Leigh snorts. “That’s a sapling, pinhead. A sibling’s a baby.”
“Butt sniff,” Emmett replies. The image is so richly animalistic that Adam will carry it with him into the corridors of middle age. That moment of bickering will make up a good share of everything he’ll recall of his sister Leigh.
Their father hushes the brawl and puts forward the candidates. There is tulip tree, fast-growing and long-lived, with showy flowers. There’s small, thin river birch, with peeling bark that you can use to make canoes. Hemlock forms big spires and fills up with small cones. Plus, it stays green, even under snow.
“Hemlock,” Leigh declares.
Jean asks, “Why?”
“Do I have to give my reasons?”
“Canoes,” Emmett says. “Why are we even voting?”
Adam’s face reddens until his freckles almost vanish. Near tears, in the press of impossible responsibility, trying to save others from terrible mistakes, he cries out, “What if we’re wrong?”
Their father keeps flipping through the book. “What do you mean?”
Jean answers. She has interpreted for her little brother since before he could speak. “He means, what if it’s not the right kind of tree for the sibling?”
Their father swats at the nuisance idea. “We just have to pick a nice one.”
Teary Adam isn’t buying. “No, Dad. Leigh is droopy, like her elm. Jean is straight and good. Emmett’s ironwood—look at him! And my maple turns red, like me.”
“You’re only saying that because you already know which tree is whose.”
Adam will preach the point to undergrad psych majors, when he’s even older than his father is on the night they pick a tree for unborn Charles. He’ll build a career on that theme: cuing, priming, framing, confirmation bias, and the conflation of correlation with causality—all these faults, built into the brain of the most problematic of large mammals.
“No, Daddy. We have to pick right. We can’t just choose.”
Jean pets his hair. “Don’t worry, Dammie.” Ash is a noble shade tree, full of cures and tonics. Its branches swoop like a candelabra. But its wood burns when still green.
“Canoes, already,” Emmett shouts. Ironwood will break your ax before you bring it down.
As usual, their father has rigged the election. “There’s a sale on black walnut,” he says, and democracy is over. By chance, nothing in the American arboretum could better suit what baby Charles will grow into: a towering, straight-grained thing whose nuts are so hard you have to smash them with a hammer. A tree that poisons the ground beneath itself so nothing else can grow. But wood so fine that thieves poach it.
The tree arrives before the baby. Adam’s father, cursing and blaming, wrestles the burlap-wrapped root ball toward a hole torn out of the lawn’s perfect green. Adam, lined up with his siblings on the edge of the hole, sees something terribly wrong. He can’t believe no one intervenes.
“Dad, stop! That cloth. The tree is choking. Its roots can’t breathe.”
His father grunts and wrestles on. Adam pitches himself into the hole to prevent the murder. The full weight of the root ball comes down on his stick legs and he screams. His father yells the deadliest word of all. He yanks Adam by one arm out of his live burial and hauls the boy across the lawn, depositing him on the front porch. There the boy lies facedown on the concrete, howling, not for his pain, but for the unforgivable crime inflicted on his brother-to-be’s tree.
Charles comes home from the hospital, a heavy helplessness wrapped in a blanket. Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.
FOUR SPRINGS LATER, with the leaves’ first flush, the Appich kids fight over whose tree is the most beautiful. They fight again when the seeds come out, and later the nuts, and finally the autumn rush of color. Health and power, size and beauty: they fight over everything. Each child’s tree has its own excellence: the ash’s diamond-shaped bark, the walnut’s long compound leaves, the maple’s shower of helicopters, the vase-like spread of the elm, the ironwood’s fluted muscle.
Nine now, Adam decides to hold an election. He cuts a slit in the top of an egg carton to make a secret-ballot box. Five ballots, five trees. Each child votes for their own. They have a runoff. Emmett buys four-year-old Charles’s vote for half a Butterfinger, and Jean changes her vote to Adam’s