The Misdirection

by Damen O’Brien

After a line from 'Growing Season' by Maree Reedman

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. – Chinese Proverb

There’s a magic trick performed with a walnut tree, the magician’s watch,

an axe and years of patience. I only know one way to perform that trick:

galling in the soft wood the slow hard way, ringed with time.

As a child I loved magicians. I watched David Copperfield on television

wade through the Great Wall of China in ghostly x-ray steps

and I stayed awake all night wondering how it was done.

Some fathers have a little of that magic, the stuff that grows a child,

they can pluck coins out of their children’s ears or noses, make the

matchstick stand up, name the right card from a shuffled deck.

My father only had one trick, but we would laugh: he’d bring his

severed finger on a bed of gauze, kept safely inside a matchbox

which twitched with a deathly life when we opened the lid.

We all knew how it was done, a splash of dye, a little hole

to conceal his finger poking through, but I never learned

the secret of The Walnut Tree: how the magician retrieved his watch

from inside a cross cut of the wood. No palmed copy, no assistant

from the audience. To place the watch there fifteen years ago or more,

to let the pulp enclose it like a fist, requires a steadiness of purpose,

a terrible determination: all that time knowing that the wood

held his greatest trick, ticking like a promise. But life is not magic.

We do not begin with the solution, we wait for the watch to be found.

Between teasing us kids, my father pulled down houses, ripping

those crumbling fibrous sheets out of the walls, claw hammering into

ceilings, to dump the tiles in a skiff, his hands and face all powder painted

with asbestos dust, his mates as well, big laughing men with burly arms,

who could break a house down to its parts in days, now sunk in on

themselves, in hospital wards, gasping out their nightmares while awake.

If I wish to save my father’s life, I have to start thirty years ago, when

those little spines had not yet needled his lungs, had not yet stung him

like a shoal of nails. Or earlier, before James Hardy Co. sold chrysotile.

But knowing how the trick is done, and doing it, are not the same.

My father’s latest trick is every breath, stolen from bubbling lungs,

another heartbeat and another, until the last card in the deck is turned.

There’s the Rabbit From A Hat, the Levitating Assistant, and finally my father,

The Disappearing Man, teaching me one last trick. We should not wait

for the watch to be recovered from the tree. There is never a better time.