popular science magazine. She struggles to hear the questions over the phone and stumbles with her answers. But the piece runs, and other newspapers pick it up. “Trees Talk to One Another.” She gets a few letters from researchers across the country, asking for details. She’s invited to speak at the midwestern branch meeting of the professional forestry society.
Four months later, the journal that ran the piece prints a letter signed by three leading dendrologists. The men say her methods are flawed and her statistics problematic. The defenses of the intact trees could have been activated by other mechanisms. Or these trees might already have been compromised by insects in ways she didn’t notice. The letter mocks the idea that trees send each other chemical warnings:
Patricia Westerford displays an almost embarrassing misunderstanding of the units of natural selection. . . . Even if a message is in some way “received,” it would in no way imply that any such message has been “sent.”
The short letter contains four uses of the word Patricia and no mention of Doctor, until their own signatures. Two Yale professors and a name chair at Northwestern, versus an unknown adjunct girl at Madison: No one in the profession bothers trying to replicate Patricia Westerford’s findings. Those researchers who wrote her for more information stop responding to her letters. The newspapers that ran the wide-eyed articles follow up with accounts of her brutal debunking.
Patricia goes through with her scheduled talk at the midwestern forestry conference, in Columbus. The room is small and hot. Her hearing aids howl with feedback. Her slides jam in the carousel. The questions are hostile. Fielding them from behind the podium, Patricia feels her old childhood speech defect returning to punish her for her hubris. For the three agonizing days of the conference, people nudge each other as she passes them in the halls of the hotel: There’s the woman who thinks that trees are intelligent.
Madison doesn’t renew her lectureship. She scrambles to line up a job elsewhere, but it’s too late in the season. She can’t even get work washing glassware for some other researcher. No other animal closes ranks faster than Homo sapiens. Without a lab to use, she can’t vindicate herself. At thirty-two, she starts substitute teaching in high schools. Friends in the field murmur in sympathy, but none goes public to defend her. Meaning drains from her like green from a maple in fall. After long weeks in solitude replaying what happened, she decides it’s time to shed.
She’s too cowardly to give in to the scenarios that play in her head most nights as she tries to fall asleep. The pain prevents her. Not hers: the pain she’d inflict on her mother and brothers and remaining friends. Only the woods protect her from undying shame. She tramps the winter trails, feeling the thick, sticky horse chestnut buds with her frozen fingers. The understory fills up with tracks like longhand accusations scribbled on the snow. She listens to the forest, to the chatter that has always sustained her. But all she can hear is the deafening wisdom of crowds.
Half a year passes at the bottom of a well. One bright blue crisp Sunday morning in high summer, Patricia finds several unexpanded caps of Amanita bisporigera under a stand of oak in the bottomlands of Token Creek. The fungi are beautiful, but take forms that would make the old Doctrine of Signatures blush. She gathers them in her mushroom bag and brings them home. There, she cooks up a Sunday feast for one: chicken tenderloins in butter, olive oil, garlic, shallots, and white wine, all seasoned with just enough Destroying Angel to shut down both her kidneys and her liver.
She sets the table and sits down to a meal that smells like health itself. The beauty of the plan is that no one will know. Every year, amateur mycologists mistake young A. bisporigera for Agaricus silvicola or even Volvariella volvacea. Neither her friends nor family nor former colleagues will think anything but this: she was wrong in her controversial research, and wrong in her choice of fungal fruiting bodies for her dinner. She brings the steaming forkful to her lips.
Something stops her. Signals flood her muscles, finer than any words. Not this. Come with. Fear nothing.
The fork drops back to the plate. She rouses as from sleepwalking. Fork, plate, mushroom feast: everything turns, as she watches, into a fit of madness, lifted. In another heartbeat, she can’t believe what her animal