[ WP ] Trees are the resting place of a soul .

From behind the fence in our bedclothes we watched Gramma Wilkins on the rocking chair again, listening to the wind in the trees with the light on her like a stage in that old dark prairie trampled on and smothered by the feet of ambitious and prideful dead men and their sorrowful long-suffering wives living in the shadow of their husbands or in the shadows of the actual cabins themselves when their husbands were away, to conserve the oil, their resentment and wounded repressed pride seething and feeding off the dark of those dark brooding cabins built in sweat and in evil, absurdly upright on the flatness of the prairie, an affront, an abomination. These first white people Gramma Wilkins remembered and she remembered the Indians too but only as curiosities. `` And when the white folk started to die out here,'' an impossibly old woman from her childhood told her, and seemed to tell her, again, on the porch, `` when they bodies got stabbed by a redskin or kicked by a horse that was scairt, they bodies had no place to go so God began putting up trees on the prairie,'' and the girl she'd been said `` Why'' and the old woman said `` So that way they souls had a place to rest without havin to fly all the way back to they homes out east,'' and the girl with the curious and almost comical scientific objectivity of children said `` But why trees, though'' and the woman said `` Because it's the shape of a soul, each of those trees there,'' pointing out the window, `` each one is similar but a little different, just like souls, and it's hard to tell the difference between them unless you really take the time to look.'' `` But --'' the girl began and the old woman ( whose face Gramma Wilkins remembered perfectly but whose name she had forgotten, perhaps because the name which everyone called her she had outgrown, had grown so old as to become so utterly different from who she'd been that names no longer mattered and had become crass and degrading ), she said `` You hush, girl. Preacher's comin.'' And out walked the preacher with the tattered Bible made from trees whose descendants had even died, and the little girl thought `` How many souls did it take to make that,'' and the memory ended and Gramma Wilkins was back on the porch with the wind whispering as we watched her, hoping she might do something crazy again. 
 
 
 

