MITCH SURVEYS the bald, scraped realm around another new house and proclaims that things will grow easily ere. "Sun, rain, rich soil," he chants, a monarch indicating with one powerful hand his kingdom of infinite breadth and wealth. This lofty gesture says that everything is in the earth, you only have to seduce it upward. Mitch squints into tropical sun; his eyes glint like the mica on the gravel road. In a row beside him three children wait to see what surprise he will conjure next; they can never guess what that might be. Already Mitch envisions fantastic flowers and plump bushes and trees offering unlimited shelter and shade; but these are private pictures he does not wish to share. Now he is kneeling down to rub red dirt between his fingers, to contemplate potential. In the valley below, an afternoon tram whistles through sisal, and Mitch's face jerks upward, crazy with confidence. "All you have to do is plant," he states, then strides away in big boots that make the gravel crunch. MJ, Lily, and Donald are poised stiffly upon unrealized landscape as if tough roots bind their feet into this alien earth, preventing them from moving freely, allowing only distant dreams of escape. Always Mitch believes he can plant them in Spain or Greece or Kenya; they will grow easily anywhere. All it takes is sun, rain, rich soil.

MITCH WAVES his wand three times, and there is grass around the grey brick house. Three times more makes buds blister, leaves widen, flowers unfold. A father can still change the world that quickly; there is no way of knowing that finally his power will fail, or be revealed as just cheap tricks. In torn shorts, a belt of string to hold them up, this creator bends tenderly over the earth, turning it with expert hands, sure fingers. The children watch his broad back brown, see his wedding band flash amid the dirt until the sun goes down. Every evening Peggy Lee serenades packed crates, croons to their suffocated contents. In the back bedroom MJ and Lily recall aloud other gardens in other places. (Donald cannot remember; he is learning only to forget.) Are they still growing, those gardens in Greece and Spain and Kenya? Or do they die once Mitch's restless eyes wander toward a new horizon, once those hands travel to touch unknown terrain? Do they wither like the mother in the clinic, in Canada, in the cold?

ONE DAY MITCH plants three saplings into the ground. "Your trees," he explains, stamping lucky circles around the buried roots. MJ, the oldest, has an orange tree, and Lily's is lime. For Donald, always youngest, there is a promise of lemons. Each child is responsible for their own tree: to water it, to pluck insects from first fragile leaves, to prune branches so they grow shapely and strong. Later, all the fruit will belong only to its owner to do with as he or she pleases. The children pose tensely beside their future wealth while Mitch hunts the camera in the house. This is another moment that will not last; it must be captured by any means at hand. ("Don't say I never gave you anything," Mitch will later say, scratching his grizzled head in puzzlement at his children's unvoiced accusation that perhaps certain essential things were once withheld from them. "What about those trees?" he will wonder, peeking cautiously into the past.) They wait until unable to see each other any more, MJ and Donald and Lily; perhaps this is preparation for when they will lose each other for good. In darkness three thin voices carol; the song about the circle game twines up into the night, echoes tinnily between equatorial stars. The father can't find the camera: was it forgotten in France, lost in Italy? There will finally be no evidence of what he provided for his children, of what was not enough. At this moment Mitch is incapable of turning on house lights or calling offspring to him. He can't dam the irrigation flowing from his eyes and watering his mouth - already parched -that in the end will be too dry to speak last words.

IS MITCH a man who often cries alone in his room when Tanzania turns dark and certainty clouds? What does it mean to him to see his children at attention beside the only gift he can think to give them? Does this image recall something from the past to a man who has his own good reasons for refusing to look behind? (There sprout quantities of weeds where once only wanted plants populated his gardens; for example, a wife pales in a clinic.) Or is he crying, on this Tanzanian evening in 1970, because he glimpses clearly his own end, when he will learn that there is only desert for him after all, no matter how hopefully he has sown and sown and sown? Yes, Mitch will finally discover that all gardens become mirage and nothing more upon a sere Sahara, and he himself only black shadow upon the burning sand.

IN THE NUNNERY at the top of the college Lily and MJ recite multiplication tables after Sister Anna and capital cities after Sister Ruth. At home, alone except for the silent houseboy, Donald tends his lemon tree. In the morning he runs to see if overnight it has shot up as quickly as the beanstalk and is now a ladder to the heavens. He totes innumerable buckets of water across the yard, spills it around his tree, waits on a flat stone nearby. The expression on his face defines expectation. Such hopefulness would be heartbreaking to see; fortunately, there is no witness. (In later years Donald's capacity for hope will only grow with each succeeding disappointment - swelling like an infected place upon the skin, bursting into an ugly mass of pus but never healing.) Surely his lemon tree must grow with special speed because of the extra care bestowed upon it? The heavy sun presses like an iron against Donald's head: he imagines an abundance of broad leaves above, protecting him and casting coolness over him. "If you water too much, it won't grow," warns the father, appearing suddenly in his teaching clothes as Donald bears another brimming pail across the yard. Half its contents spill along the way, creating a trail that anyone could follow to find a boy praying beside a stunted tree to some God with a green thumb. (How much water is enough, how much is too little? Donald will spend his life seeking to balance this impossible equation.) Upon that slender trunk he traces certain initials, along with his, within a crooked heart. At supper his head buzzes from sun; he can't eat. "Don't you want to grow as big as me?" Mitch inquires, then waits for an answer. It is, apparently, no rhetorical question; there exist myriad possibilities of who and what this boy may choose to be. Donald senses all the treasure hidden beneath the earth's skin: sunken cities, obscure selves, spirits unseen in darkness. All this may, compelled by Mitch, ascend to shine in light.

WHEN MJ and Lily return from school, Donald invites them into the yard to ponder their trees. He entertains visions of three dancers with joined hands skipping rings around three trees, incanting spells of safe, swift, and steady growth. But his brother and sister are reluctant to leave the house unless it's necessary; in the back bedroom, carefully facing away from windows, they play intricate games that have to do with distant places where no snakes slip eternally past comers of eyes. "What I really wanted was a dog," mentions Lily once, when Donald reminds her of their father's gifts out in the yard. Her thin face and crooked teeth will one day inhabit a clinic similar to that in which her mother currently shivers. "I never asked for any kind of tree at all," she flatly adds.

SUN DYES Donald's hair white, his skin becomes faint gold: in shade he appears pale yellow. The boy folds arms around knees, makes a shelf to rest his heavy head upon. Africa is just one long dream: he tastes intangible lemons, chews elusive slippery pulp. (Why is he always thirsty now and why won't water slake this thirst?) Above the dozing boy, just out of reach, dangle golden globes, a whole galaxy of flavour; if he were taller, he could pluck them, peel them, devour them. As it is, he can only view the contents of his dream with proprietor's pride, find slim consolation this way. If there were any justice, his lemon tree would be twice as tall and broad as the neglected trees of Lily and MJ; it would, indeed, be as majestic as Donald sees it in his dreams. Something is not right in how the three saplings are equal sized - still small, hardly taller than Donald himself, with only hints of branches, illusions of buds. It is difficult to believe that although they continue to appear identical, and belong to the same genus, they will one day bear fruit of different colour and size and shape.

MITCH'S GARDENS insist upon growing with the speed of hallucination, swallowing up space around the grey brick house, consuming air and gulping water and blocking out the sky. Does Mitch's garden steal all necessary substances from that area, depriving the children's trees of what they require? Donald must poison his father's plants in order to have his hope flourish? Only the death of one may permit the other life?

SOON DONALD fears losing himself in Mitch's tangled gardens; they become like the jungle that presses intently around the college, aswarm with wild beasts always on the prowl, too rich in scent and colour, enough to make anyone feel faint. It seems possible that Donald will never find his way out of this maze of twisting paths already choked and leading to no apparent destination. He will wander this wilderness forever, searching for some sign to point him back toward a time when there was order on the earth, and no canopy of dazzling green lay between him and the watching eyes above the sky. Then his lemon tree appears before him, something safe to run toward. Its trunk is still slender enough to wrap am-is around, but insufficiently thick to fill them.

"CITRUS LIMONIA," states Mitch. "Be patient. When it finally flowers, it will bloom all year, it will never stop bearing." Mitch peers down at his youngest child. "It will be worth the wait," he vows in such a way that Donald will always remember this promise even as it is broken over and over in a multitude of ways. In spite of a carefully nurtured talent for forgetting, Donald will never be able to erase the image of his father's face imposed upon the sky above him like some extra planet, another sun. Now Mitch adds that there will soon be more lemons than Donald will know what to do with. Donald will become burdened by the crop: the fulfilment of expectation has its flip side too, Mitch may be suggesting. It would be safer if dreams did not come true? Were cut short, and not allowed to materialize as ordinary, unsatisfactory, more sour than sweet? Donald's mouth puckers, his face twists.

WHEN IT'S TOO LATE to know anything for certain, Donald will wonder if Mitch meant the lemon tree to be some kind of joke. He will learn that, in fact, citrus does not flourish in the sort of tropical climate such as that part of Tanzania boasts; one season of intense rain falling down the Ngondo hills would have killed the tree for sure. (And whatever happens to the lime and orange trees? Do they somehow survive that first rainy season to bud, flower, bear? Or, before any deaths occur, does Mitch whisk the children away from one more false start, yet another bright beginning too quickly turned out wrong?) Surely Mitch is aware of the climate's unfitness for a citrus crop - even as through long evenings he describes in luxurious detail how Donald's tree will evolve: the long, pointed, pale green leaves; the short, stout spines; the reddish buds growing singly or in clusters; the blossoms of purest white exuding fragrance most powerfully after dusk. Is there something sly, or even malicious, in Mitch's face as from thin air he creates these pictures of a graceful evergreen? Is there some simple lesson here to do with life being one long series of small disappointments, and does Mitch mean for the early imparting of such knowledge, which he himself learned too late, to be his real gift to his children? Donald will carry this question, along with several others, into the desert where Mitch disappears, and where the slaking of thirst and the blooming of flower are nothing more and nothing less than the consequence of miracle.

BEFORE MITCH decides that Catholicism corrupts, Donald is with MJ and Lily sent on Sundays up to the old mission church where a Dutch priest collects souls in his big black hat. While monkeys screech in protest beyond the stained-glass window, Father Franklin explains that in one God are housed three divine Persons. Father, Son, Holy Ghost: a Trinity. The Son is of the same substance as the Father; that much is not disputed. Less easily agreed upon is whether the Holy Ghost comes from the Son through the Father, or from Son and Father jointly. This is perhaps too fine a point for a child who can glimpse no Holy Ghost nearby; yet it is clear to Donald that Father Franklin is not discussing abstract essences or representations. The son closes his eyes against incense, views the father stalking through his creation below. Dwarfed by papayas and mangos that thrust toward the sky, three small trees stand in a row. On the pew beside him, in an apparent trance, sit MJ and Lily, whose souls Donald will not be able to save. The Holy Ghost, invisible in the shadows, whispers acidic promises of divinity.

WHEN THE RAINS arrive there is obviously no need to water the lemon tree, and in the back bedroom Donald hovers near MJ and Lily. Now a mist creeps down the hills in the middle of each morning and until dusk wraps itself around the house. Donald can't look through the window to see his lemon tree, darkened and shined by wet, at the end of the garden. He can only try to remember what it looked like when standing present and real before him. Faith is required to believe it stands there still.

ALREADY ARTFUL at reminiscence, Lily and MJ discuss the past while the heavens leak. This present cannot exist until it has also been left behind; only then will its incredible qualities be discussed in tones of awe and wonder. Lily says that in Greece the garden was on a cliff and MJ says that in Kenya there was a muddy river where the garden ended. "There were paths among the stones and roses," muses Lily. "And apple trees," MJ recalls. Where was that? In what garden were there roses and stones and apple trees? For every garden outside the window there exists a previous garden; always another room lies beyond whatever walls hold the here and now. So finally Lily and MJ will in their separate fashions wander from sight of everyone, pressing through neglected gardens of the past now gone wild and overgrown, and conquered by weeds and thorns and thistles, in search of that original garden far from where Mitch's skull bleaches beside the mirage of a desert pool. "Don't forget the bench beside the willow, " reminds Lily. "Or the swing beneath the oak." Perhaps it is the mist outside that makes her voice sound muffled, something travelling across a great space of time and distance. In the future Donald will wander lemon groves of California and Italy, trample fallen fruit alive with wasps and ants. Then his sister's voice will sift through leaves in the very same way it speaks to him now, recollecting some citrus orchard that reaches fruition only in the gardens of Mitch's mind. Twenty years later the prow of a boat cuts through waves, points toward Africa. The sea air is tangy, tart. "It will be worth the wait, Mitch's voice emerges from the throats of gulls that haunt the air above the boat, urging it forward and back to a beginning. Donald has paid for this journey's ticket with countless disastrous falls from trees of knowledge; nevertheless, he is still enough of his father's son to believe that the Father creates, the Son saves, the Holy Ghost makes sacred.

IT IS THE HOUR when MJ and Lily sigh in unison across the dark room and Mitch meditates to music down the hall. Outside it is clear and coot: the rain has ceased until morning, the mist retreated up the hills. Too large and heavy, the axe trails like a plough behind Donald; a furrow follows him from the house, deep into Mitch's dangerous gardens now muddy and slippery and possessed by hoarse frogs. The lemon tree shines in the dark. Its green trunk resists the axe; anyway, Donald is too young and small for such a task; like MJ and Lily, he should be in bed dreaming of somewhere far away where promises bear fruit and the wait is always worth it. The day is not in sight when Donald will follow his vanished father deep into the desert, that vast barren expanse resisting even Mitch's attempts to charm upward what is buried. Donald doesn't see at once the shape that looms beside him, darkness made solid as spirit was once made flesh. "It isn't sharp enough," explains Mitch, taking the tool from his son. Despite this fact, he is able to sever the lemon tree's trunk with just one blow. It topples, causing not the slightest tremor of the earth. Two trees remain; a trinity is broken. There is the father and there is the son, but where is the Holy Ghost?

This is an excerpt from The Lost Oasis, a work in progress by Patrick Roscoe.