Jena Webb

The Witness Tree

The moment I credit with becoming a cynic happened on the day the city came to take down our treehouse without warning. Perhaps 13, I was alone in the house fretting over the tissue paper I had farcically stuffed in my bra and struggling with my unruly, red hair in the mirror beside the mullioned door. From that vantage point, I witnessed a decrepit city worker, cigarette butt hanging out of his mouth, mount the ladder to 108 ½. I felt the creep of hot, red blotches work their way up my neck. Might he accidentally burn the whole thing down? I was still much too innocent to think that he might be there to purposefully destroy the treehouse before my very own eyes. I hadn’t played in it in years, but I had spent a substantial part of my fanciful childhood up in those branches and I did still escape there when my altogether too busy-bodied family became too much for me. My younger brother, who did, to that day, aim his toy guns fashioned from branches at the occasional passing car from that treetop perch, was already at the bus stop down the street waiting for his ride to primary school with my mom on that fateful day.

I rarely confided in my family anymore at that age. I sat stoically through supper, all pre-adolescent pretense, until I could go upstairs to my room, but I was still a child at heart. And when the city worker went back up the ladder with an ax and started chopping down the railing, my little-girl heart broke into as many splinters as that support my dad had scrupulously built eight years prior without driving a single nail into the tree. I ran out of the house crying all the way down the street to the bus stop, leaving the front door agape.

What my mother did next became legend in the family. She was notoriously apolitical and conflict-averse, but she conjured some fervor and confronted that man.

“What are you doing?” she bellowed from a distance.

“Votre construction est dans un arbre de la ville, Madame,” he retorked as she approached with long strides.

“What?”

“De construction. It’s in de city tree.”

“I beg to differ. We built that treehouse and the tree is on our property!”

“Cet arbre sert comme poteau témoins. C’est à la ville,” each was using their mother tongue like a shield.

“Bullshit.”

 “Retournez chez vous, s’il vous plait, Madame.” When he told her to go “back home” she took an overexaggerated step from the street to the driveway in pantomime. Once safely “chez nous” she put her hands on her hips sticking one out saucily as if staring down her high school nemesis and spit out, “I’d kindly ask you to get off my property.”

Taking a step toward the street he bluffed, “Je vais appeler la police.”

“Go right ahead. There are witnesses,” my mom retorted, dragging an unassuming mother pushing a stroller along the street into the affair. That had a cooling effect on the situation. But there was nothing my mother could do about the fact that we had unknowingly built in a tree that belonged to the municipality.

The treehouse was in an age-old maple on the North-West corner of my parent’s lot. The tree itself had always “spoken” to me, even before the tree house was built in it. I had endowed it with a supernatural dimension that was key to my childhood imagination. It was a gateway. The lower hanging branches formed an arch and when I walked out of them, I became a normal girl who went to school and did other normal-girl things, but when I came home and passed under the arch in the other direction I was transformed, enchanted. When I would drive by the house after boarding the bus to school, I would turn and wave. I imagined that the other kids and the cranky, old, toothless bus driver thought I was waving at my parents or a dog staring a lonely day down his snout. But I was waving at the towering maple. At least they hadn’t cut down the tree. That would have outright killed me.

Later in life, I learned that some corner Maples are called Witness Trees. Witness Trees were either planted or left to survive the zeal of scythe and lawnmower at the corners of lots. They served to demarcate ownership, but ironically, belonged to no one until the municipalities took over guardianship, at which point they belonged to everyone. What the Witness Trees themselves own are our memories, our life history, and more importantly, the landscapes’ transitions and transgressions. The coming of electric and phone lines, paved roads and motor cars, war survivors, bb guns, miniskirts, car alarms and endless urban sprawl.

I hadn’t seen my Witness Tree since the beginning of the pandemic. My parents had come to Montréal to visit me when the relaxing of sanitary measures allowed, but I hadn’t made the trip out to my iconic, childhood house on the outskirts of Sherbrooke since Christmas 2019. Things had been looking up since summer and my family was inanely optimistic about finally holding a holiday gathering, for this, the second Covid Christmas. Don’t ask me why.

I, on the other hand, was cynically looking at Amazon.ca pages in a last-minute frenzy to get Christmas presents for my family. I was so at a loss for ideas that I had actually typed in “Christmas present brother.” (Don’t pretend you haven’t tried something like that). All the ‘Thank you for being my brother’ tokens were out from the get-go. I was narrowing the choice down to the “Book of unusual knowledge,” so he could continue to bore us with his cornucopia of useless factoids for the next 28 years, or the whisky stones, hoping I could finally get him drunk and maybe have some fun with him.

Then, my cynicism overflowed its familial boundaries, and I began to experience shopper rage. I conjured up images of myself mutilating Jeff Bezos with dull objects and distributing his wealth to factory workers. I pictured my methodical self, holding him down by the lapel while my possie of radical, anarchist friends breached his vault, kicking him with their Doc Martens in passing, and throwing wads of cash at delivery truck drivers. I pictured Saint-Denis Street, circa 2010, when there were still independent shops, and they were open, and the cafés played soft Christmas music, and you could actually sit down with your coffee. So quaint. You could think about your loved ones and their idiosyncrasies while you walked and chose a store that might have something they liked. Now, I was plowing through ideas, throwing them out with snide remarks about my brother, at five a second. Impatient. For what? Searching for a gift for my mom? Please. That would be worse. It was screen-itch. Restless finger syndrome.

The Christmas event was a moving target and only a few days away. At first, we were to have a big family reunion. The government, in their endless flipflops, had said that we could have twenty people at private gatherings. But a new announcement put it at ten. Our celebration had been whittled down to all my favorites (not) – mom; dad; me; my new fling, Carmen; Josh, my brother; his wife, Cynthia; their 2-year-old, Abigail; Uncle Bob; his son, Tyler; Uncle Steve and Grandma = 11. Then Grandma, the only one I was actually looking forward to seeing, bailed because of my unvaccinated cousin, Katherine, who wasn’t even going to be there but who lives with my uncle, of all people. At least I could show Carmen the Witness Tree, if it was still standing. With my luck, lightning had struck it in the past two years, splintering it straight through the middle. Surely my parents wouldn’t have bothered to tell me.

In a rare stroke of genius, I had had my Christmas gifts delivered directly to my parents’ place. It was genius mostly in that I could delay worrying if they would arrive on time, which they probably wouldn’t. Then, I just had to pack. Which of course I hadn’t done in…you know exactly how long, the same length of time since anyone had packed. Since before March 13^th 2020, whenever your last trip before that was. My last trip before that was to Mali, but that was a lifetime ago. Needless to say, I was off to my parents’ in my usual state of disarray. 

As we stepped off the bus, I took in the empty expanse of parking lot. You would think I brought the damn city with me. Carmen, on the other hand, pointed out the trees along the borders of the carpark with a shiver of excitement. We had quite a walk from the station without a car. About mid-way, Carmen stopped and gawked at a blue jay. Her delight was endearing, believe me, really it was. I, on the other hand, thought, the blue jays are the only thing to add colour to this dismal place. This far North there isn’t even any holly to add pep to the inner and outer landscape on the shortest days of the year. Perhaps with some holly, I’d be getting some. But despite the let up of Covid restrictions over summer and fall, I hadn’t even made it to first base with my new girlfriend. Theories abounded, but explanations were not forthcoming.

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