“Black Walnut” is the tree at the center of this story, both as the object on which the story turns and as a symbol of the problems rooted in this family. In spare, elegant prose, Danielle Claro brings us a family on the brink of disaster—a troubled daughter, a moldy house, an unhappy marriage—and a tree that may or may not be just the answer they need.
The town said they couldn’t chop it down, the tree that grew straight up like a telephone pole. It had no curve or grace, nothing to stir emotion. It provided no shade. And, if you were to believe Mark, it was the reason for the mold and the mud, the constant flooding. He couldn’t dig a French drain, whatever that is, because of the tree. The tree, the tree, the tree.
Jill didn’t know it was worth anything till someone knocked on the door.
“Ma’am?” A voice came through the screen.
It was 7:30, early for any type of visitor. Jill pushed open the door and stepped barefoot onto the single square of slate. A raft in hot lava, scavenged from one of Mark’s job sites. She folded her arms over her chest to protect the delicate world from the horror of a braless woman. The mail she’d been sorting was still in her hand, a substantial stack. Heavy for its size, like a good melon. Damp bills weigh more. As they should.
“Good morning!” the man said. He tipped his trucker hat, and opened sideways to indicate that there was another person on the scene, a young, elongated version of him—clearly his son. The son wrapped a tape measure around the tree and noted something on a clipboard.
Jill and the hat guy watched together in silence, like parents on the same bench at the playground.
“So,” the man said, “are you interested in selling?”
Jill took a couple of steps forward in an effort to herd the visitors. She didn’t like the feeling of one here, one there. Her bare feet sunk into the mud. Badass or insane? She really didn’t care.
“Selling what?”
“Your black walnut,” the man said. “I can offer you seven-five, which I assure you is generous in this market.”
Jill turned to the window. Mark was not in the kitchen yet.
The man removed his hat. People need to see your eyes when you’re doing business. His were brown and asymmetrical. “Seventy-five hundred.” He repeated it, like there were simply no better words: “I assure you that’s generous in this market.”
Jill thought of the fairy tale where a stranger knocks on someone’s door and makes an offer that will solve all their problems. Then at the end, there’s a catch. They don’t know till too late that their dream-come-true will turn everyone they love to stone and leave them all alone or some such. Why is alone so bad?
But the town has rules. You can’t cut down the tree, or paint your door red (“Historic colors only!”), or install a sliding glass door (“Street-facing windows exceeding 36 inches in height must be divided by panes”). This they learned late. The tyranny of charm. Manufactured concerns of people with no actual problems. Committee bullshit.
Mark and Jill had bought the house—a generous term for the small, slumped cottage—in foreclosure. Everything that followed was punishment for benefitting from the misfortune of others. Jill was no longer Catholic but some parts just stay, no matter how you spend your Sundays.
“Could that be in cash?” Jill asked.
On cue, Binny appeared, with her little dog, Tiki. Though Binny could just as easily walk on her own side of the street, she always found her way into Jill’s unfenced yard.
“Hello Jill…” Eyebrows up, tight smile pulled across what might once have been a pleasant face, Binny set herself in a shallow triangle with Jill and the tree guy. Her rubber boots gave her an edge. She was comfortable, planted and as usual in no rush. “Who’s your friend?” she asked.
Binny looked more than usual like Tiki today, her white hair extra wavy from the dampness; there had been rain every afternoon for days, with weak sunny mornings that couldn’t compete. Tiki scurried to the base of the tree to pee. The tree Jill now knew to be a black walnut worth $7,500.
Binny wrote herself into the scene: “You know you can’t cut down this tree.” She addressed the man. “It’s protected.”
Then she turned to Jill: “How is Paula?” emphasizing the wrong word, as if they’d been talking the whole time about Jill’s daughter and the man had interrupted their conversation, instead of the other way around.
“Paola,” said Jill. “Her name is Paola.”
“Yes, Paola,” said Binny. “That’s what I said. Is she back in school yet? She’s certainly missed a lot this semester…”
Binny’s timing was impeccable. She had magically appeared when the intervention team from the Wilderness Institute came to take Paola. It was well past midnight, but there was Binny, stationed on the sidewalk, one hand clapped over her mouth, the other clutching Tiki. Binny was there when the mold remediators came, when Mark threw that mug at Jill and she ran outside in nothing but a t-shirt. She was there when Jill paced the yard on the phone begging her credit union for another loan so Paola could finish the program.
Binny stepped closer. Way too close. Jill’s grandmother (the Italian one) believed that cats steal the breath from sleeping babies. Binny was like that. She got right in there and took your oxygen.
“How old is Paula now?” Binny asked, confirming for her files.
“Fourteen.”
Like Paola, Jill had been suspended in eighth grade after having run away. When she returned to school, she was kicked out of the gifted program. She earned a note on her permanent record card (it’s real) that every teacher and coach could see. And her mother? Her mother used it as a bludgeon. I can tell you the exact date you stopped being an A student. For the same behavior, Paola had been sent to camp in Colorado. The therapists told Jill what “needed to happen” but not how to pay for it: “Most parents find a way.”
* * *
That night after her shift, Jill looked up the value of black walnut trees. Height, girth, estimated age, all this was on the crinkly carbon copy the tree guy had left behind. She chose to trust him on the specs.
“He’s right,” she said to the glowing screen. “That is generous in this market.”
“What?” Mark barked from the bedroom. Some walls in the house were like paper, others were actual stone.
Jill riffled through another stack of sealed mail—same bills, only with URGENT stamped on certain envelopes, in red. A letter from her cousin in Chicago. Something from the school: “To the parents of Paola Dolan.”
Whenever Jill saw the name in print, she winced. She and Mark, who had once bonded over their flat names, had overcorrected. Paola’s name was a burden, a perpetual effort, always demanding clarification (“no, not Paula”), and it clashed with her blunt Irish last name. Maybe if Paola had been Emma, like everyone else, none of this would have happened.
* * *
The cottage had been the gatehouse for an estate. What even is a gatehouse? Everyone around here seemed to know. Gatehouse, pumphouse, carriage house, these words were thrown around.
It sat in dirt. In rainy weather, mud. The basement filled with water in storms; there were three reliable tributaries.
“It’s a wet basement,” the court-appointed realtor had said, as if that’s a feature some folks are into. The truth was the place had never been meant to house humans and had never been properly renovated.
It seemed romantic at first. A gorgeous challenge. Overgrown, integrated with the environment, with green shoots unfurling toward the light, from cracked tile in the bathroom. A mess, but an enchanted one. And a secret door into a great school district.
As soon as they learned they’d won the auction, they took the train up, just to look again from the outside. Mark peered into the basement with a flashlight. Jill and Paola marveled at a patch of mushrooms. Mark spotted a sparrow’s nest in the well of an ill-fitting window and signaled to come. Silently they slipped into formation to peek, Jill leaning into the cave of Mark and resting her chin on top of little Paola’s head. They held their breath as the bird mother jumped from nest to vine to dirt.
“Those are choking vines and need to be removed right away.” It was Binny, behind them, megaphone volume. Welcome to the neighborhood!
Now at night, you could feel the house straining. It wanted to stay wet, to harbor mold, to host massive crickets and small rodents. It wanted to be part of nature. For a while, Jill and Mark had worked together to beat it back, to seal and raise what they could. But the base of it—the foundation—was faulty. It needed shoring up. And no, the symbolism was not lost on Jill. So the house sat in the mud waiting for Mark and money and the energy that had been drained by life and Paola and day jobs and night shifts and debt, moistening and softening like cardboard under a potted plant.
* * *
On open school night, Jill moved from one classroom to the next dragging her marriage behind her. Mark was always ten feet back, chatting up someone whose home he’d transformed with brilliant renovations. He was known for his care and creativity, for solving problems, for undercharging. He was a hero.
During the teachers’ awkward monologues, Jill held her breath. She felt for these people—had the urge to wrap them in a blanket and drop-and-roll them to safety; they were built to deal with teenagers and seemed in pain performing for an audience of adults. All except Mr. Drew, who had the sort of calm that can come from an easy life or a very hard one. He used the opportunity to talk about his weather blog.
Mr. Drew had been the one to email Jill about Paola, to alert her to the crisis. A biology teacher who was animated by a whole other passion, like so many teachers are. His weather blog was locally famous, fiery with insights on storms, high winds, and extreme temperatures. But also poetic and intricate and appreciative of February’s first crocuses and November’s last leaves. Sometimes late at night Jill scrolled through, replaying that first meeting.
“Call me Frank,” Mr. Drew had said when she’d stepped into his classroom. They’d never met or communicated before. He had sent an email out of the blue.
He swung a chair backward and sat down opposite Jill. Then he got right to it. No small talk. His daughter had been just like Paola. They had tried and failed to pull her back from the edge.
“Send her away,” he said. “Steal the money. Whatever it takes.” He wrote something on an index card, folded it, and handed it to Jill.
The next day, Jill went to the bank. She and Mark had no equity in the house but there was a personal loan available, at 18 percent. The Wilderness Institute would take a child immediately with a 50 percent deposit, but they wouldn’t keep her if you didn’t pay the rest within thirty days. The stats on kids who left mid-program were brutal. Not just backsliding on bad behavior, but escalation—self-harm, suicide; they learned all sorts of new tricks at camp.
Three months and an anvil of debt later, Paola came home better. But soon she closed up, this time angrier, meaner. All the pain inside now flowing outward, expressed with a refined vocabulary. School was not a safe space. Home was toxic. Jill’s face was triggering. Paola’s therapist ($350 a session) asked Jill to turn away when Paola entered a room.
Then there was the essay. Jill had been called in by the school psychiatrist to “discuss her part in Paola’s trauma.” Is it a crime to yell at your kid to clean up food trash in her room, when she won’t let you inside to clean yourself? When there are actual rats making a home under her bed? Anything Jill said would be used against her, so she kept quiet. On her way out, she ran into Mr. Drew. He listened and nodded. His generosity was almost too much, considering.
Tonight on his blog, Mr. Drew said more rain, but he said it in a thousand words instead of two. Jill read all the way through.
Battening down the hatches! she typed in the comments.
A few seconds later: Atta girl! from Mr. Drew. Jill smiled and closed her laptop. She spread an old cotton quilt on the couch and punched a throw pillow into place for her head.
* * *
The next morning Jill stood at the window sipping coffee. She hadn’t slept again. Mark barreled in, poured his noisy cereal and fell into a chair, huffing.
Jill considered saying nothing, but instead said just a little: “The black walnut tree might be worth money.”
“The black walnut?” Mark mocked her tone, his mouth full of Special K. “Since when are you an expert on trees?”
* * *
On Saturday, after food shopping, Jill looked for a way not to be home. Paola stomped above her. Fee-fi-fo-fum.
Jill walked to the woods. Deep inside, where you couldn’t hear the highway at all, she stood for a full five minutes staring into a wall of roots. A massive tree had toppled. The softness of over-saturated spring ground…seasons overlapping…shockingly high temperatures bringing too much snow-melt too fast. These were the phrases she caught from a father strolling by with his curious twins. They asked all the questions Jill would have asked.
She had no instinctive understanding of nature: what made woods woodsy, what formed paths, how width might make up for depth in roots. She was city-dumb, and proud of it, obnoxious about it, even. But now she wished the twin dad would stick around and say more.
She teetered across a log that formed a bridge over a creek. Had the log fallen this way, or did someone move it? Are skinny trees more likely to tip over? How did anything with roots so shallow stand at all?
* * *
That night Jill was up again. The rain was loud. April was living up to its corny reputation. Jill checked Mr. Drew’s blog.
8:30pm Thursday night April 2. A severe thunderstorm watch goes up for this evening into the wee hours for a good chunk of the area, folks. Based on the dynamics diminishing somewhat as the storm moves eastward, the watch is up for areas from about Rt. 22 westward. I think strong winds are the main severe parameter we will be looking at.
Timing: 1am – 6 am (west to east)
Severity: Strong winds that can take down some big branches/small trees. In addition a band of intense rainfall can occur with the main line moving through.
A HUGE thanks to the Drew-Crew for sending so much love for our dog Milo. Big loss for our team. Ouch!
Jill posted a comment: So sorry to hear about Milo. Sending love to you and your family.
She stepped into her rubber boots and slipped out the door. Rain blew sideways. The leaves of the black walnut tree rustled. Jill kicked the dirt at its base to reveal a faint curve of root. She followed the line of the trunk to the sky. It made her want to stand up straight. Her phone pinged. A text:
“Hi. Frank Drew here. Thanks for the comment. Hope all is well with Paola.”
* * *
Each night Jill watched a video tutorial to become less city-dumb. Then she put on her rain gear and went out. Hours later, shivering and muddy, she stashed the shovel, stepped inside, rinsed off, and read old entries on the weather blog—always about wild storms, falling trees—till she fell asleep on the couch.
* * *
Mr. Drew began posting about The Big One later that week, a storm the news had not yet picked up on.
9:15pm Friday night April 24. Looking serious, folks. The networks should be reporting this by tomorrow. Milk and bread time, and watch this space for details.
Jill commented: Should we tape the windows?
A text: “Get some sleep.”
Another one: “It’s Frank Drew, by the way.”
* * *
Jill slept less and less—three, maybe four hours a night—but had more and more energy. She stopped trying to get the dirt out from under her nails. It lived there now, and deep in her cuticles. Washing pushed it further in. She painted her nails black to look clean at work.
One morning very early before her shift, Jill was under the black walnut planting impatiens, which she hated. The color, the name, the feebleness of the blooms, the fact that Binny was always suggesting them.
“I see you’ve decided to take my advice.” The voice came from behind.
Jill took a full minute to turn around, hoping Binny might leave. She stayed on her knees, dusting off the tip of a sharp spade. Tiki sniffed maniacally around the freshly planted flowers.
“I did!” Jill said.
“You’ll see,” said Binny. “Here in the shade, you’ll get that lovely deep pink.”
Right. The color of Post-its.
“Brightens up all this brown,” said Binny, adding a zing.
Now that the door was more or less open, Binny had a lot to say—about window-box combinations, where Jill stored her trash cans, how on earth anyone can live with only one square of slate on a muddy path—so it was Jill who first saw Tiki fall in the hole. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been dangerous. A real now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t moment.
All at once, Binny shrieked and Jill dove toward the hole, yanking up the disappearing dog by his tiny harness. She set Tiki on his feet and did her best to block the scene of the accident. But Binny, squawking with relief, had come closer. She stared at the hole—nearly three feet deep, right at the base of the tree—as Jill refilled it with mulch, moving fast, like a dog digging in reverse. Tiki could actually be useful right now, if he wasn’t up in Binny’s arms, shaking.
“What on earth!” Binny cried. “Why, your impatiens will never grow in just mulch. Where is the soil?”
Jill popped up to defend the perimeter. “Stay back!” she called, too tensely. “I don’t…want you to fall.” She reached out for Tiki. It was all she could think to do to rebrand her aggressive stance.
Binny backed away—no one else was allowed to hold Tiki. Jill took a few steps. It may have been the first time she had ever moved in the direction of Binny.
“Binny,” she said, “I need your advice about this one tricky patch.” She touched Binny’s elbow, bony beneath a light quilted jacket, and ushered woman-and-dog to the far side of the house—a low swampy spot. “Look at this mess. What should I plant here?”
Binny scratched her chin, savoring the moment. “Grasses,” she said, locking in on the challenge. “Korean feather grass. That will soak this right up, and give you some privacy from the street to boot. It’s just the littlest bit pink, but really quite neutral…”
Jill pretended to take notes on her phone—“That’s so smart…grasses…”—then interrupted herself. “Oh, I have to take this!” She held up her phone. “It’s the hospital.” She didn’t work at a hospital. But when you’re a nurse, people believe anything.
Binny waved extravagantly, mouthing bye-bye as Jill pressed the phone to her cheek.
It turned out Binny actually did have a pretty smile.
* * *
Later, Jill cleaned out the car. She took it to the gas station and vacuumed out the back. In her room, she sorted clothes. Two bags of giveaways, one small pile of favorites. She really did wear the same things every day. She located the white-noise machine and two duffel bags. She bought the rope. She practiced her knots, then practiced again with her eyes closed.
The storm began, just as Mr. Drew had predicted. Thunder so powerful the walls shook. Rain in sheets, off the side of the house, overwhelming the gutters—a wall of water.
The unopened bills, which had moved for months from surface to surface, in and out of rubber bands and baskets and file folders, stared up from the coffee table.
But now, Jill was detached, an opening machine, tearing into envelopes, highlighting important information and summarizing in square Post-its. The color of impatiens. The color of impatience. She laughed for the first time in a while.
We owe this much.
It was due on this date.
Here’s what happens if this goes unpaid.
A forecast, like on Mr. Drew’s weather blog.
Hey, Drew-Crew, the balloon mortgage is blowing up. Before it goes POP, some decisions need to be made…
When she finished, she left her neat, labeled stacks on the table. She put on her boots and her rain pants. She got the ladder. She slipped out.
* * *
The next morning, Jill stood by the kitchen window biting the nail of her ring finger. Salt, dirt, blood. It wasn’t yet 7am but her coffee was already cold. She watched the truck, the man in the hat. The son with the clipboard. Two other workers. She didn’t breathe.
Mark plopped down at the table, slurped loudly, then banged his mug. “What the hell is that racket?”
Jill pressed the screen door open and hung her body against the strength of the spring. The back bumper on her muddy car was bent. It was still attached, but barely.
The boy closed the back of the truck. Don’t speak, Jill thought. Don’t. Speak. She willed the truck to start. It rumbled to life and inched out of the driveway onto the road. Why did it move so slowly? Mark looked up, annoyed. Loud noises close to the house. Like a bear, he rose. The truck barreled into the street, spitting mud and revealing Binny and Tiki on the far sidewalk, frozen in tableau, squinting in Jill’s direction.
Jill set down her cup. Her sneakers squeaked.
“The black walnut tree fell,” she said, palming the car keys.
The tank was full. The trunk was packed. She’d be in Chicago by bedtime and Boulder by Tuesday.
Mark shuffled toward the window. His voice was small, almost tender: “Which one is the black walnut again?”
But she was already gone.
Danielle Claro’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Lascaux Review, The Masters Review Anthology, and many lifestyle magazines. She lives in the Lower Hudson Valley, where she’s working on a book of short stories.