Chapter 1

It was simple for me, the saints were in heaven and guardian Angels had extendable wings like Batman and my dad had died and gone to live in the tree in the backyard.

Weeks he'd been calling out, imitating the way I called over the back fence to my friend Megan. I didn't get the joke though; there was my dead father trying to get my attention and talk to me in a way I might understand, and every evening was the same. I thundered up the garden past the tree and sped up the back stairs, humming a mad tune all the way, trying to block out his voice.

The first time I heard him call was the evening after we'd been to the cemetery. I'd stood at his grave and watched the ants crawling across the dry earth; their pinhole nests perforated the red soil. It was too scary, I'd said to myself, meaning the ants.

"Don't worry about the ants." That's what I heard him say.

I replied in my own mind. "They're everywhere, why are there so many?" Meaning, "Is that you I'm talking to?"

"They're busy," he'd said. "Yes, it's me."

I hated thinking of him underground. I'd dreamt one night he pulled a rope and a light turned on in his dark coffin. The dream was a cross section of earth. There was a thin green line of grass, then a weight of brown earth, then my father lying in the coffin, with a bare bulb by his head illuminating the box.

That afternoon I stood at the back fence. Between me and the house was the great tree, enormous and dark with hanging branches dipping so low they brushed the carpet of coarse couch grass. It loomed above me, looking down on me like a giant. A circle of leaves at the top of the tree moved.

I bolted across the grass on my pin-thin legs, holding my breath and running like billy-o past the tree. I could hear it calling to me in much the same way I called to Megan when I lamented by the dry paling fence.

"Me-gan," I would call, dragging the word out for up to fifteen seconds. It drove the neighbors mad. Mrs. Johnson, who lived on the other side of the tree, protested to my mother.

"Does she have to call out like that? Sounds like a wounded animal."

"Me-gan," I called the second time. Starting with "Me-," then sliding down a note to "-gan," dragging out the n, annoying the suburb with my migrating goose call.

The tree calls, "Simone," with the emphasis on the "-on." The second time it calls, it extends the "-on," as I do with Megan's "-gan," much longer than I think it needs to; trying to get my attention. The third, more desperate plea always comes as I reach the back stairs, and it lasts all the way up the twenty-two steps until I have slammed the back door too hard.

I flop down at the kitchen table. My mother's back presents itself as her front, married as it is to the electric frying pan. Although, in the last three months she has barely cooked and it's been my brother's back I've become more familiar with. Her pores widen in the heat from the sizzling meat.

Three festering grins in various states of disinterest watch as I sit at the kitchen table. Christ hanging from what appears to be like a great plus sign looks down on me, the eternal victim, and the orange seersucker tablecloth mixes with the fluorescence of the bar light above to color my tanned skin tobacco yellow.

Much later, after fifty spelling words revised halfheartedly at the kitchen table in the pools of dampness left after it had been wiped clean in random circles by Edward, my eldest brother, I put myself to bed.

"Simone. Simone." I thought I heard the tree, its voice whispering through the screens.

I eventually flung back my covers and dashed across the floor to my brother's bed, ramming an elbow into his side and pushing him in his sleep closer to the wall to make room for me.

The tree was quiet for some minutes and I lay watching the space in my empty bed where I should have been sleeping.

Through the stud walls I heard voices conferring; gentle murmurings and the reassurance of Mr. Reardon. His chocolate brown eyes unblinking as he watched my mother weep. The dark timbre of his voice rose from a baseline of shuffling papers.

I had seen my mother standing on the kitchen chair after dinner while Edward was mopping the table in idle circles and James was wiping the dinner plates. I looked up from my spelling to see my mother's calf muscles flexed as she stood on the chair and stretched to reach the shelf on the top of the hall cupboard. Mr. Reardon was the accountant for the church, and now he shuffled the papers that lived in the shoe box from Edward's size fourteen and a half black school shoes. I heard the rise and fall of their voices. My mother sobbing, Mr. Reardon consoling, then more shuffling of papers. The scratching of a pen on paper, then the voices moving to the front door. The closing of the heavy glass door. Then the light feet of my mother, the dragging of a kitchen chair across the tiles, and the shoe box being lifted back into place.

Gerard sniffled in his sleep, and his arm thrashed out. I was thrust out of bed as he rolled over to take up the space he had previously occupied. He had no idea, I thought as I crawled across the floor to my bed, sleeping with his teddy, waiting for school to start; he'd find out then you couldn't spend all day playing.

Outside the tree frogs belched and I made a dash for my bed, jumping the last bit. I pulled the covers up and put a pillow over my head and attempted to sleep, but my mother's tears were too loud to ignore. I tried to block them out. "Hello, Catholic sitting on a log." I repeated the stupid phrase I had heard the children from the state school call at me. They hid behind the grasshopper-infested hibiscus tree growing out of a black tire on Mr. Beatty's footpath and tortured me with the meaningless phrase that I now sang over and over to try to banish the sound of my mother's tears and my father's voice from the tree outside, which had quietened now to a wheezing breath.

I pushed the door to my mother's room open. I felt the weight of her pain in the walls and in the cupboards. The furniture was full of it. There was heat from her tears. My mother jumped when she saw me, then she opened her arms.

"I'm sorry, love, I'm crying again."

"I know," I said, crawling into the hug.

"I'll stop. I'm sorry."

It wasn't the right time to tell her that Dad was in the tree outside. When would I find the correct moment to let her know that she could go and talk to him if she wanted to.

Excerpted from Our Father Who Art in a Tree © Copyright 2004 by Judy Pascoe. Reprinted with permission by Random House Trade Paperbacks. All rights reserved.