Hungry for This (a forest story)

The tree stands defiantly on the hill next to the river, reminding Eloi of the ones from Mixtec legend. He’s heard the story often—how two great cypress wove their roots together across a river and gave birth to humankind. He’s even more often seen one of these beauties fall and burn into dark embers of charcoal. Even so, this never gets easier.

He rests his ax on the gnarled trunk and looks out at the valley far below. From this angle he can see his milpa— the battered corn stalks clinging to the side of the mountain in testament to both the persistence and futility of life. The ears are still too small to eat, there are more bills than beans, and the donkey needs another vitamin shot because it just can’t keep up. So here he is at this tree once again pleading with God to spare him, like Abraham, from having to make this sacrifice.

Back at home, she awaits his decision. Eloi imagines her standing in the doorway with her face turned to the mountains, her fingers absentmindedly caressing her collarbone in that way that still made him go weak in the knees after all these years. He hears the baby’s laughter carried on the wind as he searches the alabaster sky for some kind of sign, but finds only a blank page with not a single word of advice.

Why had he returned? Maybe if he’d stayed away he could’ve saved more money and wouldn’t have to be burning trees to sell as charcoal in the market. Maybe if he’d stayed away, his sons could be planting trees and opening a tortilleria like she wanted. Instead, here he is at the land that called him back, his ax beside him.

He sighs again and turns to face the tree. It’s only a tree after all— a scrubby black oak about as big around as a man, maybe a hundred years old. It will probably fetch five hundred pesos. With that, he can buy some chickens to calm the grumbling bellies of the children waiting for him behind that moon-shaped face in the doorway.

“A measly five hundred pesos,” he mutters to the cicadas.

“That could buy a lot of food,” responds her voice in his head. “And the kids are hungry.”

Hungry. That’s what she told him when he returned from that trip: “we were hungry for you, mi amor, hungry for you.”

“And now we are hungry for this tree instead,” he thinks.

Eloi knows he’s not the only man on the hillside this morning. Even though the village council banned burning long ago, the people still do it anyway and everyone knows it. What else are they to do? The land used to provide enough to survive, but now the weather is changing, the fungi and diseases are spreading. The next generation wants access to education and technology and more comfortable houses— but these things cost money and farmers simply can’t compete with the cheaper imported crops that have flooded the markets. Some old-timers still talk about a mythical vein of gold they swear runs through the caves, but for Eloi it’s just that— mythical. Trees are at least safer than coca, right?

Still, he never got used to the smell of green life crisping into blackness to be collected— to watching it miniaturize under the dirt piled upon its flaming grave— and the other men are always teasing him when he cringes at the burnt fingers and palms. He tries telling himself that it’s just like skinning an animal–once the hair is gone it’s just meat— but then he invariably finds a clump of sparkly black needles, perfectly intact, refusing to become anything else in death.

So go then.

He feels her dark eyes on his neck, waiting for him to make up his mind. Behind him, the tree itself offers no defense. It doesn’t argue, nor wince under his touch. Rather, it’s he who shrinks in its presence. Eloi knows this land, these mountains, these trees, yet he’s always surprised to touch one in a moment like this— when he’s able to stand in nature not as a farmer or hunter or scavenger, but just a man in his world. Sure, his hands caress its soil every day— but by molding it, forcing it, pulling from it a daily sustenance for his children. Every rainy season he counts his blessings in the trees that are not felled, in the corn stalks that hold their roots into the ground, resisting the mudslides that come more frequently now than any elder can remember.

Yes, he forces nature, he fights with nature, he pleads with nature— all on a daily basis. Yet when was the last time he rested in the clover with crickets chirping around him and watched the clouds move by, marveling at the intricate web that is his world? Eloi can’t remember. He’s always too busy trying to survive in the harsh reality of that web.

Beyond the tree, the mountains stretch so far it’s possible to imagine the entire world is nothing but climbing and falling. Aside from that year in the North, he’s lived his entire life in the peaks between these two rivers. As a child he lived even farther up the mountains, far from anyone, in the cumbre where the mushrooms grew the size of a man’s head and the deer were plenty and the water bubbled crystal-clear from the source of the river, sparkling out onto the flat plateau.

Back then they’d still been allowed to hunt and fish but now there are too few; the shrinking river is too polluted with all the soap and chicken parts and toilet water trickling in. The forests are getting smaller, the deer and armadillos have faded into memory, and even the people have begun to disappear. They head North to live in the shadows, and become a voice on the other end of a telephone— or vanish completely, leaving enough questions behind to last a lifetime. Those that return don’t want to work the fields anymore; they’ve seen the neon lights and one can see the glint in their eyes. It’s easier to smuggle people, they say— or whatever else is currently needed by the Gringos. They walk without fear, they say, for they have no fingerprints from all those years of burning charcoal. But when home in between runs, they mostly hide out in the corner-store trading their money for alcohol to mute the numbers lurking in the background: how many dollars divided by how many years behind bars.

Eloi too has seen the neon lights, the vast cities of concrete. He walked for weeks across mountains and desert with no one to keep him company except his own voice in his head. There, in a place called Gilroy, he harvested garlic for endless days on a farm surrounded by clean white highways that led to clean white cities full of clean white people who ate nothing but nutrition bars and coffee. He’d longed for frijoles, for elotes, for his daughters’ laughter, his wife’s voice welcoming him home. And so he’d returned.

And to what? he asks himself now. To realize that Home is as fleeting as his existence there. The world is changing. So much new stuff coming in from the outside, all wrapped up in individual plastic bags. Farmers like him have no place in all this except maybe working in the factories making those plastic bags, which is exactly what his oldest son went and did. The teen just returned this morning to the city— to his concrete room shared with six others and his seat behind the machine that had sent a packing needle through his hand, resulting in an unpaid week off. He’d fought with his mother during the visit.

“You can’t go back,” she’d pleaded between tears.

“What else is there to do— stay here? And do what? Make charcoal?”

She’d looked at Eloi then, but what was there to say? The boy had a point.

The next son in line is so different, but he’s still a child. He can name all of the plants and insects encountered on a daily hike. He knows how to nurse a wounded animal back to health. He knows nothing of money except that it is the one thing that drives his family to argue. When Eloi asks him what he wants to do when he grows up, the boy says he wants to be a biologist. Of course he knows that will take a long time, he says, so he will go to the city to help his brother make plastic bags first. Sometimes Eloi wonders if there will be any forest left for the boy to come back to. Or any boy left inside to come back.

That son usually comes with him but today Eloi wants to be alone. His eldest’s retort had stayed with him. He’d been chewing on it along with his breakfast when his wife took one look at him, put the pan she was holding down on the table with a thud and said “oh for the love of God just make up your mind already.” She shooed the children from the kitchen, and when she put her hands on her hips he knew the time had come.

“It’s too painful living in limbo,” she told him, “not knowing when our last meal together might be, or what that meal might be since the weevils got the squash. And school has started and the girls need paper and pencils. So if you’re going back, then it’s time to go. And if you’re staying, then there’s a good-sized tree up on the hill behind the milpa. Unless you have some sort of better idea.”

And so here he stands, contemplating the irony of making one tree into charcoal to sell for money to buy imported paper and pencils created by another tree cut down across a vast ocean a world away. Two dead trees for his kids to go to school. He thinks of his youngest daughter’s face smiling up at him from the page, her little fingers wrapped around a tiny foreign corpse: his favorite child, so falsely innocent.

Eloi only made it through the third grade, but he’d understood when a government forester once told him trees were fifty percent carbon and that when they died that carbon heated the planet. There’s been a lot of talk recently of one day making money off of saving these forests— something about leaving them standing to soak up all the pollution coming out of the North, like a great big sponge. But the rumors have already started. If they put a price on the forests, people say, then they can take them away. Across the mountains many have already lost their homes to national parks. The rumors say the parks are going to make the government a whole lot of money when the scientists show up.

Eloi is no scientist, but he’s a farmer and he can understand that the planet breathes. He’s seen the dead butterflies. He can understand that the trees around him cool the planet in far-off places where he’s heard there exist mountains made of pure ice. What he cannot understand is this: if the only way to protect the forests is to leave them, where is he to go? Should he follow the foxes, the deer, the armadillo? They left no path in the desert.

He feels her shift the baby on her hip as she scans the tree-line for his return. She will have his bag prepared for the trip. She knows him so well, and her faith in him despite that fact is frightening. He leans his head forward to rest on the tree and thinks of the Bible story of Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of pea soup. Eloi thinks he can finally understand such hunger.

For what is there for him to decide, really? He can stay here and cut down this tree and continue to destroy the forest with his hunger. Or he can cut his losses, go North and send for them one at a time. Either way, one day his children will be pushed from these mountains towards concrete cities in search of colored paper and no one will be left to remember why the land was worth staying in. Either way, one day he will die—in a place called Home or in a place called Gilroy. In the end, does it really matter where?

He slides down the trunk to rest against the base of the tree, examining the edge of forest lying at his feet. A hawk screeches in the distance. The cicadas begin again their undulating crescendo. A drop of dew falls from a fiddlehead onto the earth to be absorbed again. He feels the life pulsing through the arboreal umbilical cord along his spine and his mouth falls open, gaping, like a hatchling desperate for sustenance— as if Home could be eaten and stored away like so many fat cells for hard times ahead. As if the roots and branches of this tree could— like those first Mixtec parents— rock him in the womb of the world.

He feels her watching him again, with those black eyes that bore straight to the depths of his soul, and realizes that he’s crying. Sighing once more, he wipes the tears from his eyes and the soil from his hands and stands to face his fate. He looks down at the winding clay road that cuts like a scar across the mountain and imagines the day when his daughter will be sitting in her clean white kitchen in a clean white city with a refrigerator full of foods packaged in individual plastic bags and no garden outside, no space even to be outside, no stars overhead. He hears her telling her husband “how poor we were. We were so hungry, so hungry.”

The umbilical cord is still humming when he swings the ax.