children grow up and leave, never to return. When my father was young, though, Peet was something of an important town. It had its own railroad station, which had in turn spawned a small but healthy local economy. There was a hotel, for example, and a music hall, and a Main Street lined with two-story wood shops painted the colors of the sea and rock. Travelers heading west to California would stop in Peet for an egg salad sandwich and a celery soda from the general store near the station before reembarking. The townspeople thrived from these impermanent relationships, which were in their own way pure: the exchange of money for goods, a pleasant farewell, the assurance that neither party would see the other again. After all, what are most relationships in life but exactly this, though stretched flabbily over years and generations?
    My father’s parents, both of whose parents had immigrated from Hungary, were the owners of the general store. Unlike their son, they were hard workers, frugal, and made wise investments. In 1911, when my father was a senior in college, they died, one after the other, of the flu. My father and his sister inherited their parents’ store, their house, and seventy acres of farmland