Up until I had my children, I always gave my Dad a hand with DIY, to be honest even though I have 3 brothers I was the son my dad never had as far as helping him out with chores etc. I remember one day he and I sledge hammered down a concrete shed 30ft by 10ft and my brother rolled up his sleeves thinking what we where doing was a piece of piss, he took a slug at the wall and ended up looking like Tom from tom and jerry hitting an anvil. Anyway if it wasn’t me pick axing up the bathroom floor of tiny mosaic tiles or chiselling up two rooms of parquet, I was either sawing , sanding and painting with my old man and in the summer I would often be found digging up the large front and back yard and landscaping it, especially when my Dad would be away then Mum and I would get stuck in as well as painting and decorating, she was just as good as my Dad is at these things.
There is a fushia tree that grew out of control in front of the main living room window area and was blocking most of the natural light in the room, and in the summer it was humming with bee’s which also meant that if it was a particularly sticky day temperature wise you couldn’t open the window without getting wasps , bumble bees and shuggies or what kids in Ireland refeer to as ‘red arses’ in the house. Dad wanted to pull the whole thing up. It was quite a sinewy tree and the fact that we didn’t have an axe wasn’t a problem according to Dad, the main trunk of the tree would be dealt severe blows with a meat cleaver and we could dig out the root.
The tree was quite broad, about 6ft in length and 5ft in height and it was dodgy as far as getting stung - it was still summer and the fuchia was in full bloom. After about an hour we had lobbed it down to the main trunk, sweat was pouring out of us and sawing the trunk at an awkward angle was no party either. We got out the spade and garden fork and tried to dig and lift out its remains, but its root system penetrated depths of unknown fathoms to us and seemed to be made of masses of inch thick wooden spaghetti . We where well and truly shattered trying to pull this stubborn woodpile up so I suggested to dad we tie some rope around it and attach it to the car and pull it out that way. We tried it, but in dads words ‘I know by the cars pressure that there’s a chance we’ll pull the front of the fuckin house off its roots are that deep’ We looked at it scratching our heads and defiant this beast would be slain by the setting of the sun.
‘Hang on ‘ my dad said lifting up a finger in the air as if he had a eureka moment and he disappeared into the house. He came out with some petrol defiant that he would destroy this wooden bastard if it was the last thing he did. He thought if he set it on fire somehow it would weaken the actual stump and in our pyromaniac frenzy/lust never bothered to think about how hard it is to set a sap laden lump of wood on fire, our eyes where too glazed over at the thought of causing actual pain to this inanimate object. Every five minutes or so we would take turn in dowsing more and more petrol on it. Mum rolled in from work about half an hour of the blaze getting going.
‘John what the fuck are you doing? that’s the fucking gas mains next to that fucking mess your trying to burn’!! She screamed with her eyes out on stalks like a church organs knobs. We quickly dowsed the flames and my father and I bowed our heads like two small children when my mother ranted on how stupid and dangerous a fete we tried to accomplish and why didn’t we go to the garden centre and get some specialised root killer for trees (we exchanged a glance my father and I with the esp message ‘ that wouldn’t have been half the fun we had’ embedded into it). Mum went inside and we cackled like crones about mushroom clouds and cartoon faces post explosion.
Dad got the root killer that evening , followed the instructions, drilled holes into the stump, placed pellets and solution into it and painted it with another solution. The next year a mass of shoots went virtually unnoticed and the year after that it was a foot high and strong and healthy. I always remember my dad calling me up.
‘Jude?’
‘Hiya Dad, what’s up’
‘its back!’
‘What is?’
‘that fucking zombie tree that wont die’
‘Groovy.. Ill be over there in twenty minutes ‘ I said in a Bruce Campbell voice.
It maybe a shadow of its former self now but for us it the land from which that tree grows is some portent or hell mouth to some sinister hinterland. And both of us know this as far as the tree is concerned ‘ the battle may have been fought but the war is far from over..
