Red-Trimmed House

From the northeast corner of the house, through the window at the top of the stairs, we could see the buds of the fruit tree, pink and soft in the last days of spring. The bare branches had grown new leaves, and by the time the sun warmed our skin, their fruits were beginning to emerge. Red seeds, they looked like, about the size of acorns, but they weren’t close enough that we could really see them, even though the branches could scratch the window at night when the wind made its way through the pines. If the tree had been a bit older, and us a little lighter, we might have climbed out of the window and into its branches to escape for a little while.

The webs appeared a month or two later, arriving like little packages too tightly wrapped to tell what was inside. We could see that they were denser than a spider’s web, and not built for the same purpose. The white lines crisscrossed, threads of thin, soft sheets. They spun larger without us noticing until they were big prisms surrounding the fruits and the leaves with irregular planes. Just a few branches—they didn’t cover the whole tree. They looked just like cocoons from where we saw them, cocoons big enough to hold a bat, probably. They got to be a couple of inches across, and about as long as my arm, up to the elbow. And that’s when Papa said he had to go to the store, and after he went to the dump he drove to the store and bought himself a long stick, and the stick came with a long blade. We watched him from the window, his arm now a straight black shaft with a scythe on the end. So easily he sliced off those cocoons, letting them land on the damp mulch below, so gently they might have bounced if they had not been so light. The tree was unburdened now, lifting only its own fruits and leaves.

Later, we saw the black bin outside the garage, left from Papa’s trip to the dump. Papa had forgotten to wheel it back in. Papa was glad to have saved the tree. We asked about them at dinner, those prisms and how they had looked up close. He had wanted to show us, the way they were spun, the way the little eggs sat within the planes. And the bigger ones too, so many of them, sharing this one cocoon. Hundreds, there must have been. And what did you do with those cocoons, we asked, and Papa had not been forgetful. The bin was full of water, and the cocoons were sunk in there, and I knew they were still hugging their branches, waiting to drown, waiting in the dark underneath that tight black lid. But the small ones had been able to swim; they swam within their cocoons, Papa said. They didn’t die. Come see. They’d crawled up the sides to where it was dry, and there they were, clinging to the lid. Now he stuck out his finger, his finger a shaft jabbed straight into the small bodies until they fell. Too many remained to kill in this way, so Papa wiped them off the lid and threw them into a bag of trash. Hundreds, he said, there were hundreds of them, if a hundred is just ten by ten. They suffocated there, the little ones in their cocoons, and went back into the bin, the bin now drained and dried and wheeled back into the cold garage. Papa drove to the dump again and came back and looked happy about his new tool.