Someone stuck an apple in the stone head’s open mouth. A grave insult. But I did not take it out. Maybe a boy did it, running through the gardens at night, his pockets full of fruit. Or maybe it was a ghost bored with its lot. It does not matter. Today I stood for the first time before the bodiless head and the strange flowering tree it guards. I tried not to laugh. The head on its post stood no taller than I. The head that had bullied me for so long, the great stone head that only the darkness had been able to silence, bagging it each night with a soft cloth sack, the way the heads of those to be hanged are bagged, made no sound. I tried not to think: This is your just dessert: Pillar of pride, pilloried. I touched with both hands the eyes of the head the way a blind person might. They were huge and swollen like the eyes of the deaf composer, or the eyes of the mad poet who left his wife alone while he spent his days in paradise. I touched with one finger the warm fruit. Against the pale cast of the stone the apple shone uncommonly bright, and behind it the thousand and thousand blossoms of the trumpet tree shone uncommonly bright. The fruit and the blossoms were the same scarlet color, and I could see for the first time in the yellow morning light the curious tree for what it was. Not a tree in flower, as I had so long thought, but a flowerless tree coupled with a blossoming trumpet vine. The vine had grown snakelike up and around the trunk, and it had grown so large it had half-strangled the small tree, crawling over every branch and shoot, until the vine and the tree were almost indistinguishable, green flesh and charred wood, flowers and rot, a new creation, a trumpet tree, tree out of time, the smoldering center of some medieval dream. The flowers swam forward in the light, each scarlet bloom so intricate and unlikely—downswung, fluted, narrower than the narrowest piping, forked with yellow silk—it looked as if it had been sewn by hand, the whole improbable tree looked as if it had been worked with impossible patience by a woman’s pale hands. Bees stumbled in and out, shaking the flowers. From nowhere a hummingbird appeared, iridescent, green, flipping its shining tail, a creature more fish than bird, more insect than fish, spinning and sipping. To nowhere it returned. The garden stood perfectly still. And for a moment in that garden it seemed as if sound and silence were the same thing, for a moment it seemed as if the thousand and thousand tiny trumpets were blowing a thousand and thousand shining notes, blown glass notes, the liquid substance of the air itself, glass and fire, the morning flushed to perfect fullness. I stood for a long time, breathing in the strange perfume of those scentless flowers. I thought of how the crow would come in an hour or two and plant his dusty feet on the carved head and pluck the fruit apart, piece by sweetened piece. I looked at the blossoming tree. I looked at the stone head. I touched the warm fruit. And I took the apple out. There was no sound. It was like closing the eyes of the dead.