a silence like nothing she’s ever experienced replaces it. It’s as though the fallen tree has swallowed all sound, and she’s overcome by the feeling that something of great significance has just transpired, that an entire era has come to an end. After the feeling passes, she climbs atop the fresh stump to catch her breath. She still has four smaller trees to take down and already it hurts to lift her arms. The stump is large enough that she can lie at its centre with limbs spread like a starfish and still not touch its outer rings.
She rests and drinks some water, then crawls over to the stump’s edge, removes her gloves, and touches just a few of its 1,200 rings, which are already weeping a rich sap, thick as tar. She begins at this year’s growth, the cambium, and counts backward to the ring that grew the year she first arrived at the Cathedral, which is not even an inch from edge. Next, she finds the year the Great Withering began. Then the year she earned her Ph.D. Then she indexes back an inch to the year her mother died. Then her father. Next, she finds her own birth year. Then, at least according to Silas’s researchers, the year her grandmother Willow and Everett Greenwood both died. Then Harris Greenwood. She passes over the drought of the thirties, easily identified by five rings thinner and darker than the others surrounding them, until she arrives at the charred ring of the great fire on Greenwood Island, which was also the year Willow was born and the same year Euphemia Baxter wrote the last entry in her journal. Here Jake stops. She hasn’t even moved eight inches from the edge, and there are still about six feet left before she reaches the centre.
Even when a tree is at its most vital, only ten per cent of its tissue—the outermost rings, its sapwood—can be called alive. All the rings of inner heartwood are essentially dead, just lignin-reinforced cellulose built up year after year, stacked layer upon layer, through droughts and storms, diseases and stresses, everything that the tree has lived through preserved and recorded within its own body. Every tree is held up by its own history, the very bones of its ancestors. And since the journal came to her, Jake has gained a new awareness of how her own life is being held up by unseen layers, girded by lives that came before her own. And by a series of crimes and miracles, accidents and choices, sacrifices and mistakes, all of which have landed her in this particular body and delivered her to this day.
She’s always secretly believed that everything we do is somewhere recorded—whether this record could ever be read does not really matter. Just that it is kept is enough. And here, perhaps, in this stump, she’s found it.
While preparing to cut down the next diseased tree, she spots a fir sapling growing on the north side of the stump, a seedling that is quite probably the child of the giant she just felled. Jake scoops up the tiny tree in a handful of dirt and re-plants it in the most opportune spot: dead centre in the patch of sunlight that is now reaching the forest floor for the first time in almost a thousand years, all thanks to the gaping hole that God’s Middle Finger has left in the canopy. And for a moment Jake stands perfectly still, envisioning the towering juggernaut of timber that the seedling might become, in a mere five hundred years or so.
“Good luck,” she says.
HBL
WITH HER FOREST Guide uniform furry with sawdust, Jake arrives at the door of Villa Twelve. When her knocks go answered, she tries the door and finds it unlocked. Inside, she hears Silas humming in the shower, and waits for him on the sofa. At rest, she realizes she’s still shaking, the chainsaw’s vibration caught somehow in her joints and nerves. She’d cut down the remaining four trees and left them where they fell, because the Cathedral staff will surely limb and burn them the second they’re discovered, mainly to protect the Pilgrims from being traumatized by the sight. Still, the fire will eradicate the fungus. That’s the hope, anyway. But she heard voices calling out from the forest as she was leaving, which means the Rangers must have heard her chainsaw or felt the tremors of the trees coming down. No doubt they’re already scouring the Cathedral