The Jesus Tree

The first time I saw it must have been sometime in the fall of 1980. Around this time my uncle, who was more like an older brother to me due to the closeness of our ages, attended Fordham University. One of the highlights of our weekend – for my younger brother and I – was hitching along with Grandma and my mother as they drove my uncle back to school on Sunday nights. It was the great end for the weekend, an exciting and often side-splitting adventure into a strange city before the mundane terrors of middle school engulfed me for the next five days.

Fordham is located in the Bronx. It’s a fairly high-crime area, or at least was in the 70s, and the campus is surrounded by spiked iron fencing. My younger brother always vied for a window seat on these trips so he could “see a murder.” That’s what New York was to him. And a little bit to me, too. Remember, this was only two or three years after the Son of Sam killings. My folks subscribed to the New York Daily News back then, and headlines proclaiming weird things about demons and killers entered our house every morning. It was truly a scary and confusing time to be a kid. Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Jonestown, hostages in strange lands, those Atlanta serial killings, the assassination attempts on the Pope and Reagan … those final few years in the house of my childhood, before my parents divorced and yanked us out of it, were honestly kind of frightening.

Anyway, the Fordham run was a scary-cool trip every Sunday night. We all knew of my brother’s hunt for “murders.” Even one of my uncle’s buddies, who we also dropped off once. Pointing to a cordoned-off Con-Ed dig, he said, “I wonder how many dead bodies are down there?” As for me, I mostly just stared agape at the buildings and bridges and the incredibly illuminated city life, and pondered the dangers just outside the doors of the old Ford Galaxie.

There was hushed talk, at first, of the “Jesus tree,” then marked enthusiasm. Apparently, if you drove up, slowly, at night, along one of the narrow car paths on the college campus, you could see what appeared to be a head and arms growing out of the massive trunk and perpendicular branches of a tree. It looked eerily like the crucifixion – it could be nothing else. My uncle, behind the wheel, quickly located it for us all. Approaching slowly, I squinted but could not see it. Could not see what they were all talking about, when suddenly – bam! – it was like spotting a constellation for the first time. It was just there, abruptly. Jesus, crucified. In all its terror and majesty. I saw it; it could be nothing else. Goose bumps sprouted up and down the flesh of my arms. So lifelike, ironically, this tree with strange growths resembling nothing but Christ in death.

My uncle mentioned something about someone splashing red paint on the tree. I don’t know if it was just a rumor or something that had happened long before. Even in the odd lighting and shadows, I’m sure there was no red paint on this tree. Regardless, twenty feet away, in the headlights of the car, at the edge of the lane, I could swear I was looking upon the Cross. We made this pilgrimage a part of our Sunday night drop-off rituals; the last time I saw it was probably in the spring of 1981.

I did a couple of brief Google searches, unsuccessful, to see if I could come up with anything more current. Something concrete, factual, to lend support to my anecdote. There was a hint that the tree was cut down in the early 90s, but the link I clicked on failed to give relevant supporting information and I was unable to even determine if this was the same tree I saw. But I’ll keep hunting around in my down time, usually around four in the morning when I can’t sleep.

Uncle T – or Uncle J, you were at Fordham, too – if you’re reading this and know anything, please, comment!