Treehouse
“Absolutely not, no! No!” Mary throws her hands up in frustration, abandoning the vegetables she’d been chopping with a final WHACK! of her knife. Her hands are empty when she turns to face her husband, fingers curling into defensive fists.
“Mary, for Christ’s sake, you can’t baby him forever! He’s ten this year!” Thomas matches her exacerbated tone, but his body language is much more rigid, controlled.
“What if he falls?! Oh, I can’t stand the thought!” Mary huffs, and her blue eyes are large and weepy now, “And do NOT take the Lord’s name in vain!”
William Leopold Kaplan watches his parents argue about him as if he’s not even there. He actually just turned eleven this July – the third, to be precise, day before Independence day – but he doesn’t dare correct his father.
Instead, he slinks away, careful not to let the backdoor slam on his way out.
His parents mostly call him William, but really, he’s thought of himself as Bill since two days after he turned nine. That was the day Debbie Sullivan first brought her cool cousin Jimmy – “not James!” – Anderson to Sunday School.
Jimmy was visiting from Boston and full of wild stories about life in the city. He was animated and excitable, and all the other kids really liked him. Bill liked him too, the way he was funny without trying to be and how he sometimes snorted when he laughed too hard, but wasn’t ever embarrassed or sorry about it.
The two of them were never friends, not really. Jimmy only visited Lincoln once or twice in the summer months and Bill’s mother didn’t like the idea of him hanging out with a kid two years older, especially not one “corrupted by the city’s sinful influences.”
But Jimmy had always been nice to him, in a way other kids weren’t.
Jimmy actually seemed interested in what he had to say, for one thing (even if Bill admittedly didn’t talk very much.) That first day, Jimmy had asked Bill lots of questions – questions like, had he ever tried out a nickname before, and did he even like his name, and what did he think about God watching them all the time, like some immortal Peeping Tom?
It’s not as if Bill had given his name a whole lot of thought by this point. He knows he was named after his father’s father, William, and his mother’s father, Leo (neither of whom lived long enough to meet their grandson,) but that’s about it. He’s worried his father might not like it so much though, if Bill were to shorten his “God-given name.”
Of course, Bill had not said any of these things to his new acquaintance; he only confirms that he’d never had a nickname before.
Then, Jimmy had told some story about these boys in his class, all of whom had the same first name and, incidentally, the same last initial – they went by “William, Will, and Billie” respectively.
Jimmy said he looked too serious to be Billie, but Will wasn’t quite right either.
Bill seems to be a good fit.
Three years later – when the Sullivans had moved away and no one calls him by a nickname anymore – Bill decides to keep it, even if it’s just for himself.
In the time it takes his parents to give-up on their argument, Bill has collected wood and tools from his father’s shed and gathered them together near a recently fallen tree (an endeavor which takes almost an hour and several trips.) And, when his mother calls him in for dinner, he's already started the bare bones of a structure at the base of the salvaged trunk.
–
The "treehouse” – which he still considers it to be, since it is technically in a tree – takes Bill the better part of two months to complete. After some (admittedly substantial) trial and error, he ends up hollowing out a major portion of the trunk and digging a ways into the ground, building the base and “house” part out with treated maplewood.
It's a bit lopsided and peculiar, but the structure is sound, and he's proud of his work.
Now, Bill has somewhere to go when he doesn't want to be in the house; a small sanctuary, close enough that his mother won't worry (as much,) but far enough to escape the somber walls of the house for a while.
His parents cleared most of the trees out of their yard ages ago, to make room for the chicken coop and a small (mostly dead) vegetable garden. The toppled tree is a small way past their back fence, right in front of the forested-area beyond the yard. He built the treehouse entrance opposite to town, so that it hardly looks out of the ordinary from his house and is obscured by the trees in the other direction.
Bill tinkers with the structure often, trying to make everything perfect, just to his liking. But it’s the following Spring that he has to make some more drastic adjustments… Specifically, after finding a family of Raccoons sleeping inside one Monday morning, curled up amongst the mess they’d made of the interior. Recounting his mother’s warnings about rabies, Bill chases the raccoons away with the BB gun he’d gotten last Christmas. He shoots close enough to frighten, but a bit too high to actually hit any of them.
Animals didn’t know any better, really. Animals are innocent.
Bill’s father tells him that’s why people used to sacrifice animals to God to get their sins forgiven or… something like that. Truthfully, Bill isn’t sure how it all works. But he at least figures he isn’t getting on God’s good side by orphaning baby raccoons.
First on the list: the two windows. He fashions shutters out of apple crates, with makeshift latches on the inside and a pull string for convenience.
Then, onto the door, which he reinforces with a horizontal slab of wood. It won’t keep a person out, granted, but it will do for the animals. Besides, it’s not like any people come back here anyway, apart from Bill and his father.
Come Summertime, Bill begins storing things (non-food items only) inside the treehouse – his favorite books and comics, handheld whittling projects, notepads marked up with to-do lists and supplies he needs, and amateur blueprints still out of reach.
Bill finds that he values his own space more than anything else. He definitely values it more than anyone else too, or that’s what he’d tell anybody who asks.
Nobody ever asks though.
Which is perfectly fine with him. It’s great, actually.
Because, by the time he’s on the cusp of his thirteenth birthday, Bill already knows he will only ever be able to be who he really wants to be when he is completely and totally alone.
It doesn’t mean he doesn’t still think about them though; the people he’d share the treehouse with if things were different.
That’s one downside of being alone most of the time – sometimes, when it’s real quiet and peaceful, his thoughts wander to places he would rather not go, places even his latched windows and barred door can’t keep away…
Like how things might have been if the Sullivans hadn’t moved away and Jimmy still had family to visit next door. Or if Bill had thought to build the treehouse four summers earlier…
Or if he would still have chosen solitude if there had been any other choice.
When such thoughts plague him, Bill tends to channel the energy into one of his many projects. Today, it’s a tripwire alarm, of sorts; he doesn’t actually have an alarm for it. Instead, he’d spent weeks collecting (and fiercely rinsing) as many cans as he could get his hands on - thirty-two and counting, since he was expecting a couple more after dinner this evening. Always good to have spares, lots of spares.
It’s mid-August now and the surrounding Red Maples are just beginning to show signs of Autumn’s annual approach.
Using the nearby trees as anchor-points, he guides a spool of fishing line around the designated perimeter, drawing it as tightly as he can manage. The line is attached to a cluster of cans, hanging between a tree fork nearby. For extra volume, Bill strings washers, nails, and other miscellaneous bits of metal inside the cans, resulting in something that sounds like the disconcerting mimic of windchimes.
Bill attaches a separate line to the door-bar. He rigs it to a larger cluster of cans connected by string, designed to fall from above and (ideally) onto the unsuspecting intruder. To avoid falling victim to it himself, Bill makes sure the line will only pull tight enough to trigger when the plank is set down too quickly and/or to the right. It’s an easy enough addition to his daily ritual, setting the plank off to the left very carefully before he enters his hideaway.
It ends up being a good call, establishing security measures when he does. Because, only four days later, Bill heads outside after his chores are done, to find the treehouse door open and some kid tangled up in the web of tin cans.