Real Ents

Seven-year-old Lilly Wall was sitting under the willow oak, bathed in green dappled light, murmuring quietly to it with her head resting against its trunk.

“What does it say to you?” Mrs. Wall asked her daughter.

“She tells me about walking to the pool and how she keeps out Orcs. Her leaves whisper to her mother,” replied Lilly.

Mrs. Wall smiled. The willow oak was the tallest tree in their subdivision, with a thick green canopy that rose above even the trees up the hill.

Often Lilly had tea with the backyard ginkgo, dumping cup after cup on its roots. Her twelve-year-old sister, Emily, joined sometimes. The two would sit outside on cool golden fall afternoons, giggling together.

“And then he’s going to—” Emily tossed a pile of yellow ginkgo leaves into the air.

“—drop all his leaves at once!” Lilly shrieked as the smaller leathery ones landed in the tea.

Emily took a drink before she realized it, choked, and spat tea back across the table, the leaf coming with it.

“And it’ll be on Thanksgiving, right after turkey—” Lilly said, undeterred.

“—so Dad has to clear the yard—”

“—no napping—”

“—and we won’t help—”

“—because we’ll be too full.”

Strangely, this exact fate did befall poor Mr. Wall a few weeks later.

One morning, Lilly was awakened to the sound of saws and large, sickening thuds.

Emily’s curly, unbrushed head popped inside Lilly’s doorway. “Mrs. Cubby is having the other willow oak cut down!”

Emily and Lilly rushed outside in their pajamas to see the largest part of the canopy fall to the ground. The once stately tree had stood at the top of the ridge, a graceful sentinel over the neighborhood. Their neighbor kid Stevie was out to observe too. “Wow!” he said as another section of the tree came down. “Epic crash!”

The branch left a deep rut in Mrs. Cubby’s yard. The saws unleashed the green wood smell of the tree, but it was tainted with gasoline and wood smoke.

“The hawks have no home now,” said Emily sadly.

As the saws continued tears began running down Lilly’s face. When Stevie finally noticed, he said, “Aw, Lills, don’t take it so hard,” and patted her arm awkwardly. It did not help.

Lilly walked to the foot of the willow oak in her own yard and plopped down.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, putting her hand on its trunk. The oak emitted a long low wooden creaking from somewhere deep inside its upper trunk, though there was little wind that day.

After a few hours, Lilly’s mother came out to check on her.

“Read me the part about the Ents again,” said Lilly, tilting her face up, green eyes insistent.

Mrs. Wall took up Tolkien and appeased her daughter’s wish for the third time that week. Even after the story was done, Lilly refused to come in for a snack.

Mrs. Wall mused, “Perhaps we should invite some of her classmates over to play?”

“Don’t worry, Mom. Lilly will be the one to learn the trees’ secrets someday,” said Emily.

Over the next few days, Lilly opened and closed the day with a solemn observance of the stump in Mrs. Cubby’s yard.

Emily joined her in the evenings by standing quietly next to her.

“Do you believe in Ents?” Lilly asked her sister.

“I believe that trees are important.”

“No, I mean Ents—the trees that walk.”

“Are you wishing that Mrs. Cubby’s willow oak had walked away from the saws?”

“YES,” said Lilly with an intensity that startled Emily.

“Then I wish that too.”

At the end of that month, the Walls’ willow oak dropped a particularly large branch on the house. It knocked a small hole in the roof before pivoting down to smash the window into Lilly’s room, spraying her bed and stuffed animals with glass and spindly green leaves.

First, Lilly went into her bedroom and gawked at the damage. A large twig had pierced her favored stuffed rabbit, Rare-bit, right in the side, and there was glass matted into his fur.

She ran into the yard and screamed at the oak. “I’m not an Orc! It wasn’t my fault.”

The willow oak stood still and mute, other than its feathery leaves rustling gently high in the wind above. Lilly waited for an explanation. None came.

“I hate you!” Lilly finally sobbed.

Emily came out into the yard with a cup of tea, but Lilly pushed her away. Lilly lay down under the tree, holding her little arms tightly closed over her chest. Squirrels ran between the branches above her, building a giant nest of twigs and dead leaves. Lilly refused to let their acrobatics and frantic games of tag ease her anger at the tree.

“That still doesn’t make up for it,” she said to the tree.

Inside, Mrs. Wall and Emily got out needles and thread and carefully stitched up Rare-bit, who was still prickly with bits of the window. Mr. Wall taped a few layers of clear plastic over the gaping hole where the window had been.

Over the next hour, the roofers were called, the vacuum cleaner was deployed, and a parade of Walls, finally including a reluctant Lilly, took turns shaking out stuffed animals in the yard. Emily called Lilly over for a break. She was carrying her iPad—the one that Lilly was NEVER allowed to touch. The screen got instant traction. As it flickered to life, a blonde woman in a lab coat with a funny accent was talking about the forest.

“The mother, or hub tree, sends carbon and other nutrients through the fungal network to its offspring and other trees connected to the network,” said the woman on the screen.

“Is that why? . . . still not cool of W-O,” Lilly murmured to herself. She watched nearly without blinking as the scientist detailed the experiments with carbon gas that revealed different subtle ways of tree to tree communication.

After the video ended, Lilly sat under the oak and thought about how it must feel—now alone with no mother tree. Finally her own mother called, “There is lots still to do, please come and help!”

Lilly still frowned at the oak but took to the cleanup work in earnest.

“What are you doing?” Stevie the neighbor wanted to know, seeing the commotion at the Wall house.

“Cleaning the glass out of Rare-bit.”

“You’ll never get it all out—you’ll need to get rid of him.”

Lilly glared at Stevie, who backed up a step.

“What happened, anyway?” he said, still shrinking from the look.

“Willow-O got hangry and dropped a branch,” Lilly said, giving Rare-bit a vigorous shake. Glass shards sprinkled to the ground.

Stevie rolled his eyes. “Trees don’t get hangry.”

“Yeah, huh! Mrs. Cubby cut down the oak over there,” said Lilly, pointing to the stump in the neighbor’s yard.

“So?”

“So—Willow-O told me that she needed stuff from that tree to live—they traded, ’cause they’re Ents.”

“You’re an Ent!”

“Bet you wish you were!”

The noise of their escalating taunts brought Emily out of the house again.

Lilly was standing with her arms crossed, staring daggers at Stevie as he shouted, “Ents are fake and dumb!”

Emily walked closer, stepping into Stevie’s line of sight.

Then Stevie sobered. “Your parents gonna chop it down now?”

“Oh, they couldn’t—could they?” Lilly said, dramatically dropping her stuffed rabbit to the ground.

Emily stepped closer and answered, “I heard Mom and Dad saying they would get some fertilizer spikes for the willow oak—so no, nothing so rash.”

“’Cause she needs carbon!” Lilly said, her green eyes brightening.

“Your family is bonkers!” retorted Stevie.

“That’s what people said about the scientist who first proposed this idea of forest trees supporting one another,” said Emily.

Over dinner, Lilly enthusiastically related the secret language of trees to her parents while Emily nodded and backed her up. After dinner, Mrs. Wall pulled Emily aside.

“Well, I don’t know if Lilly’s version is fully accurate, but you have certainly motivated her! Is it real science?”

“Yes, it is the life work of a scientist named Suzanne Simard,” said Emily. Her mother knit her brows as if she was not convinced, but she did not argue.

That evening, Lilly started a journal. She could hear the rain bouncing through her willow oak’s leaves and smell its earthy green scent through the plastic tarp taped over her missing window.

She concluded her entry with her best recollection of what the scientist in Emily’s video had said.

“They really are Ents—they are just slow and quiet ones who speak with fungus and care for us with carbon.”

Then she added in the margin of the page, “And Stevie needs to be nice for once, even if Willow-O was not.”