The Saplings
“When we first came to that bush homestead in northern Alberta, the poplars grew right up to the door. Ned and Ellen and I played in their shade and shrieked as my father felled them. My mother told my father to leave a few saplings. ‘And leave a couple of old trees,’ she said, ‘for the saplings need shelter from the wind and the storm.’
“My father did as she asked. Over the years the handful of saplings grew tall and slender. Through the grim drought years, through the fierce hailstorms of sultry July, the old poplars cracked their trunks and dried up and eventually were tossed by the wind. But by then the saplings had become resilient, green giants, sweeping back into the strongest wind when most of the land was parched and barren—almost like a shrine to my mother…”
The lecturer’s voice continued. I did not stir down there in the dimness with the others, but it seemed to me there was a great gap in my life. Up there was my brother Leon talking. He still looked a little uncertain, blinking behind his thick-shelled glasses—but his tongue held a magic I’d never heard before. With it, Leon was bringing back a world I had forgotten—or had never noticed.
He had written a book—a best-seller—about
“Sometimes in the confusion, I think people have forgotten how to listen to common sense, simply given. We’ve forgotten the logic of love and the wonderful encouragement that comes from an understanding heart. How many youths in the crowd, I wonder, have ever truly beheld their mothers? How many have ever looked at her, their eyes swimming with tears, glad because the lights were low?”
Leon was the baby of our family. He was always the weak one—he had pneumonia twice in Ireland, which was one of the reasons we came to the high, dry air of
“I wouldn’t fight him back even if I could—Ned—it hurts him.”
“Aw, shut up, you coward,” I yelled at him, with all the brutality of a ten-year old brother.
That winter Leon started writing. He would hurry home from school to show his writings to Mother. No matter how busy she was, she always read them. But what she said to Leon I’ll never know. That’s the sort of thing he has locked away in his heart, like a woman puts away the pressed rose petals of her first love, or a mother puts away the first locks of her baby’s hair.
I finally asked permission to read one of his “stories.” A bit fearfully, for he dreaded my scorn, Leon gave me one. It was a lot of rot to me—about how he climbed a great cliff to find an eagle’s nest and how the eagles nearly drove him over the rocks to violent death. If any of the guys had read that, they wouldn’t have talked to him for the rest of their lives. Leon was scared even to play baseball.
“Wh-what do you think of it Ned?” he asked me, sort of fearfully.
I was about to tell him—and then suddenly I was aware of my mother standing in the doorway. Without her saying a word, I knew that if I said what I thought, I would never—not if I chopped the whole woodpile and carried green feed to the cows all winter—get the pair of skis she had promised me for Christmas.
“I—I sure could never do anything like that!” I said emphatically.
When we got to where we had to start deciding what we were to do with our lives, Leon turned almost instinctively to writing. I still wanted to be a lawyer, go away to a university and study. Times were hard then, money was scarce, and college cost a lot. But Mother never hesitated.
“We’ll see you through, Ned. Your father and I have worked from the time we were children. It wasn’t given to us to have much of this world’s goods. Perhaps that is because God meant us to have something better—you children.”
“Mother,” I protested, argumentative and self-opinionated, “that’s just a notion. You’re not meant to have something or not to have it. If you go after it, you get it. If you’re content with something else—like children, or farming—then that’s what you end up with.”
Mother’s eyes—shy, like Leon’s—looked steadily into mine. “Good families are raised only on sacrifice. All the people—or nearly all—who cared enough about humanity to give their lives for humanity, came from poor, humble homes. People who have been crushed down by sickness or poverty are always the ones who spend their lives on the sick and poor. And remember the example of the Lord Himself.” Actually she didn’t put it as concisely as that. But that’s what she meant. And I just didn’t believe it.
Leon did though. He told me once he thought Mother was smarter than most people would ever think.
A new inspiration had hit him. He would write to get money to buy new furniture for the house, a tractor for Dad—and some to put me through college.
But it was different writing for magazines than for his own enjoyment. Their work demanded years of training. That wasn’t what broke Leon’s heart, though. It was the fact that Mother was growing thinner and older; there mightn’t be much time left to get her all he wanted her to have.
You wouldn’t expect a lawyer to understand how a mother and son could weep in their hearts for the sufferings of each other. Besides faithfully praying for him, there were nights when Mother, tired and sore from the hard work on the farm, climbed the long flight of stairs to the attic, a pod of cocoa in her none-too-steady hand, that Leon might get a little encouragement. And it was she who first carried up to him a little farm paper, “I’ve been reading it, Leon,” she said, “and it seems to me you could write as well about the farm as them. Most of them, I’ll warrant you, don’t even live on a farm.”
Up there on the platform, Leon’s voice, warm and vibrant, was telling them that in humble people you find wisdom—in meek people, you find great strength. “She hadn’t much education herself, but out of her love became the first practical help I ever received.”
To my amazement—maybe even to his, at that stage of the game—Leon began to sell. First, little articles on how to grow better strawberries, how to cut down on poultry losses; then, more literary pieces on the beauty of rural life, and finally, his first little story.
I read the story, wondering how anyone could get paid for writing that. My mother read and reread it, night after night, always with a smile on her face.
I was well on my way then. At varsity, I could reel off the fundamentals of common law and tie my co-students up in knots in mock courtroom trials. The dean of the faculty told me I had a brain.
Sometimes memories—or the faint beating of conscience—would draw old pictures into my heart. Leon would be dropping me a note, begging me to write at least once a week. I’d see my dad, suddenly, on the blackboard of an empty classroom. Dad, who was getting old and stooped from all the bundles he’d picked up and sat down again. There was the one time my mother came to see me. Her print dress, washed by hand too many times to look new, seemed strangely out of place against the ivy on the college walls. Before she went back on the train, she gave me the last dollar in her purse. Going back to the campus, I told myself the best thing I could do was to hurry—be an honor graduate—get a good job—that way I’d really be helping them. Sentiment, like Leon’s was okay, but it didn’t make life any easier.
Every little check Leon got—and they were all little ones—he brought something home to Mother. Ellen wrote me—that’s how I knew. I guess he was the first person ever to bring her a box of chocolates on Mother’s Day. They didn’t have that sort of thing—nor the money for it—when my dad was young with her. And it never got to the bush country till after the war.
And never a day in summer when Leon went walking that he didn’t carry her home at least a bunch of wild flowers. He came to see me unexpectedly once.
“I came to tell you to write to Mother more often,” he said.
I don’t know whether that visit had anything to do with it or not. Anyway, he lost his writing touch again. His fiction went to pieces. Ellen wrote me that he cried and sobbed like a child.
The summer I was to graduate, I got bad news from home. Mother had had a stroke in her left side. She couldn’t get out of bed. Ellen practically lived between Jim’s farm and ours. Leon did everything for Mother, read letters to her—and weeks later I got a telegram and hurried home. I met the doctor coming down the stairs. He made the observation to me that not many women in their lives had suffered as much, and as uncomplainingly, as she.
I took her hands because she could not take mine. But she could still talk, though it didn’t make sense to me.
“You graduated—an’ you were first,” she said.
I looked at Leon in bewilderment. Graduation was still two weeks away.
“Yeah,” Leon said loudly. “He’s sure smart, Mom. Ned sure has a head.”
“Well, no matter,” said my mother softly. “You have the heart.” The tired eyes turned slightly to smile at me again. “Thank you—for all the—the letters,” she said.
Leon just about went to pieces. When I tried to talk to him, to tell him that death was the end of us all, that Mother had done her pilgrimage on earth and that from now on she’d have her reward, Leon just lay on his own bed, has face in the pillow, silent. It was after supper before he spoke; and then it was the strangest voice I’d ever heard him use.
“Ned,” he said, “I’m not weeping for Mother—but for us. Especially for you.”
“Me?”
“You never knew,” Leon said. “You never wanted to know—or did you?”
“Know what?”
“What she gave up for us kids. The last money she sent you,” Leon said. “I couldn’t write, so we didn’t have the help of those checks. Ned, the farm wasn’t bringing in anything. So Mother got it for you. And do you know how, Ned?”
I shook my head.
“All summer long, she dug snakeroot for it. You’ve forgotten how hard seneca is to dig. The mosquitoes were so bad, every time she came back to the house her clothes were covered with blood. Nobody ever knew that, except me. And she wouldn’t let me tell you.”
For once in my life, I couldn’t talk. Leon got up on one elbow and looked at me pityingly.
“And you were so busy you couldn’t even write her a letter. These last weeks, that’s what she lived for. That’s what she was thanking you for, at the end. Your letters, Ned. Only I wrote them for you.
“I know someday—when once you understand—you’d give your right arm to have another chance to write those letters to spare her the heartache she suffered because of your thoughtless neglect. But then it would be too late. So I wrote them for you—spared her that heartache and brightened her last days. I carried them in here in an old envelope—one each day—and I’m a good writer, Ned. I really am. She thought, right to the end, they were from you.”
Leon and I didn’t see much of each other while I was looking for my first job after graduation.
I waited, with something like dread, for Ellen’s letter telling me that Leon had given up writing forever—and with it, part of his life.
The letter didn’t come. She wrote me, in the seemingly casual way Ellen has, of how Leon was helping Dad even more on the farm now that Mother was gone. But he was working at his book, too. He thought he had discovered where his own best talents lay—in long novels, not in magazine writing.
“That’s it,” I said to myself. “Maybe I wasn’t sentimental like he, but someday I’ll have something better to give my family. He’ll spend the rest of his days between dreaming and farming, especially now that she’s gone.”
Which proves you don’t learn all the answers in a law book. In less than a year after she died, that book of his—The Saplings—hit the heart of the nation. It hit, and the critics held their breath. Then the public went after it. Leon, the helpless one; Leon, the dreamer, became a legend overnight.
That’s really why I went to his lecture. To see the kid brother I never really had known. I still don’t know how he did it, but when the light went on, people were wiping their own streaming faces—and they were applauding Leon as I’ve never seen any man applauded.
He and Ellen came around to my rooms—my poor bare rooms, the mark of respectability of most beginning lawyers. For a moment I didn’t know what to say. Then I looked at Leon’s eyes, and I saw the same sort of thing I saw there when we three were kids, chasing each other under the poplar trees.
Leon smiled. “Maybe you could use a decent office?” he said. “If you had someone to back you for a year or two—“
I shook my head. “Don’t rub it in.”
“I’m not, Ned,” Leon said. And he wasn’t. “I needed you just the way you were—to sort of force me to make good, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t. But there was one thing I needed to hear from his own lips.
“Leon? How did you ever do it, with her gone?”
The old mystical look I remembered so well came back over Leon’s face. He smiled.
“Only a fool, Ned, would believe a mother’s love is cut off, or the power of a mother’s prayers is ended—just because she’s out of sight. Only a fool—or maybe a lawyer.”
But he said it gently.
