“And that friend of his? What’s his name—Feeney?”
The question seems loaded in ways she can’t decipher, though the name is unknown to her. “Must be before my time,” she says. “Harris never had any friends. He prefers assistants. They’re much easier to order around.”
But her response only saddens her uncle, whose face clouds over, and he remains quiet for some time. “At least he has you,” he says.
She laughs bitterly. “I think I’ve been more of a headache to him than anything, especially since I dropped out of his alma mater.” With her tongue racing from the speed, she describes her brief stint at Yale—a final gambit for Harris’s impossible-to-attain approval—and how initially she loved the field trips to the woods of upstate New York and Maine, and the classes in “forest management,” which, she later realized, was just a euphemism for determining which trees to destroy first. It wasn’t until the end of her second semester, under an enormous chestnut tree outside the campus chapel, that she read a book called Our Plundered Planet and her entire world caved in. The exploitation, the waste, the destruction of the land and its indigenous peoples were all laid bare, and, worse, it was people like her who’d perpetrated these crimes. “I dropped out that week and went tree planting,” she says. “I’m not boring you with this, am I?”
“Not at all,” he says. “I could listen to you all day.”
After they’ve left the grasslands behind and climbed up into a wooded valley of tall lodgepole pine, Willow notices a dark sedan in the rear-view mirror. How long has it been there? she wonders in a panic. “I need to pee,” she says, and pulls onto an old logging road, feeling great relief when the car carries on down the highway. She parks in a patch of gravel near a cobalt-blue mountain stream and goes off into the woods. Returning, she watches her uncle limp out to a lone cypress that bends over the stream’s bank, leaning against its trunk and tearing off some new-growth needles from its lowest branches. He proceeds to crush them in his hands, then cups the needles to his face and inhales deeply—an act of such strange intimacy, Willow feels guilty being witness to it. Every culture has its tree-related myths: from the ubiquitous trees of life that quite literally hold up the sky, to the monstrous trees that eat toddlers or drink human blood, to the trees that play pranks or heal the sick, remember stories or curse enemies. And watching her uncle, who has time-travelled here from a different age, she’s reminded that trees are also capable of resurrection.
When he returns to the Westfalia, his hair is slicked back with stream water, and the citrusy aroma of pine floods Willow’s nose. “Thanks. I needed that,” he says in a markedly enlivened tone while meeting her eyes for the first time. Willow remembers the oppressive concrete and steel of the prison, how its designers had avoided using wood in a way that felt vindictive.
“They move you around when you’re in prison for that long,” he says, as she tentatively steers them back onto the highway, but not before checking both directions for black cars. “First I was in Stony Mountain. Then the Kingston Pen. Some years I couldn’t see any greenery at all from my cell window. Other times, it was just a few scrubby black maples out on the yard’s perimeter. For a while it was a nice stand of south-facing birch, and I could watch their bark peel back like parchment. Those were the best five years.”
“You know, your letters were very important to me growing up,” she says. “Sorry I just kind of trailed off and never thanked you.”
“I always knew it would end. And I should be the one thanking you. I’m not sure I would have made it through those early years without your letters to look forward to.”
“What was it like?” she asks, instantly regretting the question. A child’s question.
“Oh,” he says. “It was like riding a train car that doesn’t go anywhere. Riding it with some of the worst and some of the best people you ever met. And doing that for decades.”
“The longest they ever kept me in jail for trespassing on a forest lot was overnight, and that was more than enough,” she says, silently wondering what kind of time the destruction of three logging machines worth a million dollars each will fetch her if she’s caught.
Everett flashes a quick smile, his first. “You get used to it. You find ways to handle the time. I went in during what they’re calling the Great Depression—and even after I learned to read I stuck to novels and never followed the news. I figured it’d all just be different by the time I got out. I miss anything important?”
“The stock market’s just crashed again and lost half its value,” Willow says. “Not as bad as it did in your day, I guess. And as I said there are gas shortages, because oil prices have gone crazy. They’ve lowered the speed limit in Oregon to conserve fuel.” She lights another menthol and continues her lecture on the festering rot of human greed and consumerism, while also stressing how Mother Nature is pushing back with acid rain and resource depletion and desertification, and how a global environmental apocalypse will be the only way people finally learn their lesson. While listening to herself talk, she wonders if it’s cruel to describe the world’s imminent end to a man who’s just regained it after so long a time away.
“There were some good years in there, though, right?” Everett asks after she’s talked herself out. “Other than that Second Great War?”
“Sure, things were fairly comfortable for a while after that.”
He nods. “Sorry to have missed it. Not the war, I mean. But all the years in between.”
I WON’T MENTION IT AGAIN
AT DUSK, THEY pull off at another logging road for dinner. To settle her persistently gymnastic stomach, Willow brews nettle tea on the van’s propane burner. Everett accepts his clay cup, clutching it intently, like it’s brimming with liquid gold. She picked the nettle herself with cowhide gloves from one of her secret spots, and the tea is rich with tannin and chlorophyll, almost creamy.
“I prefer simple foods,” she says later, stirring tahini into the chickpeas that she’s boiled before ladling a scoopful over his brown rice. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“I can’t imagine a meal I’d rather sit down to,” he says, taking his bowl.
“When we depend less on industrially produced food and live in the world’s quiet spaces,” she says, quoting something she read in the Whole Earth Catalog, her mouth still turbo-charged by the pills, “our bodies become vigorous. We discover the serenity of living in sync with the rhythms of the Earth. We cease oppressing one another.”
“Makes sense,” he says, slipping his fork into his mouth. She still can’t tell if he’s capable of sarcasm.
For dessert she offers some of the soymilk she makes, heated with honey stirred into it. Everett sips approvingly as she details the process: boiling the beans, blending them, and straining the mash through a muslin bag.
“Even when you were just a little thing, you never could stand cow’s milk,” he chuckles after he takes an approving sip, his voice suddenly alight with the past. “I used to give you goat’s milk, whenever I could find it. But this bean milk is a fine alternative.”