The Boy in the tree

In the broke-backed mental album that constitutes my memory, I’ve always had three snapshots that just kind of hang there on a blank black page.

I was nine. We’d recently moved to a new house in the suburb of a different city, a poor house, a house of shame, compared to the proud place we’d had in Toronto. All three of these memory pictures take place outside, on a sunless day, in the front yard, probably on a Saturday morning--although that’s a guess on my part, years afterward. It could have been afternoon. Why Saturday? Because that was the day of the week when I was home alone with Dad.

In the first picture, I’ve heaved a big stone at my father’s head, and he’s ducking and running away. I remember feeling shame, and I still feel that, even now. Shame at being such a sissy that I couldn’t throw straight, so the rock missed by a wide margin. And shame that he ducked and ran away, even though there was no need.

In the second picture, I’ve picked up a garden fork—maybe Dad had been using it, or maybe it was just lying around. I threaten him and chase him and he runs away, looking ridiculous in his baggy Saturday slacks, running from the knees like a clown. I’m nine, I’m only a little boy, and he’s a big man who continually boasts of his height: six foot four inches. Yet he runs away.

In the third and final picture, I’m on the branch of a big maple tree by the edge of our roof and I’m sobbing, while Dad is circling the house below my feet, calling my name. He doesn't think to look up. He doesn't know that I climb trees. And in any case I'm hidden in the big thick leaves.

Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

I don’t respond.

That’s it. That’s the end of the memory photos. No before, no after, no cause, no consequence. They just hang there like three glass beads that have somehow survived the darkness of lost time.

Years later, when I began the long, slow process of unfucking my fucked up life, I began thinking about that little string of memories, and I asked what they might mean. I realized that they formed a sequence. They were different moments in a single event on an overcast day outside our brown brick bungalow in a raw new suburb on the edge of London, Ontario.

What triggered such murderous rage against my father? I wasn’t a violent child. And why did he run away? If my own nine year old son did something like that, I’d have stopped him. I would have taken the garden fork away and talked to him; I would have corrected him, and tried to find out what was troubling him. I would have involved his mother in the discussion—and that raises a further question. Where was my mother? How come there was no consequence for this misbehavior? Only silence?

Although silence was a way of life in that household.

And there the matter rested, for several years, while I got on with living.

So I was left with a bunch of questions, uncomfortable ones, given all the talk about child sex abuse, which mainly occurs within the family. Was I such a victim? I explored that possibility with a psychiatrist over the course of two years and together we determined that maybe I was. Or maybe I wasn’t. Dad was dead by the time I came to those conclusions, so he couldn’t answer—not that abusers, if he was one, ever face the truth.

And then, just last month, I had a new inspiration.

Why not focus on what I know rather than try to guess at what I’ll never find out?

I know that my father ran away from me. I was only nine, and he was a big man, but he was afraid of me. I may have been a sissy, but I won.

I was stronger than my father.

That’s quite a discovery, for a nine year old kid. He’s too young to process such information. All he can feel is confusion, and the terrible, existential isolation that accompanies forbidden knowledge. And besides, I was ashamed. Ashamed of Dad. Ashamed of our house. Ashamed of myself. Although I wouldn’t have had language to formulate such thoughts.

And who could I tell?

Not my mother. She would have had a tearful tantrum and blamed me.

No teacher or kind neighbor or pastor. They didn't exist in my life; and even if they had, they wouldn’t understand. And more important, I had to keep everything secret. That was more than a duty. That was my job.

I was completely alone and I was only a little boy.

No wonder I was sobbing.

I’ve always been alone. It’s the only life I know. But it’s different now. I know how to live with it and—an old man—I understand that in a deep sense, we’re all alone, although we pretend otherwise; we deny it and fear it like death; we lunge around like a dying fish on a dock, gasping for distractions and lies.

But solitude has become my way. It’s fruitful. It’s happy.

So now, and only now, I discover the boy in the tree.

So here’s the wonder of time.

Now, I can climb up into branches of that tree and I can sit beside the child who was me and put my arm around him.

And I can listen to his story.