This one got away from me again. This part should be called “Walnut Tree” and you’ll soon see why. The titular “Ouija” will play a more prominent role in the next part, but the woodworking nerd in me dwelt on the details here.
As with most obsessions, Terry didn’t think this would be one of them.
It started at a Halloween party his neighbors down the street threw. Out on the patio by the pool a group of half a dozen neighbors he knew and people he didn’t gathered around a cardboard Ouija board. Three people at a time placed their hands gently on the plastic heart shaped planchette and tried to “communicate with the dead” with varying results.
“People never tire of trying to talk to the other side,” The old widow who lived on the other side of Terry stepped up beside him.
He started slightly at her words, focusing a little more intently on the mostly gibberish the slightly tipsy adults were getting out of the Ouija board.
“Agreed,” he said. “Do you ever wish you could communicate with Roger?” he asked, referring to her husband who had died of a heart attack the year before. She winced a little bit and Terry realized the callousness of his comment. “Sarah, I’m sorry, that was really rude of me…”
The older woman waved off his apology, “No, it’s all right, Terry, it’s all right. I do wish I could talk to Roger,” she nodded to herself. “I’d start by asking him where in the hell he put the retirement documentation, followed by why he didn’t get his blood pressure checked more regularly, and I’d also like him to give me the recipe for his rib rub that he took with him to the grave,” she smiled sadly.
“Oh, those ribs…” Terry remembered. “Often imitated, never duplicated.”
“And never will be, sadly. Unless we can get our hands on that planchette and eek it out of him from the afterlife,” her smile warmed.
“If only…” Terry chuckled.
They both stared in silence watching the game.
“Maybe…” Sarah, started, but let the thought trail off.
“You don’t suppose…?” Terry asked.
“I mean, maybe not Roger, but I wonder if the instrument,” she nodded at the laminated cardboard board and cream plastic planchette, “were of higher caliber…”
Terry surprised himself by considering the idea more seriously than he expected. “Where would we start?”
Sarah furrowed her brow. “That old walnut tree that came down in the storm last week…” she started. “I have pictures of that house from the 1920s and that walnut tree was visible in the back yard. I wonder what that heartwood has seen in the last hundred years.”
Terry knew she was appealing to the woodworker in him in a way he couldn’t let go. “You haven’t had that removed?”
She shook her head. “I got an estimate from one of the tree companies, but I think part of it is I’m still sort of mourning it. It was here when we moved into the neighborhood forty years ago. That tree shaded countless barbeques, my kids playing, climbing. It also…” she stopped, her face growing frighteningly serious.
“How about I come over tomorrow and take a look?”
…
The next day Terry knocked on the old three-story house next door that looked out of place in all the remodeled places in the neighborhood. Sarah greeted him and they walked to the back yard where the full tree had crashed into her prodigious yard, crushing the wooden fence separating her yard from the creek that served as a border for the far edge of her property.
“I didn’t realize it took out the fence,” Terry said.
“Sure did. That storm made a mess.”
Terry ran his hands over the trunk where it uprooted and marveled at the rough gray-brown bark and sheer width. “I think I can get a crew here to take this out. A buddy of mine runs a lumber mill – he’s where I get the slabs for my wood shop.”
“Is that where you got that cherry wood that you made that spectacular end table you gave Roger and I for our 75th Anniversary?”
“One in the same,” Terry said. “I’ll give him a call – he’d be very interested I think.” He thought back to the conversation they had the night before, but the notion that seemed if not reasonable at least worth exploring under the orange hunter moon now seemed exposed as silly dreams in the bright, cool light of an October morning, so he said nothing about it.
“Do you think it would work, though?” her revisiting the conversation took him by surprise.
He nodded slowly, “I do. Let me see what I can find out.”
Hector came over that same day and thanked Terry profusely for calling him. He worked with Sarah and they had a crew break down the ancient tree’s limbs and cart off the unusable branches and leaves.
“Remember,” Terry told Hector as they surveyed the crew wielding chainsaws and dragging brush to the chipper whirring in the front yard, “I get a heart slab – finder’s fee.”
Hector laughed, “You got it man.”
Terry saw Sarah watching through the window. He waved and joined her inside. “You know it’s going to take a long time before we can use that heartwood – they have to mill it and then the slabs have to dry… if we want this slab it will be years…”
“It’s got to be this tree.” The steel in her eyes took Terry aback a bit.
“Okay,” he nodded. “Is there,” he started, “Something about this tree that’s… special.”
“There is.” She didn’t elaborate.
“Alright…” Terry said.
…
Terry visited Hector the following week to pick up a slab of acacia for a vanity a customer in Scotts Valley had commissioned. “How’d that walnut break down?”
“Oh man,” Hector said. “You have to see this…”
They walked out through Hector’s warehouse into the open yard where metal racks ran in long rows holding varying lengths of drying slabs of wood. They crossed to one row and walked all the way back to the chain link fence before Hector stopped and put his hand on top of a stack of slabs separated from each other by inches to allow air to circulate. “Claro walnut. This one is yours,” he said patting the top of the stack.
Terry had to catch his breath. Eight feet long and half as much wide, the three inch thick slab seemed to almost glow, its whorls and striations picking up the diffuse sunlight between the stacks of drying slabs.
“Not a single crack,” Hector said. “I’ve never seen a trunk so perfect. This thing is magnificent. I thought I was doing you a huge favor covering so much of that removal. I mean, I didn’t mind, you know – that old lady is sweet. But practically everything we pulled out of that yard is solid. Now I almost feel bad!”
“Well, just let me know! I’ve got a really special project for this.”
…
A year later at the next neighborhood Halloween party, Sarah stepped next to Terry as he watched a different group playing with the Ouija board.
“I can make it out of something else,” he started. “I have a great piece of Blue Mahoe left over from a series of bowls I turned. It’d make a gorgeous board…”
“Not for our purposes. That walnut…”
Terry saw that look in her eyes again. “Okay.”
He did make a proof of concept Ouija board out of that Blue Mahoe. He put the tight-grained brown and blonde board with hand-painted letters and numbers on it along with a planchette from the same wood in the window of his Los Gatos gallery for Halloween. It sold handsomely to a couple visiting from Napa.
He had shown the board to Sarah who admired the grain and color of the wood and the craftsmanship. “That wood has a spicy smell,” she said.
“Blue Mahoe is known for that,” Terry said.
“It’s nice. But it won’t work for us. The walnut…”
…
Just before Halloween the following year Sarah fell in her house and broke her hip. When she got out of the hospital her daughter stayed with her during her recuperation.
Terry knocked on the door, a casserole in hand.
“Hello?” the woman with dark hair answered the door.
“Hi, I’m Sarah’s neighbor, Terry. I thought I’d bring by a chicken and potato casserole.”
“Oh, that’s so nice! I’m Jenny, her daughter. Come in. My mom’s in the back yard.”
Terry found Sarah sitting in a chair on the deck overlooking the weeds where the walnut tree had been.
“Those roots are poison,” she started abruptly.
“Sorry?”
“The roots of the walnut tree. They leach a poison that kills other walnut trees, but a whole host of other plants.” She pointed to a row of raised beds with tomato plants that leaned over exhausted from their summer-long bounty, “that’s why we had to build raised beds for the tomatoes.” She scowled. “I was going to tear those out before that damn fall.”
“It happens,” Terry said. “I can take care that for you tomorrow.”
“Really? That would be sweet.”
“You got it, Sarah.” He was quiet as the subject he knew she was thinking of rested between them.
“The wood?” she gave voice to it.
“Hector showed me when I picked up some Monterey cypress for a dining room table. It’s coming along, but he thinks another year. If you don’t want to wait, I have some really even Pau Rosa from Tanzania that would finish nicely…”
“Only the walnut.”
“Sarah, with this fall, I’m just worried…”
“That I’d die before we do this?”
“Well…”
“Terry,” she said, “I’m old, but I’ve still got fight in me. Don’t worry about that…”
“Why this walnut,” he gestured to where the tree used to stand.
“Sit,” she instructed pointing to a chair next to hers.
“Mom, do you need anything?” Jenny asked. Sarah shook her head. “Terry? Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you,” he said.
“Okay, I’m going to go call Adam then,” and she disappeared inside.
“Jenny’s been wonderful. It’s been nice spending so much time with her,” Sarah said after her daughter went inside. “Her husband, Adam, is a doll as well. I feel a little bad taking so much of her time, but…
“She had an older brother,” Sarah said and let the statement hang for a long moment. “Joey,” she smiled. “He was a good boy. Troubled, though,” she nodded solemnly. “We… Roger and I… we did our best. We knew he had some issues with the kids at school, but neither of us knew the extant of it, I guess. Until…” She remained statue still and silent for so long Terry wondered whether she would continue. “I found him. He’d come home from high school early. I was out running errands, but I saw him through the kitchen window as soon as I stepped in the front door,” she gestured to the windows behind her. “I will never forget the sight of his body hanging from one of those branches,” she pointed to the air where the walnut tree stood, “swaying in the wind. Lifeless. My boy. My boy…”
“I’m so sorry,” Terry said. Sarah nodded.
“I’ve seen him in those branches over the years,” she said solemnly. “As a boy climbing the thick limbs. I’ve seen him swaying at the end of that rope. I heard his laugh when the winds rustled the leaves.” She turned to look Terry in the eyes with that fierce look. “That tree. It has to be that tree.”
Terry’s blood ran cold knowing the story of the beautiful, tragic tree.
“The walnut,” she said, nodding to the empty space where the tree stood. “That tree.”
To be continued…
