Fiction: The Suffering Tree

By Pete Ward

 

Early in our relationship, my not-yet-husband talked to me about death. He said he didn’t fear it until we fell in love.

“I had plans, sure, but mainly what to have for dinner. Everything further ahead was work-related, which is pathetic. Staying alive was… an abstract good.” He kissed me, gently. “But you’ve fucked that right up. Now I think, vividly, about our happiness and I am terrified at the idea I could lose it. That I could lose our future happiness. I wake in the night about it.”

Lying in bed, resting my cheek on his chest (which was big, and exactly hairy enough), I said that our happiness would make the fear worth it.

“It better.”

*

I didn’t tell Aaron that I had been afraid of death since I was small, constantly, and that, on reflection, it didn’t seem to me that he had been unafraid of death so much as unaware of pain. To him, death was an on/off switch, right until he died in an intensely unpleasant experience compounded by his double sense of injustice: that it should happen to him at all, and that – while stealing the future he’d only recently learned to value – it should hurt, too.

He was diagnosed when our son, Finn, was six. It took Aaron a year to die, after which I fell apart in every way imaginable, and several that were not. After an incident I can’t recall, Finn moved in with my parents to my childhood home in a small town squeezed between moorland and motorway.

One day I realised I missed Finn, and that meant I was getting better.

*

My extensive consideration of death and pain was because three girls in our district were kidnapped when I was ten. The first, Erica Colmore, was from my town, and though the other two were from elsewhere, the whole matter became known as The Choughton Disappearances. The girls’ faces were taped to every surface.

Erica’s father was a rough sort – the initial suspicion was direct and crude – but he was conclusively exonerated. The village fell into a speculative frenzy, and we, the children, listened carefully from staircases, storing lurid inferences to decode the following day. Soon our assemblage of cruelties outgrew break-time, so we met after school under the boughs of the Suffering Tree where older sisters, sources of foulest conjecture, took inspiration from the ancient chestnut on the hill where – it was known – murderers were punished and suicides were buried. Here I studied the faces of the girls on posters we snatched from lamposts and stored in plastic wallets in a cavity in the trunk. Here I considered death and pain, and the way flesh can bruise and tear, and the hidden capacities of our bodies, and we never found the girls and that made it worse.

*

My reunion with Finn was uncomfortable. There’s a lot I couldn’t remember, and his wariness, his anticipation of me was unbearable. At one point I clapped, jauntily, to change the energy, to act – make tea, go for a walk, something – and he flinched like a whipped dog. I felt an astonishing anger.

“Let’s make a rope swing!” I said, impulsively.

“There’s a playground in the village,” Mum said, anxiously. 

“Not like the one when you were young,” Dad added. “Floor’s bouncy.” 

This conversation was a little bouncy for me too, so I said, “Making rope swings is what fathers do with their sons, right?” and no one said anything. 

I rummaged around in my father’s well-supplied workshed and returned with a too-long piece of soft, pale pine, some rope, a battery-powered drill and a saw. 

“We could cut that here,” Dad said. “Drill too. Take a minute on the bench.”

“That isn’t how I want to do it. Get your coat, Finn. We’ll go climb the hill to the big tree.” I paused. “Don’t look at them. I’m your mum.” 

*

Backlit by the icy blue of a clear winter’s day: inverted lightning. Finn was hesitant and cold, but the project was simple and I let him use tools and clamber among the limbs. With miraculous simplicity, with better-than-a-dad efficiency, a rope swing swung from the Suffering Tree. 

After enough minutes of near-flight to make it all worth it, the branch broke, heralded a split-second before by a cracking noise. I brought my arms up quickly to deflect it to the ground, where it twisted and presented its snapped end to us. Finn had only been idly dangling, and fell a couple of feet with more comic force than actual harm. 

“Wow,” he said, awed. “You okay?”

“Of course,” I shrugged, hugging him. I tried to hide my delight: a completed mission and a heroic intervention. We felt a touch closer. 

The bark-stripped, foreshortened sharpness of the branch was difficult to focus on but something about it seemed off. I held it closer and peered down its length.

The grain held the image of Erica Colmore.

“What does this look like?”

“That’s crazy!” laughed Finn, still giddy from his plummet. “It looks like a little girl!”

I threw the saw into some branches, climbed up after it and started cutting another limb on a diagonal. While Finn jabbered excitedly somewhere far beneath me, I thought: Maybe the flyers, wedged in the trunk, soaked by decades of rain, merged – ? 

“Mum?” If I’d been paying attention I would have recognised that wariness again.

“Move,” I said, bluntly. The branch fell, and I dropped down after it. Krystle Miller’s face. I was certain. Another branch: Francesca Higgins. I started just hacking with the saw and, wedged in the trunk, stamping on branches and peeling them off. I fell to the ground a couple of times. Finn was screaming. Something may have hit him. No matter how the limbs were separated from the tree, each revealed a face. Erica’s father. Different, beaten faces of men I didn’t know, and women, anguished. 

The hilltop was scattered with limbs and Finn wasn't there.

 

 

 

 

 

Pete Ward is a charity worker from Birmingham, England. He has been published in Bristol Noir and Thin Veil Press, and is on Bluesky at @phenryward.bsky.social