The Black Oak

Black as night, the oak jutted from the field in savage profile. Its branches were long, lean, and bare and they stood out in jagged relief against the twilight sky behind them. The massive trunk proclaimed the tree older than any man who looked upon him, older than the sullen farm whose fields it dominated. Generations of men had farmed this land and cleared these fields, and the oak had survived all of them.

It was not for love that the men refused to cut down the tree. The generations of farmers suffered no nostalgia about its presence, endured no fond memories of playing in its shade or climbing among its branches. In the history of the farm’s existence, only one child had taken it upon himself to climb the oak, and the fall had killed him.