“Come on, honey,” she says. “You’re sick. And it’s time to lie down.”
She hammers in her last and largest felling wedge; immediately there is a shattering crack, and the tree shudders all over like a dog that’s just climbed out of a lake. With agonizing slowness, it begins to tilt forward toward the grin, and she hears long wood fibres pulling then snapping like guitar strings through the trunk’s length with a series of shrill screeches. She jumps to the ground and backpedals as the great tree begins to crash faster and faster through the branches of its neighbours. It hits the earth with the force of a comet strike, and the ground rumbles beneath her boots and she nearly loses her footing. A blast of air flings the cap from her head and swirls her hair into her eyes. After the tree comes to its final rest, the forest rains needles and branches for a whole minute.
When the cascade stops, 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 for the cause of the disturbance, and once they find the stumps and the chainsaw she left behind, a quick check of the logbook will tell them she’s responsible. She doesn’t have much time.
Jake goes to the kitchen island and pours herself a hefty bourbon. After weeks of restraint during her pregnancy scare, the drink slips easily down her throat. She spots Silas’s phone resting on the counter and nearly picks it up. She’d like to call Knut and inform him that she’s completed the job he started and the island’s trees now have at least a sliver of a chance, but she has no idea where he’s gone.
“Tell the truth, Silas,” she announces tipsily when he finally steps from the bathroom in a forest-green Cathedral-branded bathrobe. “They’re going to do genetic tests, aren’t they?”
His eyes widen momentarily. “Once we make our filing,” he says, after his shock passes, “you’ll likely attend a kinship hearing. A mere formality. But sure, a genetic test could be ordered by the judge. However, old R.J. wasn’t quite prescient enough to set aside any genetic samples. So there will be nothing for them to compare yours to. And I can assure you that the last thing our legal team will allow is any kind of excessive or intrusive testing of your genetic material.”
“I’m not a Holt, Silas,” she says before taking another long drink. “Anyone who has actually read the journal could tell you that.”
“I don’t really care if you are a Holt, or a Greenwood, or the prime minister’s cousin, Jake. This is not a criminal court we’ll be facing. All we need to do is prove that you are plausibly a descendant of R.J. Holt, and it’ll be enough. Just some useful ambiguity is sufficient, and I expect our magnificent journal will create exactly that. These days, a real, authentic paperbook can convince people of almost anything.”
“If R.J. was such a serial sleazeball,” she continues, “why haven’t you discovered other ‘accidents’? Why weren’t there children with his wife? No doubt they tried. Men like that love an heir. And besides, Euphemia had visitors other than him.”
“I thought scientists are supposed to reserve judgment,” he says, nudging the bottle of bourbon out of her reach. “And yes, Euphemia mentions other visitors, including this HBL. But let’s not cherry-pick facts and rush to any hasty conclusions. Why are you covered in sawdust?”