Space & Mango Guts

          The tree is odder than the things in town, but then again most things in your grandmother’s garden are. There are times where your ama slips in and out of the orchard vines, where at night Yaya Coching tells you bedside rumors about the voices that roam through the creeping tendrils in the dead of night and the dogs themselves are too scared to howl. Sometimes you can swear there is something in the wood of the walls that creak too loudly and keep you wide awake and alert until your mother comes in to call you down for breakfast.

         Sure, you might concede, these things are strange. But none were stranger than the big old mango tree at the very corner of your grandparent’s garden, which loomed over its territory and into the street, bent with its lush branches filled with deliciously fat fruit, and yet not even the bravest of the town children even stopped to consider sneaking a bite of it. Its shade was oddly cool, even in the summer. There, the sweat beads clung cold and dead to your skin, and though the breeze never made it to its trunk, would never even stir the frailest leaves that clung to its cracked wood, you would sit and shiver in its chilling grace until your yaya would come out and scold you for disturbing its peace. As if it was old enough to garner a respect that your childhood self could not fathom.

         At night, in the days of your youth, your father would maliciously joke of the young children that would hang about underneath its branches, before the town kids had learned to leave it alone. Most likely they had wanted to mill about and cause trouble for your grandmother’s property, he would say. He could not recall, he had only been a young boy back then. He would recount his own list of tall tales, all ending with some fairy or duwende carting the young ones into some underground fantasy, never to be seen again. Sometimes, when he had snuck one too many bottles of beer under your mother’s notice, he would admit that the trees took the children for themselves. He never answered when you asked if they were true. Once you had asked your grandmother, and all she had grunted was that she was glad that those troublemakers were gone for good. God, and how she loved that old mango tree. She would turn back to kneading at the cold dough in her wrinkled hands, and your eyes would once again fall back to the mango tree that sat a distance from the windows, looming and forgotten, at the far edge of the property wall. You think this is something that the grown ups are hiding from you, and you don’t mind it much. The tree has never hurt you.

         You have grown plenty since then. Taxes and college and moving out have stripped you of a childhood in the broiling provinces, and it has been almost nine years since you have been back to that old barrio, down past the crooked black fence of your grandparent’s country home and into their green maze of a garden. But now it has been a few weeks since your grandmother's passing, and you pay respects to their old house when you and your parents return from the funeral. Your father puts his hand consolingly on your shoulder as you gaze about the property, eyes settling on that same old landmark that marks the edge of your grandmother’s garden.

         You spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around the orchards, and now that you are towering and tall, you discover it isn’t the same terrifying maze you had thought it as a child. In some ways it is a relief, in more ways it is disappointing. When your mother calls you in for dinner, you knock absently at the wood, finding it empty and lifeless: the false ghosts of a past long abandoned. You will sleep soundly tonight.

         From your seat at the end of the table, you glance now and then at the silhouette of the old tree as dusk sets in, then early evening. You wonder, too, if that was only a figment of your imagination. Your family had held your grandmother’s wake in their country home, led the funeral procession down the streets of the town, carrying the heavy coffin between the shoulders of your father, your uncles, and a few of the young barrio boys you had once known that had come to pay their respects to the old woman. Even they had still been careful to avoid the eaves of the large mango tree; even as the noon sun had beat down on their backs they would swerve to avoid its long distorted shadows on the dusty province road.

         But it is late evening now, and you are watching out of the wooden slots of the bedroom window as you lay awake in bed, kept up more for the sweltering heat than for the sounds of an old house settling its foundations. Your father and mother have, as always, slept in the other guest bedroom, and you are left alone to reflect on this childhood home that now seems as odd to you as any stranger’s abode. In the quiet, you reflect on the funeral. You wonder about how you mourned for her, how the small town had mourned the loss of one of its few members. You wonder at how the house had mourned for her.