Under the Cherry Tree
by Abigail Celoria
University of North Carolina Wilmington
Abigail Celoria (she/her) is a junior at UNC Wilmington pursuing her BFA in Creative Writing. She has been writing avidly since the fifth grade, with a particular affinity for literary fiction. She currently serves as a Culture Editor of *The Seahawk,* Editor-in-Chief of Second Story Journal,* and Fiction Editor of *Atlantis: A Creative Magazine* all of which are a part of her university’s publications. She also works in her University’s Learning Center as a Writing Consultant. Her work has previously appeared in Atlantis: A Creative Magazine and Carolina Muse.
I know Dad has told Momma what happened because she is silent as she hands out the brisket. Usually, she asks us how many pieces we want, and what size, but tonight she dishes it out as it comes. Her thin hands hesitate before placing the meat on my plate alongside mounds of mashed potatoes and string beans. I clamp down on the cherry pit in my mouth when she sits back and asks Dad to say grace. He prays so quickly and quietly that I wonder if he doesn’t want God to hear him.
I wouldn’t, if I were him, because God knows just as well as I what he’d done.
We sit in silence after the prayer. Dad’s gummy chews and Momma’s scrapping utensils seem to echo as I stare at my plate. The longer I look at the meat, the more it resembles that fresh mound of earth under the cherry tree in the backyard. Heat pricks the backs of my eyes, but I’d resolved earlier at the foot of that tree that I would not cry when I came back inside. The plate scrapes against uneven wood as I push it away.
“Bryson, baby, you’re not gonna eat?” Momma asks.
I shake my head, pushing the cherry pit around with my tongue.
“I made your favorite and you’re not gonna eat it?”
It has never been my favorite, even before now, but I am not going to say that. I shake my head again. Dad plops another piece of brisket from the serving dish onto his plate and my stomach contracts without warning. I keep rolling the cherry pit, focusing on its texture against my tongue.
“Is that something in your mouth?” Momma asks.
I tuck the pit under my tongue.
“No?”
“Bryson, what is that? Spit it out—”
“Momma, I’m telling you, there’s nothing in my mouth.”
“Just eat your food, Bryson,” Dad says, cutting up his new piece of meat. “She’s gon’ worry if you don’t.”
He still won’t look at me, just like he wouldn’t earlier this afternoon when I’d come up to him under the cherry tree after school. When he told me, in too few words, what he’d done as he shoved upturned dirt back into the ground. When the hole he was filling became a grave before my eyes, and I had started sobbing.
If either of us has a reason not to look at the other, it’s me. Only me.
“She can keep on worrying, then,” I scoff.
“You want to take it out on her, then?” he says. “Is that it?”
“I’m not hungry,” I shot back.
Momma’s hand appears on the tabletop next to my plate. I raise my head. She has that sad smile on, the one that normally makes me feel like nothing terrible can remain for long. Right now, it mocks me.
“I know how upset you must be, baby,” she whispers. “But it isn’t going to help you to punish yourself. It’s not your fault.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s Dad’s.”
“I don’t know that that’s it, either,” she begins, but Dad cuts in over her.
“I already told you,” he says. “It was a mistake. There’s no use being mad at anyone.”
I turn to him as he brings a bite of mashed-potato-coated brisket to his mouth. Though his eyes are downturned, I catch their stoniness through his lashes. Anger flares in me so fast my vision blurs.
The cherry pit sits heavy under my tongue. A reminder.
“You killed him,” I whisper. Then, with more conviction, “You killed Trevor.”
“Bryson,” Momma says.
I don’t acknowledge her; I keep my eyes on Dad. Another thing I had told myself at the foot of the tree is that I wouldn’t be the one to talk first. I resolved to go days, weeks, however long it took until he apologized. But now that the words have left me, all the others I had imagined myself yelling at him bubble in the back of my throat.
I slam my fist into the table, ignoring the pain that shoots through it.
“You shot my dog!” I yell at him.
Finally, Dad looks at me. His eyes have hardened even more. He swallows the piece of brisket.
“It was a mistake,” he repeats, his voice low and dangerous.
“He never liked hunting,” I say. “He’s a gentle dog. He never hurt a fly.”
“What d’you think he was doing going after that deer?” Dad scoffs. “He’s a dog, Bryson. He liked it fine.”
He poises his fork and knife over his plate as if that’s that. Something in me snaps. I find myself out of my seat. Momma reaches for my arm, but I draw away. I can’t stop the image rising into my mind—Trevor’s furry body shaking on the forest floor, in pain, wondering where I am. I point in Dad’s face.
“He was my dog!” I scream. “Did you even try to help him—to stop the bleeding, or get him to the vet, or anything?”
“He wouldn’t have made it to a vet,” Dad says, raising his voice over Momma’s wordless protestations.
“So you just shot him again, finished him off?” I say. “That was the only alternative you could think of?”
“Bryson, there was nothing to save!” Dad says. “The bullet hit him in the neck!”
“No,” I wail, “you hit him in the neck! And then you buried my dog without me!”
“I didn’t want you to see him like that—”
“No, you just didn’t want me to see what you’d done to him!”
A wetness suddenly runs down my cheeks—tears. I wipe at my face furiously. Trevor’s face—his wide eyes; his blocky muzzle; his slightly-too-long ears—overlays my vision.
“You killed him before you even knew if you could save him,” I spit, “because it was the easy thing to do. I know you. I know you, Dad. You can’t even admit you are at fault. Some hunter, shooting a dog instead of a deer—”
Dad seizes my arm and shakes me violently. He is out of his seat now, towering over me, fury distorting his face.
“Who got you that dog, huh?” he yells, shaking me again. “Who took care of him while you were at school? Who bought his food, his toys, his medicine?”
“Marcus, stop it,” Momma cries pitifully. “He’s just upset!”
Dad doesn’t seem to hear her. His grip on my arm has grown more painful as he stares me down. In those split seconds, I notice another emotion mingled with the fury in his eyes—smaller in presence, but still there. Anger fades long enough for me to wonder what it is. Until he speaks.
“Be grateful. At least you had a dog at all.”
Before I know what I am doing, I pull the cherry pit out from under my tongue and spit it at him. It strikes his left cheek hard enough to make a sound.
Dad freezes. His grip loosens. I slip out of it and run to my room, immediately locking the door behind me. Then, adrenaline taking over, I wedge my desk chair under the doorknob. Footsteps thundered up the stairs after me. I cower against my bedframe as Dad bangs on my door.
“You come out right now, Bryson!” he says through the wood.
For about five minutes, he pounds and yells. My doorknob jiggles so hard that I fear it will snap off and render the chair useless.
Eventually, Momma’s voice joins his out in the hallway. I have stopped listening to the actual words at that point, but her own shouts seem to work, and they draw away. For the rest of the night, I hear nothing but the humming of the ancient air conditioning.
I lay on my comforter and stare at the ceiling. I think back to Dad’s too-few words—how Trevor had “got in the way.” Had Dad even looked, or just fired? I can almost hear the boom of his Savage 110 Hunter rifle—the frenzied shot of a man who needed a win. Dad lost his job three weeks ago to his hip problem. Since then, he’d been out with Trevor every day. Momma said once it was what he did when he wanted to hide.
But why did my dog have to hide with him?
As the adrenaline dies down, I become aware of the stickiness on my cheeks. I wipe my palms across them. Drying tears. I hadn’t caught them all. Dad had seen me cry. The rest of them come now that it doesn’t matter. I pull myself into a ball and sob silently.
The times I’d done this when Trevor was here, he’d come curl up in the curve of my stomach, his muzzle tucked alongside my face. He would let out a settling-down huff, and I would find myself laughing a little bit. His golden fur was softer than any pillow. On special occasions—which included me crying—he’d let me rest my head on his body.
I stick my arm out now as if to wrap it around him. Of course, Trevor is not here—the first time he hasn’t been in eight years.
I spend the rest of the night in and out of sleep. As dawn breaks, I wake for the final time. Early light spills through my flannel curtains, trickling down the opposite wall. I think about getting under the covers to black it out, but instead, I kneel on my bed and brush the curtains aside.
The leaves of the cherry tree sway in the golden air. At its foot, my dog’s grave stands out against the overgrown grass as a dark square of dirt. The sight turns my stomach, and I realize I had been hoping, when I looked, that it wouldn’t be there—that I would only have to go downstairs and find Trevor sitting behind the patio door, waiting to be let in. My vision clouds over instantly.
At first, I think it’s light catching in my tears that is causing the movement beneath the tree, but when I blink them away, I see it.
A figure hunches against the trunk of the tree occasionally obscured under the swaying branches. Finally, I distinguish Dad’s gray work shirt and beige cargos. He crouches with a hammer and chisel in hand. He silently strikes the chisel, over and over, against the surface of the bark.
Anger floods me again, stronger than yesterday. Before I have time to think, I am out of my bed, down the stairs, and out the back door. The morning breeze soothes my dry, tear-stained face. I stomp across our half-acre to the cherry tree. My mind floods with the things I’ll say to—no, shout at him. Dad may have won last night, but this is too far.
First, he kills my dog. Now, he’s defiling Trevor’s grave?
Copses dot our backyard; I stop behind the one closest to the cherry tree. I am steeling myself to confront him when Dad steps back to rustle through his toolbox, revealing his work. He has chiseled a large heart—half the width of the trunk—into the center of the tree. Carved deeper in the heart’s center, in ragged, blocky letters, I read “T, R, E.” It looks like Dad has just started on the “V.”
I watch dumbly as Dad turns back to the trunk with a thinner chisel in hand. He curses, then lifts his knee. A fallen, crushed cherry sits beneath him. Dad fishes the pit out of its carcass, and for a moment, he stares at it, and turns it around in his hand. Then, his shoulders start shaking. He clutches the pit in his fist as he leans against the tree, sobbing silently.
He turns in my direction, and I duck back, but he is not looking toward me. His gaze rests on Trevor’s grave. The emotion I’d seen behind his fury last night fills his eyes now. Isolated, I am able to recognize it. Grief.
Any sense of direction I had in coming outside fades away. I wait until he turns back to the tree, composed enough to begin chiseling again, to walk back to the house.