under that tree a barefoot young woman and mistake her for what is somewhat archaically known as a slattern, being that her hem had been well-dragged through the mud and her sunburnt cheeks were smeared with wild blackberry and she carried a magpie’s nest of tangled hair above her squinting brow. Around her would graze the goats which belonged to her poor family, nuzzling her occasionally and stamping the earth when they were ready for their evening milking. At that time she would quit the comforting shade of her favorite tree, rise and shake pinecones from her lap, and head back down the path with a sigh as if she were being forced to leave a lover’s bed. Behind her the spruce would stand becalmed, for that is nearly all that a spruce can do in such a situation—though if there were a breeze present, the movement in his boughs might sound a little like a sigh. He would watch her walk slowly away, listen as the goat-bells clanged into the distance beyond the next blue copse, and then curse his fate. It is too much like a fable, he would think to himself: one of those with a particularly self-satisfied and superfluous moral.
II. The Pine
One might think it a dull and inactive life, that of a tree, but it’s really not like that at all. Thrushes will too-whit too-whee you out of your dreams while it’s still dark, bluejays keep you awake all morning, and raccoons roust you from your deepest midday slumber; there are always summer storms to fear and winter freezes that crack and split your bark. Beetles bore into you, chattering chipmunks simply bore you, nests tickle you, moss irritate you, and when it’s too hot the sap trickles down your bark in a manner most unpleasant. The four zephyrs taunt you hour after hour, never leaving a needle unturned. Dogs humiliate you. Insolent bears have the audacity to rub their rumps against you just to relieve an itch. You thirst half the year and feel you could drown the rest. Many times you long to just lie down and rest. When you’re the tallest and the mightiest, who will shelter you, who will shade you?
Still, it’s not too bad; I could have been a sniveling fountain or a narcissistic little flower or a dumb, gadfly-beset cow or a nightingale consigned to repeat the same monotonous melody for eternity. Doubtless I have a stately countenance and a wide command of my territory. My limbs are strong and sturdy, my foliage thick and my pinecones ample, and when a woodpecker beats a tattoo against my torso the sound echoes satisfyingly across these boulder-strewn hills. Am I not beautiful, after all? Are not my newest and greenest needles soft as feathers, my scent alone enough to inspire nostalgic poets? Am I not as lofty and awe-inspiring as any of those tiresome Seven Wonders? Behold, I say to all within my presence, I am an imperial emblem of the countryside—and I am still godlike if barely a god.
I could not even say that I miss my old form, for I have had many bodies in my time—so many I’ve quite forgotten what it is like to have just one, to rest inside one skin for any length of time. I cannot remember what I once looked like. If she had borne my child—my fertile anthers could not have missed their mark—I might have seen this child that bore my countenance and I might have looked into him as into a mirror. And known. But it was not to be so.
Centuries passed, a millennium or two. The mountains wore down a little, the stars imperceptibly shifted and rearranged themselves, and all I really knew was that every passing year I gained a ring and grew fatter. In time I forgave Jove, forgave even meddlesome Cupid. All I’d lost, lands and wealth and praise and burnt sacrifices and all, meant nothing to me. True, I knew sorrow for a long time… but then I left sorrow behind. I longed and then somehow I forgot longing. I let go. Only… something unsettled, something unfinished inside me remained.
After so very long, after I had been standing here, witnessing the incessant herds come and go with the turning of the earth and suffering the torments of the heavens for so very, very long, she came to me, all of her own accord. She could not be the same girl, of course, and yet she was the same girl. It was not she and yet there she was, barely altered, I was certain—for she wore the same tattered tunic and tossed the same greasy locks, and she carried her shoulders in the same fashion as before, as though she were perpetually under a yoke, carrying full milk-pails.
She would come in the afternoons with her small flock of bony goats, carrying a burlap sack with apples in it for her lunch, and sometimes a lyre in her arms which she rarely plucked (for every young miss around here must always receive some rudimentary lessons in the arts of womanhood). It would have been nice to say that she looked sad or lovelorn, but in truth there was seldom any intelligent expression on her face, just a kind of ovine hunger, or else her features were blurred in sleepiness. Sleep she did for most of the afternoon under my big bristling boughs, whistling through her nose loud as a wasps’ nest on fire and tossing and turning on the trampled grass as if it were on fire, too. She was not a sedate sleeper. Perhaps it was her dreams.
Staring down on her restless figure hour after hour I longed for her all the more with each of those hours, as if it were the first time I had ever really desired anyone—ah, it was exquisite torture to have her so near and yet so untouchable! All I was to her was reliable shade and perhaps a place to rest her weary back while she ground away at an apple. I looked with jealousy on the forests, fading from green into blue at nightfall, which would cover her in the distance when she left me every evening; it was as if we shared an unhappy marriage in which we never talked and every night she lay in another lover’s arms… and yet she felt it her duty to accompany and aggravate my misery day in and out with her stinking billy goats.
One such summer’s sunny afternoon, however, I felt more than saw an alteration in her appearance, though it took me weeks to begin to guess what that change was. For one thing, she began to torment her lyre in earnest, trying out refrains from haunted old tunes with little success but fingers forceful enough to break an occasional string. Sometimes she even sang, though this would drive the goats away and make me strain at my very roots. Undaunted, she’d throw apple cores at the herd and shout up into my branches. It was when she did this that I saw her smile for the first time ever and I knew then that she was in love … but, alas, not with me.
Ye gods above, what was I to do? My adored had no doubt been manhandled by some bucktoothed lug from the village down the way, some drooling young hayseed who’d been scaring the heifers not long before he’d discovered more natural pastimes. I wanted to quake my boughs and roar into the wind, but I could do little more than drop a few needles onto her hair— and she noticed me not at all and I raged within my wooden prison and inevitably I knew for the first time in my five thousand years of existence what it truly means to be in love.
She had even begun to wash her hair and use a handkerchief now, to sew up the rips in her garments and scrub her linens clean. She was turning herself into a woman—for him, for one of those ungainly freckled clods who passed my way each morning and each evening, switching flies off the skinny kine they so flagrantly led to and fro across my verdant lands. I despised him, though I knew not who he was, and I longed more than ever to speak to her, to persuade her to leave this stinking mortal, but the most she could hear was birdsong in my branches, the futile whisperings of one lone pine.
In my mind, or the heart of my softwood core, I would speak to her nevertheless, without fail each day and with all my might. I would philosophize and rhapsodize, I would tell her more tales than all the bards together tell, I would teach her all I had learned in the ages I had known and lived and lusted, I would wax stentorian about the passions we gods are famous for and speak softly but reassuringly of the love trembling just beneath my bark. In my mind, my core, in my heart of solid pinewood, I would woo and win her with words, words which—cursed of the gods!—she would never hear. She was so bad at the lyre. Her voice would invite the turkey buzzards to harmonize. She wouldn’t have heard me, anyway.
I will try to bring my tale to some semblance of an end without much further ado. Bear with me as I did then. There came a decisive day, a day and an hour just before a brea
thless summer sundown, when birds and insects alike had been stifled by the heat. It was, I like to think, a disguised Cupid who came to ask forgiveness for the way he had humiliated me so long ago, the way he had thwarted my age-old lovemaking among the maids of my lost kingdom. Or else despite all that happened it was just an ordinary meadowlark which had lost its way or its mate. My beloved had been sleeping rather more quietly than usual—the goats, too—when she blinked and woke to the sound of this bird within the evergreen twilight of my boughs, hopping from branch to branch as it piped its orphic song. On her back on a bed of soft needles she stared up, enraptured by the sound, by the fleet-winged bird catching glints of the last of the sun in its yellow feathers. The bird, or Cupid, seemed to be daring her to follow him, up there into air and light. She stood on tiptoe, stretching her arms as if she could tempt the creature to her, but instead it danced farther up my branches. In a frenzy now, she leapt like a bacchante into the air —as if she could snatch it as one might a moth. She cursed and her eyes were tear-filled, radiant.