Harry's Trees by Jon Cohen

Author:Jon Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2018-04-13T13:21:29+00:00

18

Simple would suffice. Beth liked simple. Harry, freshly bathed in the chill waters of the stream, shaved, put on a clean shirt, combed his hair and set off into the forest, ring in hand.

The sun was bright through the green of the trees. He wondered about Amanda, what the moment had been like for her. She put her ring in a drawer, and that was that? No. And then, I just kept shedding his stuff, she said. Got rid of as much as I could as fast as I could. As if that would make it easier. It wasn’t easy for Amanda, it was doubly hard, because she had Oriana’s grief as well as her own.

And now Harry had their grief as well as his own. Remarkably, the disastrous decision to buy the lottery ticket a year ago had one positive outcome. It led him here, to Oriana. I can return Oriana to her mother, he thought, and together they can move forward. And that, for Harry, was the gift hidden within the story of the grum and his gold.

The less I have, the more they will have. I will dig away at the mountain of gold until Oriana emerges, free, released from her spell of grief. The Plan was a good plan.

But first, a proper Beth farewell, the next step in his long goodbye. He would leave the ring at the base of the sugar maple because that’s where he’d reached for the Snickers—the gold that saved his life—and found a way into his future. He would return to the tree house. Okay, Oriana, he’d say, I’m ready.

For a few minutes, moving through the ordinary familiarity of the forest, the world seemed to Harry like a reasonable place. Perhaps even straightforward, after the convolution of death-bringing lottery tickets, life-saving hawks, grums, willful little girls and very tall beech trees. Really, all he had to accomplish next was a mere financial transaction. There’d be four million dollars in his bank account, and then there wouldn’t. The Plan was a wee bit fancy, perhaps. Or hell, maybe not. No reason to be nervous about it, the Swiss do this sort of thing all the time, right? Ordinary Americans do it. Oriana had shown him the sites. Tons of sites. Big deal, Harry, gold. Everybody’s doing it!

He stopped in his tracks. Stared. The forest an ordinary and reasonable place? He had reached the sugar maple and the stone wall. Sitting atop the wall was an old woman looking for all the world like...a witch. Frizzly white hair, wrinkly face spookily veiled in a cloud of smoke. Very witchy. The smoke swirled away, and Harry saw that she was smoking a large meerschaum pipe.

“‘Are you a Being Natural or a Being Unnatural, O forest-dweller?’” she said in a raspy voice.

Harry took a step back from her.

Olive laughed, smoke puffing from her mouth in little bursts, like a steam locomotive. “It’s just a quote, dear, from a short story, a bit of Gothic piffle written by Washington Irving in 1838 entitled ‘The Midnight Encounter.

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