The Way it Bears Fruit

Short Story by Trin Encarnacion

A Filipino American daughter and her mother dig up a beloved loquat tree, unearthing buried memories and healing generational wounds.

By Trin Encarnacion

My mother’s most precious possession was a loquat tree yielding bundles of yolk-colored fruit. Several items had vied for that top spot, such as the heirloom rosary she kept on her nightstand for her daily prayers, her engagement ring featuring a Philippine pearl that my late father sourced himself by diving in the south seas surrounding the island home they left, and even her fake designer handbag that appeared authentic. Of course, there was also her green card and subsequent certificate of naturalization. There was even her only child’s framed diploma with the Latin honor magna cum laude (that she said should’ve been summa cum laude). Yet despite other strong contenders, the tree sprouting forth from the fertile soil of our southern California backyard had rooted itself into the depths of her heart, leaving room for little else.

“Nanay, why can’t we just get you a house plant?” I asked. In one day, we would cede the keys to the home my parents had planted themselves in upon their immigration to America. While we spent the past few days boxing up 26 years’ worth of stuff, Nanay had summoned me to pack up one last thing with her: the tree. It loomed above us with its lowest branch dipping down just enough to pat the top of my head, like the condescending touch of one who believes they are superior to you.

“Anak!” she said, thrusting a shovel into my hands. Her wrinkled fingers with chipped crimson nail polish grazed my own hands, rough and dry from constant hand washing at the hospital where I’d just started working as a labor and delivery nurse. “We move out from house; we take tree with us.”

I turned the shovel over in my hands, avoiding the many splinters sticking out of it. “I’m not sure this tree will fit in our new backyard or if we can even get it there ourselves...”

She gave me a look and I shut my mouth. The first light of day had barely begun to roll over a horizon that hid behind the graffitied billboards and old wooden power lines surrounding this suburban neighborhood. A lingering morning fog blurred this image, giving it a watercolor effect as sharp boundaries obscured. The cloud-dotted indigo sky faded into dawn’s golden sunbursts, which then bled into the muted greenery of the lush, uninhabited land in the distance. The sky and land folded together, melding into one.

Even the chirps of birds overhead harmonized with the lull of traffic in the distance and the vague mumblings of characters in a Spanish children’s cartoon floating out from the next-door neighbors’ TV. I’d seen the kids, both too young to be in school, kicking a ball around in their backyard earlier. Upon seeing my mother who had once scolded them for kicking their ball into our yard, where it struck the tree and caused some loquats to fall prematurely, they fled back inside their house in tandem—even their little strides syncing up. They shut the screen door so fast it bounced back a bit, leaving Nanay and I alone.

We stood on opposite sides of the tree. A decent pile of dirt formed behind Nanay as she hurled mounds of earth over her shoulder with an impressive speed for her age. Then again, she had cared for this tree ever since moving into this house.

It was only when Tatay was diagnosed with advanced-stage lung cancer that Nanay shifted her focus onto him. Upon his death, I suggested she and I move into a smaller house closer to my work. I’d assumed she’d grown apart from the tree enough to leave it behind.

At my father’s viewing, however, she floated through the wooden church pews explaining her master plan of how I was going to help her excavate the tree and relocate it. Our friends and family humored her by listening in as she recounted her wish of digging the tree out of the ground and strapping it onto the top of my old station wagon. She told them we’d drive away from the only neighborhood we’d ever known in America, past all the neighbors who spoke broken English, rusty and dented cars parked on the cracked street, and yards with overgrown weeds. We’d drive away from it all, planting the loquat tree in the miniscule backyard of the tiny townhome—complete with access to a community recreation center and a strict HOA—that I could barely afford.

I knew it would be near impossible to fulfill that dream, but in the presence of God, my dead father, and our extended family who’d flown in from the Philippines, I wasn’t going to turn her down.

“Anak! Don’t just stand around. Start digging. We finish by sundown!”

I finally pushed my shovel into the grass. As I did, a gust of wind blew through the tree, causing the branches to sway and the leaves to shiver. If I hadn’t felt the wind myself, I almost would have believed the tree was moving on its own and shaking with laughter, clearly entertained by my dilemma.

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It was borderline unsettling that Nanay put as much effort into raising the tree as she had with me. She set the tree up for success by giving it the best fertilizer on the market just as she sent me to highly regarded tutors and ushered me into prestigious internships. She monitored how well the tree performed by tracking the number of perfect loquats it produced just as she checked all my report cards for straight A’s. She molded the tree into exactly what she wanted it to be by trimming any unruly and discolored leaves and discarding scarred and imperfect fruit just as she pulled me out of my fun art clubs and away from friends she didn’t approve of.

Despite our shared experiences, I found myself at odds with the tree. I deemed the slim branches bony and unattractive, always wondering how they could even support the weight of all that fruit, which in itself was almost too sweet and too addictive. Once, I bit into a loquat and was propelled into a frenzy, gnawing at its flesh until nothing was left but the pit and juices streaming down my chin. I loathed the way I craved it in the off-season and felt idiotic when it was the first thing to come to mind when my stomach growled during long shifts at the hospital. It annoyed me how easily the tree flourished under my mother’s care. Each year, the crop was more bountiful than the last, while I barely made it through school without losing my mind and struggled to keep up with work. And more than anything, I hated how day by day my mother seemed to prefer the tree over me.

This was evident in the ways I always found her with the tree, even when she wasn’t actively tending to it. In the mornings she’d bring a mug of steaming green tea out back and walk circles around the tree to exercise. During the day, instead of sitting inside with the air conditioning, she’d lean against its trunk or sit at its base and hum songs to herself in Tagalog. Sometimes I’d come home from study groups late at night to find her eating a meal beside the tree and she’d wave me away when I’d beckon her to come in lest the mosquitos get her. It appeared like she was permanently attached to the tree, always hovering about it and keeping it in sight the way a mother would a young child.

My suspicions of her favor for the tree were officially confirmed after a New Year’s Eve incident a decade ago. My parents threw a party at our house, with the bulk of the guests being Tatay’s co-workers. While Nanay and the wives of these co-workers congregated around the TV in the living room to watch the live New Year’s Eve broadcast, the men sat outside in plastic chairs positioned in a ring around the loquat tree. They downed beer, smoked, and prattled on to each other while gawking at the string of lights Nanay had hung around the tree’s branches for decoration. The lights glistened off the slew of empty bottles scattered at their feet.

While Nanay was busy hosting, I kept an eye on the men all night, drifting from the living room to the kitchen under the guise of getting more food so I could peek out the glass door. They were loud and obnoxious, like the college-aged frat boys renting out the house across the street. As the night wore on and the amount of empty beer bottles on the ground multiplied, the men became more animated. They kicked their chairs, gyrated suggestively, and shoved one another.

When one of the men smashed a beer bottle against the tree, eliciting an eruption of laughter from the others who then joined in on smashing their bottles against it, I beckoned Nanay to see what was happening. Despite not really caring for the tree, this behavior unsettled me. When she opened the door and cool night air polluted with the aroma of smoky beer ushered in, I studied her plain expression.

Before I could ask why she didn’t seem to care that they were abusing her precious tree, she grabbed my arm, yanking me away from the open door. It was too late. I had already glimpsed one of the men with his pants and underwear pushed down to his knees, urinating on the base of the tree while the others howled and cheered him on.

Eyes wide, I snapped my head back to Nanay, whose own face remained still.

“It’s almost midnight!” a woman yelled from the other room, causing the men to stumble inside and gather with the others in the living room.

“Nanay, aren’t you going to do anything?” I asked as we stepped outside.

“No anak,” she said, bending down to pick up glass shards. She ran her hands through the grass, searching for cigarette butts.

“But-but, it’s not right,” I said, eyeing the wet spot on the tree. When I stepped closer to inspect the trunk, I found tiny burnt dots.

Nanay stood and placed one hand on the tree, the other on my shoulder. “The tree is fine. You and I are fine. Let’s not say anything to Tatay, okay?” My eyebrows scrunched together. “But why can’t we? Why did—”

“Do not question him,” she said, her eyes wide and unblinking.

Beneath the moonlight and lit-up tree, Nanay and I missed the countdown to the new year as we finished cleaning up in silence. I wanted to obey her—something about the pleading look in her eyes told me to—but an uneasy bubbling persisted in my stomach. And when no amount of pain relievers eased the sensation by the time the guests left, I took it as a sign to confront Tatay.

I found him in the kitchen. He’d forgone a plate, instead picking up a fistful of fried rice and shoving it into his mouth despite dropping most of the rice grains. When I approached him, he’d moved on to the lumpia.

“Tatay, what your friends did to the tree was wrong. You shouldn’t have let them do those things to Nanay’s—”

Tatay held a hand up, causing the words spilling out of me to stop. His hand hovered in the air for several seconds. I focused on the gleam of lumpia grease on his palm and fingertips. Then, so slow as if suspended in a vat of the syrupy sweet and sour sauce we used for dipping, it came down and slapped me across the face. I froze. My head remained tilted downwards just as his hand willed. Strands of hair fell forward, veiling my reddening face as tears blurred my vision. He walked away without saying a word.

When I finally willed my legs to unstick themselves from the ground and passed by my mother, holding my throbbing cheek in my hand, she had a knowing look on her face. I didn’t blame her for continuing to help the tree and not coming to my aid. Unlike me, it hadn’t disobeyed her.

After that ordeal, I aspired to be more like the tree: quiet, content, and never out of line. I found myself spending time with the tree just as Nanay did, hoping its qualities and appeal to my mother would rub off on me. At first I’d just lean up against it, bark rough against my back, and scroll on my phone for a few minutes. Then, I started bringing books and snacks out to enjoy under the tree for hours. That led to me staying beneath it long enough to fall asleep, my eyes fluttering shut as the tree’s shade blanketed me and whispers of leaves in the wind swirled into a lullaby.

Still, I couldn’t shake my hatred of the tree for being what I couldn’t be—if only because it was what my mother wanted me to be. I often daydreamed about its downfall, thinking about poisoning it or chopping it down myself. If poisoned, it would deteriorate slowly. The leaves would wilt and turn yellow. The fruit would cease to grow. But if I took an ax to the trunk, then I’d get that satisfaction of seeing it tumble before me. Its fall would shake the earth and send dirt flying everywhere as the tree succumbed to its fate.

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By midday, Nanay and I stood waist-deep in the trench we’d dug around the tree. The sun, now unaccompanied by clouds or fog, relinquished its hot rays to us. Sweat dribbled down my neck, sticking my hair and shirt to my body as I sweltered in that makeshift underground oven. Dirt adhered to everything: a layer of it coated my clothes and exposed skin, it was caked underneath my nails, and it had somehow made its way inside my bra.

I pushed my shovel to the side, taking a break from digging to rub my throbbing forearms and pick at the blisters on my palms. I thought that by now, Nanay would have voluntarily given up. Of course, I’d planned to make a show of helping. I’d come out here before daybreak and fling some dirt around, but hoped that Nanay would catch on to the fact that the two of us couldn’t de-root this massive tree by ourselves. Despite the minimal progress we’d made, she didn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

“Nanay, enough of this,” I said, attempting to clean my hands by wiping them on my dirty pants. “Let’s just leave the tree here.”

She raised her shovel, forcing it back into the ground at once. Her whole body shook from all the effort.

“Nanay? Are you listening to me? Stop digging.”

Heaps of dirt just narrowly missed my face as Nanay slung a shovelful over the edge.

“Give it up!” I yelled, moving to grab her shovel.

She tore it out of my reach and held it close to her chest, which rose up and down quickly with her breaths. “Not done yet,” she said.

“Look at yourself, Nanay. You really want to do this all for a tree?” In response, she pushed her shovel back into the ground. “Okay, fine. Let’s finish what we started then.”

If she wasn’t going to budge, then I at least wanted to see the tree topple down. Then I’d leave her there to deal with it, her darling tree. I snatched my shovel and the two of us resumed our excavation. I drove my shovel into the ground as hard as I could, picking up way more than it could manage. Dirt slipped off the shovel’s sides and I catapulted whatever remained over the pit’s edge. For a moment, the chaos of shoveling took me back to when I was younger, helping my mother kill any surrounding weeds by making sure the roots were carefully removed. We’d make a game out of it—who could extract the most weeds? She’d always let me win.

“Why do you even love this tree that much?” I asked after a while, swiping at my eyes with grubby fingers.

Nanay refused to answer.

“Why?”

Dirt flew around us as we slung it out, no longer aware of where it landed since we’d long forgone trying to aim. Our skin shone with sweat, allowing dirt to cling to us even more than before. My eyes stung and started to water. My mouth was dry from dehydration. My body ached from overexertion. I knew Nanay felt it too, for she grunted in pain with every shovelful. Soon one of us might throw in the towel—not by choice, but by passing out.

Clank! I’d assumed our shovels collided, rusted metal blades kissing one another in the flurry of dirt slinging, but we struck something in the ground. Nanay fell to her knees and crouched over, tossing handfuls of dirt to the side. In this state, with her body balled up and made small, shoulders hunched, sun highlighting strands of grayed hair hiding amongst the box-dyed brown, I remembered just how old she was. The hands that used to pick me up and hold me above her head so I could reach fruit on the tallest branch, now trembled as she unearthed a metal tin from moist soil and tangled roots.

“Nay, what is it?” I asked, as she wiped the tin’s cover to reveal images of Danish butter cookies. I recognized this kind of tin, often used for miscellaneous storage rather than preserving treats. “Don’t tell me there’s mending supplies in there?”

Her chapped lips turned up into a smile as she popped the lid off. Inside were several yellowed photographs with tattered edges, dust specks, and creases from where the photos had once been folded up. In one, Nanay wore her school uniform and stood next to her own mother, a woman she’d left in the Philippines long ago. In that photo I couldn’t tell where my mom ended and her mom began—they were that close to each other. In another, Nanay’s gummy smile with missing teeth was on full display alongside a group of girls her age. Then there was one of her and Tatay at the airport, before they embarked on their journey to America and learned of all the hardships that came with immigration. Tatay’s features were softer then—his face plump and without the deep frown lines and rough patches of skin that would form later.

The photo that caught my eye amongst the many in this time capsule, however, featured Nanay leaning against a lofty tree, her arms crossed. I’d always known my mother and I looked alike, but when I first glimpsed the image, I thought it was a picture of me. Same dark hair, familiar brown eyes, similar constellation of beauty marks across our cheek.

Before Nanay became Nanay, she was once just a young girl. Only she grew up in a small province in the Philippines where she spent her days basking beneath the sunshine and looking out into the vast sea wondering, perhaps, what else was out there for her. Maybe she daydreamed of moving elsewhere and raising kids whom she could protect and raise to stand a chance in this world. Maybe her mother was just as hard on her, fearing what might come of her in a world so unkind to girls.

“I loved and cared for this tree because it reminds me of one from the Philippines,” Nanay said, recalling days past of her own mother caring for various fruit trees planted in the family farm. How she learned to distinguish when the mangoes and pomelos and jackfruit were ripe before she was even old enough to start school. How she could never forget the stench of fruit marinating its sweetness in the humidity or the way her mom pinched her playfully when they ate lunch beneath the canopy of rustling branches and leaves, the harvest between them. “The way it bears fruit may be different,” she continued to me while looking up at the budding loquats, “but they’re still similar at the core.”

Nanay put the photographs back into the tin, tucking in her memories. “And I raised it the way I did because that’s all I knew. It’s what I saw from my own mother. I thought it was what’s best. Maybe I’m not always right.”

“Maybe I’m not, either.”

“Maybe you are, sometimes,” she added with a chuckle.

A loquat’s stem snapped above us and the fruit dropped into our trench, rolling not too far from the tree. We both bent down to pick it up, our fingers brushing against one another as we stood. At that moment, I imagined the roots at our feet coming up from the ground and twisting around us, tying us together. I could almost feel the slimy roots slithering up my body, pulling my mother’s chest to mine as they tightened around us.

“Sabay nating itanim ito,” she said, holding the loquat up to the sun’s light as if, through its golden exterior, she was trying to see through to the pit.

I nodded. Together, let’s plant this.

About Trin

Trin Encarnacion is the Filipina American daughter of immigrants who moved to the United States from the Philippines in the 70s. She grew up in San Diego, CA unsatisfied with the lack of Asian characters in the books at her school library. She now resides in Bellingham, WA where she pursues an MFA in creative writing at WWU, teaches writing composition, and writes stories about the Gen Z Filipina American coming of age.