A draw knife is a thin steel blade between two perpendicular wooden handles. You grip them firmly and draw the blade down on a stump to flay the bark. It lifts like skin, cracking, breaking, to show the sapwood underneath. Turn the stump and draw again, then again and again. Its end is nobility undressed: the giver of fire, shelter, oxygen. Shave and shave and shave again, the wood curling like ribbons of butter. Make the noble a serf: a spoon, bowl, plank, handle. This requires forgetting: You can neither make a tree nor understand its secret life. The roots like underground fingers interlaced with the fingers of other trees. A spoon, a plank you understand.
Ownership, you understand.
*
A concussion is a blow to the head that flings gray matter against bone and bruises it. There is no cure, only rest. No screens, no sounds. I am a writer, and I am concussed. I write daily to understand my life. Give the best part of the day to myself is my mantra, which is why I write at dawn. Tucked under quilts and wool, I rattle a keyboard, setting down the first words that come to mind. Today the words are coffee. Pink. Blanket weight. Draw knife. I like the way the last one sounds. And looks, so much that I bought one. A wood carver’s tool with a curved blade and carved grips. I cannot use it because I am concussed, but I didn’t buy it to use it. I bought it because it is an elegant tool. The kind my husband would have loved. I have taken it out of the box and fingered the blade. I can write about a draw knife’s allure, though I am supposed to sleep, eat, nap. I wonder if I am permitted to think, imagine, or write. I shouldn’t be writing but I must because I am concussed and I live alone.
I need someone to hear.
*
The doctor asks for an emergency contact. I think hard, not because my head has been whacked but because I’m an orphan. The family’s identified patient, the “problem child.” In a crisis, I have no one to call.
I was diagnosed with a cerebellar defect in my fifties. It announced itself with blurred vision and repeated falls. I needed surgery, the neurologist said, to prevent further damage. Afterwards, my sister asked, “Why do you keep calling it brain surgery?”
I shielded my eyes from the sun: I needed to hear her right.
What do you mean, I asked?
“You keep saying you need brain surgery,” she said again, “and it’s upsetting everyone.”
Who?
Mom, dad, everyone.
What would she like me to call it instead?
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Maybe you can put up railings in your house and wait a year?”
Crack.
Another blow to the head.
*
The Adverse Childhood Events Scale is a measure of childhood trauma that predicts risk of physical, emotional, and psychological maladies in adulthood. Abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction; the more you experienced, the greater the risk of drug addiction, depression, cancer, stroke, and heart disease, among other disorders. The assessment asks about getting pushed or slapped or verbally abused, or seeing someone else pushed or slapped, or having a parent attempt suicide, or being touched inappropriately by an adult. Of 17,000 ACES study participants, 12.4 percent, the smallest and reddest slice of a mostly pale pink pie chart, have four or more ACES. I have five. All those things happened in my childhood—and more. I didn’t have a parent go to jail or need foster care. No one put cigarettes out in my skin. But I was repeatedly cracked in the head. There are no questions for blows to the brain.
No questions about how my mother told me I was the cause of her suffering and pretended to take a bottle of pills when I was six, eight, ten, fourteen, sixteen. How she put a knife to her throat and told me to push it in because you’d love to see me dead. How she screamed that I wanted to have sex with my father…on Christmas Eve. How she told me she prayed to Satan to release me, how the minister came over to exorcise me.
I remember that kid. Brown pigtails, freckles. Lost in a dollhouse or the woods. Lover of tadpoles, chickadees, and the arms of the maple tree she nestled in to read. Florence Nightingale, Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth: all the noblest biographies in the children’s library. She loved to sing.
I try to imagine a mother seeing in that little bunny of a girl, satanic possession. In time I would come to believe it: Of course I did. That’s how it works. She said it, screamed it, sobbed it; my sisters joined in chorus. Evil evil evil. Today we call it verbal abuse or gaslighting. I call it shunning. I call it a smear. That’s how it feels, as if all the colors and sounds in a moment melt into a messy clot. Like hardened candlewax or the detritus from an explosion. A detonation in the brain.
*
ACES are a blade. Sharp and quick. It’s easy to peel the skin off young wood. That’s where they do the real cutting.
*
I love the emptiness that is a forest. The green light through the leaves. The silence that is not absent sound but an absence of the human.
As a kid I snuck out at night. Sat under yellow-lit windows and listened. To clinking glasses, tinny laughter, the television. I wanted to belong, but not to that.
I stood in the dark with a chorus of crickets. I pressed my cheek to the silver skin of a tree and felt the life inside. An aliveness in me that I could not speak. Knew that I was touching all of creation, and wept. Knew that such knowledge made me alone.
*
To be shunned is to be owned. Because to smear or to shun requires forethought and consistency. In a word, it requires attachment. I live in the mind of my shunner, and she in mine. One role defines the other: jailer and captive.
To be shunned is to be concussed. I remember the first time. A family party: I was not invited. Crack. Then my newborn son was sick and nobody came. Crack. Then my husband was dying and nobody came. Crack, crack, crack. Then he died…and nobody came. Each instance, a stun-gun to my head. A bit of my life lost to the shock. Many instances over many years. In sum the wordless conveyance that
Your life is expendable.
*
I need.
These are not words I dare to say. I have learned, or have I?
The concussion was a freak accident. An ambulance carried me away. In the hospital, half-blind with pain and fear, I text my sisters: I need help. It is hard, I say, to go through something so scary alone. I have two black eyes, a cut nose, and a bruised forehead and knee.
A day later I get a text.
“When you are alone,” one sister says, “all you can do is laugh.”
There is nothing else.
I live two miles from my father, who tells me another sister visited him.
“I felt really bad for her,” he says, his voice resonant with feeling.
Why?
“She is really worried about you.”
This is when I know: One can be concussed from a blow or concussed from mercilessness. The neurological detonation is the same.
*
My husband was a woodworker. He loved trees. He fashioned a bow for his daughter in three shades of wood: ivory, chestnut, and chocolate. He bent it in a heated box the way my long-gone forebears bent wood for lobster traps. I watched him work the wood: caress and measure it, mark it, cut and sand it; rub in oil. A tree should not be felled unless one is prepared to treat it this way, with reverence.
When my beloved clapped his pants, they exhaled sawdust.
A tree has rings. A hackneyed metaphor for a life like an onion’s layers or the pit of a fruit as its heart. Lest we forget: The rings of ancient trees tell of phenomenological histories buried: meteors, droughts, ice, and fire. There is deep time in a tree as in human beings. One cannot detonate a human being if one understands: You cannot make this woman or understand her secret life. To shun her, you must forget common humanity. You must reduce nobility to serfdom. A woman who writes and reads and sings of trees becomes an inert thing. An object to wound, discard, resent, ignore. Your captive invites your secret sadism; your hatred is purposeful. An introject, some call it: command of the very thing you most fear. Yourself being flayed, carved, discarded.
Irresistible, that fresh drawing of the blade.
*
I have a dream: I am in a cave with iron bars. The jailor comes, black-robed and faceless. Jangles the keys and opens the door. My choice: walk out or stay. Captivity is what I know best. Expendability is what I know best.
In the morning I write. The best part of the day; the pink light, a gift to myself. The blanket-weight that tells of gravity, earth-boundedness, roots, fingers interlaced underground. The arterial pulse of a tree. I have a concussion; I have had many concussions. I imagine each one memorialized by a ring: If they slice open my head, will there be graceful concentric circles, or circles disrupted by knots?
For concussion, there is no cure. Only rest and sleep. And thinking and imagining. I close my eyes and rattle the keyboard. I write what I see: The pigtailed-bunny-girl sitting in a tree, a safe strong lap in which to read. Her brown eyes lit with the leaf-drenched light. She knows too much about good and evil. And I know what she does not say: that we belong to the trees.
Yes, I say, it’s time.
Melanie S. Smith is a 2019 graduate of the GrubStreet Memoir Incubator; her work has appeared in Ruminate, The Common, and Cagibi as well as the yearly anthology, Ms. Aligned. She teaches writing and counter story at Boston University.
