The Eve Tree: A Novel

Prologue

Humboldt Country, Northern California: 1943

The hills were plucked like chickens, and Catherine was breathless with fear. She stood on the ground beside her horse, tightened her hand around his reins. A dark gray haze covered her eyes. She saw racing white pinpricks. Her unsteady knees trembled. When the haze passed, the landscape was still changed beyond recognition. Enough trees had been felled to throw heaven off kilter, and she could still hear the ringing of the logger’s saws.

Catherine and her horse were perched on the ridge of the hill that was thrust from the river valley below. On one side of the ridge, her house was cupped in one of the smooth plateaus of hill. On the other, the forest had stretched out for miles, rippling in small hills, eventually plunging into another valley. Now it looked like a terrible storm had passed through. They had cut so many trees down already, it couldn't be believed. Contracts, promises, and money changed hands. Small plumes of smoke wound into the air where the loggers had burned to make room for falling trees.

It was late spring. Beside her, two of the last of the wild irises waved in a tiny grassy bowl. They were flecked with sawdust. Catherine turned her head and saw that behind her all was like it had always been. Clumps of trees on hills, forest in the valley. The green of spring bathing everything. As she turned back to the desecrated slopes on this side of the ridge, she heard someone call the all clear, and she cringed, bracing herself for the crash.

Catherine knew that any falling tree made a sound, but in the last months she had learned that a hundred-fifty foot Redwood shook the very earth. It made a sound like dying, like what might happen if the stars crashed out of the sky. This one gouged a hole in the forest, and the crash scraped at Catherine's insides. A tremendous cloud of dust rose as the tree settled its groaning corpse into the ground, and as the dust cleared, Catherine saw a dozen men scramble over its long body, already working to cut it apart, carry it out in pieces. She felt sick. She turned away.

God in Heaven. She was the one who had called the loggers here. She mounted her horse and they climbed back to the top of the ridge, then descended, slowly, the horse stepping carefully on the new grass. In the distance Catherine could see the house, stock still beneath the protective oaks. She didn't look back as they came past the point where the logging was hidden from view. She didn't want to see it again.

She held her body still as she slid the saddle off her horse and heaved it over the saddle post. Eased the bridle off his face. Leaned her face against his.

Catherine had been up to the logging zone many times, but today was the worst. For a month now, she had wanted to change her mind, to say, Forget about it, selling the trees was a bad idea, but she couldn't. She wouldn't back down.

She left the barn and walked up the hill to the house. The air smelled like advancing rain. One tree on the hill waved its limbs at her. It looked like a threat.

The house was cold, as though no one had taken care of the fire. She walked to the stove and saw that it had gone out. She rubbed her red hands together and piled kindling into a small tipi, lit it with a match. She set a few sticks on top, finally, one log. She sat back on her heels and watched it catch. Tiny flames snaked into grooves in the dried grains of the wood, snatching at them and hissing. Her throat thickened and ached.

She shut the stove, stood slowly. Went to find her mother.

Bertha was sitting in the gray living room in her rocker, holding her face in one hand, looking down to the river below. Mostly it was hidden from their view by the trees and knobs of hill that got in the way, but a glint showed here and there, flashing like the sides of many fish in the sun.

Ma, Catherine said. She crossed the room and sunk down in front of the rocking chair. You feeling all right?

It took Bertha a long time to look at Catherine. When she did, her eyes were dark and sad.

What did you see up there? she asked.

Catherine stood and brushed at her blue jeans.

It's chilly out, she said, Temperature took a dive again. Like it's barely spring. She walked a few steps away, turned again, twisted her hands behind her. Hope the tomatoes don't freeze.

Catherine. Bertha rocked the chair violently.

What do you want to know? Catherine couldn't meet her mother's eyes.

How much have they taken?

Catherine stared at her mother’s skirt where it ended and flapped against her thin legs, a few inches above her moccasins. They were crisp and new, Catherine had bought them the last time she and her mother went to the Pomo tribal land. With timber money.

A lot, she whispered.

How much?

I... I can't tell. They've taken a big swathe. Almost as far as I can see.

Through their feet and in their ears, they felt and heard another tree fall. Catherine's mother recoiled as though someone had hit her. She shrunk in her chair and gasped. Then she started to weep. Catherine was at her side in an instant, her hands on her mother's hair, strung through with all the gray that had appeared in this last year.

Ma, Ma... she said, but she didn't know what else to say. She held her mother as she cried and she felt nauseous with guilt. A long line of choices spread behind her, choices her mother had opposed.

Bertha took a deep breath, then sighed from her belly, a deep sigh, a dying sigh. She pushed Catherine's hand away.

Tell them to stop, she said. "It's enough. It's enough."

Catherine stood and left the room, sprinted to the barn to saddle her horse and go to the loggers, tell them to stop. Stop the falling, stop the noise, bring them back. Finally she could make herself bend and undo this doing.

Chapter 1

Humboldt County, Northern California: 2005

Even the donkey was restless.

He was standing outside Molly’s kitchen window, pawing the gravel in the driveway relentlessly until Molly was ready to scream.

Jefé! Shhhhhhhh, she said, standing on tiptoe so she could speak through the window over the sink. He looked at her with reproach.

"It’s alright," she said, but still he scraped the gravel with his hoof.

She ran a tiny stream of water over the last of the dinner dishes, turning the fragile plates on their edges in the dish rack. She was so tense she thought one might just shatter in her grasp, but no, they all reached the rack safely. She dried her hands on an old, threadbare towel and left the house, flip-flops crunching across the gravel of the driveway.

Jefé, she said. His ears perked and he plodded over to her. She reached out for him, rubbed her hands under his bristly mane, making shushing noises. The donkey had been a colt when they found him, a remnant of a herd somewhere, or detritus of a family of settlers from long ago, perhaps, hunkered in these remote hills in Northern California. No one knew where he was from. No one had claimed him.

Molly was secretly jubilant; she’d fallen in love on the first day, the morning she untangled him from a blackberry thicket, sluicing the scratches in his dusty hide with aloe. He stayed on at the O’Leary ranch, spoiled and given to roaming wherever he pleased. He spent a few days with the cattle, a week or two with the goats or horses. Often, he drifted to the people. He lurked around the house like her little gray ghost.

She pressed her forehead into the side of his neck and he blew short whiffling breaths onto her hands and her bare legs. She smelled him; warm hair, dust, and the clean achy smell of grass, and she inhaled the new smell, the one that was troubling him. The awful smoke.

It’s alright, she said again.

Abruptly he tore from her and whirled away in a clumsy trot, lumbering toward the oak tree that stood below the goat barn. He pulled up there in the shade, his brief rebellion defeated by sheer laziness. He stood twitching flies away, disgusted with her. It wasn’t all right. They both knew it.

She watched him for a moment with one hand shading her eyes, finally turning and trudging into the house when she saw he wasn’t coming back. She let the screen door slam behind her.

Jack! she called from the kitchen, reaching for a bottle of red wine. She pulled the cork and poured the dark wine into a glass, watching it settle into stillness. There was a painful hum running through her, threatening a storm behind her eyes.

The fire was quiet now, the firefighters said. Just a small old growth fire, six miles off, creeping along, nothing to be afraid of. But the smell! In the morning when she awoke, fear was like iron in her mouth.

Jack! Do you want some wine?

Her husband appeared in the doorway, tall and barefoot, socks in one hand, standing in the space where the kitchen opened into the living room. His dark hair was wet from the shower, curling at his temples and on his neck. He had shaved, but his face wouldn't be bare for long, that bristly shadow would be back in a couple of hours. He looked tired, Molly thought.

No thanks, he said.

Are you sure? I’m thinking of sitting outside for a while.

I’m sure.

She shrugged. Well, fine, she said. Will you keep me company?

Yeah... give me a minute or so, He stepped back down the hallway, disappearing from sight, heading toward their bedroom, deep in the ranch house.

Outside, Molly sat herself down on the steps. Sam, the old cow dog, looked up hopefully, one ear raised and one eyebrow cocked. He settled back onto his bed when he saw Molly wasn't going anywhere.

She sat like a bird, knees up and elbows tucked into her sides, taking small sips of wine, head to one side, taking stock. There was the carport with its four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles, the driveway with an ancient tractor she and Jack had the best intentions of repairing, there was Sam lying on his bed made of one threadbare vintage sleeping bag, the kind with patterns of ducks and lakes on yellow flannel innards. The dog was panting hard in the standstill heat of the afternoon.

She turned her eyes farther, to the vast undulating fabric of hills—golden now in the dry season—sweeping along and quickly becoming dimmer until they were hidden from sight by the haze that swathed their curves. She allowed her eyes to linger and rest there; allowed her heart the little bit of yearning she always felt when she looked at her hills. Before this smoke had invaded she’d been able to trace the hills until their distant blue lines leaked and faded into the sky. She lifted her hair from her neck to bring some cool air to the base of her skull.

Since she was a small girl on this ranch, Molly had loved the shadows that the hills cast in the late afternoon light, the dimples and ridges and the clusters of trees, the huge gnarled oaks, the way the grasses shifted from green to golden and back from golden to green again when the rains came. In spring the hills were blanketed in wildflowers, and when she was a child she would lie on her back, feeling the small petals brush her face, wishing they would grow to enclose her. Sooner or later she always started sneezing and had to jump up and stumble away. The flowers, yes, she had missed them during the eighteen years she’d spent away.

These days in wildflower season she and Jack took a day and let their horses wander, pointing out to one another the different species of flower faces.

Wildflower season seemed long past.

Behind her, the screen door opened and closed again. Her husband eased himself down beside her, folding up his long limbs. Molly was quiet while he slid his feet into his boots, sitting with his hands draped loosely on his knees when he was finished, looking out over those same hills, frowning.

It’s thicker today, he said.

He was talking about the smoke. She didn't want to think about it.

I still think we need to grade the roads, she replied, knowing what his response would be even as she said it. Her shoulders slumped and she plucked her t-shirt away from her damp skin and fanned herself with it. They were both on edge, living in heat and fear, and trying to agree was so much effort, even in the best of times.

Jack shook his head. We've had this conversation. We can’t get to it now.

I’m not talking about something stupid, this isn't planting flowers in the ditches, Jack! You said yourself that all those trucks will be coming one of these days… She lowered her face to her glass. If we’re unlucky.

We have to wait until this thing is over, Jack said. That’s all we can do, Moll. Filling the holes means days of work; picking up gravel, trucking it all over the ranch—

I know what it means!

They were quiet.

Molly forgot what she’d ever thought about before the last three weeks, before their growing awareness of one of last month’s lightning strike fires in the State Park; the one that didn’t go out by itself the way old growth fires usually did. The fire that tapped at the insides of their skulls as it crept toward them with unbearable leisure.

They were on the phone all the time. Molly called Athena, their nearest neighbor, daily. Called because it took her a half hour to drive to Athena’s house over the dirt roads that separated the plots of land this far out, and Molly was a goat farmer, she didn’t have a lot of time. Athena never had anything positive to say about the way the fire was being handled. She was sure that there was conspiracy involved on the part of the government, that they were all in real trouble. Molly’s friend Greta from across the valley thought they should wait it out, not panic until they had real reason to. But it was unlikely that the fire would reach Greta. Everyone had opinions and nothing seemed clear. Jack hounded the unruffled Fire Department. Their line was that the forest floor was under a hundred-fifty foot canopy, the forest was a damp temperate rainforest. They weren’t worried and neither was the Department of State Parks. But the fire continued, and this morning, Vincent Conners, fire battalion chief, had called to make sure that they had their home at defensible standards.

You need one hundred feet of cleared space around the house, he told Molly over the phone. She shifted her feet, exasperated. Of course they kept the space cleared, mostly. A few things needed to be moved.

Well, move them. And you should start relocating the animals.

It was confusing, the sudden change. They’d been told for weeks that they had nothing to worry about, and even now CalFire was insisting it was only a matter of precaution. After they stared at each other blankly for five minutes or so, Jack went for reinforcements, pulling his phone out of his pocket and calling their three grown children and Molly’s mother, Catherine.

Catherine had inherited the ranch from her mother when she was only twenty-five, and she'd passed it on to Jack and Molly ten years earlier, bringing them from their home in San Diego. She then moved to a retirement community in Sacramento, surprising everybody. With disaster frog-marching toward them, everyone was coming home. They would be here in the morning.

Molly didn’t want them to come.

She stared off into the distance, watching the changing afternoon light on the oak stand beyond the goat barn.

I can’t stand the thought of trucks skidding over these rutted pits we call roads, she said. It’s like we’re in Honduras or something. And you called the family. They’ll all need to drive around here, and they won’t want to be launched into crater after crater.

They’ll understand. He reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear. She flinched and pulled away. And you’re exaggerating. Besides, your mother didn’t fix the roads nearly as often as we do.

Well? Why do you think she’s struggling with arthritis now? She didn’t let him answer. Because of bouncing around on pitted roads, that’s why.

Jack smiled at Molly, which infuriated her.

I thought it was more about her being elderly, he said.

She’s not elderly!

She’s over eighty.

She’s eighty-one, that’s hardly over eighty!

What? Of course eighty-one’s over eighty! Jack said. There’s no disputing the logic, babe. Molly looked into his face and he looked back at her. The late afternoon light was kind to him. As years sputtered by, the smile lines around his eyes lengthened and grew closer to the smile lines that reached up from beside his mouth. Molly wondered what would happen when the lines crossed each other. She hated fighting with him, she hated this sudden rush of anger that always caught her up with it. She looked away first.

You know what I mean, she said to her empty wine glass. It’s just that you make her sound… old.

Jack gently laid one hand over her clenched fingers.

She is old.

If only it wasn’t so hot. The heat folded over them like an unwanted blanket that they couldn’t kick off. It was a fierce August heat wave, and they were baking, along with the grasses and the earth. Even the small spring that was their water supply had been reduced to a depressing trickle. Normally it flowed so plentifully, so lovingly for them.

It’s going to bother me every minute of the day until it’s done, Molly said.

Jack tightened his hand around hers before letting go and stretching his arms behind his back with a yawn.

You’ve got to put it out of your mind. The others will be here in the morning, and we have a thousand things to do without thinking about the roads.

Molly put her hands over her face.

I told you that I don’t want them all coming here.

Jack sighed.

Why on earth not? he asked.

She pulled her hands away and turned to him. Because it’s crazy enough right now and I have a business to run. I can’t get all the cheese made this week if the kids are hanging around and my mother isn’t going to help things any. She chewed her thumbnail. I know she thinks this wouldn’t have happened if she still had the ranch.

Even Catherine can’t prevent lightning strikes.

"Does she know that?"

It doesn’t matter whether she does or doesn’t. She has a right to come. We need help and the family wants to be here. You can’t shut them out.

Molly wished she could tunnel into the earth and stay there. She looked at the hills and wished herself away from fire, from disturbances in her routines, from disappointed people. Sam grunted and heaved himself up, settling back down by her leg with a sigh. She edged her foot away from him. All that black hair was terrible in the heat.

Are we going to have to feed them? she asked.

Catherine and the kids? I assume so. But then maybe they’ll help with the cooking, Jack said.

She looked at him. Not them. The firefighters.

Oh. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I could ask, I guess.

Because I’m not sure I’m up to that.

I don’t think you'll have to do it. Besides, you need to help move the goats.

I don’t want them to go anywhere! She almost moaned it, pounding one clenched hand on her knee.

Molly! Jack raised his voice, now. His black eyebrows pulled towards one another, forming a deep divot in the skin between them. Molly stared at the line, fascinated. He took a deep breath. I need you on board with this. We’re really lucky that our ranch is as big as it is—that we only need to move them to the other side.

She was pushing it, she knew. Oh God, she thought. Grow up, Moll, come on.

It was the splintering of their rhythms that she hated. She didn’t like not knowing what would come next. A thought came to her.

Let’s go down there, she said.

What?

Let’s go see the fire. Meet the enemy.

I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.

It’s a great idea! We can find out for ourselves what it looks like, rather than just listening to what we’ve been told.

I’m thinking of you. You seem tired, you’re already wondering if you’re up to this… what about the goats?

Gerard already said he'd take care of milking tonight. She turned and looked into his eyes. She relaxed her shoulders, softened, melted up at him the way she knew would make him give in. Jack. Please.

He looked back at her, eyes narrowed. He held himself rigidly, and then as she reached out and touched his shoulder, she felt him give way.

Fine. Alright.

She laughed, feeling giddy, like she’d won a race. Let’s go!

Now?

Right now.

A few hours later, after the drive down to the State Park and the long walk from the parking lot to the roped off fire area, she was staring straight at the fire in the encroaching twilight.

Close up, it could almost have been a friend.

Flames lapped at the bases of giant fir trees. The fire was no more than a foot high, a warm tide at the feet of the giants; this tiny thing was the threat that had been stealing breath and sleep from her.

It was working sluggishly through the old growth that swept up to the top of the nearest mountain, toward their home on the other side of the ridge, about six miles away. They were standing on ground that belonged to the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, and the untouched woods around them were a vast fortress, canopied by fir and redwood branches, a place where sounds were hushed by the thick carpet of needles and ferns on the forest floor. Many of the trees were taller than city buildings. It was a secretive thing, the forest, there were so many pieces of moss you would never hold between your fingertips, so many trees whose bark would never make an indentation on your palm.

Molly was a tiny thing in these woods. Even Jack beside her looked deceptively small, his tired face pale in the gloom. Sam nosed around the forest, looking for a place to make his mark, to let everyone know he had been here.

Molly wandered away to look at the ground the fire had already passed over. There weren't too many signs, she was glad to see. The blackened feet of the trees, the earth bared of needles. Birds panicking overhead. She sighed. There were signs.

The fire stretched across her line of sight, glinting even in her peripheral vision, a glowing thread in a land of giants. It looked like nothing more than a chain of people, linking