Mary and Jes (1991)
It is a cool spring morning, and a boy and a girl are running, breathless and laughing, in ragged circles around their backyard. The girl gallops clumsily, just out of reach of the bigger boy’s grasp. The two-storey house behind them is faded white clapboard, the paint chipped and peeling at the edges. An old shed crouches at its flank, its low roof sagging beneath the weight of tree droppings and decades-long neglect. The sun shines through smudged clouds onto the damp grass. They are both barefoot, and their heels and toes are numb. The tips of fungi tendrils, intertwined in the grass roots and searching upward from dark earth, touch their soles.
The nine-year-old boy is tall and muscled from climbing and bike-riding and playing shinny games on the street, which last well past his bedtime. The sun tucks itself farther upward behind the clouds as he bounds up the porch steps, slapping the screen door shut behind him. He begins counting, the syllables guttural through the woven mesh: one-hippopotamus, two-hippopotamus … The boy’s voice fades inside the big house as the girl heaves the splintered boards up behind the old shed high enough to wedge her body through to its dim inside world of damp, musty soil, clicking insects, scurrying rodents.
She squeezes herself into the darkest corner and waits for her brother to find her, while beneath her, moist fungal enzymes crawl upward to kiss and consume the light bones of a dead animal, twisting and curving through jaw, teeth, eye sockets, skull.
The network below her spreads outward, spreads downward, growing, thriving, listening.
From: Mary Blackwell treehugs@hotmail.com
To: Jes Blackwell blackwelljes@gmail.com
Monday, August 18, 2004, at 10:35 a.m.
Dear Jes,
Imagine this: You grasp the edge of the industrial-grass carpet in your hands, its edges curling up to the end of the world, and your knuckles whiten and bleed against the stiff plastic blades, and with the effort of Thor, you pull it up. There is a sucking sound as you peel it back, there are acres of it, it’s been waiting so long for you to do this, you peel it back and away for miles and miles, and it satisfies like a long-rotten tooth throbbing and screaming in your jaw, finally pulled.
And here we see the life that lies beneath: rodent bones, mouldy acorns, mud-streaked stones, a toy ring. A tin can, rusted and empty. A rectangle of glass, half a dirty plastic cup. Small skulls. Decaying stink of fungus. Refuse, treasure, braided together. And, presently, what we don’t want to see faces us: what’s been buried too long has come up to the light.
This is what the earth does. Each year what lies beneath gently pulses upward by another millimetre, another centimetre. Ever so slowly the secrets push upward. And after a million years, then thousands, then hundreds of years, it becomes this year, this day, and what has been so long buried finally faces the sun’s scorch. We must bear witness to the chorus beneath our feet, in all its entangled darkness and light. This is, in fact, what we’ve come here to do.
I hope you will come home soon.
Love,
Mary
Mary (April 18, 2011, 5:25 a.m.)
In the beginning, there was a tree.
These are words that begin a story. But each story of the Great Tree is different: Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life, with Odin losing an eye; the Christian tree in the garden of good and evil, with the evil snake luring Adam and Eve to sin; the Ashvattha tree, under which the Buddha gained enlightenment. This story will be different, too. Everything is being unearthed now, and how will it all end? They will soon learn — those who uproot the tree — of the secrets she houses deep beneath her.
The air in the park is heavy with dew. With silence. Mist hugs the trees, the bushes, the park benches. There are no people. I steady my body on the platform as I untie the rope and release it from my waist. Light has begun to peek through the canopy of leaves. The dawn is breaking up the dark. I push my back against the trunk and stretch, ready myself for the fall. Down below, bright green shoots poke through dead brown grass. The yellow police tape is dirty and trampled upon. I look up to the emerging light through the latticework of leaves: It hurts my eyes.
I press my soles on each branch as I descend, then I jump from the bottom branch to the grass below. The dew kisses my scarred toes, sending a shiver up my calves. I take my sandals from my poncho pocket and slip them on.
I look up to her now. They call her the Harron Tree, named after the park. She told me her real name, though: Oman. I say goodbye to her in my mind, but she doesn’t respond. Her sadness is an ache in my heart. She stopped talking days ago, with the death of the child. As I turn away, everything in me wants to run back, to save her, to save them. But I can’t. There is somewhere else I must be.
Bring home The Chorus Beneath Our Feet (Radiant Press, 2025)
About The Chorus Beneath Our Feet:
A grief-stricken soldier accompanies his best friend’s body home after eight years away, only to find his nonspeaking sister, Mary, missing and wanted for questioning by the police in the murder of an infant in the city’s central park. As Mary’s life hangs in the balance, Jes must follow the obscure clues she has left behind, the only way to find her and absolve her of wrongdoing. In his labyrinthine search, the mystery of the park’s infamous Harron tree and its connection to his sister, and their community, is slowly revealed. The Chorus Beneath Our Feet explores buried secrets, and the human desire for healing and connection.
“With her sharp, clear-eyed prose Melanie Schnell has created a symbiosis between past and present where the two relentlessly interrogate each other to unearth a story that’s both old and new, a story as disturbing as it is redeeming for the estranged siblings at its heart.”
— Iryn Tushabe, author of Everything is Fine Here
About Melanie Schnell:
Melanie Schnell’s novel, While the Sun is Above Us, was shortlisted for The Fiction Award and Book of the Year award and won the Saskatchewan First Book Award and The City of Regina Award in 2013. The novel has been listed as part of the ELA A30 curriculum in both Public and Catholic schools across Saskatchewan. Melanie has published long and short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Her fiction placed second in the City of Regina Awards in 2010 and 2017. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Regina. She lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.