Zera and the Green Man (18 page)

  The tree stood thick, full, covered. The Green Man’s face appeared high now, in the center of the branches, defined amid the leafy crown. His eyes glowed.

“In our heads are the flowering and fruiting of our thoughts and emotions.”

The tree exploded into bloom with thousands of alabaster flowers. Their perfume filled the air, filled Zera’s lungs. Just as quickly, the white flower petals fell and the fruits, first tiny and green, grew large. The green faded and the full fruits blushed into luscious globes of gold. The Green Man’s face became longer, softer, fair, the lips as full and ripe as the fruit that adorned it. 

The Green Man had become a Green Woman.  

She whispered. Her voice was melodic, honeyed. “Yes, I am
all
. Male
and
female. One cannot exist without the other. Man and woman are borne of the earth. We are all one. We are all plants. All flesh is grass. It is our life-giver.”

Tears sprang to Zera’s eyes. She recognized the voice.
It’s the voice from my dreams.

The fruits began to fall from the woman-tree, noiselessly onto the clouds. On their way down they turned fetid; worm holes and bruises appeared on their surfaces as they reached the white clouds and landed. They grew moldy and shrunken. A thick decay smell clotted in Zera’s nose. The rotten fruit disappeared.
At the same time, the leaves of the tree turned gold, blazing briefly and brilliantly in the blue sky, before falling from the tree in a shower. The leaves, like the fruit, turned brown then shrank, crinkled, vanished through the clouds.

“We are all that lives and all that has lived before,” said the Green Woman, whose face now formed in the bare branches.

Zera thought of her mother and father and was not afraid. 

“I am the thought of all plants.” The skeleton-branched tree turned green, the limbs becoming round and fleshy, as it metamorphosed into human form. A towering woman of green stood before her, clothed in leaves. She was voluptuous, mighty. 

She began to move, walking atop the clouds, looking down where the fruit once lay, and shaking her majestic leaf-crowned head. The clouds thundered under her footfalls as they had with the Green Man’s. 

Her voice grew cold, as did her gaze, and fear crept into Zera’s heart.

“Man’s greed has far surpassed his wisdom. The plants call to me in despair. They know not what they should be. They know not what they are.”

Her face twisted into a horrible mask of anger. “The timeless wisdom of nature, of life, has been defiled, again and again. Man has been given the whole world; yet it is not enough. The answers are
there, simple to see, yet his eyes remain willfully closed.”

Her voice grew louder, until it boomed. “If the work that man has started does not stop, the world shall grieve as it has never grieved before! That is the message. That is our warning . . .” her voice and countenance softened once again as she paused, “. . . and our plea. Zera of the Greens — you
must
do
whatever
it takes to help set these wrongs right.”

Her blazing eyes met Zera’s. Zera forgot to breathe. The Green Woman’s lips did not move, yet Zera heard unspoken words whispered to her, as vividly and as surely as she had heard the snakes. The gentle voice she had heard in her room, both at Piker and here, was now tinged with anger and hysteria. “You
will
help us, Zera of the Greens. If you do not take action, the natural world will have no choice but to fight against all humanity. And humanity will lose.” 

Zera’s heart
raced as an icy wind returned. The Green Woman faded and disappeared. The sea of clouds parted and sped away. The azure sky darkened and a nearly full moon cast the rocks around her in an eerie, white glow.

Thunder rumbled down the mountain. Zera could see the lightning, blinding white zig-zags that brought rocks and trees far below into high relief.

The fury of the weather gripped Zera as the Green Woman’s words rang in her ears.
You will help us, Zera of the Greens.

How can I do that?
she thought.
I’m alone in this world.
The thought clutched her in icy fingers of panic.
How can they ask this of me? I’m just visiting my nonny . . . I’m too young.
Tears came again into her eyes and she couldn’t stop herself from screaming out into the cold night. “What do you expect me to do? I don’t even know what this is about!”

No answer, no response came. She was alone.

The moment the words left her she knew with total clarity —
The Toad.

This all has something to do with Uncle Theodore — but how?
Zera sat in the freezing darkness, her heart racing. She tugged her jacket around her, staring first up at the moonlit sky, then down at the storm raging below her on the mountain. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. As her lungs filled with cold, crisp air, she thought of her parents.
I know I’m not really alone, somehow they’re with me. I’ve got to hold on to that. And to figure out what all this means.     

Grandma Wren’s voice startled her. “Now we know.”

“Where were you?” Zera said to the small figure on the blanket. Grandma Wren was plainly visible as the pale boulders and gravel around them reflected the moon’s glow.

The old woman unfolded her limbs and stood. “I was here, all along,”

Zera shook her head. In light of what she had just seen, how could she say what was real anymore?

Grandma Wren moved to the edge of the cliff, peered down. “It’s a bad storm. I hope the train makes it back okay.”

Her words were calm.
How can she be calm? After what just happened?
Zera got to her feet, nearly stumbling. The burning feeling had returned to her palm, and her leg was stiff with soreness. She gathered up the blanket and shook off the dirt. Grandma Wren held out her hands for it, but instead of putting it into the bag, she folded it in half and wrapped it around her small shoulders. She took a flashlight from her bag and handed it to Zera. “Take this. I find myself very tired now.”

Zera insisted on carrying Grandma Wren’s bag, and this time she let her.

“Here’s the path, to the right a little,” Zera said, lighting the area. Once their eyes adjusted, moonlight helped illuminate the path as well. Grandma Wren led them, inching up the incline while Zera kept the light on the ground ahead. The dark climb, more difficult than the descent, seemed to take a long time.

The second time she slipped Zera said, “Damn it!” Grandma Wren ignored the outburst.

At the top, they paused to catch their breath.
It feels good to be standing upright,
Zera thought, stretching. They got to the top just in time. The clouds had rolled in again, covering the moon, and the night grew blacker, the wind bitter. Thankfully, the outside lights of the café were on. Zera moved closer to Grandma Wren as they crept along the rear of the stone building, then around the side. As they neared the front door, snow began spitting from the skies.  

Grandma Wren’s voice was raspy. “I do hope they remembered to leave the door unlocked.” 

Me too.
Being stranded outside now would be awful.

Grandma Wren was the first to reach the door. She went in, flipped the light switch and turned to Zera.
“Ah, warmth!”

The stone exterior had given no hint of the coziness inside. A gas fire in the large stone fireplace glowed, casting its reflection on the golden pine planks of the floor and dining tables. Thick cotton curtains of green and white check
erboard hung from the windows. Along the top of the walls a stenciled border of pine trees circled the room like a miniature painted forest. 

“Nice and toasty,” said Grandma Wren, taking off the snow-dusted blanket.

“I smell coffee.” Zera made her way toward the long, chrome, ’50s-style dining counter. “A whole pot. That should warm us up.” She lifted the clear glass dome off a plate stacked with doughnuts. “They left us a plate of goodies, too.” Her stomach growled loud enough for Grandma Wren to hear. 

Shaky with hunger, Zera knew Grandma Wren must be starving too.
We haven’t eaten since noon.
She found she was not eager to talk over what they had just seen, not yet. She got cups from the cabinet and found plates and napkins.

The door opened. Hattie and Nonny, in snow-covered jackets, entered the room.

“Sorry we’re late!” Hattie pulled down her hood, shook out her long hair. “We were waylaid at the station with electrical problems. There’s a big storm down the mountain. Dan’s outside now, making an adjustment to the engine before we can go back down. He said it’d take about twenty minutes. So, how did it go?”

“You’re late?” said Zera. “What do you mean? We just got here.”

“Zera,” said Nonny, “it’s been four and a half hours.”

Zera looked at Grandma Wren, who showed no surprise.

* * *

They sat at one of the round pine tables watching Grandma Wren eat an extraordinary amount of food for someone her age: the tuna and cheese sandwich Hattie had brought for her, potato salad from the refrigerator, a candy-sprinkled doughnut, and two cartons of milk. When Hattie commented on her appetite, Grandma Wren said she’d been fasting since she had the dream, in preparation for the vision quest. Disapproval darkened Hattie’s features but she did not comment.

Zera had just finished her sandwich when Hattie, across from her, said, “So do you want to talk about it before we get on the train? What happened?”

Zera took a deep breath. “I saw the Green Man and the Green Woman. They were giants. Like . . . gods.” She searched the expectant faces sitting around her. Something was holding her back from telling everything as she saw it. And how could she possibly explain something she didn’t understand? “The Green Woman, she was beautiful.” Zera looked at Grandma Wren next to her and suddenly felt panicked. She blurted, “They said that ‘wisdom has been defiled,’ that ‘man’s work must be stopped.’
That plants don’t know what they are any more, that the world is in trouble. I don’t even know what it all means!”

Hattie shifted in her chair. “Whoa. You saw this too?” she asked Grandma Wren. “A Green
Man, and a Green Woman?”

“I saw the Creator,” Grandma Wren said.
“Sinawaf.”

“What?” Hattie’s eyes went wide.

“One God, Hattie, many faces,” Nonny said.

“We saw what we needed to see,” said Grandma Wren. “We must do as we are asked. I remember how our people, when suffering from depression, as they call it now, when they felt
empty they would go out alone, into the woods. With arms extended they would press their backs to a pine tree in order to draw from its power and revive their spirit. Now we take pills, made with synthetics. Our connection with nature has been ignored for too long. Without its health, we will never have real health again.”

Zera locked eyes with Grandma Wren. The next thing she had to say was even more confusing. “I know one thing. That this all has something to do with Uncle Theodore.”

Nonny stared at Zera. “Is that what you saw during the vision? Is that what the Green Man, or Woman, said?”

“No, but afterwards, I felt it.
That this all has something to do with him. It’s hard to explain.”

Nonny nodded and a deep sigh followed. “I had the same feeling, that Ted was somehow connected to all this. The biotech industry, genetic engineering; I knew it had to have something to do with his work. Oh, when all that business started, I knew it was going to be bad, tinkering with the essence of life! Theodore must be involved in something horrible.”

“How horrible?” Hattie asked what Zera had been wondering since the revelation had came to her.

“Horrible enough for gods to come out of the sky and speak,” said Grandma Wren.

They sat in silence, pondering that. Hattie stood up and picked up the dirty dishes to take to the kitchen area, gesturing to Zera to stay seated when she tried to get up to help. “I had this thought that all this was somehow about global warming,” said Hattie. “Although that’s here, too. All this plant trouble began when chemical companies started splicing genes of different phyla together,” Hattie said.

A chill ran through Zera. This was all too much. She thought of the white roses on the porch, how they had opened, how beautiful they were, and how they had all died the next day. A feeling of dread, that things could be worse,
much worse
, filled her.
The natural world will fight against all humanity. And humanity will lose.

“What is a
phyla?” Grandma Wren asked.

“
It’s the plural for phylum.  Phylum is a scientific word for divisions of living things. For example, in the Animal Kingdom, all organisms with backbones, the vertebrates, are in one phylum, most of what we call insects are in another. Plants are in a separate Kingdom.” Hattie walked across the room and deposited the dishes in the sink, then grabbed a towel to wipe the table.

“Divisions?”
Grandma Wren said. “That is strange. Our people always knew we were all connected, not divided into groups. The wind and mountains are as much our relatives as the animals and plants.”

“It’s about levels of being related genetically,” Zera said.

The puzzled expression did not leave Grandma Wren’s face.

“Remember, Grandma,” said Hattie, “how I told you they’d crossed a bacteria with the corn plant, creating insect-killing corn? Or when I ranted about the Beefy Fries?  Mother Nature has always had certain boundaries that could not be crossed, like the impossibility, in most cases, of inter-breeding species. Working with nature, man has been able to develop plants and animals through selective breeding, and we’ve been able to clone plants naturally, but there have always been limits. Now they’ve crossed a potato with a cow, for God’s sake! And that’s not the worst of it.” She scowled.

“What could be worse?” Grandma Wren asked, her eyebrows raised.

Zera answered. “Genetically-engineered crops can’t be contained in their fields. Pollen can travel on the wind for miles; butterflies and thousands of other insects carry it too — animals carry it, we even carry it on our shoes, clothes, vehicles, in our hair. When pollen escapes and reproduces with wild plants, or non-genetically engineered plants, their offspring are then genetically modified. Nonny told me about this a long time ago.”

“And what did Theodore think about that?” asked Hattie. “about the contamination?”

“He said they were working on solutions to limit the problems.”

“To
limit
them?” Hattie spat out the words.

Nonny interrupted, “The danger is, once our wild plants are contaminated, many, many millions of years of evolution
is disrupted. We cannot even guess at the potential for disaster. You can’t just look at the plants either. You have to look at every single organism that is even remotely connected to them — every human, every animal, every insect, every bacteria — each eco-system. Everything’s affected.”

Hattie had a disturbed, far-away look in her eyes. “The bugs that sip the nectar and eat the leaves, the birds that eat the bugs,
the people who eat the meat which was fed on the biotech grain that the bees and birds have also fed on.”

Zera finished Hattie’s thought, “Everything’s linked.”

“Yes,” said Hattie. “We have no idea what we’re messing with. They didn’t even have the word ‘gene’ until the 1920s! Some have compared genetic engineering to the splitting of the atom.”

Zera couldn’t believe what she had heard.
The splitting of the atom?
“The atomic bomb?”

Hattie’s face twisted.
“Yes, Zera, the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Nonny, I know Ted’s your son and you love him, but there’s something demented about it. It’s like Frankenstein, creating, bringing to life, something that was not meant to be.”

Nonny looked out toward the black windows of the cafe. “I can’t help but think it’s my fault somehow.”

A sadness enveloped Zera as Nonny took a paper napkin from the table dispenser and dabbed her eyes. Then annoyance at her uncle reared its ugly head.
Thanks a lot, Toad
.
It looks like you’ve really done it this time.

“I wasn’t there for him after his father died,” Nonny said. “I went off on my own to deal with my grief. I traveled, selfishly lost myself in other cultures. I ran away, left him, a frightened eight-year-old, with Sally, who was just seventeen. And I didn’t come back for months. When I did return, it was only briefly,
then I’d take off again, absorbed in my own little world, my ‘spiritual seeking,’ when I had something more important at home the whole time. I was a terrible mother.”

I didn’t know that,
thought Zera.
I knew she traveled, but I didn’t know she left them for that long. I didn’t know she left Theodore when he was little . . .
She looked at Nonny with new eyes; it was plain to see her grandmother was tormented, yet, now she felt sorry for her uncle. She knew how she felt when her parents died. So lost and alone, terrified.

Hattie walked over and gently touched Nonny’s shoulder. “We’ve all made mistakes.” She sighed. “I’m so sorry about the tirade. I’m just rattled, by everything. I can’t stop thinking about a quote I read once from the late Japanese master gardener, Masanobu Fukuoka. He said, ‘If we throw nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork.’”

Zera saw Hattie shudder, and one reverberated through her own body.

“In the end, we can love and teach our children, but they have to find their own path,” Grandma Wren said, her voice steady and sure as she measured the words. “As for your feelings, Guinevere, there is still time to heal your relationship with your son.”