Money Doesn't Grow on Trees

The year had not been a good one for Martin. First he lost his job, then he lost his car. When his friends finally got tired of his freeloading, he was forced to move in with his mother. From the outset, Martin decided to make the best of it and determined not to let his mother get under his skin.

This was easier said than done. While living in his mother’s house, the mild depression he had arrived with soon matured into something unbearable. Each day he woke up a little later, and when he stumbled into the kitchen his mother was there, waiting to serve him breakfast of cold eggs and coffee. It didn’t matter that he told her over and over again that all he wanted in the mornings was buttered toast. She insisted on making him a “good” breakfast and would make sure he ate it, even if it was cold. After all, she couldn’t be expected to make two meals each morning, one for herself at a decent breakfast hour, and another for him whenever he decided to get out of bed. And with Martin unemployed she certainly couldn’t afford to throw food away.

“Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know,” she reminded him daily.

With her bitter voice ringing in his ears every morning, Martin choked down greasy eggs that had gone cold and tepid coffee, then he got dressed and left the house. He had tried watching TV during the day, but his mother complained that he was ruining the couch by sitting on it.

“You’ll make it all soft, not fit for company to sit on,” she insisted. “And besides, the electric bill is too high when the TV is on all day long. Go out and find something to do.”

Martin got into the habit of going to the library for a few hours, then wandering around town. Each day he chose a different neighborhood to explore, roaming aimlessly and imagining what life was like for the people living in the houses he passed.

He had no way of knowing it, but block by block, Martin’s path was leading him to a place of destiny. On one particular day he stopped, just as he was meant to, in front of a house that was old and run down. He was fascinated by the sagging porch and peeling paint. The missing roof shingles and weedy dirt yard bespoke long neglect. Clearly whoever lived here was of a very different class than the families in the nice well kept houses surrounding this derelict place. Martin stood on the parkway watching the house and wondering about the story behind its dilapidation.

That was when she came to him. The woman struck up such a natural conversation that Martin felt as if he’d always known her. She was a kind woman who asked questions and listened intently as Martin talked.

Eventually she said to him, “Martin, it’s late. You must go home now, but you may come back tomorrow if you’d like.” Walking home he realized that he’d learned very little of the woman, only that she had given up a career as a ballet dancer to marry, and that her husband had since died. The mystery of her filled his thoughts, consuming him. He had not been this besotted since he was a teenager; lost in fantasy, he made his way back to his mother’s house through the balmy summer evening without noticing night fall.

When he walked through the front door his mother upbraided him for coming home so late. Once again, he’d have to eat a cold meal, she warned him.

“It’s your fault for being so irresponsible,” she shouted. “If you’d only come home on time, I wouldn’t have these worries. It’s no picnic making sure you have decent food to eat, you know, young man. And where were you all day? Judy told me she saw you at the library and that you left at one o’clock. It’s after dark now, so I’d like to know just what you’ve been up to. I have a right to know these things when you're living in my house. Don’t ignore me, young man!”

Martin did ignore her and walked through the living room to his bedroom, closing the door firmly to muffle the rattle of her voice. The drivel reduced to background static as he lost himself in the poetry that poured from his heart. He spent the night writing verse and feeling life return for the first time in a year.

The next morning Martin was up in time to eat hot eggs and coffee. With nothing to complain about, his mother was peacefully silent, adding to the brightness of the day which greeted him when he stepped out onto the sidewalk.

When he got to the rundown house he noticed that the wooden shutters had been opened just a bit; the louvered openings formed dark stripes in the windows. And, a pair of red toe shoes hung from a nail on the front door. Martin knew these belonged to her and he also sensed that they were an invitation. He scuffled up the walk to the door and took the shoes down before knocking. When he got no response he tried the handle and let himself in.

He was astonished that anyone could be living here. Dust lay thickly on every surface and cobwebs crowded the corners and decorated the furnishings. It floated in the air, invisible motes in the gloomy darkness of shuttered rooms. The house had the musty smell of abandonment. On the walls there hung photos of the woman. As Martin's eyes adjusted to the grey light he could make out that in some of them she was with a man, but many were pictures of her performing, flashes of time frozen for him to enjoy. He followed the gallery of dust-free pictures down the hall until he came to a room that had the feel of life. No one was there, but the wardrobe was open and Martin could see a red dance costume hanging. He draped the ballet shoes on the hanger and left the room.

When he reached the front room, Martin noticed a roll-top desk. The freshly polished wood shone in the slivers of light escaping from the bottom of the blinds. He opened the desk and was rewarded with a note from the woman.

“Martin, these pages I took from my journal. They are for you.”

He sat in the desk chair and began reading. The pages had been torn out of her book and many of them were fragments of longer writings; she had torn out the paragraphs she wanted him to see.

“Tonight marks the moment when our lives will change forever. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but the man who came home from the bar with Mike has entered our world and will leave behind chaos. My instinct tells me this. Perhaps I am wrong. How I hope so.”

“The stranger has left. Mike scolded me for not being more hospitable, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to be cordial to the man. I stayed awake all night wondering when he would leave, willing him to leave. He and Mike stayed up until this morning. Now he is gone and Mike has a greedy grin on his face. He also has a secret. It will either make us happy beyond measure, or it will destroy us.”

“My bruises are finally fading. I look good enough to go out and get Mike his whisky. This time he beat me up so badly that I couldn’t go out in public. Oh, why do I do it? Why do I buy the liquor for him? Is it only because he’ll beat me black and blue if I don’t? The truth is I’m protecting him from going out to the bars and ending up in prison, or dead in the streets. He sends me, I go. But there’s no way he’d let me be seen like this. People would start to ask questions.”

“I get more and more lonely. It’s been months since we’ve seen any of our friends. The last time we were out Mike almost made the mistake of revealing the secret. Ever since, he’s refused to talk to anybody. He says he can’t trust himself. When I brought up the idea of sharing, he beat me. NO, he says, it belongs to us, only us. Actually, it belongs to him. I’m just along for the miserable ride.”

“Mike was on a rampage. I managed not to get slapped by ducking around the coffee table. He stumbled and passed out on the floor. He’s never been a docile drunk and now that he has something to fear the paranoia makes him especially violent. Each day I fight for my life.”

“Tonight I will do it. He’s out of money and will have to get more before sending me to the liquor store. Everything is ready. The only question is: will I have the courage?”

One last item. A newspaper article titled: Mysterious Fire Destroys Home of Local Vanished Couple. Before he had a chance to read through the piece, Martin startled at a sound behind him. When he turned, he smiled broadly.

“Rose,” he breathed.

There she stood in her red ballet costume, wearing the red shoes. She rose up onto her toes and did a slow, precise pirouette. She nodded toward the papers on the desk and asked, “It’s all right, then?”

“These? I don’t understand any of it, but whatever it is, Rose, it’s all right.”

“Come with me.” She took his hand and walked him out the back door. The small yard was half occupied by a pool, which had long since gone dry, except for a few inches of murky rain water in the bottom.

Near the pool grew a tree that had dried, brown leaves covering its branches. Its roots grew out and away, erupting through the plaster of the pool, creating a latticework of woody fingers.

Rose walked Martin to the tree. “Look up and tell me what you see.”

“Brown leaves.”

“Pluck one of the leaves, and then tell me what you hold in your hand.”

Martin reached up and picked a leaf from the tree. When he looked at it closely he realized his mistake.

“Why, this is a twenty dollar bill! Not one that could be spent – it’s brown, not green, but it sure looks like money. This is the secret, isn’t it?”

“This was the secret. This was the curse of the strange man who came to our house.” Rose shook her head and retreated into memory. “An evil spirit disguised as a man, offering unlimited riches, no strings attached. And my husband fell for it.

“Think about it Martin. How can you possibly spend money when you can’t explain where it came from? You can’t make up a plausible lie that’s big enough without arousing unwanted curiosity. And with money growing in your back yard you can’t possibly ignore the riches.”

Rose laughed softly as she remembered the morning after the stranger left. “Mike made a list as long as your arm of all the things he wanted to get. A BMW, a million dollar house on the golf course, diamonds for me, and the best clothes. It went on and on.”

Her smile faded. “He never spent any of the money, except on booze. He was paralyzed by the fear that someone would discover his secret and horn in on it. He was an alcoholic anyway, and pretty soon he forgot about everything except satellite sports and his unlimited supply of those bottles with the black labels.”

“Why didn’t you just leave, Rose? You could have taken enough money to disappear and settle into a new life.”

“Haven’t I asked myself that hundreds of times? I don’t know if there is an answer except that I had loved him once, and I thought he needed me to take care of him. I did, in the end.”

“What did happened that final night?“

Rose took a deep breath and blew it out through her cheeks. She tapped the box of her right toe shoe in a quick rythm on the hard ground and wrapped herslef in her arms. After a silent moment she pointed to the tangle of tree roots covering the ground.

“On that night, the ground was clear, there were no roots growing here. But there was a very deep hole. I had dug it the night before knowing that Mike would come out soon to get money for more whiskey. He lived every waking moment in a drunken stupor and I knew what I had decided to do would be easy.”

Rose couldn’t continue. She took Martin’s hands and looked at him. As he looked into her near-black eyes, the darkness he saw there spread and filled his mind. He saw Rose wearing her red costume standing behind Mike, in the moon shadow under the tree. As he leaned over to peer into the hole, she shoved him and he fell to the bottom, landing unconscious. Then, unbelievably, she crawled down and lay on top of her husband. Martin saw the tree roots grow down into the hole and surround the couple. In an instant they had fully embraced Mike and Rose, hiding forever their burial place. The last glimpse he got of Rose was a flash of red as one of the roots lifted her skirt and carried it briefly to the surface before the silk fabric slid back down and was swallowed in darkness.

“It’s all right, then?” Rose asked a second time.

Martin understood. “It’s all right.”

They went back into the house together and disappeared in its darkness.

Outside, a dog sniffed a tuft of weeds growing from a crack in the front sidewalk. He looked up, perked his ears and ambled across the empty lot. A young, reclusive couple had lived here until they disappeared and the house burned to the ground. The stray made his way among the blackened remains of the burned house and relieved himself on the stump of an old, charred tree stump


The prompt:
Red ballet shoes
A man in love
A tree that grows money
An evil spirit