Talulah

Karen E. Kachra

The day Joanie decides to live in a maple tree happens to be a Tuesday in July. She steers her grey Volvo off the highway and drives up to the construction site, her black carry-on case bouncing in the trunk.

The scene is familiar from television, the machines themselves entirely unfamiliar. To her untrained eye they might as well be the remains of abandoned spacecraft. There is one the size of her bungalow, and another with mammoth jagged-tooth discs that resemble the radial saw her husband keeps in the garage. In between these giants is an old-fashioned bulldozer, its front claw slumped on the ragged ground. There is a red and white ROAD KILL! banner draped across it with blood painted dripping from the letters, and when Joanie sees this she thinks about putting the car in reverse and driving home.

Instead, she gets out. The gravel is too rough for the wheels of her suitcase so she picks the case up, stooping sideways from the weight of it. Her peach overnight bag swings forward and dangles uncomfortably from her neck. She can see a circle of people ahead: legs growing out of mud-caked boots and heads topped with baseball caps and bandanas. Joanie squints and smiles a cheerful, storytime smile.

“Somebody’s mom,” one of them says.

She says her piece, the one that’s been preparing itself in her head like some inane radio drama, and still they don’t understand that she’s come to join the protest. They ask who she is looking for. Do you have food to drop off?

“I’m dropping myself off,” she insists. “I want to live in the tree, please.”

“Well.” A man with kind, dark eyes like her son’s, and a ring piercing his eyebrow sticks out his hand. “Jeremy,” he introduces himself. “Let’s get you started.”

“Joanie Challis.”

Jeremy introduces the rest of the ground crew, as he calls them. He tells her to leave her case and bag behind, the crew will deliver her belongings. Then he leads her away from the open ground, towards the forest.

The only thing for it is to climb up using a rope ladder that sways sickeningly with each movement she makes. Finally, Joanie crests the platform and sits down. She rubs her sore hands and arms and breathes heavily. For the moment, she forgets that her new living room is fifty feet up in the air, cradled in the chimney-thick arms of the tree.

“Like being one of the Flying Wallendas, isn’t it?”

Joanie recognizes the girl from her television interviews: the same ink-black braids and thick fringe of bangs. The black is too stark for her pale, freckled face, though it makes her grey eyes stand out—intelligent eyes, thinks Joanie.

“I, uh,“ Joanie begins, fighting to catch her breath. “It’s very high.” She looks around at the expanse of decking. At the edges of the platform sprays of leaves rise up as well as the occasional branch, though sometimes there is only air.

“You’ll get used to it.”

“The climb?”

“No, the height. And the green colour scheme.”

“Actually, it’s spectacular,” Joanie says softly.

“Isn’t she. You’re living in Talulah, now.”

Joanie gets to her feet, feeling a bit wobbly. On the floorboards around her, shadows shift and change as the branches overhead sway gently under the sun. Already she feels purer and more at peace. Consciously now, Joanie fills her lungs full of fresh air.

“Talulah,” she repeats.

“And my name is Katrina,” the girl says.

She brings Joanie over to the “kitchen” where five other young women sit on milk crates, sipping from mugs and water bottles. Katrina introduces each one, though Joanie forgets which name attaches to which person. She spots her pajamas poking out of a yellow IKEA bag. Re-packed and hauled up by pulley, her belongings have arrived before her. With a pang of embarrassment she realizes that Jeremy and his friends have touched her underwear and her Daily Prayer calendar.

“It’s so cool that you’re here.”

“What group are you with?”

“No group,” Joanie tells them politely, as if she’d said “no thank you.” They all raise their eyebrows. “My family used to hike in here. When my children were small. We loved it in here.”

She thinks of the little meadow where they used to stop for lunch and suddenly she smells egg salad and Saran Wrap. Off the path, Duncan is laying out the blue blanket near the solitary, oblong boulder they’ve named Alan. The kids climb the rock and wrap their skinny arms around Alan’s sun-warmed roughness. The blanket looks like a fallen patch of sky.

“So it’s personal,” says Katrina. “Wicked.” She hands Joanie a well-worn duotang.

Embarrassed, Joanie opens it immediately and leafs through the pages. One is titled Passive Resistance Strategies: the Ten Commandments for Resisting Arrest. Her eyes snag on number five.

5. Throw Something Handy Down on Police. e.g. tub of urine.

What have you gotten yourself into, kiddo? Joanie thinks of Duncan, law-abiding, conscientious, Duncan. In a few hours he will come home from work, line up his shoes in the closet, and walk to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water. Then he’ll see her note. Maybe she won’t be here long; maybe the protest will only take a day or two more.

“You seem to be making progress,” Joanie says to them. “The machines have been abandoned.”

“When they come back,” says Katrina, “there’ll be nothing to stop the crew from cutting right round us.”

“What’s stopping them now?” asks Joanie.

“Sugar in the gas tanks.”

They laugh.

Duncan calls her cell phone at 6:10 pm.

“Is this true?” he asks. “You’re, uh, you’re up a tree?”

“Yes.”

The treehouse has come alive in the dusk. Everywhere women are washing dishes, unrolling sleeping bags, flossing their teeth. Someone crosses her legs into a double lotus. Katrina clicks a ballpoint and hunches over her moleskin journal.

“Are you all right?” asks Duncan.

“What do you mean? Yes, yes I’m fine.”

“Joanie, I know I’ve been busy lately.” Long pause. “I suppose I haven’t been very attentive.”

She says, “You think I’m here because of you.” Her forehead feels hot against her hand.

“Sorry, I have to go,” she says into the receiver.

She can’t touch Talulah without humming. She strokes and pats her bark, and some mornings she is even inspired to hug a big limb or two. Nobody seems to think any of this is strange. Joanie tries stepping off the platform floor to straddle one of the branches, an upside-down elephant trunk that curves to the sky. Surprisingly, balancing so far off the ground is not frightening at all.

From this spot she spies a songbird’s nest with four chicks in it. She watches for what seems like hours as the mother bird flies away and back again, bringing tufts of something mossy from each sortie. She holds them out one chirruping youngster after another, letting them snap up the food with their tiny beaks.

Katrina says she hasn’t noticed the birds.

“Are you a student?” Joanie asks her.

“I just graduated. History and Poly Sci. Twenty-five school days up this tree and I still aced those weak-ass exams. What do you do?”

“I’m retired. A retired mother, really.” Joanie chuckles. “Though I still work a little at the library in town.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I run two of the storytime programs. For the little ones, you know. I’m in the children’s department.”

“Right. Songs, puppets,” says Katrina.

“Most of the time I read them stories.” People always expect that children won’t sit quietly for a book, certainly not one without any pictures. Joanie knows better. Even preschoolers freeze, bug-eyed, when she tells them about the man who could see with his skin. She feels badly for the children who are missing her special summer session because she isn’t there. Officially, the library doesn’t schedule classes in summers, but Joanie still offers one for the kids who don’t have a cottage to go to. She tells Katrina all of this, and crosses her arms against her chest when Katrina’s gaze wanders back to the place where Joanie’s shirt hangs awkwardly, concealing an empty bra cup.

“I miss the library,” Joanie concludes.

“Already?”

And already Joanie misses the Bingo scratch ticket she buys on Thursdays after grocery shopping and her big cat Sir Tabby climbing onto her lap during Jeopardy; she misses mirrors and she misses her nightly, scalding bath. Does she miss Duncan? She wants him to come and find her, that much she knows. Instead, he is trying to wear her down with information. When the others pass down their cell phones for recharging, Joanie considers pitching hers into the green sea below.

“Carpet Corps left a message,” he says this time. “Somebody called Nelson wants to know whether you’ve decided on the, ah, ‘deep burgundy’ or the ‘claret.’”

“Pick something, Duncan. You know what, stray from the wines and go for one of the middling browns you were stuck on for a while.”

“You’re serious?”

He resumes. “Doctor Paulson’s office called again. Joanie? Are you there?”

She opens her mouth but cannot bring herself to say “I don’t care.” Not to the man who sat up with her at nights, who held her hand while she dragged her weary self to and from the toilet bowl.

“I told them you’d reschedule as soon as possible,” he says. “She was none too happy with me, that secretary. What am I supposed to say, eh? My wife’s up a tree?” He chuckles uncomfortably.

“You can say exactly that, Duncan. We want the publicity, remember?”

“Joan-ie,” he groans.

“I’m watching a nest of songbirds. The mother bird sings a few bars of a song and then the chicks try it out. Quite interesting. They get it wrong, for the most part, but they are imitating. I can hear it. I’m eavesdropping on a beautiful wee bird teaching her babies to communicate.”

Duncan says wearily, “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself, Joanie.”

“Could use a hot bath, though,” she admits.

One day, Jeremy sends word that the logging crew is expected to return that evening. Joanie has almost forgotten that there is a crew, and that it intends to demolish this sanctuary.

“They’ll come in the evening?” she asks.

“These bastards like to work under cover of darkness,” says Katrina. “Our source thinks they’re bringing two new feller bunchers and at least one crane. They’re gonna saw right up to our doorstep, ladies.”

Joanie looks at the band of woods that remains between Talulah and the muddy parking lot of machines.

“They’re gonna try to scare us down,” Katrina continues, looking each of them in the eye. “So far, the action has been pretty removed. Tonight, they’ll bring spotlights to blind us. The sound of industrial chainsaws, as you know, well, it’s not friendly.”

They shuffle nervously at Katrina’s news. Several of the girls start biting their fingernails.
“But what I’m betting,” she tells them, “is that you’re like me. The sound of chainsaws ripping into living wood, biting into living flesh, doesn’t scare me. It makes me angry. Like, so angry.”

“What do we do?” one of them asks.

“Nothing! We stay put. I’m handing out earplugs. We link arms and we shout.”

Katrina goes on, though Joanie stops listening. She feels as if she’s just downed three espressos. They won’t kill you, she vows to Talulah, and the vow suffuses her with power. She imagines the night flooded like a baseball field from their lights and the deep silence of the forest ruined by the manic buzzing of saws.

Later she calls Duncan at work to tell him the news.

“Christ,” he says. “Are you sure about this, Joanie?”

He means, is she sure she wants to stay put. He sounds genuinely puzzled. She pictures him scratching the top of his head, ruffling that fine blond hair of his that has been disappearing over the decades.

“I’m sure about this.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he says immediately. “You remember when Jim Reddie had that big pine cut down in his front yard?”

“Ye-es.”

“You didn’t do a thing about that tree.”

Joanie sighs. “Don’t you remember how beautiful Haddon woods is?”

Thirty-three years ago Duncan proposed to her in Haddon woods. Not at the lookout, where all the local romantics came to kiss and make out, but in a cave that he’d discovered. He led her into a fissure in the limestone and helped her to perch on a ledge that felt as cold and clammy as the inside of a refrigerator. Then he’d lit a candle and promised her a ring.

“Of course I remember,” Duncan says, his voice suddenly formal. “Pimm’s just come by,” he whispers, referring to his boss. “Gotta go. Call me if you need me.”

Joanie was folding laundry when she first learned about the ROADKILL! protest and the tree sitters.

“You’ve decided to put your life in the path of a bulldozer,” the interviewer told the girl who turned out to be Katrina. “Why?”

Had he been listening to this woman at all, Joanie thought? Had he ever walked in the still woods and delighted in a slope of white trilliums in bloom? Katrina, she saw, was struggling to explain. Surrounded by socks without mates, in a house without a family, Joanie found herself praying at the TV screen.

“It’s not about being a hero,” Katrina said to the camera. “It’s about reaching a limit. What has to happen to our planet before people say enough. No more. Before they stop just “going on” and “getting over it” and folding the newspaper up and then everything’s back to normal. Does the tiger have to go extinct? The sea, like, drown Manhattan, or Amsterdam or Cairo? We’re literally killing each other with pesticides and growth hormones and other poisons. And all of these things are traumas, man, that we live through and live with, and sooner or later, each one of us will have to take a stand. If not for ourselves, then for our children and grandchildren. I don’t know but maybe, for this community, the limit is Haddon woods.”

If Duncan had truly wanted to know, Joanie might have told him that Katrina was why she climbed the tree. For in the days following the interview, Joanie’s mind percolated. It already seemed to her impossible that her life should continue on as it once did. This difficulty, she now realized, was a good thing.

The earplugs are useless. The air vibrates and Talulah shakes and cutlery bounces across the floor. A fine mist of sawdust blows over them in waves. They sit cross-legged, backs facing backs, and link arms at the elbows. They chant until Joanie’s throat is raw. Shame, shame, the wil-der-ness will not be tamed. She is linked to Katrina and to a geography student called Lynn, who wears braces. Katrina swears prodigiously. She wishes the lumberjacks death by chainsaw. “Supreme karma!” she yells into the eye of the floodlight.

It is meant to be inspiring, Joanie supposes. The girl with braces snarls until her lips quiver; she is about to cry. Joanie unhooks an arm to stroke her hair.

The midsummer air does not cool at all that night so they flush red from the heat, and from the fear and rage inside them. The crooks of Joanie’s elbows are wet where skin meets skin, like all of her other overlapping places: armpits, backs of knees, eyelids, and her single, dangling, braless breast. The skin between her clenched fingers. Her cunt, as Katrina would say.

“Where is the fucking press coverage?” shouts Katrina. She has a point.

What does Talulah sense of the wreckage around her? Joanie recalls that it has been proved that carrots produce a biochemical response when plucked from the ground. Or is that a story by Roald Dahl? What a pity trees can’t simply get up and leave.

Finally, the chainsaws stop. The women lie back into the circle they’ve staked and Joanie plunges into a warm, intensely black sea of sleep whose water rushes through her ears. Not long after, she is vaulted back onto a hard shore, awake and staring up into daylight. Talulah’s branches shimmy gracefully in the breeze and the sound of the wind through the boughs makes a gentle ballad. Something swells inside Joanie and she grins like a kid. Talulah holds forth.

What now? A question for the morning after. It was the question Joanie asked herself the day after she was diagnosed with cancer. The question came again when they stamped her chart “cancer free.” In her opinion, she never fought cancer like everyone presumed she was doing. Instead she tried to understand it, she negotiated with it, and begged and pleaded and promised. After a while she accepted her situation with the same, steady breaths she used to try to change it. Her world had grown full of nows and she had cherished each one of them, at first. How strange that in this moment, five years later, she is ready to fight.

“Holy shit.”

Sitting up, Joanie sees what Katrina is looking at. The road crew has managed to take out most of the big trees on the path advancing to Talulah. To do so the machines have simply trampled the smaller ones. Overnight, a swath of forest has been flattened into a mess of stumps and twisted branches—it resembles an open pit grave. The air smells faintly diesel and the skies spot with turkey vultures circling constantly over the newly bared ground.

Katrina turns away and roots through the kitchen gear, fishing out bowls and a box of instant oatmeal.

“The birds,” Joanie says, remembering the nest. She scans the mess on the ground.

“Damnit. Those chicks were too small to fly.” She tugs off the bandana she has taken to wearing, and throws it to the ground.

For a long time afterward the crew does not return and the women treat the stand-off as a victory of sorts. The logging machines are abandoned to a series of thunderstorms that sweep through the area. Under Talulah’s canopy it starts off dry. Soon enough, though, they have to tarp out the rain and their living space shrinks to the size of the tarp. A damp chill sets in as the end of August approaches and, one by one, the others head back to school. Until only Joanie and Katrina remain.

“You man, you’re hard core,” Katrina tells her. And you’re a little crazy, Joanie wants to say. She asks Katrina what her plans are for the future. One of the others mentioned that Katrina trained with tree dwellers in Wales and England. Katrina talks about maybe a job with Greenpeace, and about seeing the glacier at the top of Kilimanjaro before it melts. Then she crouches over yet another press release.

In her sleeping bag in the evenings, Joanie fantasizes about a scalding bath—one that turns her skin pink under the waterline. When the thunder cracks close she buries her head in the bag and holds the smooth egg of the cell phone in her hands.

It occurs to Joanie that Duncan has long ago succumbed to takeout.

“How are you eating?”

“Scaring up a few omelettes, you know.”

“You’re living on Il Fornello, aren’t you?” she demands, knowing his weakness for fettucine alfredo.

He doesn’t admit this. He says: “I’ve been craving a slice of your famous tortière. In the summer, imagine that. Maybe a little Caesar salad on the side?”

Joanie steps out from under the tarp and lets the rain drizzle into her face.

Duncan starts up again. “One solid meal, and then—“

“You don’t think I’m sick of eating instant mashed potatoes? If you want to be supportive, dear, come out. Sign a petition. Climb up your own tree. It’s wonderfully liberating. Plant your butt down, Duncan, and sit still for once in your life.”

He makes a noise to dismiss it all. After a long silence, he adds, “I don’t understand why you have to do this, Joanie.” This he says tenderly and honestly. He misses her.

“I can’t just leave it up to somebody else, Duncan. Well, I don’t want to. There are things that can happen that you just don’t get over. And maybe there are more of them than I thought.”

“Okay,” he drawls, obviously confused. “But why do you have to…a woman like you…”

“A woman like me?”

“Well, I mean, a woman with commitments. You have a family that needs you.”

The conversation cycles, once again, in a familiar, inhospitable orbit. When Joanie hangs up she is too exhausted to make herself the cup of tea she badly needs. Thankfully, her treemate has already set out her travel mug. Joanie receives the brown liquid gratefully and they each take a slurp.

“Doesn’t get it, does he?”

Katrina’s voice is typically self-assured and Joanie bristles instantly. How could she know what Duncan doesn’t “get”? She’s never even met him. Plus she’s barely past twenty and so she’s never had what Joanie considers a serious romantic relationship. Joanie stares as Katrina takes a second slurp. Why, God help her, does the girl presume that Joanie wants to talk about this at all?

“Not cool,” Katrina says decisively, answering her own question.

Joanie still says nothing. When Katrina's finally up, Joanie’s eyes warn her off the topic.

“Sorry,” the girl mutters, and smoothes her unruly eyebrows. “Just saying. Hey. I’ve got a spliff left?”

Joanie feels badly. Katrina is only trying to be sympathetic. It’s Duncan, talking to Duncan has made her grumpy.

“It’s difficult,” Joanie says. Though what exactly is difficult? Even that is lost to her now. A question escapes from her mouth into the gloom. “Are your parents happy?”

“Happy? Yeah. Yeah, I think they are.”

Joanie flushes hot against the chill.

“Now that they’re divorced,” says Katrina.

Divorce, the punchline.

“My Nan was married for fifty-three years, though.” She makes a soft chuck-chuck sound with the lighter and a tiny flame bursts up. “I seriously don’t know how she didn’t end up disemboweling my grandfather. Different era, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“You’re thinking smoking’s not good for you,” she says through the exhale. “It so depends on what you’re smoking. Seriously. Nicotine, for instance, is not bad for your health. It’s not. Why do you think you can get a doctor to prescribe a nicotine patch for you? What’s bad for you are the hundreds of chemicals that the cigarette companies load into their cigarettes along with the nicotine. Arsenic, benzene, et-cetera. That’s what’ll kill you.”

“And what about marijuana?”

Katrina ignores this. “Corporate cartels. That’s the new term for that sort of profit-at-all costs bullshit. Like, Marx had it even more right than he thought.”

Joanie’s never had cause to read Marx. Or the Post-Marxists, or the French radicals, or the American feminist who writes about cyborg existence: indeed, none of the long list of theorists that Katrina has been “riffing on” all week long. Joanie trained as a legal secretary and then worked as one until her son was born.

“Did you know there are thirteen species of maple tree,” she tells Katrina. “My son Steven did a science project on biodiversity. Many years, in fact, before the idea was popular.”

Katrina peevishly inspects what’s left of the crumbling joint. “It’s nothing short of war, Joanie. A disgusting, sado-masochistic assault.”

Joanie purses her lips. “Is it really?”

“Remember those people they tear gassed? Those people protesting at the G8 summit? Orders executed by government pigs, uniformed pigs on horseback. Christ, it’s like a bad trip!” She bares her very white, very straight teeth and nearly laughs. “That’s where the real bang-for-your-buck resistance is happening, Joanie. In the anti-globalization movement. Mmmm-hmmm. Anti-globalization.” Katrina savours the word.

“And here we are, stuck up a tree.”

Not just a tree. Talulah. She is a grand dame whose sister saplings have died long ago and whose children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren have grown up beside her and fallen too. Joanie’s eyes fill with tears that she quickly brushes away. Lately, since the kids left home, she can feel empty down to her bones. Like the rest of her is useless flesh.

“You want to have kids, don’t you?”

“Nope. Not on the sched.”

“Really?” Joanie falls silent, confounded by this news.

“Dude,” chastises Katrina, “just because I’m a woman…”

“No, no, I thought I heard you say something about it. Before.”

“I said something?” asks Katrina. “I guess I’m always saying something.”

“In a TV interview…” Joanie mumbles, wishing she hadn’t brought up the topic.

“Ohhh, right. Tactical reference.”

“Pardon me?”

“People relate to having children, don’t they? It’s a tactic in the fight to save our planet. Foo-ah.” Katrina sucker punches the air between them. “Sock it to ya, tribunal of old white men, two point five kids in Montessori.”

Joanie realizes that Katrina, the one here in the flesh, is serious. She lied, and silly Joanie fell for it. Shame fills her and then leaks away slowly, draining her energy with it. The two of them sit in silence for while.

Then Katrina asks, a little hesitant: “You had cancer, right?”

“Yes. You noticed the missing breast.”

“So, like, are you okay now?”

Joanie sighs. “I’m lucky. Everything is back to normal.”

Joanie is hopeful. Surely the longer they stay put, the higher up the chain Talulah’s case gets. The highway might be diverted, or even halted together.

“Everyone’s on holidays is all. Politicians, August,” Katrina sing-songs, holding up a fist to represent each one.

At bedtime, Joanie gets into her sleeping bag first. In minutes her right hip starts aching and she guides her mind through the fantasy of the scalding bath. This time she dreams of a fat pumice stone at her fingertips.

“Somebody’s here!” Katrina hisses.

Joanie bolts upright and peers into the darkness until she too can see the wavering beam of a flashlight.

“I’m getting the flare kit,” says Katrina. “You grab the pruning shears.”

“What?”

“We cut the ladder if he tries to climb up.”

“What if it’s Jeremy?” wonders Joanie.

“Since when does Jeremy come alone, in the middle of the night?”

Joanie crawls along the floor until she can peer over the edge. She moves in the makeshift hideout, now, as well as she navigates her own dark bedroom at home. Suddenly she knows the intruder is Duncan, the foolish man, stumbling along in the dark, about to get shot in the face with a flare gun.

“It’s Duncan.”

“Who?”

“My husband.”

There is a crash where Katrina drops the flare gun.

“Joanie?” Duncan shouts. He waves the flashlight over Talulah’s branches.

“I’m right here.”

“I can’t see you!”

“That’s because it’s pitch black,” Katrina yells down at him.

“I’m right here, Duncan!”

“There you are!”

“You’re blinding me with that thing.”

“Oh shit.” He lets the beam fall below her. “I bought an industrial strength hand-held lantern, they call these things.”

She imagines him grilling a pimply faced salesboy at Canadian Tire about the relative merits of their flashlights. Do you have something with a beam long enough to reach my wife? She’s up a bloody big tree.

“What do you want, Duncan?”

He extinguishes the light and says nothing for a few seconds. Long enough that she begins to fear something horrible has happened. So horrible he’s come to tell her in person.

“You. I want you!” he yells. “I want you, Joanie.”

“Me?”

Katrina groans.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Joanie points out.

Pause. “It’s 10:38,” he shouts back.

She doesn’t remind him that, outside, it has been dark for nearly four hours.

“So will you come home now? Okay? I’m here. I came. I’ve just bashed my shins to hell on these stumps, incidentally.”

“Oh nice,” says Katrina.

“And I, uh, I brought you an Eccles cake. Sir Tabby came with me too. He’s waiting in the car. I didn’t even have to scam him in there like we usually do. I took that as a good sign. Damnit, he better not be into that Eccles cake.”

“Duncan—“

“I was watching Coronation Street,” he keeps on shouting. “You wouldn’t believe what that builder is up to. Well, you’ve missed so much of it. I’ve been jotting down notes, would you believe? To update you when you get home. Then I think, to hell with this, she’s never going to come home on her own.”

“Never? Duncan—“

Far below, he coughs with a flourish. “I realize, yes, that I’m going to have to drag you back. If I want you back. Right. So I’m here, Joanie. To drag you back.”

Katrina speaks. “A real New Age type, isn’t he?”

“Duncan! I’m staying put.”

“What do you want from me, woman?!” he explodes.

“Hey, among other things, it’s not safe, dude, to climb down a rope ladder in the dark,” Katrina shouts out.

“Who are you?”

“Duncan, I’m seeing this through. For Talulah.”

“Most Goddamned determined person I’ve ever met,” he grumbles.

“You got it, man. Your wife, she’s hard core.”

“Thanks for coming,” Joanie says, appreciating the magnitude of Duncan’s journey.
The flashlight flickers back on and hesitates in the woods below. Now that he’s come so far, it is an effort to go back. So they talk for a while about the usual household trivia. Their carpet, he informs her, is now “twilight plum.”

“I like your tree,” he tells her.

“Talulah.”

“What?”

She raises her voice. “Talulah. The tree’s name is Talulah.”

“What a beauty. Shame.”

This last word she barely hears. Yet she does hear it, and her stomach clenches. The flashlight starts moving. Joanie watches until she can no longer see it.

“You’re humming,” Katrina points out.

She lifts her hand off Talulah’s furrowed bark. “Sorry.”

“Now that was interesting,” Katrina comments, her voice muffled by her sleeping bag. “And what, by the way, is an X.L. cake?”

In September, the logging crew returns with an enormous cherry picker and a squad of police cars. This time, Jeremy and company have convinced the press to come. Joanie counts three different camera crews dragging cables across the muddy clearcut. Half a dozen reporters stand below, waiting while their faces are powdered and their hairdos sprayed. Showtime. Nervous, Joanie calls Duncan and leaves a rambling voicemail. It is a Saturday morning and he is probably fertilizing the lawn.

A policeman raises a megaphone. “Descend in an orderly manner or you will be charged.”

“Charged with what?” Katrina challenges him.

“I’m not going to fling urine on anybody,” Joanie informs her.

“Fine. You fling what you feel you must.” She winks.

The cherry picker roars across the field, churning over the uneven ground on its
massive conveyor belt. Would they actually use that thing? Joanie paces the treehouse.

Katrina, though, surprises her by packing up the gear and pulling down the tarp.

“What are you doing?”

“We’ve gotten good coverage, finally, and we’ll get more at the base,” she reasons. “And I don’t want this stuff crushed when the tree is felled. We’ll need it.”

“When the tree is felled? You’re going to just give up now?”

“This isn’t storytime,” snaps Katrina. “I’m not risking a criminal record for a highway that’s already half excavated. Do you want to count how many letters I wrote to council, and how many press releases? Maybe if we could have tapped into more local support, but as it is…”

“As it is, your résume will still look wonderful.”

Katrina looks sheepish, folding the tea towels and laying them in a plastic bag. “Actually, I got a girl waiting for me in Newfoundland. I promised to sail with her to one of those ocean oil rigs. Craziest water on the planet, she tells me, plus we want to be out there when the whales are migrating.”

They descend in an orderly manner. It is the Canadian way, Joanie thinks bitterly. How does one apologize to a tree? Trees are not supposed to be worthy of apologies. Seeing her, the police officers trade surprised glances. “Come along, Ma’am.” She recognizes the split-second calculus of her grandmotherly ineptitude.

For a few minutes Katrina eludes the officers, speaking with animation to the reporters who have gathered. Joanie notices that Jeremy is being interviewed some distance away, apparently naked but wrapped in the ROADKILL! banner. Joanie herself is not asked any questions and she says nothing. Eventually, the police simply nudge her forward and they all trudge away from the tree.

For a moment, though, Joanie swoons and her mind spirals suddenly upward until she sees her own small body bobbing on the brown gash of the clearcut and, not so very far away yet, the fat green umbrella of her ancient friend. Talulah will be cut and killed and taken away and then she will be erased from our memory. And life will go on. Joanie wrenches one arm free and presses it to her chest so that she can feel her thumping heart. Over her thin sweater, her fingers automatically trace the shape of her sutures, where her left breast used to be. And then she bolts.

She runs, and falls, and runs some more, desperate to get to the rope ladder. Lights flash on her, people shout words she doesn’t hear. Talulah looms before her. Just as she reaches the dangling end of the rope ladder, she hears Duncan’s voice.

“Don’t touch her, Goddamn you.”

She scrambles onto the ladder and turns around to see.

“I warn you, do not touch her.” It is indeed Duncan who stands with his back to her, facing three very annoyed police officers. He’s wearing his favorite plaid sweater vest and his golf shoes are planted wide in an athletic stance.

“Duncan!”

“Drop the golf club, buddy,” says one of the officers.

Duncan looks over his shoulder. “You going up?” he asks her.

She nods and begins climbing frantically. He’ll be charged, she worries, with assaulting an officer or disturbing the peace. He’ll lose his job! At twenty feet up she sees that he’s directly below her, cornered underneath the ladder and swinging like mad.

“I’m no good at politics!” she shouts down.

“Is that what this is?” he shouts back.

But he sounds good. Alive and kicking, Joanie thinks. She climbs all the way to the top of the ladder.