Sprout

thick. The only opening in the foliage is for the front door—although copious amounts of itch ivy still make getting into and out of our house a bit of a risky undertaking. At least in spring and summer anyway. Come winter, the leafless brown strands look like a fisherman’s net tangled around a beached whale. People tend to have two reactions when they see it, one of which is “Cool!” and the other of which is:
    “ Weird .”
    Well, most people say “weird.”
    In fact, only one person ever said “cool.”
    Mrs. Miller’s eyes floated to the top of my head, as if wondering what kind of man would encase his house in bright green vines and let his son walk around with bright green hair. She shook her head— click click went her bangs against her glasses—a little amused, a little perplexed, a little scared.
    “Your father ,” she said carefully, “is very, very weird.”
    And now the stumps:
    One time my dad and I were driving on the western side of the county. I forget why. Sometimes my dad liked to drive. Sometimes my dad liked to take me with him when he drove. Sometimes I didn’t manage to sneak into the forest before he found me. This must’ve been one of those times. So:
    We drove past a cottonwood that’d fallen over. The big bristly ball of roots was open and exposed, a dense, knotted tangle like a virus magnified a million times. It had been out of the ground long enough that the dirt had washed off and the bark had fallen away and the sinewy wood had gone almost white. My dad slowed the Taurus as he looked at it, then just stopped and stared. Finally, he said,
    “Son, that is an amazing sight.”
    “ Tolutation ,” I said. “ The action of ambling or trotting .”
    From the corner of my eye I saw my dad glance at the dictionary, but he didn’t say anything. Just pulled the car off the road before we got rear-ended. We must’ve sat there for like a half hour while I made my way into the U’s, until finally a woman came out of the house with a cordless phone in her hands, which she waved threateningly.
    “What’s she gonna do,” my dad said, “throw it at us?”
    “I think she’s gonna call the cops.”
    “Oh right.” My dad pulled back onto the road. He looked both ways first, though. He might be crazy, but he’s a considered kind of crazy. Careful.
    A week later the stump was in our back yard. My dad cut the trunk off about two feet above the rootmass, which was a good six feet in diameter, and brought it home on the back of a rattling flatbed trailer he’d gotten who knew where. With the help of a couple of buddies (drunks can always find a couple of buddies), he balanced the stump upside down on the grass, so that the roots reached up into the air. On the one hand, it looked a little like an enormous dead cauliflower, or the head of a giant troll doll. On the other, you could stare at it for a really long time. Not just at it, but into it. Even in broad daylight there was something about the shadows created by all those tangled roots that made you think the stump contained limitless hidden spaces. It was a paradox. Something that was normally hidden beneath the earth had been exposed, yet in the process new mysteries were created. I had to admit, it was kind of impressive.
    It was also really ugly.
    It also started multiplying.
    The stumps became my dad’s hobby. He combed three counties looking for them. Would go up to strangers’ houses and ask if he could haul away the tree that had fallen in their field or front yard. At some point he got the idea of cutting up the non-stump part of the tree and selling it for firewood, which proved surprisingly lucrative. So you could never say his hobby was indulgent, or took time away from his job.
    On first glance, the stumps look like leafless trees, dead or merely dormant depending on your outlook on life. But when you get closer you see the difference. Roots don’t grow the same way branches do. Branches tend to be straight or gently curved, easing their way through open air towards a sunlight that’s all around them. Roots have to push though solid earth. To say they inch their way is an overstatement. They millimeter their way, micron their way even, searching blindly for water or nutrients or patches of ground strong enough to hold up the huge mass growing invisibly above them, the evidence of their labors in their gnarled, stunted shape (and yeah, I know I switched from old-style to metric in the middle of that