The Orchard

Word Count: 2,664

I became a source of disquiet unease for my parents at a very young age. It troubled Mother and Father that I appeared incapable of interacting with other children. I did not act like a ‘normal’ child and this greatly disturbed the people who brought me into this mundane world.

I was the first and only child. My parents did not bring me any siblings for fear they would turn out like me. Mother and Father did not understand me; they did not know how to communicate with me and this made them afraid of me.

It was not I was not able to interact with other children; I simply shared no common interests with them what-so-ever. I could not enjoy the company of children my age because they saw me as an oddity. As a general rule, I paid them no mind. I preferred the company of my other friends instead, for they understood me in a way no one else could.

My parents tested me for autism when I was a toddler. Of course the results came back negative. Enduring a multitude of tests over a period of several years, I proved to be normal in every sense of the word. None of the doctors Mother and Father carted me off to found anything wrong with me.

Simply because I had an uncanny ability to discern and detect patterns in the mundane ignorant people missed, the parents of my birth thought surely I was somehow mentally disabled. They almost seemed disappointed to find out I was not mentally challenged. It was as if they hoped something to be wrong with me.

As the years progressed and other children my age went off to Kindergarten, my parents decided to keep me home. They were undisputedly sure I would not be able to assimilate into the close social environment school provided. Truth be told, I didn’t want to waste my days learning at the slow pace of the dull dimwits who would be my classmates anyway.

Before my mother began to home school me, I spent most of my time out in the pecan orchards. The trees there were hundreds of years old, the land being passed down through several generations of my family. That was where my true friends made their home.

They were so joyful and performed beautiful dances accompanied by the sweetest of music just before each sundown. Most of the time, I simply watched them, clapping my hands with the beat of the music.  The dances sometimes being very intricate, they were too difficult for me to perform. I was satisfied plenty simply being in their presence.

During their holidays, my beautiful friends insisted I join in on the gaiety of the festivities. Every night was a celebration for them, so their holidays were over-the-top. I felt very awkward attempting the dances of my friends. I knew I was in the way and looked so out of place, but they did not mind in the least. They only wanted for me to share in the joy and happiness filling their lives.

My excursions into the orchards many times did not go uninterrupted as my birth parents sometimes snuck into the woods prying on my happenings. Were they to catch me clapping and dancing, they would think me insane for sure. Luckily my friends noticed my parents long before my parents noticed me. I never went unaware of their approach. When they found me I was typically reading a thick book for the duration of their eavesdropping. After my parents departed the orchard, I rejoined the festivities.

Several years passed and my education accelerated. At only age seven, I surpassed the materials typically given to seniors in high school. The concept escaped me that other children were not equally as smart. I could not understand how others demonstrated such difficulty in learning. Mother home schooled me because my parents feared what the people of our small community would say about their freak son. The town developed enough gossip of its own concerning me and my lack of friends, much less if others observed me on a daily basis.

I returned home following one joyful sunset celebration to catch some exceedingly disconcerting news. A large corporation was buying up all of the land around here. It planned to develop all of the beautiful orchards and farmlands into apartments and shopping malls. Dad said, when the representative corporation returned, if he got a good enough offer, he was selling the orchard. First he planned to cut down all of the pecan trees to sell for lumber. The developers did not want the wood, only the land. Pecan lumber caught a substantial amount of money, and he planned on making a hefty profit from this.

A panic filled my gullet with the receipt of the devastating news. What was going to happen to my friends? Cutting down the trees meant the death of them all. In a state of shock I began yelling “You can’t kill them! You can’t kill them!”

All reason left my mind and I began to fight them physically, but my struggle was a futile one. Dad was much bigger than me: I was still only twelve. I soon ceased my struggle and dropped hard on the tile floor beneath my feet. Balled up in the fetal position I continued to whimper the same words over and over, “You can’t kill them.”

The local doctor worked out of his home very close to our own, and he did not mind making house calls. Almost immediately after his arrival, the doctor gave me a strong sedative. In only a few seconds everything became an absolutely blissful peace. The next day I awoke in my room. My dream friends did not visit me that night; the manmade medications prevented them from doing so.

When I awoke the next day the clock was already close to striking noon. Quickly I changed into my outdoor clothes and ran out of the house. I saw my father working the pecan harvester, gathering the nuts off of the ground, and I mustered a slight gleam of hope. He worked since early morning, judging by the amount of completed work. That meant he had not yet been to town. At least for now, I did not fret over the sale of the land. I knew he did not speak to the corporate man yet, and he would not until the next morning.

After dinner that night, I cleaned and put away the dishes. I waited until everyone fell asleep and made my way deep in the heart of the manicured forest where my friends always awaited my arrival. I thought along the way about how to break the news to them.  I did not know how to tell them we would never again covert in the light of the full moon. We would never again celebrate one of their sacred holidays.  I did not know how to tell them their world was about to be destroyed, their lives were about to come to an end.

Immediately the others knew something terrible was on my mind. It ripped my hart to find out I would never see my dryad friends ever again. On this night there was no celebration. No dancing and singing joyously filled the cool night air. Tonight we mourned, for we knew soon all of my friends would be dead and I would be alone.

The elders and I sat for a serious discussion, something we never did before. The topic, of course was how to save the lines of these century old trees and those who resided within them. We talked until the sun began to set.

During supper that night I stayed quiet and took in every last word my parents said. Dad told Mom the men were coming to cut down the trees on Thursday. That only gave me three days to figure out how to save the lives of thousands of innocent beings.

After my parents went to bed and had enough time to drift off into a deep slumber, I snuck out of the house. I had to climb down from the third story, which I did before with great difficulty. I walked toe to heel from my bed and over to one of the windows. This was always the easiest to escape. I looked out to see a heavy mass of vines grown up the southern wall of my home in only a matter of a few hours. My friends were helping me escape the confines of my bedroom.

The elders and I discussed again our possible options to save their lives, but it always came back to one specific solution. However horrible it was, it was something that had to be done. Once we reached an accord I went back to sneak back into my third story window. The vines grew to the thickness as a small woman’s wrist, which made it incredibly easy to climb back into the window.

The next morning I looked back out my open window and noticed the ivy retreated from the walls and back into the flower bed. I went down the stairs for breakfast and made it a point to act a bit odd. I would take a long pause before answering any questions my parents might ask me. I would make myself zone out on something just to bring to their mind something was wrong with me. I shoveled the food into my mouth rather than displaying at least a rudimentary etiquette.

Father went outside after breakfast and Mother commenced to cleaning up the dishes. I sat at the table ten minutes or so after I finished, just to arouse much more suspicion to the situation. Finally I rose from the kitchen table and shuffled my feet against the hard wood floor in the hall, standing in front of the door a good minute or two before I exited the house.

I found my father was already at work. He began to use the belt vibrator to shake the loose pecans from the trees, but he was nowhere close to my usual hangout. As I sadly strolled to that one single clearing, the dryads began to exit their trees. While they walked along side me, they spoke to me and I spoke to them. I hoped my parents would see this and come up to do one of their regular spying visits.

It must not have taken long for Dad to see me apparently talking to myself. I could hear the belt vibrator stop some ways behind me. I could not resist the temptation not to turn around to look and found my father quickly making his way to the side door of the house. Just as planned, I slowly made my way to the clearing where all of the celebrations took place. My strange actions worked, and my parents thought they snuck up on me in my favorite place of that massive orchard.

The others began to sing and dance as they would on any other day while I clapped my hands and swayed my head with the beat of the music. Things progressed as normal and we all tried to ignore the presence of my prying parents. They could not see the dryads as their minds were too dull to perceive anything beyond their five limited senses.

Mom and Dad watched my actions and thought I was dancing and singing in the warm sunlight all by myself. This finally confirmed what they always believed about me. They thought I was insane and probably planned to institutionalize me. We anticipated all of this though, even counting on it as a crucial part of our plan.

They watched me engaged in my strange spectacle for over an hour before I heard them calling my name. I continued to ignore them and persisted in my joyful activities. My friends and I all hoped they would make their way up to me. When I failed to heed their calls, I knew they would come and drag me home physically. The eldest of the dryads, along with a few others, lay in wait.

When my parents were within their reach, the roots of the trees rose out of the ground like tendrils. Clumps of dirt fell as the roots coiled like pythons, holding my dim witted parents tight. The roots did not strangle them like the snake would. Instead the roots held them firmly in place.

They screamed out to me, begged me to help them. I paid them no mind. The only good thing they accomplished was blessing the world with my presence. I continued with the dryads in their nightly celebration.

The roots of the elder shook my parents violently sending dirt flying everywhere. What happened next should have terrified me; it should have horrified me to my very soul. Instead, I found solace in the actions of the elder.

The smaller roots burrowed their way into my parents’ flesh, digging into them as they screamed in pain. The elder drained them of all fluids in their bodies. The screaming weakened, and eventually it stopped. When he was finished their corpses were dry and stiff. They looked like mummies without the rags.

The elder opened a hollow in his massive trunk, depositing their bodies inside. Withdrawing the roots from their bodies, he pulled them back into the earth. Two large bunches of mistletoe sprouted from his branches. There my parents’ souls would remain. So long as the elder lived, they would live as well.

At the end of the celebration, four of the dryads walked into the circle of the others. They carried a large box by means of two long poles. The dryads set the ornamented box to the ground and turned it on its side. Precious metals, coins, and jewels poured onto the ground. The dryads dug all of out this ground; items lost over many centuries. Some of the coins were minted from a metal I never saw before.

I picked up one of the odd coins to examine it closely. It almost appeared to be glass filled with microscopic flakes of gold and platinum. Most of the coins I sold to collectors through a prestigious auction house. The strange coins sold for millions of dollars each, but the coins of common metals brought in a lot of money as well. I worked with the auction house to sell the jewels, jewelry and other antique items as well.

I hired an attorney to act as my proxy and to handle the recordkeeping. Through him, I purchased all of the land around mine, dozens of square miles. We created a tax fund, a banking account holding twelve million dollars. The interest alone would pay the taxes on the land for an indefinite period of time. There was no way I was going to let some corperation to come in and ‘modernize’ the area…

I protected my friends and insured their continued existence. I took their seeds, the pecans they dropped to the ground, and planted them all over the land I purchased. The seeds would sprout the next year, giving life to the dryads’ progeny. When they saw me doing this, the maples and the oaks asked me to spread their seed as well.

During this time and for several years to follow I planted trees, tended the forest and enriched the soil. This allowed the dryads to grow healthy and strong. To show their gratitude, the dryads promised to grant me one wish. There was no question of what I wanted. I did not have to struggle to find my greatest desire. My request was a simple one.

The next spring, growing near the elder, was a small vibrant sapling. One day I would grow into a big strong tree. For untold years to come I would celebrate nightly, living with my friends of the orchard.

Copyright 2019 ©