Mayan kapoks, Egyptian sycamores, the Chinese sacred ginkgo—all the branches of the world’s first religion. His decade of obsessive sketching has been practice for whatever art this sect requires of him.
Olivia leans in. “Are you okay?” His reply sticks in his wide, coprophagic grin.
The raid party readies to head out again. Blackbeard, Needles, Moss-Eater, and the Revelator: warriors competing for the palm, the laurel, the olive.
“Hang on,” Nick tells them. “Let’s try something.” He sits them on a camping stool in the shadows of the fire, while he paints their faces. He dips a brush into a can of green latex that a woman named Tinkerbell uses to letter banners. He follows the contours of their skulls, the curves of their foreheads and the mounds of cheekbone, finding his way forward into whorls and spirals, surreal freehand memories of Maori ta- moko tattoos. Tie-dyed tees and paisley faces: the effect is devastating. The night’s commandos stand back and admire each other. Something enters them; they become other beings, inscribed and altered, filled with power by ancient signs.
“Jesus H! This’ll scare the shit out of them.”
Moses shakes his head at the new guy’s handiwork. “It’s good. We want them to think we’re dangerous.”
Olivia comes up behind Nick in pride. She curls her hands beneath his upper arm. She has no clue what that does to him, after days together on the cross-country car ride, nights side by side in thick sleeping bags. Or maybe she knows, and doesn’t care. “Nice work,” she whispers.
He shrugs. “Not especially useful.”
“Urgent. I have it on good authority.”
They christen themselves with forest names that night, in the soft drizzle of the redwoods, on a blanket of needles. The game seems childish, at first. But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear. Why shouldn’t they take new names for this new work? Trees go by a dozen different labels. There’s Texas and Spanish and false buckeye and Monillo, all for the same plant. Trees with names as profligate as maple seeds. There’s buttonwood, aka plane tree, aka sycamore: like a man with a drawer full of fake passports. In one place there’s lime, in another linden, Tilia at large, but basswood when turned into lumber or honey. Twenty-eight names for longleaf pine alone.
Olivia appraises Nick in the darkness, far from the fire. She squints for evidence of what to call him. Pushes his hair back behind his ear, tilts his chin in her cool hands. “Watchman. Does that sound right? You’re my Watchman.”
Observer, bystander. Would-be protector. He grins, discovered.
“Name me now!”
He reaches out and takes a fingerful of that wheaty stuff that soon will never be lighter than mud. It fans out under his fingers. “Maidenhair.”
“That’s a real thing?”
It is, he tells her, another name for a living fossil, earlier than flowering trees, early as the earliest conifers, a native for a while, in these headwaters, then disappeared for millions of years before returning in cultivation. A tree from back at the beginning of trees.
. . .
SHE CURLS against him in the pup tent as they fall asleep, made safe from anything more intimate than warmth by the proximity of so many other volunteers. He lies gazing at her back, the slight rise and fall of her rib cage. The T-shirt she uses for pajamas slips off her shoulder, revealing a tattoo across her scapula, in florid script: A change is gonna come.
He lies as still as he can, a tumescent monk. He counts the poundings of his heart high up in his ears until the surf weakens into sleep. As he drifts off, a spidery thought spins through him. People from another planet will wonder what’s wrong with earthly names, that it takes so many different ones to tag a thing. But here he lies, alongside this friend he has known only weeks, joined again after so many lifetimes. Nick and Olivia, Watchman and Maidenhair—the complete quartet of them—open to the January night, under topless columns of coastal redwood, the ever-living Sempervirens.
PATRICIA WESTERFORD sits on her ladder-backed chair at the pine farmhouse table, pen in the air, taking dictation from the insects. Eleven o’clock nears and she has nothing—not one sentence she hasn’t revised to death. The wind wafts through the window, smelling of compost and cedar. The scent triggers an old, deep longing that seems to have no purpose. The woods are calling, and she must go.
All winter she has struggled to describe the joy of her life’s work and