“Be right back.” The smallest packet of surprise lodges at the top of her chest. Like that, she’s off. She retreats through the kitchen into the back pantry—a warren of cubbies cluttered with decades of set-it-and-forget-it. Some weekend she’ll sort through the ancient junk, pitch it all, lighten the lifeboat for the last few nautical miles. The back door opens, and she smells the waves of grassy summer rolling over her. She has no shoes. The neighbors will think she has lost her mind, caring for her brain-damaged husband. And if she has, well then, that’s the story.
She crosses the lawn, takes the lowest branch in her hand, bends it toward her, and counts. There’s a song about this, she thinks. A song or a prayer or a story or a film. The branch slips upward from her hand. She drifts back to the house over the sun-ghosted grass, humming the tune that is about exactly this moment.
He’s waiting for her, hanging on the denouement. “Five in a sheath. We’re on a roll.” She flips through the book to the next unfolding branch. “Are the cones long with thin scales?”
This splitting and choosing: she recognizes it. It’s like the law, those cases she transcribed during all those years when she played a court stenographer: the evidence, the cross-examinations, messy negotiations and manufactured facts, the path narrowing in on a sole allowable verdict. It’s like evolution’s decision tree: If the winters are tough and the water scarce, try scales or needles. It’s even weirdly like acting: If you need to respond with fear, go to gesture 21c; If wonder, 17a. Otherwise . . . It’s a programmed telephone support system for living on Earth. It’s the mind moving through mysteries, their explanations forever one more choice away. More than anything, it’s like the tree itself, with one central questioning stem splitting into dozens of probing ones, and each of those forking into hundreds, then thousands of green and independent answers. “Stay tuned,” Dorothy says, and disappears again.
Once more, the back door’s black enamel knob protests, squeaking in her hand. She makes her way across the yard to the tree. A short journey, repeated ad nauseam, more times than anyone ever signs on for, across the same patch of familiar ground: the path of love. If you want to keep fighting, turn to entry 1001. If you want to break loose and save yourself . . .
She stands under the tree and studies the cones. They cover the ground, spores that crashed to earth from some remote asteroid. Then back to the house with her answer. The way across the wet grass in stocking feet is long enough for her to wonder how she can still be here, buried alive, tied to this frozen man year after year, when all she ever wanted in this life was to find her freedom. But back in the prison doorway, waving the book in triumph, she knows. This is her freedom. This one. The freedom to be equal to the terrors of the day.
“Victory. Eastern white pine.”
She’d swear a great wave of contentment sweeps across the rigid face. She can read him now, with a telepathy honed by years of having to guess at his clotted syllables. He’s thinking: A good day’s work. A very good day.
That night he makes her read to him about a tree that once ran in great vertical veins of living ore from Georgia to Newfoundland, out through Canada, and past the Great Lakes to where they camp out together by lamplight. She tells him about giants four feet wide, their trunks shooting eighty feet straight up before the first sideways branches bothered to extend. Trees that stood in endless stands that darkened the air with pollen each spring, the clouds of golden dust raining down on the decks of ships far out at sea.
She reads to him of how the English first swarmed a continent that rose from the ocean overnight, seeking masts for their leviathan frigates and ships of the line, masts that no place in all stripped Europe, not even the farthest boreal north, could any longer provide. She shows him paintings of Pinus strobus, in hulking shafts as big as church steeples, so valuable that the Crown branded even those that stood on private land with the King’s Broad Arrow. And her husband, who spent his life protecting private property, must see it coming, even from the future: The Pine Tree Riot. Revolution. War, fought over