She feels it from two yards away. “Why?” The word comes out wilder than she planned.
“Why the giveaway? I don’t know. It felt like another artwork. The last of the series. Trees give it all away, don’t they?”
The equation electrifies her. Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.
The man casts a cold eye over the sawhorses and planks. “You could call it a fire sale. No—a fungus sale.”
“What does that mean?”
“Here.” He moves toward the barn door. “I’ll show you.”
They cut across the snow-crusted field, past the house. She stops to grab her parka; he has nothing but jeans and the waffle shirt. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Always. Cold is good for you. People keep themselves way too warm.”
Nick leads her across the property, and there the mammoth thing stands, spread out against the porcelain sky. Strange and beautiful math governs the subtending of the hundred branches, thousand twigs, ten thousand twiglets, a beauty that the barn full of art has just primed her to see.
“I’ve never seen a tree anything like that.”
“Few living people have.”
From the interstate, she failed to notice the thing’s thick, tapering grace. The way it flows upward to the first, generous cleave. She wouldn’t have noticed, except for the flip-book. “What is it?”
“Chestnut. The redwoods of the East.”
The word puckers her flesh all over. Confirmation, though she hardly needs it. They pass through the drip line and under the crown.
“All gone now. Why you’ve never seen one.”
He tells her. How his great-great-great grandfather planted the tree. How his great-great-grandfather started photographing, at the century’s start. How blight crossed the map in a few years and wiped out the best tree in eastern America. How this rogue and loner specimen, so far from any contaminant, survived.
She looks up into the net of branches. Each limb is a study for another of those stricken sculptures back in the barn. Something happened to this man’s family: She sees that as if reading it off a crib sheet. And he has been living in this ancestor-built house for a decade, making art from a freak titan survivor. She puts her hand on the fissured bark. “And you’ve . . . outgrown it? Moving on?”
He recoils, horrified. “No. Never. It’s done with me.” He circles to the other side of the gigantic bole. The long, Renaissance finger points again. Dry rings with orange spots spread from several places across the bark. He presses the spots. They cave in at his touch.
She touches the spongy trunk. “Oh, shit. What is this?”
“Death, unfortunately.” They back away from the dying god. With slow steps, they make their way up the rise toward the house. He kicks his shoes against the back-door stoop, to clear the snow from them. He waves toward the barn, his would-be gallery. “Would you please take a piece or two with you? That would make today a very good day.”
“First I have to tell you why I’m here.”
HE MAKES TEA on the stove in the kitchen where his parents and grandmother sat on that morning a decade ago when he said goodbye to them and drove to the art museum in Omaha. His visitor tells her story, through grimaces and smiles. She describes the night of her transformation—the hash, the damp nakedness, the fatal lamp socket. He sits and listens, blushing and hanging on her every description.
“I don’t feel crazy. That’s the weird thing. I was crazy before. I know what crazy feels like. This all feels . . . I don’t know. Like I’m finally seeing the obvious.” She cups her hands over the hot teacup.
The dead chestnut agitates her in a way he doesn’t fully get. She’s young, free, impulsive, and full of a new cause. By every reliable measure, she’s more than a little tilted. But he wants her to stay like this, talking crazy theories in his kitchen, all night. There’s company in the house. Someone has come back from the dead. “You don’t sound crazy,” he fibs. Not crazy dangerous, anyway.
“Believe me, I know what I sound like. Resurrection. Bizarre coincidences. Messages from television sets in a discount warehouse store. Beings of light I can’t see.”
“Well, when you put it that way . . .”
“But there’s an explanation. There must be. Maybe it’s all my subconscious, finally paying attention to something other than me. Maybe I heard about these tree protesters weeks ago, before I electrocuted myself, and now I’m finally seeing them everywhere.”
He knows what it means to take dictation from ghosts.