"What does it do when nobody is looking?" The girl puts this to me at the gate of the glebe field outside Nicklemas, where a hornbeam stands alone with its trunk split from crown to knee. She is nine and has her own answer ready. It turns, she says. Whichever way the school bus faces on the lane, the longest branch is pointing at her window. The carter who hauls lime up from the kilns at Ambry Cross says nothing turns. The ground leans. Stopping under the tree to mend a trace, he watched his horse's shadow stretch away from the sun and toward the trunk, half again as long as the horse. He did not finish the repair. He led the animal out by the head and mended the trace a quarter mile on.
The face is plain from the gate. The split makes a long, upright mouth, damp inside in dry weather, and above it sit two knots that do not match, the left a fist wide, the right no bigger than a walnut, both without lids. The widow who keeps the post counter at Nicklemas says the tree is vain about its letters. A boy courting in spring cut MARGET into the bark. The wound closed overnight and opened again a week later reading MARGARET, in cleaner lettering than his. She tells this as a complaint, since the girl now expects the same standard from him.
Nobody says a person's name aloud within twelve paces of the trunk, because a name spoken there is kept. People say "you there" and point. Nothing grows inside that ring. Rooks cross the field and swing wide of it rather than land, and a stranger can find the tree from two miles off by watching where the rooks bend. Pigs refuse its winged nutlets, and it holds its dead leaves, stiff and brown, until spring. Dunstan Mawle, whose field it stands in, mows to the edge of the bare ring and goes home early.
The girl says it turns, the carter that it draws, the widow that it corrects. I stood at the ring's edge from dusk until the owls changed over and saw none of it. What I saw was the trunk's shadow lie across the grass toward me while the moon stood at my back, which a moon does not allow. One animal ignores every rule above. A sheepdog from the Mawle farm, fourteen years old and half deaf, sleeps each afternoon in the crook of the roots, well inside the ring. The farm boy fetches her at five, standing under the branches and shouting her name, and the tree has never once taken it up.
- Classification
- Haunted tree, name-keeping plant spirit
- Habitat
- Lone trees on parish field margins
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 40 ft tall, trunk 9 ft around
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Village glebe land and lane verges
- Binomial
- Carpinus nominivora
- Diet
- Spoken names and standing rainwater
- Temperament
- Watchful, vain, patient