Chapter 87
In his sixty-fifth year, the mango tree in the yard fell.
Not in a storm that would have been dramatic, the kind of event that fit a story about endings. It fell quietly, on a windless night in August, the old split in the lower trunk finally giving way. The tree leaned and then settled sideways against the back wall, still partly upright, still with leaves, not dead but no longer the tree it had been.
His mother called him in the morning.
'The tree came down,' she said.
He drove to the yard. He stood in the concrete space and looked at the tree lying against the wall the third branch where he had sat for hundreds of hours as a child, now at a sideways angle, still reaching.
He sat down on the back wall, the same wall where he and Leroy had sat on so many evenings.
He was sixty-five years old and the mango tree was down and he felt something that was not grief but was adjacent to it the feeling of something that had been permanent turning out to have been long-lived, which was a different thing.
Leroy came. Marcus had not called him but of course Leroy came.
They sat on the wall together, looking at the tree.
'It lasted,' Leroy said.
'It did,' Marcus said.
'Sixty-five years at least,' Leroy said. 'Maybe longer. We only knew it for about sixty.'
Marcus looked at the third branch, now at the wrong angle.
'I could see the whole street from that branch,' he said.
'I know,' Leroy said. 'You told me every time you were up there.'
'You told me a quiet man couldn't protect himself.'
'I was seven,' Leroy said. 'I've learned some things since.'
Marcus smiled.
They sat in the yard for a while. The neighborhood made its sounds around them. The sky was the Kingston sky, exactly as it had always been.
'What do we do with it?' Marcus said.
Leroy was quiet for a moment.
'We plant another one,' he said. 'In the same spot. That's what you do.'
Marcus looked at him.
'Yes,' he said. 'That's what you do.'
They planted one that Saturday. The new tree was a stick, barely hip-height, with two leaves and an uncertain future.
His mother stood in the doorway watching.
'That's going to take years,' she said.
'I know,' Marcus said.
'I might not see it tall.'
'Someone will,' he said. 'Thomas, maybe. Or Diane. One of the grandchildren.'
His mother looked at the small tree for a long time.
'Good,' she said finally. 'That's as it should be.