The Gumball Tree - Anthology

Richard Beard

The Gumball Tree

There isn't much to do when a town is dying. Standing on the shoes of giants the dust of days anoints all in the rituals of slow decay. People cling to past routines, half from memory, partly from fear, hardly ever from hope. Memories become faded and peel away, like the paint on the old clapboard Church. This is why Alejandro began to steal.

He remembered being a little boy, five or maybe six years old, trying to help his mother after a particularly bad storm. Windblown dust was piled against the front door so his brother had taken a piece of board, climbed out of a window and started to shovel it away, into the road. Alejandro had been so keen to help, he had followed Celestino. Cupping his hands he had tried to carry the dust, but it had trickled through his fingers. In the short journey to the road he lost half of it, mainly onto his legs where it clung. Celestino had laughed at him and refused to let him use the board.

"You are too little and won't do a good job anyway," he declared, in that special voice that all younger siblings know and all older siblings know how to use.

Alejandro had cried and thrown dust at him that blew back in his own face. He had rushed inside, through the front door, and the rest of the day had been about trying to get the dust back outside again.

Years later, long before he heard anyone talk about the town dying, Alejandro got a sense of it slipping away from him, just like the dust. Perhaps the pared down routines of the town in decay were jealous of the memories of brighter times and stole away first their colour and then their substance. Things he knew had happened became like the old brown photos he'd seen in books; somehow unreal and disconnected from him. So he had taken his mother's thimble from the shelf. It wasn't really theft, no-one except him would think of it as hers anymore, it was sort of his anyway. More importantly though it was a time of joy...

His father had returned home after three weeks away. Sometimes his mother would hardly speak after these long absences. She would make a meal and take his clothes that needed washing and turn her back a lot. This time though there had been colour in the air. Father had strode in the house, thrown off his hat and grabbed mother. From his pocket he had produced a thimble, made of china, with a picture of a dancing woman painted on it.

"I can't push needles through with that, it'll break."

"It's not for needles it's for decoration, ornament, beauty," his father had declared and started to dance her round the room.

"Dance with me like the woman on the thimble."

She had laughed and he had whispered something in her ear.

"You saw Carlos?" she asked.

Alejandro and Celestino knew then that their father had been working with Uncle Carlos whilst away and that meant money. Their mother put the thimble on a high shelf and their father, after dancing her twice more round the room, sent them across the street with enough money for two milk shakes each from Georgio's. It had been a good day...

The thimble had been the first object he had taken, to shore up the crumbling memory of that happy day. Even though there was no-one in the house to complain, Alejandro had guiltily hidden the wrapped thimble in a succession of places, until it found its way to the jar.

The thimble was first but it wasn't lonely for long.

Nothing he took was of great value, most often it was not even missed, but to him these trinkets were signposts to the past, each a compact memory of a bigger time, a greater life, a breathing whole. He hid them away beneath the gumball tree, buried between two roots in an old glass jar. Whenever his head began to spin, whenever the dust choked him, he would escape to the tree to look through these mementos; each of them a story.

The gumball tree stood in the yard of the old house where he and his brother used to live. It was a gumball tree, not because of what it grew but because of what it hid. Months, years, decades ago? Whenever it was, each day the church bell would sound to call the faithful, or just the plain obedient, to prayer. At these times Alejandro's parents would chide him and his brother Celestino in loud voices. The voices had to be loud because the boys would be in hiding. They would not come out and their parents would leave for church with half voiced threats of dire consequences come dinnertime.

Once the wooden walls of the Church were humming, a muted soundboard for the voices of all those within, then the brothers would appear. Celestino would order Alejandro to keep watch and then dig carefully down around the roots of the tree. There lay the treasure of dreams, the jar of gumballs that Uncle Carlos had sent back from the city. For an hour they would sit, and suck and talk about what they would do. Celestino was to be a soldier, a great warrior, he would change his name to Bolivar and become famous for his bravery. Alejandro would drive one of the great trucks that father had told them about, 16 wheels and a mile long. No-one would dare get in his way, Alejandro: King of the Road, just like the record in Georgio's store.

They had an hour for such thoughts before the imminence of parents would force them into action. Each gumball would be carefully wrapped and returned to the jar. Most would last a week, given an hour's attention each day. If one was particularly fine it might even last through the three services of Sunday and breach the eight day barrier. Each such gumball was given a name and recorded on a list of honour, stored in the jar.

Alejandro was eleven when he put the last two gumballs secretly into his brother's pack. Fifteen was too young to join the army, everyone said so. Celestino would listen, acknowledge the fact with a slow nod and then carry on with his preparations.

"I'll lie about my age." "You don't think that has been tried before," his mother asked, "you don't think they see that trick every day?"

Celestino paused in his packing and looked up at the ceiling. "I think they do see it every day and I don't think they care. They will want me in the army."

His voice was slow and considered. That was when Alejandro had known, his brother was really going and he had decided to sacrifice the last two gumballs for his brother's trip. For four years the empty jar had remained buried, without purpose, until Alejandro began his theft for memory.