Out on a Limb (2 page)

We slammed our car doors and walked from the sidewalk onto a trail. At first it was like any other trail through the woods, with squashed pop cans under bushes and potato-chip bags in twigs, but as we walked along it got prettier and prettier. After we’d gone a long way, we came to an old stone wall, as high as my head.

“If I’m not mistaken,” Dad said, “this wall is the edge of Great-great-aunt Lydia’s property.” It isn’t easy getting over a wall that high. Tilley stood on Dad’s clasped hands and got boosted over. I did the same, and jumped to the ground beside Tilley, all thrilled at our sneakiness. Then came Mom. I’m not sure how Dad made it without a boost, but somehow he did.

On the inside of the wall the woods were even nicer. There were emerald green ferns, and ruffly pink rhododendron blossoms, and moss like dark-green velvet. These woods went on and on. “I can’t believe that this is all Great-great-aunt Lydia’s property,” I said.

“Yup,” sighed Dad. “It’s quite the inheritance that Great-grampa missed out on.”

We came to a stream with a great big meadow on the far side. The stream wasn’t deep, but it was fast, and there was no bridge. We crossed it by leaping from rock to rock. Tilley didn’t quite make the last jump, and she soaked a runner and a sock.

“Wow,” Tilley said as we stood on the edge of the meadow looking downstream. “Is
that
Great-great-aunt Lydia’s place?”

“That’s it,” Dad said. “Grand Oak Manor.” Way across the meadow was a mansion like a little castle, with turrets and everything. We all stood staring until I suddenly remembered why we were there. I turned around. Way across the meadow, standing all by itself, was the giant oak tree. It was incredibly, unbelievably, impossibly enormous, like it was Photoshopped in, or something. It rose way, way, way up above normal tree height, and spread itself into the sky.

“The treehouse tree!” Tilley shouted. We both ran for it, Tilley’s runner spurting little jets of water the whole way. I slowed when the massive tree trunk filled my entire field of vision. Stepping forward, I touched it in amazement. It was as big around as a traffic circle. I tilted my head back and looked up. I couldn’t see a single speck of sky, just the green of a billion leaves.

Tilley would climb absolutely anything, even streetlamps, and I could see that she was already figuring out a route up this colossal tree. There were a few ancient-looking boards nailed to the trunk, making a random kind of ladder, and there were also bumps and gnarly places in the bark. It was enough for Tilley. She started to climb.

My parents ran, calling to get down. Tilley pretended not to hear. I tested a foothold on a board and went after her, pretending I didn’t hear either. I was way too eager to find the treehouse to wait around on the ground. I climbed fast. With the boards and the natural footholds, it wasn’t hard. Part way up, the trunk divided into big branches. I climbed off at an angle up one of the branches, following what was left of the boards. “Rosie,” Dad kept yelling from below. On his seventh or eighth yell I looked down to the bottom of the tree, expecting to see Dad and Mom with freaked-out faces. What I did see was Mom and Dad, far, far, far below me, in miniature. Their faces were dots. I couldn’t believe how high I was. Suddenly the tree seemed to tilt and the meadow seemed to rush around.

“Wow,” my little sister yelled, her voice way above me. I breathed. If she could do it, I could too. I started climbing again, but really carefully this time. I made sure not to look down any lower than my foothold. I focused on the old boards and the rough bark of that massive branch, and my own knuckles, white from clutching. A billion heartbeats later I saw Tilley’s runners, one dusty and one glistening wet, standing on wooden floorboards. I was part way through a trap door. I crawled through and rested my knees on the floorboards, glad to have something solid underneath me.

“Come on Rosie, get up! Let’s go see it.”

I got to my feet. “It’s still here,” I said, and then I just stared. The treehouse was better than my very best daydreams. Tilley and I were on a big porch, and there in the middle was a tiny cottage, with real glass windows and an arched door. When I pushed on the brass handle the door stayed shut, but Tilley and I butted it open and shoved inside.

“Wow,” I said as my eyes adjusted to the gloom. “No wonder Great-grampa loved this place.” There were six walls, with six giant oak branches cutting through the six corners. Three bunks were built in to one of the walls. There was a velvety layer of dirt over everything, but the treehouse smelled really nice, like the inside of a cedar chest.

We could hear Dad getting closer, yelling at us for climbing up without permission. When he stopped mid-sentence we knew that he had seen the treehouse. “Amazing,” we heard Mom say a moment later. They both came inside. Mom’s fingertips traced and traced the rough bark of the massive oak branches. Dad opened the grimed-over windows, and we all stood looking at the sudden view over Great-great-aunt Lydia’s woods. Beyond the oak branches was a sea of treetops in every possible colour of green: blue green, silver green, golden green, creamy green, and lots of plain green green. Birds flitted around singing complicated songs. I was filling up with this fabulous weird feeling. I couldn’t remember when I’d felt it before, and then I did. It was from my dreams about flying.

“I know,”Tilley said. “Let’s live here!” Dad just laughed, the way grown-ups always laugh at their kids’ ideas. Then Mom turned from the window, looking sort of dazed.

“I think Tilley’s right,” she said, turning toward Dad. “I think we
should
live here.”

Dad laughed again, but he didn’t seem so sure of himself this time. “Andrea,” he said. “It’s all very nice for a treehouse, but we can hardly live here.”

“Why not?” said Mom. “It’s ours.”

“Only technically,” said Dad.

“What’s wrong with technically?” asked Mom.

“Andrea, it’s a treehouse. There’s no electricity,” said Dad.

“Mankind lived thousands of years without electricity,” said Mom.

“There’s no running water,” said Dad.

“There’s a stream right down there,” said Mom.

“We’re smart people. We could figure something out.”

“
Andrea
.”

“Don’t say ‘Andrea’ in that condescending voice, as though you’ve made some sort of valid point,” said Mom.

“We’d save a pile of money on rent, you know. And we’d be five minutes from the university.”

“Come on,Andrea! It’s not the slightest bit practical.”

“You’re making the assumption that we should be practical,” said Mom. “Maybe we should be adventurous.”

“We’ve got kids to think of,” said Dad.

“Kids like adventure,” said Mom.

“We do!” said Tilley, or maybe it was me, or maybe it was both of us. “We love it! We want to live here!”

“Oh, David, look out the window! Listen to the birds! How can you think about writing rent cheques every month for some crappy apartment over a brake-and-muffler shop when this place is ours!” Mom was raising her voice. She is a cheerful person, but a lack of enthusiasm can make her really mad.

Dad said nothing. That’s the way he argues.

“Consider it at least,” said Mom.

“I’ll consider it,” said Dad.

We had our Sunday picnic sitting on the porch outside the treehouse, gazing through the banisters. Tilley elbowed me and pointed down. A deer stood drinking in the stream below us. When it heard the lemonade pour from our Thermos it looked around all big-eared, and its white rump bounded for the woods.We ate our peanutbutter-and-banana sandwiches. Long after they were finished, we sat waiting for the deer to come back. “I guess we’d better get going,” Dad said finally. Cautiously, we all climbed down the oak tree.

I heard my parents considering the treehouse when I was in bed that night.They were murmuring in the living room, on the other side of my bedroom wall. I lay as still as a dead body to hear what they were saying, but it didn’t work. Every time I caught a couple of words, a car would squeal its tires; or our fridge would get the shakes; or Tilley would rustle in the other bed; or someone would slam a dumpster lid. I had no idea how the considering was going when I finally fell asleep.

NOTEBOOK: #3

NAME: Rosamund McGrady

SUBJECT: Legal Rights

The results of the considering
were announced the next morning.

“Well, it’s unanimous,” Dad said as he buttered his toast. “We’re moving into the treehouse.”

“We are?” I crashed my chair backward when I jumped up to hug Dad, but nobody got annoyed. Nobody wanted to spoil the mood.

All I wanted to do was celebrate, and it killed me to have to go off to school. Tilley and I got home in record time that afternoon. We burst into our apartment at 3:34 to find Mom and Dad sitting at the kitchen table with their friend Clarkson, who was a law student. Clarkson had already written a letter to Great-great-aunt Lydia, claiming our rights under the will. Clarkson’s letter said that in his legal opinion, we were entitled not just to the treehouse and the oak tree, but also to a certain amount of the surrounding land. We also had a right to pass through Great-great-aunt Lydia’s land to get to and from the treehouse. In addition, Clarkson said, we were entitled to riparian rights, which means rights to the stream. Clarkson’s letter said that we would begin making improvements to the treehouse immediately, and we would move in on June 30. Clarkson’s letter all by itself didn’t seem too friendly, so Mom and Dad wrote a letter to Great-great-aunt Lydia, too.Their letter introduced the four of us, and said that we hoped past family conflicts wouldn’t keep us from getting to know each other. We folded Clarkson’s letter and Mom and Dad’s letter into an envelope. Then, all of us walked to the post office and mailed the letter off by ultra extra-special delivery to Grand Oak Manor, Number 9 Bellemonde Drive.

There were only thirteen days until our apartment building was going to be torn down, and there was lots to do to make the treehouse fit for occupation. We were so busy that Tilley and I got to skip school to help. The very first thing we did was make the climb to the treehouse less dangerous. We made a wooden ladder going all the way up the trunk, along the branch, and through the trap door in the porch. Next, we made a homemade elevator out of pulleys and rope and a big garbage bucket cradled at the end. ‘Dumbwaiter’ is the word for this kind of device. Tilley begged for a ride up to the treehouse in the dumbwaiter, but Mom and Dad said the dumbwaiter was strictly for inanimate objects.

The dumbwaiter’s very first load of inanimate objects was cleaning supplies. We pulled our broom out of the dumbwaiter and swept out all the dried-up spiders and cobwebs. We dug out our Windex and washed away generations of grime until a new golden-green light slanted through the windows. We dug out our furniture oil and polished the wooden walls until they shone like new chestnuts.

Next we worked on plumbing. We designed the system ourselves. It featured an old-fashioned iron pump on the treehouse porch, to pump stream water up through a plastic pipe along the tree trunk. The pipe included filters for straining out parasites and stuff. It was a cool design, but gadgets didn’t fit other gadgets the way they were supposed to, and this led to frustration. Tilley and I even heard the occasional swear word. In the end though, we got it working.

For our heating system, we got a wood-burning potbellied cast-iron stove. It was free on Ebay, probably because it was so heavy that nobody else wanted it. Moving it to the treehouse was a problem. “It would be so much easier to bring it in by Bellemonde Drive,” Mom said. “If we could drive onto the driveway of Grand Oak Manor, we’d just have to worry about getting it out through the Manor garden and across the meadow. That’s so much shorter than dragging it all the way through the woods. Do you suppose Great-great-aunt Lydia would mind?”

There was no way of knowing. Great-great-aunt Lydia had not replied to Clarkson’s or Mom and Dad’s letters, and in all of our trips to the treehouse we’d never caught a single glimpse of her. We’d seen gardeners clipping hedges and watering flowers in the Manor garden, but never Great-great-aunt Lydia. “I don’t think we should push our luck,” Dad said, so he and some of his friends tied the stove to a trolley and pushed it down the long, bumpy path through the woods. When they got to the stream they untied the stove and rolled it across the stream bottom. The very hardest part was getting the stove up to treehouse level. We tied it securely into the dumbwaiter and six of Dad’s friends cranked the winch until the stove levitated slowly off the ground. Before it was even halfway up to the treehouse their necks were purple and throbbing with veins. I waited in suspense for the stove to plummet to the centre of the earth. It was a big relief to get it safely onto the porch. Dad and his friends put the stove in the centre of the treehouse, and added a sheet-metal chimney that went out the roof and up past the highest branches so that no sparks would ever come into contact with the oak tree. My job was to keep the friends supplied with the cans of beer we had chilling in the stream.

“Now that was hard work,” Dad said when the stove was finally in and the friends had gone. He leaned against the banister and turned his beer can upside down into his mouth. “I sure hope Great-great-aunt Lydia isn’t about to come brandishing a court order to get us off her property.”

“She won’t, David,” Mom said. “If she really didn’t want us moving in, she’d have done something to stop us already. My guess is that she’s glad for a chance to reconnect with her family. That’s how I’d feel if I was an old lady with a big, empty mansion and no one of my own.” We all looked across the meadow to Grand Oak Manor. As usual, there was no sign of Great-great-aunt Lydia.

“Dad,” I said. “You know how Great-great-grandfather Magnus was so mad at Great-grampa that he cut him out of his will?”

“Mmhmm,” said Dad.

“Well, I don’t get how he could be so mad at his very own son.”

“Oh, Rosie,” Dad said. “Grown-ups think up all kinds of reasons for getting mad at each other.”