The Living Tree

A white horse, a stormy sky, and a muddy road. This is all Lynn Bennings could see in front of her. The horse’s dirt stained hoof had struck a water puddle, and a large droplets suspended themselves around his once pallid calf. A lightning bold stood frozen mid-leap in a field of grey wheat. And the road stretched on toward a horizon it would never touch.
The light touch of her mother’s hand startled Lynn from her thought, “It’s looking great, Honey,” she said stroking her daughters strait, dark hair.
“It needs something,” Lynn replied. “I put a carriage on the horizon, but I rubbed it out. It seemed too…” she squinted and stared hart at the large oak behind her mother without even seeing it. “too, inorganic.” Having found the word she was looking for, she allowed her thin blue eyes to wonder around her own backyard with curiosity. Finally they fell on it once again, but this time she saw it, the giant oak standing its silent vigil over the small home, Lynn’s make shift easel, and her brothers broken down swing set. As her eyes traced the golden-orange leaves dancing in the late October sun, it hit her. “A tree!” she exclaimed suddenly.
“A tree?” her mother asked curiously.
“Yeah,” Lynn replied gathering up her canvas and paints and shoving them into a worn, army messenger bag, “but not that tree.” She dropped the bag into a large wire basket roughly mounted to the front of her rusty bicycle, then slung her leg over the frame and pedaled toward an overgrown dirt path leading into the woods. “I’ll be back in a few hours, she called over her shoulder.
“Wait, where are you going?” her mother yelled back.
“Out to the old plantation,” Lynn replied in hast.
“Lynette Anne Bennings you watch for snakes,” but Lynn was too far down the path to hear.
The wheals of her bike bounced over the broken branches, rocks and puddles that littered the narrow path, as Lynn make her way quickly through the brush. She knew the road well, when they were young, she and her brother had raced their bikes here, and many times in Junior High, she and her friends would sneak out to the old Plantation to sit in the fields under the moon light and share ghost stories. And it had been under the very tree that she now set out to paint that Bobby Reid had given her her first kiss, then four year latter, a ring before he left for Vietnam.
As the Plantation cam into sight, the tree was the first thing she saw. Its gnarled boughs reached upward toward the heavens like the arms of a child reaching for his mother, and its roots spread fare from the trunk, sometimes curling upward so far that they stuck up from the tall grass that now filled the cotton fields. It showed no signs of like. A leaf had not sprouted from those branches in over a century. Its bark was black from ash. The land had been cleared a hundred years before the civil war, and the mansion and the slave quarters which had once filled the eastern horizon, had been burned by Yankee troops. Now the tree stood alone in the fields, and when the wind blew in dark, thunderous clouds from the west, and the rains poured, the tree burned.
Lynn let her bicycle fall to the ground, as she took her canvas from her bag, and looked up at her subject. The upper branches of the tree framed the sun as it sank low in the sky. A tear washed the dust from Lynn’s cheek, and she let her eyes drop to the brush in her hand. This tree had seen life, death, love and war. She could not do it justice.