Story-A-Day #377: The Weeping Tree

THE WEEPING TREE

"I've been in jail," he informed me.  It was a casual, off-the-cuff remark between two strangers at a bar, not one designed to intimidate, but one that intrigued me.

"Is that so?" I replied.

"It is.  I did a bad thing, and I did my time, but I don't regret a moment of it."  He took a long swig from his pint, and followed it up with a shot of whiskey.  "I can show you the place it happened, where I did what I did to that son of a bitch."

I shrugged and finished off my beer.  "Might as well," I replied.  "Nothin' much else going on today."

We stepped out into the dull grey afternoon and I followed my new aquaintance down the road as he told his story.  It was pretty horrific, and I found myself on more than one occassion, wondering what the angle was.  It seemed too unreal to be true.

He had been in love once, with the most incredible girl he ever did lay eyes on.  They married just out of highschool, and bought a small house together.  They were happy.  They were in love.  It lasted the better part of four years, and then one day, on their anniversary, he got home and found the love of his life in bed with the man he had thought of up to that point, as his best friend.  He hit her once, and dragged his friend outside where he delivered a furious beeating.  When his knuckles grew too sore, cracked and bloodied by the pumelling, he dragged his naked friend over to a weathered old tree and tied him to it with a length of barbed wire.  He then sat down in the dirt and watched as his friend whimpered and moaned out of existence, then called the police himself.  He called them because he felt guilty about hitting his wife.

"I've been out for a three year stretch now, on account of good behavior and recognizance for what I did that day," he told me, a mouthful of exhaled cigarette smoke wafting up past his face as the final words escaped his lips.  "I only regret that I laid hands on her."

He paused and gazed across a desolate patch of land, then extended a finger towards a gnarled old tree.  "That's where I strung him up.  That where I watched him die."

He dropped his cigarette onto the dirt at our feet and ground it out with the toe of his boot.

"I call it the weeping tree," he said.  "On account that what happens is so sad.  You have yourself a good day."

I watched as he wandered off across the empty plot of land towards the gnarled old tree in the distance.  I could hear him whistling, a low and mournful tune.