Tree of life in a circle on upper back

Mr Abel Quarrie's Travelling Marvels had one winter left in its canvas when the ring was dug. Nobody believed the ground would take a sapling under the big top, but old Quarrie had a bucket of soil from the village where his mother was born and a pocketknife. He cut the earth at dead centre of the ring and planted an ash switch no taller than a broom. Every night for thirty years the lions stepped over its roots and the clowns tripped on them, and the tree grew down as much as up, the way a good tree must, reaching under the sawdust for the water the show had stopped drinking.

Then the trucks stopped coming. The last season the tent had nine holes in it, and the rain came through in a line exactly the width of a rope. By then the tree was taller than the centre pole, its branches pushing the canvas up like a hand under a sheet. Quarrie's granddaughter, Ida, wouldn't let the men cut it. She sat on the sawdust with a flask and a ledger, counting the seats still standing, and when the bailiffs came she told them the only thing on the premises worth taking was underneath the ring, and they had better dig for it.

They did not dig. They left it, and so did the crowds, and the tent came down one wet Tuesday in March. What remained was a black ring of canvas on the grass and, in the middle, a tree with nowhere to stand but air. You can still find it if you walk the field behind the chapel, though I wouldn't advise it. Its roots run the whole circle of the old ring, and in the dark they look as though the ground is writing something down.