Changing Heaven (21 page)

“Jack Green were rich man’s gardener, and south of London to make things worse: in Devon I think it were. He were
what you would call these days a designer of the land or what my father called one who tried to do God’s work and very nearly succeeded-building hills and lakes and, yes, making forests. Thousands of acres these men in the south own and they want their forests changed all the time to suit their whims. So Jack Green was the man they most often called when they wanted new forests created or old forests altered or whatever, for Jack Green was a man who could coax forests, charm them like. He were right seductive with a tree, were Jack, and it was said when he was walking in woods, trees would fling suckers out toward him as he passed or bring forth saplings right at his feet-even in winter. But there is a price to pay for attempting to do God’s work, my father always said, and an even higher price for almost succeeding.”

“Do you believe in God?” asks Ann, curious.

“I believe in weather and in belief. You believe in weather and in questions. There should, at this point, be no more questions.

“Let’s see if we can picture Jack Green, happy as a healthy lad, playing with rich man’s acres. For that was what he was doing-just like lads in village play with dirt and puddles, making battlefields and oceans for their soldiers.”

Ann’s dollhouse and laundry tubs, and the long province of the floor in between, flicker in her memory.

“There he would stand,” John continued, “probably right on the edge of some forest he was planting and charming-the great house like a battleship behind him-and he like as not never even invited for tea, knowing rich men, and some, though not all, of their wives. And probably he’d spend time walking back and forth through his infant forests, enjoying young beechwood and sycamore just brushing his thighs-it were so high, maybe, this forest.”

John raises his large hand six inches above the place where his knee bends over the chair. Ann sees the light from the fire catch in the golden hairs on the back of his wrist.

“Would he touch the young trees? Yes, I think he would, but gently, gently, so as not to damage the delicate veins
that young leaves have. They bend in an instant and crack in the fingers. A seam of wet green appears and then you’ve killed a leaf. But Jack wouldn’t do this, not Jack. He would caress his trees softly and coax them.

“He didn’t plant rows, not Jack. He planted in the manner of God. Sometimes saplings, sometimes seeds. Willow, linden, balsam, ash, birch, walnut, juniper, cedar, poplar, elm, hickory, sycamore were some of the trees he caused to come into being. He’d draw them first on map paper, shading in the wooded areas that he wanted to make. He’d shade them in until they looked like thunder clouds all over the thousands of acres that rich men own. It was said of him, he said it of himself, that he knew one thousand, five hundred different shades of green. And he knew exactly how to place one of these shades against another and how much to use of each and all this would be surrounded by the various greens of grass.

“He loved doing this. He loved bark and twig and root and limb and leaf. And he loved gesture. Gesture he loved the most, for each tree had its own gesture. And Jack’s trees, because of the speed at which they grew, changed their gestures like moods, like states of mind.

“Sometimes, when working the land farthest from the house, Jack would pretend to be the wind. A man capable of reaching the heart of a woman like you was Jack, pretending as he did to be the wind. He’d run, right swiftly, through a beechwood forest, circling some trees three times, passing others right directly. And as he ran he stirred up the air so much even the trees became confused and believed he was the wind and trembled their leaves and swayed their limbs accordingly. Or he’d twirl around and around and around in a clearing so that four or five of his forests blurred past him like cars on the motorway – but prettier-a regular smear of greens-the different greens of the trees.”

John pauses at this point and, seizing the poker, rearranges several large, glowing coals in the grate.

“It was said,” he continues, “that she was tall and thin and straight and that Jack used to see her, now and then, bending over roses in the garden closest to the house. Her hair was black and thick and her brown eyes sloped down at the corners so that even when she laughed she looked sad. And puzzled, as if she didn’t quite know why she was sad – which she probably didn’t – being a rich man’s wife and all her wants provided for. Jack must have admired her, admired her beauty and her grace when bending over roses, but he would never have dared to speak to her, she being a rich man’s wife and also confined, it would seem, to the calm, cultivated gardens from which one picks flowers for the house. And Jack all the time busy with his forests, making them grow and being the wind in them.

“Then one day when Jack was causing an ash grove to come into being, concentrating like, so that the saplings would happen just so, as he’d planned and drawn them, she came bursting out of a more mature forest to his left, weeping and wearing green and not noticing Jack at all until he caught her arm as she rushed by. She had been strangely moved, you see, by departing from the great house and from her flower garden and through curiosity visiting one of the forests that Jack had planted, or that he had caused to plant itself. She had seen that each gesture of each tree was different and that these gestures could change before your very eyes, so that the trees seemed to be either reaching towards her or pushing her away. On the edge, you see, of either embrace or denial. Some of them appeared to be beckoning with great longing, others seemed to be poised for attack. All of them were responding to her presence. She was drawn towards the trees and terrified of them all at the same time. She felt that if she stood still she would grow roots and sprout leaves-would become one of them. What had happened was that, engulfed in his green, without having ever looked closely at his face, she had fallen in love with Jack; though, unfortunately for her, and for him as it would turn out, she was utterly unaware of this. She
ran weeping towards the light and then there was Jack hanging on to her arm.

“‘The trees are alive,’ was all she said to him.

“And when they made love Jack kept his eyes open so as not to ignore the hundreds of shades of green.”

“That is a wonderful story,” says Ann.

“Oh, no, it’s not. It’s a sad story and a grim story and it’s not over yet. For, you see, she never returned to the forest or even to the rose garden, for Jack looked for her there. He waited for weeks and weeks on the edge of the very forest from which she had run weeping, and as he waited he kept absolutely still, never once attempting to be the wind. Finally, in despair, and as a last desperate gesture, he picked a leaf bouquet, a stem from every tree on the property: beech, ash, oak, pine, laurel, and so forth. He walked, for the first time, up the wide stone steps of the great house, under the gaze of all its windows, and knocked on its high front door. One of the servants answered and Jack asked that the bouquet he held be given to the Missus.

“Whether those leaves ever reached the tall lady or not we’ll never know. But we do know that she never came out to Jack. Not that day, nor any of the days following. And in a month’s time Jack left the rich man’s land forever with his heart set against trees and his back turned to all his forests. And as he walked away, the woods behind him-the trees of the woods – lost their individual gestures and became just like those shaded thunderclouds he had drawn on his map paper.

“It’s my thinking that he believed that the woman had been a tree, so tall and straight she was, and wearing green. That she had been a tree and that she had betrayed him.

“He would suffer, then, whenever he saw a tree.

“He came here to the moors because, as you can see, this land has few trees. The views from his windows, therefore, would not disturb him with memories of the tall green woman or of his abandoned, beckoning forests. He set
himself up in the big house of Oldfield-for he had quite a lot of money from the rich men-and began to write a long book condemning the tree. ‘It obscureth the view,’ he wrote, ‘It hideth slugs in its flesh, the rodent inhabiteth it, it blocketh out the sun, it maketh shadows on the grass,’ and so forth: a chapter for each idea. And then one day, in the valley below the house, near the beck, he found the huge black stone.

“He had walked by it, already, hundreds of times, of course. It’s just that, until that particular moment-maybe it was the way the light was-he had never really looked at it. But this time he did and he was right pleased with what he saw. He circled once in a clockwise direction, and then again in a counter-clockwise direction, and while he was doing this he scrutinized the rock’s surface. It had come to his attention, all of a sudden like, how completely unlike a tree that rock was and how there was nothing at all frantic about its gesture: nothing that could propel sorrow to fling itself, weeping, into your arms, for instance, when you’d never even gone courting her. And there was little about it as well to make a man want to pretend he was the wind, for Jack knew looking at it that the wind would have no effect upon this rock at all. Yes, Jack as he had become then thought the old stone was beautiful, and he resolved to have it for the headstone of his grave.

“So he marched up the hill and into the village to find four short, stout, strong men-he’d gone right off tall, lean people had Jack-and then he marched with these men back down to the stone. Jack wanted the stone rolled up the hill to the little graveyard near the chapel at Oldfield. Not that he intended to die just then, but more that he felt that the big beautiful rock was in danger in the fertile valley where, Jack couldn’t help but notice, small growing things that looked suspiciously like saplings flourished, now and then, until the sheep ate them. Jack certainly didn’t want his beloved boulder growing roots or sprouting leaves or displaying any other signs of germination that might cause
him to become anxious. During this time, you see, even a tall buttercup could cause Jack to become anxious. He were trying his best to remain, always, in a horizontal frame of mind.

“Well, the four short, stout, strong men used their eight stout, strong arms and their four stout, strong backs and they rolled the huge black stone up from the beck into the first pasture. But when they stopped to mop their brows the stone rolled right back down to the beck again. After going about this task three or four more times the four short, stout, strong men decided they would rather be lifting a tankard than a rock and they returned to the Grouse and Rabbit whence they had been fetched, leaving Jack alone with his boulder.

“In subsequent weeks he couldn’t eat or sleep for thinking of the stone, all silent and brooding-like down by the water, and for his wanting to move it to higher ground. This in its own way were a relief to Jack in that it were a change from not eating or sleeping because he was thinking about the sorrowful woman. And a change too in that he was temporarily distracted from his preoccupation with creating venomous sentences concerning trees. Except that now Jack began a chapter in which he chastised the trees for being so unlike the rock. ‘They do not keep still in the face of the wind,’ he wrote. ‘Sap riseth in them in certain seasons and courseth through their veins and sticketh on the hands of those who touch them. Their surface doth not remain smooth but rather is complicated and textured.’ Anyway, after days and days of thinking about the rock he decided that he himself would roll it up the hill to the graveyard.

“From that decision onward his days were filled with activity. In the daylight hours he wrestled with the boulder, inching it upwards with the aid of a crowbar and then positioning it with wedges that he had chiselled into the correct shape from smaller rocks. He had no use for wood any more, Jack hadn’t, for, as you know, it is simply the
flesh of various trees, and were therefore, to Jack’s mind, deceptive and unreliable. He had written in his book, ‘The flesh of trees is untrustworthy as a material for building houses. It bursteth into flames at the touch of a match and small insects gnaw at its heart.’ And, I believe, he added, as a footnote to that particular page, ‘If a tree hath a heart, which is doubtful, it is one liable to change and eventually to decay. It is not constant like the heart of a rock.’ In the evening he wrote such things in his book, and being so engaged in hours of light and in hours of darkness, there were no man in the riding who could match Jack for sustained industry.

“After about a year of this employment Jack had managed to push the boulder to the top of the hill-almost. He had maybe ten feet to go, when a strange thing happened. Right in the middle of the afternoon the sky turned a disturbing shade of green. It was the exact colour of the sorrowful woman’s dress and also the shade of one of the larch trees that Jack, in the past, had shown great affection for, and he knew in his heart of hearts that there was some uncommon weather on the way. So he angrily wedged the boulder and reluctantly entered his house just as hailstones the size of large grapefruit began to pound the earth around him. They changed, in time, to rain, and there were this great green weeping sky that could not help but remind Jack of the woman, and that angered him even more than having to abandon his daily application to industry. He had hoped, you understand, to forget all about her in the midst of rigorous and sustained activities, but the colour and the moisture of the atmosphere had brought the idea of her so close again that it were like the feel of her breath near his shoulder.

“Now Jack did have some wood in the house at the time in the form of a wooden table, for he were not an uncivilized man and took his meals as we all do, and he began pounding this with his fist, so great was his wrath. And, of course, his candlesticks and cutlery jumped as he pounded
and then, when he grew tired of his tantrum and ceased thumping, his candlesticks and cutlery continued to jump without his assistance. When he rushed to the window to look outside he saw all the hills of the moors heaving and swelling and rolling because this were the day of the Great Bog-Burst, which Reverend Brontë, over in Haworth, said was God’s response to the sins of the parishioners. The mud from the burst poured down the next valley, coming as it did from Crow Hill, but the earth itself shook as far as Bingley so you can imagine what happened to our friend Jack’s boulder.”