The Tithe of the Root

Confession

My dear Elias, they have taken my staff and my seat at the table, and for good reason. You were the lucky one to be cast out, though you called it a curse when the gates closed behind you. I cannot bear the silence of this house anymore, and I cannot carry the weight of the soil in my lungs. Every seventy years, the oak demands its due; it is not a poem, it is not a legend, it is a transaction. I remember the smell of the marigolds we crushed into the mud to mask the scent of the open pit, a cloying, bitter sweetness that sticks to the back of your throat for weeks. I remember the cold iron of the spade hitting the roots, the sound of metal on dead wood that felt like a strike against my own ribs. The soil beneath that tree is always wet, even in the height of August, a thick, black slurry that pulls at your boots and swallows the light. We did not pray, we did not chant, we simply worked. I felt the earth pull back, a literal tugging on the ankles of the one we laid down, a hunger that is physical and greedy. It is a debt that settles in the marrow of your bones until the next cycle, a heavy, damp cold that never truly leaves you. I failed the transition this time. I hesitated when the iron touched the skin, my hand shook, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing I have ever heard. The valley knows. The wheat is yellowing at the edges, and the calves are being born with blind, milky eyes. Do not come back, Elias. Do not let the memory of the apple orchards or the nostalgia for the valley blind you to the cost of the harvest. We are not the masters of this land, we are only its debtors, and the root is coming to collect.