KS Culbreth

The Forest of Unbranching Trees

You ran cross country and track and you weren’t half bad. Nowhere near a letterman, but you were in good shape, had a six-pack and muscle tone, not much mass, but strong, defined muscle. You wonder how you became the man past middle age, sitting at the conference table with a lapful of distended gut.

You wonder how you became the one at the conference table rah-rahing the Comp’ny. Raising your hands and applauding when a kudos is given to one of your coworkers or at the news of the latest acquisition. It’s all good for the Comp’ny, so you cheer when you really don’t give a damn about the Comp’ny. You’d prided yourself on being a nonconformist and wonder how you’ve come to play along. But then you nod your head because you do know how you became one of the cheerleaders. It’s what you vaguely refer to as postmodern indentured servitude.

Like everyone else was doing, you married and had a family. They needed a home so you took out a mortgage. As the kids grew and got involved in one activity after another and your wife took on different interests, went back to school for another degree, changed careers, that all came with a cost. You didn’t have it so you took out loans, a second mortgage, put it on the cards.

Pretty soon you had no choice but to keep working. No time to change careers nor the luxury of another degree for that live spark. Because even a few months without an income and it all breaks down. You’ve been playing the game more than halfway through your 30-year fixed and you wake up one day and because the neighborhood has changed and because of some wizardry the moguls of finance concocted to line their pockets, your house is now underwater. No way out.

Back at your desk, while you reorganize a pile of printed spreadsheets the screensaver turns on. It’s a stock photo of the perfect trout stream, a middle-aged man in waders. He is about your age, handsome, salt-and-pepper sideburns, fit, retired and living the good life, his chartreuse fly line arced gracefully over his head. It’s the perfect stream and the perfect day for fishing.

When we were boys, we’d run in the yard and soy fields, barefoot, no shirt, only cutoffs, the white of our towheads set off by the dark brown of our tanned skin.

Now your hair is thinning. It’s white again, but it’s that white that is on the other side of gray. Your skin wan from sitting inside the day-long five days a week, sometimes six. Seeing the sun during the summer only on the short arc of its ascent during the morning commute and the last long light as it sets. Not seeing it enough during the winter to notice.

At least I still dress well. Khakis and a white Oxford-cloth button down. The classic look. Thank God I never went for the pastel shirts with white cuffs and collar. You look down. Except for the cap toes. They’re a bit scuffed.

In the breakroom, Ann Marie cuts the cake and hands you a piece. She is portly and a sweetheart, Aunty to everyone in the office. When she hands you the paper plate and plastic fork, she looks at you with those warm, sympathetic eyes. You’ve wondered what was behind that compassion but could never capture it.

“Happy birthday, sunshine,” she says.

It hammers a pang through your heart that what you see in her eyes is that she pities you.

How have I come to find myself thus?

They have enough cake for twenty in that breakroom off the main hallway, the one with no window. Only seven come. It’s nice of them anyway. They sing happy birthday but it’s a quiet song.

At your desk again, you look at the screensaver.

The perfect stream, you snicker but you don’t know why.

When you were a boy, the old man took you fishing when he could. Once when you were nine or so, you had to walk through a woodlot to get to the stream. You caught three brook trout that day, kept them in the water on a stringer, took them home. He taught you how to clean them and the family had them for dinner. A rare delicacy.

It was your best day fishing and you were so happy you almost completely forgot the walk back through the woods.

Your father stopped you and said, “Look at the trees, boy. This is why I brought you to this stream.”

“They’re very tall,” you said. “Maybe the tallest I’ve ever stood in.”

“Yes, but that’s not the point,” he said. “They’re all very tall. They have to be in order for their tops to reach the sunlight. But they only get enough sunlight to stay alive.”

“What’s wrong with that?” you asked, looking at the trout and making a fish mouth at one of them.

“They’re all tall but none is taller than any of the others. And what you have not noticed is that they have no branches for almost all of that height. For so many growth rings and all their great height…each has missed out on its fuller breadth. These are less like trees and more like stately weeds.”

You thought about it for a moment and then got that wise-aleck grin as though your brothers were around.

“So this is your gem of wisdom for me, isn’t it?”

“I suppose that’s what you boys call it.”

You take a bite of the cake and smile thinking about how mercilessly you and your brothers ragged on the old man. You’d tear him down for a laugh even in front of your mother. He rolled with the punches and laughed at himself most of the time. You think about all the crazy laughter you and your brothers shared and there, at your desk, you smile, icing gunked between your front teeth.

How we used to rag on him.

When you and your brothers started breaking his chops about his gems of wisdom, he may have smiled, but it wasn’t natural.

He tried to take each of the boys out alone, fishing or hiking or camping. And during these one-on-one outings, knowing each of his sons as individuals, he’d try to pass along what he thought each boy needed.

When you showed promise but no interest in mathematics, he tried to encourage you to pursue teaching, explaining how mathematics trained the mind with an objective process and, most importantly, how its reasoned, measured approach became logic, the foundation, though not the inspiration, of philosophy. He went on about how you could blaze new trails from mathematics to the humanities and that you may be able to save philosophy which was surely going the way of a dead language.

You thought about how boring that would be and how you wouldn’t make any money at it and you mocked him and the pipedream he tried to cast for you.

Your smile fades and you tilt your head.

He didn’t mind laughing at himself most of the time. I guess they were some pretty cheap shots, mocking his gems of wisdom.

You sit back and take another carving of the vanilla layer cake. A forkful falls and smears along the cliff of your paunch.

Dammit.

It’s your birthday, but that’s not what you’re thinking about. You look at the perfect stream as you dip a napkin in your water bottle and scrub at the daub of icing.

Today I am the same age you were when we boys were jolted out of sleep by mother’s long, wailing shriek and we went in to find your cold, stiff body halfway off the edge of the bed.

You take another forkful and suck at the icing and think for a moment how long you’ve feared that you may not outlive the old man.

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance or similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental. The author bears no responsibility for any damages that may occur to actual persons based upon this writing.]