The Not So Lovely Comes Out Beautifully
by Sally Drumm

On either side of Augustus' gates your trees shall stand sentry,
faithfully guarding the crown of oak leaves hanging between them.
— Ovid, Metamorphosis, I.562-563; Trans.: David Raeburn, 2004

Here is the story of Joonie Lee Bourk, a story told in a land of rivers, a place where it always seems to happen that a baby is birthed at the same time a loved one is laid to rest. As it was told to me, I tell it to you in my turn.

Around the time the Towers fell, old-timers and newcomers living in Bayetown began moving away. No one was certain if the exodus was due to the falling Towers or to falling real estate prices. Many who stayed thought that what ran people out was Mr. B.T.D. — Mr. Big Town Developer — closing down Crabs at the Landings. At Crabs on a Saturday nighter, Bayetowners sitting in fours and sixes around sawmill wheel tables banged down frozen mugs of Go To and listened to that peculiar mix of music popular with river folk: Zydeco Blues & Beach Boys topped off with a little Redneck Woman kick to the side of the head.

Frogtown Stew was served piping hot on those nights, fresh from the Old Bay steam pot. Whatever is in season — Blue Crab, mussels, oysters, shrimp — goes in that pot and gets mixed with a few potatoes, green beans, ears of corn, and sweet onions, all of it served with a slab of butter-slathered cornbread on the side. The Ladies and Gents had a way about them on those nights. Both sexes tapping their toes, the guys eating, joking, and slapping each other on the back; the gals whispering behind tiny hands, tossing back a Jello shooter or two, maybe a glass of wine, with a womanly-sized no-thank-you helping of Frogtown cooling on the sawmill table before them.

In those times, the young ones were born with an oyster knife in hand, and the folk remembered that their own soul and the soul of the land were one, both of them melded in names chosen for themselves and the land. Mr. B.T.D. and his people fixed that — they liked the Frogtown Stew all right, but they didn't like receiving their mail addressed to Frogtown, the island village on the far shore of Big Bird Creek. So Frogtown became Bayetown and the stew lost its history but kept its name, Mr. B.T.D's people streamed in, and Crabs on the Landings was closed when the man himself bought the village marina for redevelopment.

After Crabs closed, the old timers didn't leave town because of a lack of decent restaurants — No ... they left because taxes kept going up until no shrimper or crabber could afford a home in the place they grew up. The Land Runners served that dish. Mr. B. T. D. himself. The folks who made the place all that it was, up and moved away. Who knows to where? Tennessee, Kentucky, Nebraska? Even the cinema on Guy's Island closed down and reopened as a church. Seems to go that way when people lose their land — they try to fill the big empty by lifting their eyes to the sky and slapping palms together, hoping to squeeze away the place where the empty hides. Good luck. Better they should look upon the earth, draw up a handful, and sing its praise.

The real kicker came when the State closed down the shrimp dock and fuel station in Port Mary. State revenuers said they needed to clean the place up to make it an easier sell for Mr. B.T.D. to digest. 27 million bucks they wanted for it...Ai, Port Mary is the oldest port in the New World. Those revenuers could have made it into a state park, built a heritage site, or put a pirate ship in the bay, put a tall ship, a pilgrim ship, or a kaolin miner to float in the bay and charged a fee. 27 million bucks for all that is a piss ant's dream of a soda can palace come true.

Redevelopment prospects won out. Again.

That's almost the oldest story remade into the newest story in these parts. Almost. Redevelopment by way of Mr. B.T.D.'s big bucks really was the newest story before the White-haired Man gave up his part of Joonie's story. Now that news was news bigger than any the Bayetown Freeloader ever spun in black and white on its recycled-paper pages. But no one reads that newspaper anymore, not since the story of an unemployed, unmarried South American couple expecting quintuplets made the front page. That couple making press made the folk round here darned mad. That couple had nothing, not even a car. Now who's gonna pay for that family of seven coming up? Not Mr. B.T.D., who brought the couple to town — one couple among many — to build his duplexes and multiplexes and complexes. It's Bayetown going to pay for what Mr. B.T.D. brought to town. The Freeloader was advertising for donations for the couple and, sure-to, that's what made folks see red-on-white instead of black-on-white on the front-page that day. And there you have it, the unnatural order of things that take and take without giving back more than another mouth to feed, and that always leads straight to collapse of one kind or another.

On the day Joonie's world changed forever, and it changed forever because that was the day of her deciding to decide, it was partly that article on the unemployed quintuplets that got Joonie to make up her mind. On that day, while she pedaled her bicycle toward her real estate office, Joonie considered all the goings-on in her town and there round. She considered the Towers falling, Crabs on the Landings closing, and the people moving away. She considered the family land she'd sold away during her life as a real estate agent. She considered the family she'd waved away while she'd worked her life away, and she considered the quintuplets soon to be born to unemployed parents. She considered all this and more as she pedaled her bicycle toward her real estate office, as she pedaled past the concrete-holding facility beside the dock, as she pedaled into the next block of her life. Reading about the quintuplets during lunch at Mel's diner caused the Frogtown in her stomach to rumble with a force equal to the eighteen-wheelers rumbling their loads of dry concrete mix away from the dock. She decided right then never, not ever, to read the Bayetown Freeloader again —

"That's a start," she huffed and pedaled on her way.

Joonie had been pedaling beside eighteen-wheeler milk-trucks filled with concrete powder-mix rolling by the Port Mary grade school for twenty years. She'd been pedaling and watching. She watched them trucks run for home while the years changed oyster shell-paved road to black top asphalt and then into recycled rebar covered in recycled tires, watched them slice the air as oyster knife was replaced by sterling silver in the hands of her friends, watched 'em run on the day she walked the aisle to marry her man, Art, and watched 'em on the day she learned she would never have a child, and after learning that most important of facts in the history making of any woman, Joonie took to selling real estate instead of raising family with her old man. She couldn't have picked a better time or a better man, a carpenter who built her a fine house on the family land her parents handed over to them on the day she and Art married.

Working in real estate all those married-years paid off. Joonie kept her own last name and stayed busy. She didn't fret over the child she never had and Art didn't have to work so hard with the money coming in from Joonie's selling of the family land. During ten boom years of Joonie's speculating family land given her by her parents, Art spent a great deal of time building bird houses shaped like cats' heads, with the mouth being the place the birds flew in. Without a thought about how the land that had been in her family for generations might feel about it, Joonie tucked up Florida developer dough selling family land faster than she could pick bad stitches from a quilt.

With all that land haul, Joonie could have retired any old time. But she waited ten more years, ten years too long, and just when she thought everything was going to come out beautiful, the world turned not so lovely. The Towers fell, the country went to war, the folk went to moving away instead of moving up from a one-bath shack to a two-bath mansion on what was once somebody else's land, and Joonie began to suspect the fall of human commerce and human kindness would be hard and not far off. She knew what was coming as sure as she knew where the world and all us in it are going. But Joonie didn't pay attention to her knowing. She smiled and waited, expecting an upturn instead of the downturn that followed. She set aside her knowing, and the soul-starving kicked in.

First it was her Dad who died of the rot. Joonie should have been ready to retire then. She should have been ready to hug her family and what was left of her land to heart, but instead she told the green grocer she would work the grieving out of her system. She should have been ready to settle matters of the heart when her Mom died of the rot three months after her Dad. Joonie thought it would end there, after she lost both parents within six months, unexpected and not due to old age. She could have listened to her heart, but instead she told the mail lady she was going to work her way through. At forty-four years old, Joonie should have known better. Forty-four is when the dying just gets to beginning and it doesn't care to stop — not until the last watcher takes the last look, not until the last heart breaks and life heaves itself up and away through whatever is left, digging out the rot like earth following a quake or the row a plow makes. Life keeps on dying. 'Cause isn't that the other half, one and one minus one, the sum of one being the indifference of the other?

Gretchen, Joonie's mother-in-law sailed off next. Emphysema. The woman couldn't stop smoking until the doctor said her lungs had turned to concrete. She was seventy-one by then and quitting came decades too late. Maybe quitting wouldn't have mattered much after her breathing in all the clouds of concrete dust of all the years those concrete trucks rumbled past her windowsills. Still, Gretchen hung onto life like a monkey swinging from tree-to-tree until day-by-day led to the oxygen machine. Then it became minute-by-minute. That led to sleeping upright in her chair every night. And all that led to falling from the tree.

Then it was just Joonie and Art, living happily ever after on nine island acres between Logger's Reach, a few hundred acres of new wave subdivisions on a landward island, and Sino Island, a few dozen acres of seaward island where monkeys are raised for the benefit of science and Dr. Kite — Art making his bird houses and Joonie selling land, happily ever after, until nine acres was all that was left of Joonie's family land, the quilt with its stitches undone a few acres at a time, until a few hundred acres of subdivision surrounded what was left of Joonie's family land, until Mr. B.T.D. and his Logger's Reach reached into the heart of Joonie's onetime family and squeezed it dead.

Every once't one of those monkeys on Sino Island escapes. It's a hopeful thing. Unlike those unemployed quintuplets, those tiny escapes from Sino Island breed the hopeful in folks wishing for their own escapes. It really is news when a monkey breaks free. The front page of Bayetown Freeloader displays a little map of the critter's trek until it's caught. As if tracking a fugitive from the State Prison across state lines, the Freeloader spins up a magical picture with little dashes marking off the monkey's trek like footprints on a pirate's treasure map. Some spodunk reporter writes what he thinks is a smart caption that is nothing but smart assed aim-taking at river folk he suspects don't know an escaped monkey from an escaped convict: "From Sino Island, the non-human primate launched across Big Bird Creek and onto Turtle Island. Crossing the headwaters of the Pentas River and heading to Guy's Island Country Club, the escapee held in for a few holes and a nightcap at the nineteenth hole. Ultimately, our little buddy was trapped beneath the several wheels of a local concrete hauler's eighteen-wheeler. Say 'Bye-Bye, Birdie.'" Spodunk reporters ain't much on matters truly of the heart.

Escape don't come easy.

After all the dying coming to life in Joonie's world, she was kept sane by the sweet rhythms of work-then home-then sleep-then work. Joonie and Art, alone on their island, were marooned in the illusion of healing that comes from waking with the sun and sleeping with the stars. That is, until the rot got Art. Breast cancer. Of all the freakish deaths Life might have chosen for him, Art died of breast cancer. As if that weren't enough, Joonie's pets died, too — first the dog, then the cat, and finally the fish. All of them had strange growths on their bodies. The dog grew spikes out his head, all red and pointed like alien quills. The cat's eyes closed down with huge eyelid growths. The fish in the tank Joonie kept — my God, that was a sight: all red and gold and blue with the strangest white mountains of fish flesh growing on their heads, behind the fins, and before the tails, making the fish entire into small scale, multi-hued Moby Dicks — dozens of them; that tank was full to the brim with Death.

We folk around town and about the islands say Joonie shouldn't a taken out all those stitches from the family quilt. The land got away, getting even as it went. You know, like it has a mind of its own and breath enough to curse you if it wants to. Getting to where it wants to takes a lot of going wrong. We all reckoned, later of course, after things went back to beautiful, that Joonie had a lot of going wrong going on, right from the moment she chose money over land and family history. That's a swig from the wrong mug, a turn onto the wrong pike, a fish in a dirty tank, a Moby without an Ishmael. Joonie didn't blame cigarettes, concrete dust, or Art having breasts for the dying. Joonie blamed Termite Man.

Termite Man had come to spray the piers of Joonie and Art's house before the dying began. Joonie hadn't wanted it, hadn't wanted Termite Man to come around, but Art had insisted. Over a plate of Frogtown Stew, Art told Joonie they had to protect their investment.

The Frogtown was hot and the draft was icing over the edge of her frozen mug.

"But Honey," Joonie said, "poison is as poison does."

"Those Formosas, Joonie...." Art replied. "Damn, you make it hard, Honey, but a man gotta do what a man gotta do."

"Oh, hell with that," Joonie said, knowing she'd lost the argument the moment he threw on his down-in-the-mouth-South accent and started with his Mantown fake bull about what a man gotta do.

"Gotta-doodle-doodle-do, my ass," Joonie replied, and thought about Formosa termites chewing through New Orleans' levees.

Joonie gave in — Art gets what Art wants — and Termite Man came on.

Right after Termite Man came around and sprayed the piers beneath Art and Joonie's house, the house Art built on land Joonie's family had stewarded for generations, Joonie's parents came for an extended visit. Once a year, in the same way owls come home to roost for winter, Joonie's parents showed at Thanksgiving and stayed a good long while. That year was no different from any other of the twenty years Joonie and Art were married, not until her parents returned to their retirement home in the mountains.

It happened just how Joonie read oncet in a story: "Boom, down" — just like that. First her father. Then her mother. Art's mother next. Art dead, too. Holy Jesus. Then the dog, the cat, the fish. Just like that. Boom. Down. And no getting up. All of them gone like thoughts never brought to fruition. Just gone and just Joonie left. Joonie all alone on that nine-acre island, all alone in the house Art built on what was left of the land her family had stewarded for generations.

Joonie knew it was Termite Man's work. She thought the awful thought against Termite Man and said nothing.

Of Joonie's few friends, Punkin lasted longest through the time of dying. Some of Joonie's friends had died over the years before and after her family died. Others of her friends had moved away in the great exodus. Keeping in touch became more chore than act of love, and with the sunshine of acts of love fading in the thunderheads of acts of work, Joonie's friends dimmed into the background of her life like happy and sad masks at the cinema when the lights go down. All except Punkin, who stuck by Joonie through the insanity of losing it all in a run of bad rot.

Joonie didn't see the run as bad luck. She faced her losses and watched life work on her like a beetle on a dung ball. In the stitches of time that made up the circumstance of her life, Joonie saw a fact, a matter of time, foresight and hindsight all rolled into one big ass wad of Catch-22. But the more Joonie talked with Punkin about her newborn sense of the natural state that is death, the natural course of life that flows into death and back into life, the urge to rest that leads to death but stirs to life at dawn, the further apart she and Punkin grew. The distance between them widened by miles of silence until, finally, the farce of friendship fell into Shit River during a weekend trip.

That weekend at the Hilton Head Hilton, Punkin couldn't find anything to agree on with Joonie. After two days of swimming, sunning, and arguing like an old married couple, they faced off in their muted-peony-pattern-wallpapered room. Joonie looked at Punkin across opened suitcases laid upon the matching blush-colored bedspreads of the room's two queen-sized beds. Punkin looked down as she tucked a blouse on top of the neatly folded stack of new clothes she'd bought for the trip but hadn't worn.

"You need to look at the brighter side of things. You're always so damned dark," Punkin said, looking into Joonie's suitcase. Punkin's black bob waggled in time to her words.

Joonie admired the gloss of Punkin's hair, the black sheen so lively, the Husky-blue eyes so careful, but she didn't answer her friend.

"Maybe if you quit working so much, got out of the house more, got away from that island, tried to —"

"What? Find another man? I don't want one. I've had men enough for twelve lives. Sometimes I feel like...like a tree trunk. Yeah. A tree trunk...only...only every man I ever knew is my roots and they've all run up my legs, and now they're popping out of my head. Like branches. Or flowers. My head feels like florist's foam." Joonie was talking trash, but she didn't care. Her hair was nothing compared to Punkin's. Sometimes she hated Punkin for her hair, her husband and three kids, two boys and a girl, her living parents and her very much alive parents-in-law.

"You're nuts," Punkin moaned and went back to packing.

"Yeah. Speaking of that, I'm really hungry. Do you want to eat before we leave?"

"No. I don't want to. I want to go home —"

Punkin stopped dead.

"— to Mac and the kids," Joonie finished for her.

Over the tops of the suitcases spread on the two queen-sized beds, Joonie's and Punkin's eyes met: Joonie's calm and relaxed glance met Punkin's frantic thoughts, thoughts jumping from Punkin's eyes like sharp scissors at work on florist's foam. Punkin's face glowed with the frenzy of not being able to get away from Joonie quick enough. Joonie carried death in her green eyes, as if her gray-by-choice hair were a warning, a death's head in the mirror of Punkin's Husky-blue eyes.

The women fell into the dam of no surpass at the same time.

The drive back to Bayetown was silent. Shit River had somehow jumped its banks and swallowed the women's friendship. That was the last time Joonie spent with Punkin. They tried to talk on the phone. But whatever had been between them lay dead under the stress of all the stress in Joonie's life.

Pedaling her bicycle toward her real estate office along the wide palm-lined street, an eighteen-wheeler whooshed by, and in the hot dusty wind rising from beneath the truck's wheels, Joonie felt the relief of no longer having an oldest friend. Losing everyone she ever loved set her free to be exactly whoever she wanted to be. She didn't have to cook or clean or send birthday cards. She didn't have to celebrate the holidays. If she wanted, she could eat shrimp for Thanksgiving and oysters for Christmas. And if she didn't want to, she didn't have to work another day.

But she could. She could if she wanted.

Despite her inheritance, Joonie, the now-wealthy sole heir of four people and several animals and fish, had kept working during the year after Art died, mostly because she wasn't sure what else to do. She sold other people's homes three days a week from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. Some days she stayed home; some days she showed homes. Homes intrigued her — homes of other families, and most of all, her own home and the nine-acre island living through its seasons.

And the seasons did pass.

Joonie pulled up her bicycle to the curb and caught a glimpse of herself in her office window with the sun smiling over her shoulder. She held the handlebars and lingered in her image: the long gray hair tucked behind tiny ears, the braid she couldn't see hanging down the middle of her back, the striped boatman's T-shirt outlining a figure still trim, the space between Bermuda shorts and flats allowing a glimpse of tanned calf.

Within herself, Joonie recognized the forming of a new order.

She was done living for those lost or dead or moved-away others. And being done with living for them, she decided to be done with living with them. She would never again allow anyone to tell her how to think about the past, the present, or the future, about life or death or now, about Thanksgiving or Christmas or the New Year. About birthdays, there was nothing to say.

She promised herself right then.

She would eat shrimp every Thanksgiving, boiled shrimp with bright red cocktail sauce, ketchup mixed with horseradish in a brown crock, shrimp served over crushed ice with a side of cocktail sauce. And maybe this weekend, the weekend before Thanksgiving, the time she would have been spending with her parents on family land if only she hadn't sold all but nine acres of the family land, this weekend she'd finish digging out and removing the poisoned earth beneath the house, the soil poisoned by Termite Man and his laundry list of unpronounceable chemicals and fillers and activants and limiters and whatever else had been in the spray sprayed by Termite Man beneath her house around the pillars, poisoning the very foundation of her life.

The thought filled her eyes with laughter, her eyes green as marsh grass waving against the tide, her ideas flicking through those green eyes like slick fish darting among reeds. A concrete truck rumbled down de Spain Avenue. The door to her office opened and Joonie walked in.

First, she phoned Joe Blue, her attorney, to ask if the trust was ready to sign. She was planning a long trip, she had told Joe when they began discussing the trust, and she wasn't sure when she would return to Bayetown once she worked the nerve to leave. She needed a break from sharks and real estate and Mr. B. T. D. She wanted to be sure taxes and insurance, along with any other incidentals, would continue to be paid while she was away. Fortunately for Joonie, her inheritance had already paid off the mortgage she and Art had hacked at during twenty years of marriage. Joe had suggested a few other things. To each, Joonie agreed, or not.

"Great," Joonie said into the phone. "I'll stop by on my way home. Let's say ... um ... 3:30?"

She hung up the phone and pulled a file marked "Withdrawal" from the drawer. Joonie ran the short-clipped, unpolished nail-tips of her left hand across the front of the file she held in her right hand. Opening the file, she glanced at the list of tasks assigned and completed, all of them neatly checked: purchase and install solar panels; well installed with hand pump; wood stove installed for cooking and heating; soybean, tomato, wheat, corn and flower seed ordered and received. She checked the box next to "Complete Trust," closed the folder, and leaned back in her chair.

There. She was finished with work, and that was that.

Joonie left the office, climbed onto her bicycle, and pedaled toward Joe's office. No more deferment — Thanksgiving was only a wink away.

The river Pentas flowed hard along the western side of the island where Joonie made her home and her escape. She stopped going out, stopped calling out, stopped going to town as soon as she could grow her own food. She stopped eating meat, began washing her clothes in the river, and sewing the river-beaten rags of her old clothing into new clothing. Day in and day out, one thing led to another until years had passed away, until in the sewing of her rags into new clothes even the rags fell away.

No one rode out that way and Joonie was supposed gone. To Europe maybe, we folk declared when we felt like declaring, over breakfast maybe, or a plate of Frogtown. The years went on, and we folk could only guess what went on for Joonie, when we felt like guessing, until later, when we fit the pieces of what we knew to those pieces given us by the White-haired Man. We guessed, yarn after yarn, till we stitched together the beginning of the tale to its end, and then like wishing on a star, or casting a line and expecting the big one to take hold, we pieced together the middle.

Out there on her island, as days grew long, then short, then long again, Joonie's hair grew whiter in the sun than the salt of the sea spread upon the land by the western wind. Each day, between her chores — and her chores were hard what with living off the land and filtering her own water, washing herself in the river, settling her debt to the land, and only the river Pentas to look to for company — each day between chores, she sat down on a log beneath an old oak tree, a Live oak bent by storm and draped in Spanish moss. There beneath that oak — the only kind of tree that can heal itself after a deep wounding — with the river Pentas looking on, Joonie made her peace with her dead. After the peace, there was nothing before her and nothing beyond. No expectations. There was nothing to lose and her whole soul to gain.

Joonie liked it that way, all quiet and peaceful-like. No drama; no soaps; no TiVo; no instant replay, no reality TV. Just the sun coming up making love to the earth each day, the tide going in and out, and the sun saying goodbye to its lover each night.

And it was just that way — her looking toward the river on a day like any other day, the clouds dancing against the sun, rain a hundred miles away, all the earth just a'smiling in the sun's embrace — it was just that way on the day Joonie spied a boat, a sailing boat moored against the sea grass, half a mile from shore, balanced on the horizon between shore and shore. There it sat in the mirrors of Joonie Lee Bourk's eyes, eyes long unaccustomed to the fellowship of any creature other than squirrel, deer, birds, insects, and raccoons. On that day, Joonie hadn't spoken to another soul in umpteen years, and there it sat, that boat, doing its work upon her mind.

"Oh Lord," Joonie said to the boat moored off the shore of her island. "Whatever shall I do about you?"

Nothing, not a thing, a katydid answered with the voice of a lord. Do nothing. Not a thing. Go about your work. Wait it out.

"Yes. Too soon you have come, so soon you must leave," Joonie said to the boat and cast her mind into finer waters.

Off she went to wash her body in the river, to cook her greens, to stitch her quilt of twigs and nests, to gather back her soul unto herself, off she went with the thought of the offshore boat deep in her mind, floating there amongst clearer thoughts of what to do with her time.

Next day as Joonie sat on her log beneath the tree, the thought of the boat growing more ferocious by the minute, she nearly fainted when she saw a rowboat launch from the stern of the sailboat, the rowboat complete with tiny figure lifting and pulling tiny oars.

"Oh dear Jesus, Harry, and all the saints of the Lord, don't let it come this way!"

Not to worry, answered a great black Fish Crow high in the tree, the crow speaking with the voice of a lord. Not to worry, Woman. If the boat should come this way simply plant your feet firmly and stand your ground.

"So I shall," said she. "So shall I."

And the boat did turn her way. Soon the rower became visible from shore. Lifting and pulling those oars was a man with hair as gray and eyes as green as Joonie Lee Bourk's own strands and mirrors. She stood at the shore, watching, waiting, watching the rowboat move closer. She planted her feet; she stood her ground.

He pulled to shore beneath the great oak, and looked around. There on the shore stood the most remarkable tree: a young oak in the shape of a woman, its bark gleaming as if grown from a seed of silver and gold, its trunk rounding the curves of a woman's body. Its roots — her small foot; its lower trunk — her hips; its upper trunk — her very breasts! And her leaves — her leaves glistened white in the sun rather than green. He felt as if he stood in a place where snow had fallen, though it was ninety degrees and rising, that day on the shore of Bourk Island, where a tree can still be seen with a branch extended to the sea, as if to wave away those who wish to land.

The very coldness of the spot hastened his departure. When he pushed his rowboat back into the river, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the sunlight-dappled waters beneath the Woman Tree's outstretched arm. He saw that his own gray hair had turned pure white, as white as the leaves that grew from the head of the Woman Tree. The White-haired Man turned back to the Woman Tree intending to touch her, to sniff her bark and stroke her leaves, but the Old Hag had other plans for the Woman Tree and the White-haired Man. She opened her bag of wind, and in the great rush of western wind escaping from that foursquare bag, a dead branch broke away from the old oak and hit the White-haired Man soundly upon the head. He was knocked unconscious into his rowboat and set upon the waters. The rowboat swirled on the water as if sucked into a genie's bottle, and the White-haired Man dreamt of a beautiful white-haired woman dressed in silver and gold and longed for her embrace.

The White-haired Man drifted in his rowboat from place to place, always with the image of the Woman Tree foremost in his mind, always wondering what might have been had he touched her bark or smoothed her leaves, always seeking to return to her through the swift raveling of rivers and the slow unraveling of time — but his is another story....

And so you have it, Friend, the story of a woman who sold her soul and stitched it back by standing her ground. Told it to you, I have, as it was told to me, as you will tell it in your turn.

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