I made a promise, and I kept it. You don’t owe nobody. Leave that damn thing be.”
He might as well command the giant chestnut itself to stop spreading.
THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY dances by in a five-second flip. Nicholas Hoel thumbs through the stack of a thousand photos, watching for those decades’ secret meaning. At twenty-five, he’s back for a moment on the farm where he has spent every Christmas of his life. He’s lucky to be there, given the cancellations. Snowstorms sweep in from the west, grounding planes all over the country.
He and his folks have driven out to be with his grandmother. Tomorrow, more family will arrive from all over the state. With a flip through the photos, the farm memories come back to him: the holidays of his childhood, the entire clan gathering for turkey or carols, midsummer flags and fireworks. It’s all encoded somehow in that animated tree, the gatherings in each season, joining his cousins for days of exploration and corn-bound boredom. Flipping backward through the photos, Nicholas feels the years peel off like steamed wallpaper.
Always the animals. First the dogs—especially the three-legged one, half wild with affection every time Nick’s family pulled into the long gravel drive. Then the horses’ hot breath and the stiff shock of cows’ bristles. Snakes threading the harvested stalks. A stumbled-on rabbits’ nest down by the mailbox. One July, half-feral cats emerging from under the front porch, smelling of mystery and curdled milk. The small gifts of dead mice on the farm’s back doorstep.
The five-second film triggers primal scenes. Prowling the machine shed, with its engines and arcane tools. Sitting in the Hoel-crowded kitchen, breathing in the moldy, cracked linoleum while squirrels thumped in their hidden nests between the wall studs. Digging for hours with two younger cousins, their antique pear-handle shovels cutting a trench down into what Nick promised would soon be magma.
He sits upstairs at the rolltop desk in his dead grandfather’s study sampling a project that outlasted four generations of its makers. Of all the cargo packed into the Hoel farmhouse—the hundred cookie jars and glass snow globes, the attic box containing his father’s old report cards, the foot-pumped bellows organ rescued from the church where his great-grandfather was baptized, his father’s and uncles’ archaic toys, polished pine skittle bowling pins, and an incredible city run by magnets underneath the streets—this stack of photos has always been the one farm treasure he could never get enough of. Each picture on its own shows nothing but the tree he climbed so often he could do it blind. But flipped through, a Corinthian column of wood swells under his thumb, rousing itself and shaking free. Three-quarters of a century runs by in the time it takes to say grace. Once, as a nine-year-old, at the farm for Easter dinner, Nick riffled through the stack so many times that his grandfather cuffed him and hid the pictures away on the highest shelf of the mothballed closet. Nick was up on a chair and into the stack again as soon as the adults were safely downstairs.
It’s his birthright, the Hoel emblem. No other family in the county had a tree like the Hoel tree. And no other family in Iowa could match the multigeneration photo project for pure weirdness. And yet the adults seemed sworn never to say where the project was going. Neither his grandparents nor his father could explain to him the point of the thick flip-book. His grandfather said, “I promised my father and he promised his.” But another time, from the same man: “Makes you think different about things, don’t it?” It did.
The farm was where Nick first started sketching. The penciled dreams of boys—rockets, outlandish cars, massed armies, imaginary cities, more baroque with detail each year. Then wilder textures, directly observed—the forest of hairs on a caterpillar’s back and the stormy weather maps in the grain of floorboards. It was at the farm, drunk on the flip-book, that he first started to sketch branches. He lay on his back on the Fourth of July, looking up into the spreading tree while everyone else pitched horseshoes. There was a geometry to this constant splitting, a balance to the various thicknesses and lengths that lay beyond his powers as an artist to reveal. Sketching, he wondered what his brain would have to be like to distinguish each of the hundreds of lancet leaves on a given branch and recognize them as easily as he did the faces of