My siblings and I were quite content to do the bidding of The Eye Tree. But there was someone who cared about us, who was not so happy with her ruling.
This was Mom.
She had dealt with her share of paranormal overr the years, and, from snatches of conversation with us, had gathered that we were dealing with spirits.
But were they good or bad? The idea for The Stick House, and it’s purpose, seemed irresistably good.
At last, though, she challenged our thinking about the Tree. This is how it happened:
My older sister and brother had originally built the Stick House to a height of about eight feet. They had carefully laid a foundation of large branches, nested in the dirt, and stacked and woven other sticks and branches between three living trees, and another upright which we had taken from a lesser elm near the Eye Tree. (My little sister had gotten bonked on the head during the process of getting the large dead branch down from its donor tree.) I spent most of my time fetching smaller sticks as filler, and collecting grass for the same purpose, as did my little sister.
Even without these additions, though, the Stick House was amazingly wind-proof. I remember standing inside of it, watching between the holes in the walls as the cheat grass bent before the breeze, yet not feeling a breath where I stood within. Outside, dirt-devils whirled by, picking up sand, corn husks, and leaves.
The Stick House was also difficult to see into from the outside. Inside, my siblings and I felt invisible. We very nearly were. It was difficult to tell whether anyone was in the House, unless you stood in the doorway, and had come for the purpose of seeing. Even then, it was possible to miss occupants. Strange, we thought…but very welcome. The place was built for refugees, after all.
Another thing you must not forget is that The Eye Tree was ordering how the structure went up. She guided the placement of each branch and stick with whispers to our minds, and made visible the next needed branch, up to a quarter mile away.
After the first three walls were up, which took a long day, my brother insisted on building a roof. The Eye Tree did not want a roof; such was not in her plans, and she repeatedly said, “No.” But he defied her, and went out the next day to build a sturdy roof which he thatched with bundles of loose grass and clumps of sod.
The day after, the roof was fallen in. There had been a terrific wind storm during the night, which he promptly blamed, and he and I built up the roof again, this time weaving the sticks carefully, and wedging them into the solider parts of the wall with smaller sticks and grass. None of the House’s walls had been affected at all by the wind. If anything, they seemed to stand taller. By that afternoon, which had proven exceptionally calm, the roof had caved in again. My brother got discarded bailing twine and bound it up in such wise as to make it withstand the harshest winds we knew. I helped him, and we promptly went to get Mom, to show her our handywork. By the time we got back out to The Stick House, minutes later, the roof had fallen in for the last time. Again, the walls had not budged. We stared in dismay at the shambles of sticks and twine, and then Mom made her challenge. She had been meaning to talk to us, she said, about this work we were doing, and whether or not it was of God. She challenged my older brother and and sister, particularly, to pray that if the ideas we had built The Stick House in response to were from God, that the work would prosper, and that if they weren’t, that any demonic forces would leave.
Mom seemed to know, though we were not ready to admit it, that demons held the walls to their impressive height, and bound the sticks in place. She suspected, furthermore, that they were responsible for sabotaging the roof.
My brother and sister would not say that The Tree was bad. Neither could they defend her, saying that she was good.
They prayed.
The next day, the walls had fallen to a compact three foot in height…four where cross-braces held them to the living trees and the one dead upright.
For days after this, we worked to rebuild the ruins, but our best efforts failed to produce anything but a muddy heap of sticks, which Dad came to call “the fort”.
We built it up with cheat grass, mud, and the branches of the roof. We spent whole afternoons up to our elbows in five gallon buckets of mud and grass, chinking the walls with the mixture. We dragged branches from all over the elm grove to build with, and pulled down dead branches that wouldn’t fall on their own. We sawed some, scaling the old trees until we were scraped and bruised. This was nothing like the ease and fleeting intuitive hum of following The Tree’s wishes. The walls eventually reached six feet in height again, but were in constant need of repair, and seemed clumsy. As we could not get the walls to respond to our needs, we began digging out the floor, and at last attained again some of the comfort and invisibility of the original House.
To be continued…
Part 7
