The shade beneath the giant hanging limbs of the great tree brought a welcome cool relief from the stillness of the heat that surrounded them as Robby and Cynthia stepped out of the sunlight. Little changed in the twenty years, a mere blip in the thousands of years this tree had lingered there. A living thing set inland from the coast and the tidepools and the marshlands. An isolated tree with its thick branches flying outward like its name suggested, like an angel’s wings. It still inspired awe after all the years away for Robby. Worth the pilgrimage to pay respects as if it was an old woman or old man that deserved your honor.
This time away, alone with Cynthia, was planned for days, but Robby pressed her to make it this day, set time aside to walk and talk. He needed to probe her without revealing all of his thoughts and inclinations. He wanted to discern what Carrington’s plan was all about and whether there was an opportunity somewhere where Robby could understand Cynthia better.
“How’s he treating you?”
“You keep finding different ways of asking me that, but that’s the most direct one yet,” she said.
“I’m interested...”
“Like he’s the sole focus of my life.” An odd thing for a wife to say, perhaps. But considering Carrington and his domineering manner, perhaps it wasn’t anything but defensiveness. “I’m not a trophy. I’ve made my own way...with the school for the arts that I helped found downtown. My interests go beyond golf handicaps and turf types.”
“That’s good,” Robby laughed, enjoying her aggressiveness and strident posturing.
“What?”
“No, I’m happy you’ve done more than just be his wife. That you’ve been productive in so many ways. Nurturing kids.” He could tell right away that this might have hit too close again to a sensitive point with Cynthia, unintentionally or not, but he wished he could explain that last point better. He wished he could turn the attention back to the tree, so he purposefully stopped and studied it as if his remark was just an offhand thing.
The tree was a centerpiece. It shaded and surrounded them with its weeping limbs and leaves and dripping moss. As it threaded outward it paradoxically grew heavy and pulled back towards its roots. The limbs, some of them bent into the earth to emerge again out the other end ten feet away, behaving like a new tree born from the ground. Taking in the whole of it and trying to evade the subject he had just touched upon, Robby said, “Reminds me of Medusa with snakes crawling out her hair.”
She stopped and studied the limbs too, traveling back along the same roads of the past Robby tried to bring her back to. “Pop adored this old tree,” she said. “Paid homage to it every week like it was a holy place. He’d say how it’s watched over everything for a thousand years. Watching man’s and God’s changes. Withstood ‘em all too. Slavery, rebellion, revolution, civil war, hurricanes. Only living thing still standing around here. Witnessing.
Robby couldn’t resist.
“And you and your husband wanna make it the centerpiece of a signature hole.”
Cynthia kept looking at the tree, lost somewhere, letting his words settle and measuring her response.
“That’s his plan.”
“I thought you were with him?
“I’m not against him. How could I be? He’s been good to me,” she said. “Carrington provides.”
Provides what? Robby thought it but didn’t speak it. Money? Love? Sex? Which of these?
School kids fresh off a yellow bus, local kids, probably from Mount Pleasant or Summerville by the looks of them, mostly white kids, on a tour of the plantations, making a detour to visit the most famous old tree. Most of them have probably been dragged over on school trips or with their parents before. The kids would’ve preferred Citadel Mall over seeing a tree. The best it could possibly offer was a climb, but that wouldn’t ever be allowed. Still, a boy or two would try to walk up a low limb clinging to the earth.
“I know what you think about us,” Cynthia said icily. “His faithfulness. Despite what you think, he’s never been cruel to me. He’s never hit me.”
Robby was surprised she would say it. It wasn’t something that Robby would’ve considered: Carrington being a wife-beater. She wouldn’t stand for it, no matter how much money he had.
Besides, the way she worked out, and the tautness of her arms, suggested Cynthia could kick Carrington’s ass.
“But I know he’s never loved me,” she said.
“Sure he has,” Robby found himself saying, defending Carrington. Why was that?
“Don’t you know?” she said and started walking apart, letting the kids from the bus surround her, brush past her to the lowest limb. “He wanted me because I was yours. That’s why. When he couldn’t play anymore, didn’t get drafted like you did, he decided he wanted to take something from you. He couldn’t take your talent. He could take me.”
Jeez, she sounded like maybe she took too many psych courses at the local community college, giving her just enough knowledge to make her dangerous. To say it so plainly, something that he had forgotten long ago, buried away or simply left behind, like a watch you might leave and forget on a hotel bed stand or at the pad of a one-night-stand.
“You left and he came.”
Robby realized that these memories were still fresh with her, but Robby had long ago abandoned them. The memories. Now he was coming back to them. Now strangely defending his opponent, his enemy, his friend.
“But is he doing right?” he asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“Is he thinking right? Is this the best plan...for you?”
What was Robby talking about? The land development that would engulf and change Angel Oak and the people who lived around it, or was it Carrington’s proposition? Cynthia didn’t seem to indicate that she was thinking anything but the development. “He wants to rip up this old land and it’ll make a difference in people’s lives, there’s no question. I know that. But there’s all this deep history here down in the roots and ingrained into the trunk,” she said as she ran her hand over the deep rivets of the bark. “All this brutality in this ageless beauty. Did you know there was lynching here?”
A caretaker, an older black man, looked sternly at the mostly white kids trying to climb the tree limbs. But perhaps out of regard for the teachers, parents, and chaperones, he said nothing. Let the kids go about their play without rebuke.
“Look at the tree, how it stays the same,” Cynthia said. “How it bends its branches down, inviting you, defying you to climb it. Seems to me that history proves it doesn’t matter what’s nearby...a shack, a church, or a strip joint. It’ll still be here. It’s always been here, through every storm, through every era. When the first slaves where dragged here from Africa and the Caribbean and auctioned off in the market downtown to work the rice and cotton here.”
The nagging image of her father came into Robby’s head, and along with it the paradox. That this daughter of the son of the daughter of a man owned by another man would elect this particular path.
“What do you think Pop’d say?” Robby asked her.
“I’ve thought about this and I know what my Pop would say better than anyone else would know. He’d say some things don’t have to be about progress. Some things are best staying about the same. Sun comes up, sun goes down just the same on every man regardless of his station. But my father was a realist too, don’t you forget. If given the choice I can almost hear him say to me, ‘What’s the difference, sugar? It’s a rich land with poor people living on it that somebody can make money from. Should best be us.’”
(Read Chapters Eighteen and Twenty of Blacksmith's Girl.)