Grow
When I was fifteen, I smashed my fist into a thick oak tree and snapped the bones of three
fingers. I was brutal and I had no reason to hit the tree, but its calm existence struck something deep in
my gut, and I attacked.
Whenever you step outside of our church, the air is thick with water. It doesn’t matter if it
hasn’t rained in a week or so, the thick leaves above hold the water in a maze, releasing it slowly as the
droplets escape and fall to the ground. The House is a ways away, through a mess of dark, moisturecoated trees. The path is well worn, from Brother Joseph and me walking it several times daily.
I knew a path like this one when I was fifteen. It was smaller and less worn, but it led through
the same rainy woods where I now make my home. I used to stomp along it, kicking the low trunks of
trees and snapping branches from their sockets, leaving a trail of broken, green wood behind me.
Sometimes I took those branches and sparred with the tree trunks, leaving scratches and gashes down
the bark. Leaves swarm around my head and the rainwater crashed on my scalp in huge, heavy-hung
droplets, but I kept battling until the branches I was wielding snapped.
There aren’t any umbrellas in the church, or in the House, because technically we don’t own
anything. Not even our clothes, or the House, or the crucifix that Brother Joseph cradles in his fingers at
night when he says the vespers he’s had memorized for years. The rhythm of his speech matches the
raindrops outside. It’s easy to get used to the soft patter of rain in your hair, as if God himself was
tapping you gently to make sure you hadn’t forgotten him, filling your hair and the ground with
reminders that you’re not alone. The shoes we have aren’t traditional “good shoes”, because it would
be impossible to keep them nice in the perpetual mud and soft, damp earth that makes up the land we
live on. Even then, we don’t want people from town to feel out of place when they walk in wearing old,
scratched-up sneakers, which is sometimes the best footwear they have.
Glancing blows off of rough tree bark can scratch up your hands pretty quickly, and possibly the
worst feeling in the world is when dirt or water soaks its way into those scratches. I had sacrificed many
branches in beating one old, towering oak tree up, however; I was okay with losing a little skin. Arms
throwing fists in an endless spray of meaningless violence, I think now that the only reason I fought so
hard against that tree was because I was trying to fight myself. Every scratch was a victory, every injury a
battle won.
I met with a kid a while ago whose parents had brought him to me because he had almost
burned their house to ashes. We walked along the path around the church, and he seemed
uncomfortable with the rain. Rain was so much a part of my life now I had nearly forgotten about it, and
it never occurred to me that it might make someone uncomfortable.
“Did you want to start a fire, or did you want to burn the house down?” I asked him.
“Huh?” he looked up at me from the soaked earth. “Oh, I dunno. I guess they’re the same, right?”
“I don’t think so,” I replied, “Starting a fire is creating something, burning the house down is
destroying something.”
“I don’t know—I don’t care,” he spoke pointedly at the ground and I kept quiet, giving him the
opportunity to change his words.
“Well,” I began after a few moments of silence. “If you wanted to create something we could
always use help here. Or you could work on your own projects, if that’s better for you. However,
wanting to burn your house down for the sake of ruining it is a different story.”
He was still silent as we stopped walking, so I leaned down with a sigh and said, “Hey, look at
this.”
Once I had his attention I took the ring finger of my right hand and bent it back until it touched
the outside of my wrist.
“Cool,” he remarked, his face twisting up into a fascinated smile.
“When I was your age I punched a tree for kicks, and I was too stubborn to tell anyone about it,
so the bone never set right.” I flex my hand and the white threads of scars outline themselves on my
knuckles.
“You wanna see something?” the kid asks as he holds out his hands. His fingers and palms are
scarred and padded with thick callouses. They look like mattresses stuffed under his skin, and it must
have been very painful to have them built up that strong.
“That’s from fire?” I ask.
“Yeah. Cold water helps ‘em heal, and mud is good to make ‘em smaller.” He nods his head,
reciting his findings.
Now he comes back on Saturdays, and takes care of the new flowers in front of the church. He
picked out all the plants himself, every one a thick-petaled flower with a deep red hue. He has a way
with them, and he keeps the delicate stems from drowning in the rain or wilting from lack of sun. The
little kids that run around outside the church every Sunday pick some of them and loop the stems
through buttonholes and into bracelets.
I went for a long walk yesterday, wandering through the masses of trees until I came to a
familiar one. It was a large oak tree, once abused and hurt, but its bark had healed and the only sign that
anyone had ever abused its surface was shown by a few thin scars, as thin as string, which crisscrossed
its surface like a testament to time.