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Love

by John Benson

A chestnut tree grew on the edge of a lake in a large, well-kept garden in a not too heavily polluted city. It wasn't a particularly beautiful tree. Its trunk and branches didn't soar or curve in a satisfying fashion. In fact the whole thing was just a bit lop-sided because it grew on the verge of the lake. It was a solid tree, but even that fact did not lend it any aesthetic value because it had large ugly knobs all over the trunk from where the gardeners had trimmed its branches when it was young.

Anyway, the tree didn't care, and it liked very much its life beside the lake. In Spring it watched the swans and ducks with their young paddle up and down on the glassy water, while it felt the sap rise in its trunk and tender buds split the tips of its branches. In Summer, in the long afternoons of heat and flies, people came to picnic under its broad leaves. They tied the slender row boats they had rented at the far end of the lake to its exposed roots, jumbled higgledy-piggledy near the water's edge.

In Autumn, it felt with relief the small needle pains that meant another of the heavy chestnuts which had ripened all Summer had fallen from its laden boughs. In the giant tracery of roots under the ground, it could feel the shock of the nut hitting the ground, and it sighed, though no-one was there to hear it. Winter the tree slept, only half aware of the people and animals that moved around it, of the freezing and thawing of the lake.

And so it went. For nearly sixty years the tree had lived next to the lake, watching the procession of people and fashions. Gradually it learned how not to grow anymore so as to avoid the agony of the pruners' saws. In the Autumn the gardeners would come and hack off any limbs which offended their careful plan for the park. It was vaguely aware of changes in human society. It felt in its leaves the roar of the planes overhead, it heard the thud of bombs in the distance and every night it tasted the changing mixtures of gases in the air.

For the last twenty years or so it had been aware of a very beautiful beech tree that had been planted on the shore of the small artificial island in the middle of the lake. Unlike the chestnut, the beech grew in one graceful sweep of flawless trunk. Its branches hung beautifully in a cone around it almost touching the manicured lawn. In Autumn its leaves would turn gradually into the deepest flaming red-brown before falling to form a multi-coloured carpet around the silver bole.

The chestnut tree loved to watch the beech tree and sighed and sighed and sighed. Every year the spectacle of its leaves turning and falling would fill the chestnut with painful joy. Its own leaves went straight from their customary deep green to a dry, burned brown. But for it, it didn't matter because it always had the beech.

The chestnut gradually came to love the beech and with this love came a deep, slow, tree-size desire to be with it, to touch it and grow with it. It started to push small young branches across the lake. All Summer it grew and grew, sucking tremendous quantities of water from the lake and sending its roots worming deep into the earth for nutrients. However, with the Autumn, the gardeners came, and, noticing the asymmetry that this particular chestnut was causing, lopped all the new branches off.

The chestnut just stood for a while, not breathing, mastering the pain, and feeling the sap drip from the severed limbs, all pointing mutely across the water to the other shore. It had not had a major limb sawn off in over a decade and the bite of the steel saw into them had been horrible. But the worst pain came from the fact that it knew it could never succeed. Sixty odd years had taught it one thing about the regularity of the gardeners' pruning. It knew that it could never grow across the gap in a single summer, and if it tried again it would simply lose its new branches next Autumn and have to start over again.

The beech stood silently across the lake, reddening slowly as the days grew shorter. Gradually the chestnut was consoled by its tender beauty. It grew cold and the bare trees in the park one by one fell asleep for the Winter. The chestnut tried to stay awake as long as possible, to see the beech, and just before it went to sleep its patience was rewarded when it thought of a plan that might work, and was happy in its drowsiness.

The next Spring, the chestnut went to work immediately, neglecting its leaves and branches, and made a huge effort to keep its sap from rising. It directed all its energy to encourage its roots to grow in the direction of the opposite shore.

Deep under the lake in the dark moistness of the mud, through clay and rocks and gravel beds the tree wormed its tendrils. Pushing and growing, growing and pushing. Above ground, only a handful of new leaves budded. The tree felt as if it was suffocating, which it was. People, who the year before had rested under the tree, wondered what was wrong with it. They blamed the pollution and went and held their picnics under other trees.

All summer the tree worked with all its awareness centred on the beech on the opposite shore. It continued to suffer from the lack of leaves, but it didn't care because it could look at the delicate foliage of the beech trembling in the warm summer breezes. By Autumn, it felt as though it was near its goal. Although it wasn't sure, it thought it could feel the warm drier earth of the opposite bank through its new roots. Desperately, aware of the approach of the wearying cold, it started to branch out from the ends of its new roots to find the roots of the beech.

Most of the other trees had already gone to sleep when the gardeners came to look at the chestnut, which had lost the few leaves that it had had during the summer.

"What do you think killed it, it was a pretty robust old tree?"

"I don't know, but we'd better get it out before it gets cold, and then we can put something else in right away next Spring when it thaws."

They brought out chain saws to cut up the old tree, starting with the upper branches and then working their way down the trunk in sections. They were quite surprised by the amount of sap in the lower parts, but by then it was too late anyway. They brought up a tractor to pull out the stump.

The tree was so confused by the pain by this time that it could barely think. But as it felt the tugging of the chains around its stump it vaguely realised what was happening.

It wasn't sad or terrified, because it knew it had won.