Sonny Brewer is this year's Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium keynote author, so I took his latest book on a weekend trip, thinking I'd have a little extra time to give it a good read. By the time I got off the plane in Albuquerque, I didn't have much left to finish. This story is very engaging and the prose is a delight. It's not an easy book to put down. Deceptively simple, the story concerns the right of the widow to own the tree on her property, the right of the law to claim it for the public (or his own profit), and the rights of her neighbors and the townspeople to visit the tree for their own purposes. Though the widow is rumored to shoot trespassers, she rarely has. This 500-year-old live oak has seen plenty of activity around its trunk and roots, and the stories that unfold present a microcosm of Americana. More than the story of a tree, Brewer presents us with a story of ourselves and raises questions of ownership, wilderness, death, and rebirth. The book is finished, yet the story remains. What more can we ask of a true work of literature? ( )

On a patch of dry land in the swampy rural coastline of Alabama there grows a 500 year old live oak tree. Larger than any other tree in the area, the Ghosthead Oak (so called because of a knot on its trunk that resembles a twisted face) grows on land owned for generations by the family of the widow who now lives there alone with her dog, quietly mourning her dead husband. It is the focus of many of her memories, and those of the Vietnam veteran who lives in an Airstream trailer on a patch of land walking distance from the widow’s 100 acre plot. Both have long turned to the tree and its hugely spreading branches for solace, comfort, and solitude. Many others in the community are drawn to the tree as well, despite the widow’s reputation as a reclusive sharp-shooter who takes aim at all trespassers. Young lovers come to the tree, as do drug dealers, tourists, and thrill-seekers. In addition, the local game warden has designs of his own on the tree, seeking both to buy the veteran’s small plot of land and also to introduce legislation that would take the widow’s land out from under her and turn it into a park celebrating the ancient tree. As the fight over who owns the Ghosthead Oak—or if anyone can ever be said to truly own a thing like a 500 year old tree in the first place—commences, other presences, including a watchful crow and a strangely menacing black panther, haunt the swamp and the tree’s environs.

As the battle heats up, the widow finds herself haunted more and more by both the memories she has surrounding the tree, but also by the very fact of the tree’s existence, and she finds herself forced to make a difficult decision regarding the future of the ancient Ghosthead Oak.

Inspired by true events, “The Widow and the Tree” has the flavor of fable. Straightforwardly told, yet lyrical in its descriptions of the power of nature and emotion, this book is highly recommended. ( )