Purple

I bang up my knee falling out of the big apple tree in the neighbor’s yard, the one that Momma keeps telling me to stay out of because it doesn’t belong to us.

“You can’t take what’s not yours,” she says, and she doesn’t care that I’m crying or that my knee is all puffed up and red-starting-to-turn-purple-and-black. Even though I’m crying, I just think, I’ve never seen a sign on that tree saying whose it was. If it belonged to someone, certainly there would be a sign. But there’s not, so it must just belong to everyone. The people’s apples. “A free real estate tree,” Daddy would say.

Daddy wouldn’t yell at me for falling out of the neighbor’s tree. He wouldn’t tell me to not take what isn’t mine. Because there isn’t a sign on that tree, so it isn’t anybody’s. Daddy always talks specifically like that about words. He corrects Momma when she says who instead of whom. She hates it, but he always winks and tries to hide the smile crawling across his face. My head’s full of Daddy and words and what’s right and what’s wrong. Then I imagine two people, one named Nobody and the other named Everybody, and I imagine them arguing about who owns the big apple tree as I sit up high in the branches with a not-banged-up knee.

“It belongs to Nobody,” Nobody says.

“No, it belongs to Everybody,” Everybody says.

And that’s how they go on.

I make myself laugh thinking about it. When I’m laughing, my knee starts laughing with me. I feel it throb, full of chuckling blood, and I know Daddy would be laughing too if he was here.

I can’t climb with my knee all banged up. I can’t put all my weight on it, which wouldn’t normally be bad except it’s my push off knee. The knee on my leg that stays on the ground while the other one jets up to that first groove in the trunk. I’m so used to using my right leg to steady myself that I can’t figure out how to change it so my left leg is my push off leg. That means I’m stuck on the ground until the purple monster on my knee goes away. It probably won’t for a long while. His belly’s still full of that chuckling blood and he’s grown almost twice as big. He doesn’t like the feel of the grass, though, all prickly against his skin. I don’t like it much either. But I’m hoping that by sitting in it underneath the tree, it’ll scare him away faster, and I’ll be able to climb again.

Rarely do I sit so still for so long. I thought I would hate it. But now, with the tree branches shimmying in the wind and the air smelling like the cold and autumn bonfires, and the pain medicine that Momma fed me that morning making my head heavy and arms loopy, it doesn’t seem so bad to be nestled against the trunk of the big apple tree. I smile and try to imagine the two people arguing about whose tree it is. But I can’t think of their names with my eyes closed.

Daddy sits on the highest branch in the big apple tree. The branch is high and thin, and I think he is going to fall, but I know from the way the sun is shining on him and through him that Daddy is lighter than a feather. Lighter even than air. He is the lightest thing there has ever been. I laugh and holler at him and he waves down at me, his hand rippling with some dizzy magic.

“What can you see?” I yell.

He takes a deep breath. Even though he is lighter than air, he looks so strong just then. Stronger than the ground.

“Everything,” he says. And then he points. “Even where our tree used to be. Remember? It was taller than this one.”

He is thinking about something deeply, frozen atop that high tree branch. And when it starts swaying with the wind, he sways with it, as though he has grown into the tree.

“I made a sign, Daddy,” I say. “I made a sign for our tree so people know it’s ours.” 

His head’s turned away and he’s so high up that I can’t see his lips move. But I hear his voice as though he’s whispering right in my ear.

“Good boy.”

When I wake, days have passed. Well, hours, but they’ve felt like days, just because the world looks so different. There’s no autumn bonfire or scent of the cold in the air. The branches don’t dance in the wind, just shiver. And everything looks drearier than I remember. Even my knee, which isn’t as purple or swollen or throbbing. I wonder if it’s looked like that all along and there’s something wrong with my head.

“Momma,” I say when I get home. “I think there’s something wrong with my head.”

She pulls me into her, which she’s been doing more lately, and she speaks all matronly, “There’s nothing wrong with your head.”

“But I think there is. I keep imagining things that I don’t think are really there.”

“Like what?”

“Like Nobody and Everybody,” I say. “And the purple monster in my knee. And Daddy.”

Momma sighs and strokes my hair. My ear’s pressed against her chest and I can hear her heart beating all low and sad.

“Well, I can say that Nobody, Everybody, and the purple monster are all in your head,” she says. “But your Daddy, he’s in your heart.”

“No, he’s in the tree. Our tree.”

“Yes,” she says. And we’re quiet, and I know we’re both trying to keep him up in that tree.

We’re trying to keep him up in that tree forever, looking out over the flat world around us, and we’re trying to forget what it looked like when he fell, and the mighty thud that his bones made when they hit the ground.