the sidewalk near her feet is a thing twice her height and half again as wide as her extended arms. A single stout upward path splits into a few thinner ones, and those divide into thousands more, thinner still, each one tentative, forked, full of scars, bent by history, and tipped out in insane flowers. The sight takes root in her, ramifying, and for a moment longer she remembers: her life has been as wild as a plum in spring.
JUST DOWN THE ROAD two thousand miles east, Nicholas Hoel drives into an Iowa June. Every dimple in the land, every remembered silo just off the interstate twists his gut, like the last thing he sees before dying. Like coming home.
The math stuns him—how few years he has been away. So much has gone untouched. The farms, the roadside warehouses, the desperate public service billboards: FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD . . . So many imprints from deepest childhood, permanent scars in the prairie and in him. Yet every landmark seems warped and remote, seen through dime store binoculars. Nothing here should have survived where he’s been.
Over the last rise to the west before the exit, his pulse shoots up. He looks for the horizon’s lone mast. But where the column of the Hoel Chestnut should be, there’s only June’s annihilating blue. He heads the car up the exit ramp and drives the long square back around to the farm. Only: it’s not a farm anymore. It’s a manufactory. The owners have removed the tree. He parks the car halfway up the gravel drive and walks out across the field toward the stump, forgetting that the field is no longer his to walk across.
A hundred and fifty steps in, he sees the green. Dozens of fresh chestnut shoots spring up from the dead stump. He sees the leaves, the straight-veined, toothed lances of his childhood that always meant leaf to him. For a few heartbeats, resurrection. Then he remembers. These fresh starts, too, will soon be blighted. They’ll die and rise again, over and over, just often enough to keep the deadly blight alive and vigorous.
He turns toward the ancestral house. His hands lift, to reassure anyone in the parlor who might be watching. But it’s the house, in fact, and not the tree, that has stopped living. Siding pulls away from the walls. On the north side, half a length of gutter hangs down. He checks his watch. Six oh-five—obligatory dinner hour throughout the Midwest. He crosses the weedy lawn and walks up to the east windows. They’re matte, dusty, lusterless, dimmed with only dark behind them. The stiles, rails, head jamb, and all the wood around the double-hung panes soften into paint-peeled rot. Cupping one hand around his eyes, Nicholas peeks in. His grandparents’ living room is filled with metal basins and canisters. The oak trim that covered every doorway in the house has been stripped away.
He walks around to the front porch. Its planks wobble beneath him. Five raps of the brass knocker yield nothing. He climbs the rise behind the house to the old outbuildings. One has been torn down. One is gutted. The third is locked. His old trompe l’oeil mural—that crack in the wall of the cornfield revealing a hidden broadleaf forest—is gunmetal-gray.
On the front porch again, he sits where the rocker used to be, his back to the front window. It’s not clear how he should proceed. It crosses his mind to break in. He has spent the last three nights sleeping rough. Scared shitless by a cow near the Bighorns in Wyoming, who nuzzled him in his bag before dawn. Kept awake in a national forest in Nebraska by two campers setting endurance records in a nearby tent. A bed would be nice. A shower. But the house, it seems, has neither anymore.
He waits for the softening smudge of midwestern dusk, though there’s no real need for cover. Far away, a satellite-guided agribiz monster, practically robotic, combs through the rolling fields. No one will pass here or see him at his task. He can do what he needs to and go.
But he waits. Waiting has become his religion. There’s corn to listen to, miles of it. Beans to watch grow, sheds and silos on the horizon, an interstate, and a huge tree cut out of the sky in negative space, like a Magritte. He sits with his back against the house, feeling the farm emerge again, like wild animals from the edges