The dirt track past the farm turns into a real road.
The youngest son works in the Polk County Assessor’s Office. The middle boy becomes a banker in Ames. The eldest son, John, stays on the farm with his family and works it as his parents decline. John Hoel throws in with speed, progress, and machines. He buys a steam tractor that both plows and threshes, reaps and binds. It bellows as it works, like something set free from hell.
For the last remaining chestnut, all this happens in a couple of new fissures, an inch of added rings. The tree bulks out. Its bark spirals upward like Trajan’s Column. Its scalloped leaves carry on turning sunlight into tissue. It more than abides; it flourishes, a globe of green health and vigor.
And in the second June of the new century, here is Jørgen Hoel, in bed in an oak-trimmed upstairs room of the house he built, a bedroom he can no longer leave, looking out the dormer window onto a school of leaves, swimming and shining in the sky. His son’s steam tractor hammers down in the north forty, but Jørgen Hoel mistakes the sounds for weather. The branches dapple him. Something about those green and toothy leaves, a dream he once had, a vision of increase and flourishing, causes a feast to fall all around his head again.
He wonders: What makes the bark twist and swirl so, in a tree so straight and wide? Could it be the spinning of the Earth? Is it trying to get the attention of men? Seven hundred years before, a chestnut in Sicily two hundred feet around sheltered a Spanish queen and her hundred mounted knights from a raging storm. That tree will outlive, by a hundred years and more, the man who has never heard of it.
“Do you remember?” Jørgen asks the woman who holds his hand. “Prospect Hill? How we ate that night!” He nods toward the leafy limbs, the land beyond. “I gave you that. And you gave me—all of this! This country. My life. My freedom.”
But the woman who holds his hand is not his wife. Vi has died five years ago, of infected lungs.
“Sleep now,” his granddaughter tells him, and lays his hand back on his spent chest. “We’ll all be just downstairs.”
JOHN HOEL BURIES HIS FATHER beneath the chestnut the man planted. A three-foot cast-iron fence now surrounds the scattering of graves. The tree above casts its shade with equal generosity on the living and the dead. The trunk has grown too thick for John to embrace. The lowest skirt of surviving branches lifts out of reach.
The Hoel Chestnut becomes a landmark, what farmers call a sentinel tree. Families navigate by it on Sunday outings. Locals use it to direct travelers, the lone lighthouse in a grain-filled sea. The farm prospers. There’s seed money now to breed and propagate. With his father gone and his brothers off on their own, John Hoel is free to chase after the latest machines. His equipment shed fills with reapers and winnowers and twine-binders. He travels out to Charles City to see the first two-cylinder gas-powered tractors. When phone lines come through, he subscribes, although it costs a fortune and no one in the family can think what the thing might be good for.
The immigrant’s son yields to the disease of improvement years before there’s an effective cure for it. He buys himself a Kodak No. 2 Brownie. You push the button, we do the rest. He must send the film to Des Moines for developing and printing, a process that soon costs many times more than the two-dollar camera. He photographs his wife in calico and a crumpled smile, poised over the new mechanical clothes mangle. He photographs his children running the combine and riding swaybacked draft horses along the fields’ headers. He photographs his family in their Easter finest, bound with bonnets and garroted by bow ties. When nothing else of his little postage stamp of Iowa is left to photograph, John turns his camera on the Hoel Chestnut, his exact coeval.
A few years before, he bought his youngest girl a zoopraxiscope for her birthday, though he alone kept playing with it, after she grew bored. Now those squadrons of flapping geese and parades of bucking broncos that come alive when the glass drum spins animate his brain. A grand plan occurs to him, as if he invented it. He decides, for whatever years are left to him, to capture the