Katie's Tree​​

​

It was the summer I met Katie that the trees began to hum. Not everyone could hear it; it was mainly children who spoke of it, talking about the humming that started when the sky got dark. For some it was a comfort that helped them fall asleep, but others complained about it being too loud and waking them up in the middle of the night. At first, parents mostly disregarded these statements, thinking them isolated to their own children’s imaginations, especially right before bedtime, maybe the result of traffic or electrical wires or cicadas. It took a few months, from what I remember, until people started paying more attention to what their children described, almost uniformly, as the humming trees. There were then around that time a few adults who also began to claim to hear the humming. But these were usually those kinds of people who were paid even less attention to than children. Street people, public drug users, or ‘crazies’ whose testimonies were not taken very seriously if at all. Some didn’t stick around either. They were transient, coming and going, disappearing as quickly as they appeared.

​

There were also a few who made claims about hearing the humming trees and who lived in more stable conditions, but these were also generally disregarded as the kind of benign crackpot conspiracy theorist or weirdo who gravitated to the oddest unscientific claims. With confidence as their sole authority, they would go so far as to proclaim that they knew what specifically the trees were saying, though when pressed the content was usually vague and contradictory. They rambled on about this humming starting when the sun went down and the first stars appeared, and that it continued humming until the dawn when the final stars disappeared in the growing light of the sinking night. And like the stars in the night sky, these people too came and went, and nobody paid much attention to them.

​

Katie was one of these weirdos. I don’t think she ever used drugs herself but she certainly had no problem dolling them out, especially to me at the beginning when she was trying to help me hear these trees. And while the general wisdom attributed the humming to the trees, Katie assured me that this was in fact not the case. Only some of the trees could be heard humming, she told me, and some louder than others. She claimed that the oldest ones or the tallest ones were the most consistent and the loudest – they taught the youngers, she added. And she would explain her reasoning by stating that it was because they pointed at the stars and followed them, but she couldn’t really go further into the mechanics of it all and, if pressed, would act as if that was an obvious consequence of trees pointing themselves at stars. She also insisted somewhat contradictorily that despite popular opinion, which was almost always wrong anyway, it was not so much the trees that hummed as the entire universe; the trees were kind of like the ends of instruments that resonated out what everything else was humming. At times she even became adamantly annoyed on the general focus on the trees. She much preferred to claim that the trees had very little to do with anything and that it was the whole harmony of the spheres that people were hearing finally, simply being expressed through the oldest trees that knew what they were doing.

​

That, of course, didn’t help her case much. Her insistence, which could be quite embarrassing at times when she started on that topic of conversation in public, that the trees were only part of the greater harmony, led most to dismiss her even more as a weirdo not to be taken seriously. It’s definitely how I thought of her when I first met her. She was sitting beside me at a cafe and wanted to talk. It was awkward at the start, being too polite to tell her to leave me alone and too reserved to relax into a conversation with a stranger, and a pretty strange stranger at that. But she had a certain disarming charm, a way of talking that didn’t overwhelm with monologue and showed enough genuine curiosity and inquiry, that the initial awkwardness of talking to a stranger melted after a few minutes. Although she certainly was strange and never really improved on that, she seemed to know how much a person could tolerate her and kept within those limits. And what was, back then, even more strange to me than her occasional hints at singing trees, was her astute knowledge of the history of science. She knew and cared very little of the complexities of modern physics, but was surprisingly well read in Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Galileo. I was amazed once, during a particularly heated discussion on cultural assumptions preventing us from seeing the reality of a situation, that she began to talk about how Galileo’s theory of tides completely contradicted his own insights on physical momentum. But more often than not she seemed a bit embarrassed at her arcane knowledge. She would start talking about some seventeenth-century scientist but then stop suddenly and smile bashfully, before trying to steer the conversation in a completely new direction.  And as I got to know Katie better, I came to realize that this peculiarity stemmed from a genuine eagerness for companions to accompany her on her life journey rather than a desire to teach and lord over those behind her.

​

After seeing her at the cafe a few times and once just sitting in a park looking up at the trees, we became friends, and I sealed that friendship with an offer to help her move a week later. It was the first time that I had been to her place, and curious to see how she allowed her external space to reflect whatever was inside of her. She had found a small place on the first floor of a three-story house, which was a definite improvement from her basement suite. And she didn’t have many possessions; most were already in boxes when I arrived. She was a bit sheepish with their contents, but over the course of the week after the initial move, warmed up enough to let me help her unpack. Besides numerous books, she possessed mostly an array of oddities and touristy mementos seemingly without any overarching guiding force. There were figurines of cute smiling dwarves alongside the more serious, high fantasy dragons baring teeth; Bavarian beer steins and gaudy tea sets; pictures of landscapes probably taken from the curb or a thrift store, and strange fabrics and tapestries of apparent Eastern origins or influence. It was all fairly typical, I thought, of the amassment of stuff of someone like Katie. I was, I had to admit to myself later, a bit disappointed in her at being so predictable with her collecting habits.

​

Her books, on the other hand, were a bit more interesting because of how wide ranging they were. She was completely unashamed of an extensive collection of vintage erotica, which she shelved haphazardly alongside a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra with a broken spine, which she admitted never reading beyond the first page. Her source of early modern science was also revealed. She had translations and collected volumes of authors both ancient and modern I had never heard of in my life. As I flipped through a few, I noticed her handwriting making brief comments sporadically throughout. Most of these were unintelligible, except for occasional note like “cf. Fermat’s little theorem,” written randomly, and for that reason even more bewilderingly, on the final page of a book on Linnaeus.

​

There was one box, however, that she was very protective over, though she tried very hard to appear to be not protective at all. I noticed her first shifting it under the table with her foot as if to remove it from my attention. And then later, I saw her carry it to her bedroom in the back where she covered it with a sheet. I didn’t pry further into the contents of the box, but she remained nervous about it and would glance over to her room, almost involuntarily, where the box remained in full view. After the move, I had visited Katie’s place often, and although she never bothered getting a door or any kind of separating device for her room, the box under the sheet was no longer visible.

​

It was also right around that time that people started talking more about the humming of the trees. I recalled afterwards that she had mentioned this humming in passing but never in any kind of detail. I always assumed it was just some reference to something I didn’t quite get. But once other people started talking about this apparent humming that only children could hear, it began to occupy a place in almost all of Katie’s conversations as she developed a reserved obsession over it. And even back then, at the beginning of that summer, she insisted that it was not the trees alone that were humming but the harmony of the spheres. But incorrect origins of the humming were not Katie’s only frustration, not even her main one. I could see that she was growing increasingly irritated by the fact that she was constantly dismissed on this topic, and overlooked for the testimony of children. People distrusted her and her opinions on the matter and saw her more as a weird opportunist who was claiming some secret knowledge about this unique phenomenon to find some kind of validation of herself. I knew better and although I really thought she was out of line sometimes or verging too close to a fringe, almost crazy, worldview, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. I myself found it hard to align what she was saying to what seemed most likely the reality, but even though I had only known her a few weeks, I had already developed a deep respect for her. I couldn’t dismiss her like I could the other adults or sometimes children who came up with the most outlandish comments on these humming trees – humming trees, which, by the way, almost no one else could even hear.

​

Katie saw this and our friendship grew deeper. This is when she searched out all sorts of ways for me to hear these trees, or rather, to her, the harmony of the spheres. We tried hippy mediation things at first, but these didn’t work much. The candles and incense increased, but we both got impatient at how ineffectual they were. Then she got me drugs – I have no idea from where – and I reluctantly agreed to take them. At first, it was at her place, and she would tell me all about the the motions of the planets around the sun, things like the parallax or the retrograde of Mars that I could hardly grasp sober. But at least we never got bored. Eventually, we started going for evening walks in the forest, always to her favourite tree, a large, gnarled oak that stood alone on the edge of a cow field. These were fun nights for me. Katie almost never took drugs herself and was an excellent guide for so many evenings and hours, laying on blankets in this cow field, looking at the stars, close to the tree, but never under it – she always regarded it nervously and with a certain degree of reservation. When we settled in that field, and laid down on the soft earth looking up, she would show me constellations and point out the journey of the moon and stars across their circular paths. But I never heard the hum.

​

Eventually, Katie gave up on plying me with drugs and a few weeks passed of me hardly seeing her at all. When I did she was taciturn and maybe even a bit more nervous than usual. Eventually, she invited me over and told me she wanted to talk to me. It sounded ominous and I was getting kind of anxious. I thought she was going to do some sort of friend breakup or tell me that she was planning on moving back to where her parents lived, or something along those lines. But when I showed up, she was clearly the more nervous one. She invited me to sit at the table, where for the first time since the move, the box that she had hidden in her room had appeared. She was holding both sides, softly but firmly. I sat down and she told me, with an odd, nerve-wracking formality, that she had appreciated our friendship, even though we hadn’t known each other for so long, and that she trusted me. I replied that I felt the same.

​

After sharply inhaling, she stood up and opened the box on the table. She looked in and removed an object. I couldn’t really tell what it was, or even what it was made of. It seemed to be a kind of intricate wood, polished and veneered that wrapped around a smooth white object, only visible in a few places where the wood intersected with itself in the folds of a knot. She put this object on the table and stared at it before speaking.

​

“This is the skull of my former lover,” was all that she said.

​

I looked at it, confused, trying to figure out this nature of this puzzling statement. The white bits between the wood certainly could have been bone, but it was totally unclear how a skull could have gotten in there. We sat in silence for a long moment until Katie again spoke.

“This is when the humming began; or not really, I mean... I mean, the humming has always existed for as long as the universe has existed. But this is when I first was able to hear the humming. For a long time. For years even, I kept it to myself. But then I learned of others. The kids for example. That makes sense; their ears are like that. They hear things and see things that we can’t. But also there are the others. I don’t believe all of them. You know that. But I believe some; you can tell when they can hear the harmony, you can just tell.”

​

She stopped speaking and looked at me. I did not know what to say. We sat in silence again for a long moment in the dim light of her living room.

​

“So. This is Sam, or Samuel to be technical, but I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone call him that. I suppose it makes me Delilah, though I didn’t cut off his hair. But here, here’s where I need to trust you. I’m going to trust you, and I’m sorry, I’m going to lay this burden of trust on you. I think it will be ok. I hope so. But it will all be fine. I just need you to trust me.”

​

We looked each other in the eyes and I was not really sure I wanted to continue. This seemed like something more serious, something that was pulling me into a world I was not sure I wanted to enter. And yet the pull was inescapable. I felt myself wanting it so badly and after a few more seconds looking at each other, I took a breath and released. I entered.

​

“You can trust me,” I said.

​

Katie looked at me a little longer, and then replied, “This is Sam’s skull. Sam and I were lovers, well, we were lovers at first. But you know, things started to get old, and we just ended up, I don’t know, existing together instead of loving each other. I don’t want to get into that. But let’s just say, one day Sam took off. We fought in the evening and went to sleep and in the morning he was gone. And that was it for a while. I knew it was over and I didn’t want to pursue him. I just wanted to move on. I learned gradually, bit by bit, that he moved back to where he grew up and that he was living there. I didn’t care. I did love him and I still really did care about him, but that was that. Things were over. Things had been over for a long time before that fight.

​

“But then a few months later I got a call from his mom, and she said he was missing and she wanted to know if I knew where he was. I hadn’t seen him and I told her that. But I started getting a bit anxious myself. We talked, me and his mom, a few times over the week and then the police showed up and asked me some stuff and then left. It was all very disturbing. I didn’t sleep well and wasn’t in a good state then.

​

“But then one day he just showed up. It was evening and he knocked on the door and I was so surprised. But he wasn’t good. He wasn’t good at all. He was exhausted and looked drunk or stoned or something. He just came in and sat down. I was going to call his mom, but he told me not to. He told me he was on the run and that no one should ever know he was here. I was pretty scared, and tried to comfort him. He told me that he came just to show me something, but that we would have to wait until it got darker.

​

“Well, we waited. I tried to talk to him, but he just sat there at the table, right where you are. But he wouldn’t look at me. I kept telling him that he should call his mother, but he refused and told me that he was going to be leaving again, and that I shouldn’t tell anyone because it won’t matter.”

Katie stopped talking to compose herself. I sat at the table and looked at her. She swallowed and stumbled a bit in her speech.

​

“I’ve never actually told anyone this before you know. You are the first person, the only person.” Another moment of silent assessment and she continued, “Anyway, once it got dark, like really dark, probably past midnight, he stood up and told me to follow him. I did and we walked out to that oak tree I took you to. I hadn’t been there before, but he seemed to know where he was going. I was so scared. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t think I was in any danger, of course, but I was still so scared.”

​

She swallowed and looked up to the ceiling. “Well, we got to that tree and he stops in front of it and asks me if I can hear the humming. I don’t know what he’s talking about. And he says it’s the souls of all the dead singing or screaming or chanting or whatever, and it makes a vibration that sounds like humming. I tell him that I don’t know what he’s talking about. So he turns to me and then starts walking backwards so he can proceed towards the tree, but still keep his eyes on me. He gets right up to the tree and tells me he saw a man die. He says that he saw a man die and didn’t do anything about it and then he even helped get rid of the body. He said that he fed the body to this tree.

​

“I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought he must have been stoned, and I was ready to go back and call his mom. But then...”

​

Kate stopped, and closed her eyes, not looking at me while she spoke, “Then he just steps back into the tree and says, ‘We got rid of him like this.’ Right at that moment, the bark of the tree just kind of moved aside like it was soft and took in his body and closed over most of it. He yelled for a few seconds and then was silent, his head the only thing outside of the bark, hanging down as if unconscious. I ran like fuck. I ran so hard and so fast. I was so scared. And when I got home, I slammed the door shut and locked it and went into my bed and put the sheets over my head and I cried the rest of the night. I was so scared.”

​

Katie opened her eyes and looked at me again, “I must have slept, but I’m not sure. I think I did, because when I woke up it was light out. I knew it wasn’t a dream. I knew that Sam was out at that oak tree, dead and mostly swallowed by it. I kept thinking over and over again what he had said, about being involved in a murder or something. And I kept thinking about his head sticking out like that, flopping to the ground.

​

“When it was night – I don’t know why I waited – but when it was night, I went out with an ax. I thought I might chop the tree down or something, I don’t really know. But when I went out there, the first thing I noticed was that I could hear the hum. I stood there at the edge of the cow field and I looked up and I could hear it. It was so beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. And I knew that it was not the souls of the dead like Sam thought. Or at least, I knew that it was not just the souls of the dead, but that it was everything. It was the harmony of the spheres.

​

“After a bit, I looked down again from the sky and at the tree and I could see that these branches had gone around Sam’s head.” She placed her hand on the wooden thing on her table. “That’s what I cut down. I cut down those branches and I guess Sam’s head with it. And that’s what this is.”

​

She gently pushed the wood-like thing on the table closer towards me.

​

“This is Sam’s skull.”

​

“Fuck,” was all I could mutter.

​

“I hated that tree after that,” she continued. “Or I mean, I hated it for a while. But then I came to learn its ways and respect it. It didn’t kill Sam. Sam killed himself, and even then, I don’t know if that’s the right word. Sam entered the tree, that’s all I can say. He entered so that I could hear the music of the spheres. He must have thought it better for me to learn to hear that than for him to keep loving.

​

“For a while after, I would kind of experiment with the tree. It wasn’t good, I admit that. I tried to feed it, you know? I would throw things at it and see what happened. But it always just behaved like a normal tree. I myself was far too scared to touch it, but I would go at night and sit under it and listen to the spheres. I even once brought it a cat – I’m not proud of this – and pushed it against the bark, but even then nothing happened. The cat ran off back to its home. I cried so hard that day. I felt so sorry for that cat I tried to feed to the tree. But the tree, as I learned, only takes those who are willing, or those who are already dead.

​

“And I learned that it’s the tree that determines who can hear the spheres. Usually it lets those hear who feed it, but not only. I guess it lets children hear, but I don’t get why they deserve it. Maybe it is just their ears, or whatever. But I also learned that this is not the only tree. I think all trees, maybe all creatures, have this ability somehow. But some trees or, from what some have told me, cliffs and lakes can do it, and some are stronger than others. This one is ancient. It has been around looking at the stars for hundreds of years, maybe thousands? There is so much I don’t understand. But I hear it; I can hear the harmony of all things.”

​

Katie sat there, with her eyes now on the skull beneath the wood. After a long silence, she spoke again, tersely, “Let’s go to the tree.”

​

I didn’t know what to think. I felt like laughing, but it wasn’t really funny; it wasn’t funny at all. She stood up silently and walked out. All I could do was follow her. I grabbed her hand, and was terrified, consulted only by my own incredulity. I knew without being told where we were going. We walked in the dark to the tree, neither of us saying a single word, communicating only through the holding of our hands. The evening sky was clear and the stars were out. We got to the edge of the cow field and stopped and looked: the tree was there at the edge yearning upwards towards the starry, deep blue sky.

​

We continued walking to the tree, slowly and with a strange hesitancy that I had never seen with Katie. She stopped under its branches and asked me if I could hear the hum. I couldn’t, and she pulled me closer to the tree. I still didn’t know what to think. It all felt so ridiculous, but we kept going under its bower, still holding hands. A few feet from the trunk, Katie stopped, turned to me. We hugged and for the first time in our lives, we kissed. Katie then said in the most serious tone, “I love you and I want you to hear the harmony.”

​

She let go of my hand, turned to the tree, and ran towards it, almost skipping in a newly found joy. She jumped and embraced it with her arms and both legs. The bark, as she had described earlier, was now soft and malleable, and she began to skink inside. I yelled and ran to her. I reached around her, deep into the bark, grabbed her and started pulling her back. The tree did not resist and I pulled Katie out.

​

We fell back together on the grass, my arms covered in a soft wood-like substance, almost like sawdust. I looked at Katie laying there and she was smiling. But as I sat up, I could hear it, a faint resonance coming from deep in the fabric of the world. It was all around, singing the song of all the universe, the wonderful and terrifying chant of all that is and is not, the harmony of the spheres.

​

​

By Tristan Major

​

​

Tristan Major is a Toronto-based creative writer. After decades working in academia, he has returned to imaginative and speculative thinking and writing. He is fascinated with the social interactions in uncanny urban settings.