The Winter Trees

Christmas was a Wednesday. Wren drove to Litchfield in the morning with a ham and a bottle of wine and a gift for her mother, which was a pair of leather gloves from the saddlery in New Preston, the kind of gloves Jesse wore when she gardened in the spring, thin leather, close-fitting, the hands protected without losing dexterity, which was what Jesse valued in gloves and in everything — protection that did not impede function.

The house smelled like cinnamon and coffee. Jesse had put a wreath on the door, the one concession to decoration that she made each year, the wreath made from white pine boughs cut from the tree in the backyard and wired to a frame and hung with a red bow, the wreath a circle of evergreen that Wren had been looking at every Christmas for twenty-two years, the same wreath, the same bow, the same white pine, the tree providing the boughs the way it provided the shade in summer and the windbreak in winter, the tree part of the household the way a working animal was part of a farm, not a pet but a contributor.

They ate the ham at noon. They drank the wine. Jesse opened the gloves and put them on and flexed her fingers and said, "These are good," which was the highest praise Jesse gave to a material object. Wren opened Jesse's gift, which was a book — a field guide to Pacific Northwest trees, the Peterson series, the cover showing a Douglas fir against a mountain backdrop, the Cascade Range behind it, snow on the peaks.

Wren looked at the book. She looked at Jesse. Jesse was pouring more wine, her face neutral, the gesture of giving the book absorbed into the routine of the meal, no pause, no emphasis, no explanation offered. But the book was not routine. The book was not a random selection from a catalogue. The book was a field guide to the trees of Oregon and Washington and the Pacific Northwest, the trees that Glenn had cut, the trees that Jesse had not spoken about in twenty-two years, the trees that Wren had never seen.

"Thank you," Wren said.

"You should know those trees," Jesse said. She said it the way she said everything — plainly, without elaboration, the sentence complete, the meaning requiring no explanation because the meaning was the words and the words were sufficient. You should know those trees. Not you might like this book. Not I thought of you when I saw it. You should know those trees.

"Why now?" Wren said.

Jesse cut a piece of ham and ate it and chewed and swallowed and set her fork down. The sequence was deliberate, the delay not evasive but compositional, the way a person who had spent her life with books composed her sentences before speaking them, the words arranged in the mind before being released into the air.

"Because you're thirty-four," Jesse said. "And your father died at thirty-four. And you've been carrying his axe and his saw and his work for your entire adult life and you've never been to the place where he did that work. You should go. And before you go, you should know the trees."

Wren set the book on the table. The cover was glossy, the photograph of the Douglas fir sharp and detailed, the bark visible — the deeply furrowed bark of an old-growth Doug fir, the furrows three or four inches deep, the bark thick enough to protect the tree from fire, the bark that Glenn had seen every day of his working life, the bark that Wren had never seen.

"You've never told me to go to Oregon," Wren said.

"I've never told you not to."

"You've never talked about Oregon at all."

"No."

"Why not?"

Jesse was quiet. The house was quiet. The street was quiet — Christmas morning, no traffic, no sounds, the snow from two days ago still on the ground, muffling everything, the world wrapped in the white insulation of a New England winter. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked. It was a clock that had been in this kitchen since Jesse bought the house, a round clock with a white face and black numbers and a second hand that moved in the smooth continuous sweep of a quartz mechanism, the ticking not actually audible but Wren heard it anyway because the silence was deep enough to make a person hear the things that were not there.

"Your father loved that work," Jesse said. "He loved the woods and the trees and the cutting and the crew and the mornings and the rain and the mud and the bar oil and the sound of the saw and the feeling of a tree going over, the moment when the hinge lets go and the tree begins to move and the ground shakes when it hits. He loved all of it. He talked about it the way you talk about climbing. The same light in his eyes. The same — precision. The same care about the details. He knew every species. He knew how each one fell. Douglas fir fell straight if you read the lean right. Western red cedar was unpredictable — the taper made it hard to aim. Hemlock was brittle, it could shatter at the stump. He knew these things the way you know your trees."

This was the most Jesse had said about Glenn in twenty-two years. Wren did not move. She did not speak. She sat at the table with the ham and the wine and the field guide and listened to her mother talk about her father the way she listened to a tree tell its history through the rings — carefully, attentively, aware that the record was fragile and that interrupting it could stop it.

"I stopped talking about it because talking about it was talking about the thing that killed him," Jesse said. "The work killed him. The woods killed him. Oregon killed him. If I talked about Oregon, I was talking about his death. If I mentioned the trees, I was mentioning the thing that fell on him. If I said the word saw, I was saying the name of the tool he was holding when he died. Every word connected to that place connected to that day. So I stopped saying the words. I moved to a place where the words were different — different trees, different work, different landscape — and I made a life in the different words."

"But I went into the same work."

"Yes."

"And you never said anything."

"What would I have said? Don't? Don't climb trees? Don't use a chainsaw? Don't do the thing your father did, the thing that is in your hands and your body and your blood? You were going to do it. I could see it when you were sixteen and you took the chainsaw out of the garage and cut up a fallen tree in the yard. You handled it like you'd been holding it your whole life. You had. You'd been holding it since you were three, since Glenn put you on his lap on the porch and let you hold the saw with the engine off, the chain not moving, just the weight and the shape of it in your hands. You were always going to do this. Telling you not to would have been telling you not to be who you are."

"Were you afraid?"

"Every day. Every day since you started climbing. Every day since you started the business. Every day when you tell me about the trees you've taken down and the height you climbed and the rigging you set and the wood you dropped, every day I hear Glenn. I hear him in your voice. I hear him in the details. The species names. The diameters. The grain and the bark and the way the saw sounds in different wood. He talked the same way. You talk the same way. And every day I wait for the phone call that doesn't come, the call that came on September 18, 2004, the call from the foreman whose name I can't remember, the call that said Glenn was gone."

Wren reached across the table and took her mother's hand. Jesse's hand was small and dry and strong from thirty years of shelving books and pulling weeds and the daily work of living alone in a house in a town in a state three thousand miles from the place where her life had broken, and the hand gripped Wren's hand with a strength that was not physical but was the strength of a woman who had held herself together for twenty-two years by not talking about the thing that had broken her and was now talking about it at the kitchen table on Christmas Day with the ham getting cold and the wine half-drunk and the field guide to Pacific Northwest trees lying between them like a bridge.

"I'm careful," Wren said.

"I know you are."

"I rig everything. I check every rope. I use two tie-in points. I never climb alone. I never climb in wind. I never climb when I'm tired or when the conditions are wrong. I am the most careful person in this business."

"Your father was careful too."

The sentence landed like the widow-maker. Wren felt it in her chest, the impact, the truth of it. Glenn had been careful. Glenn had been experienced. Glenn had written notes in his field notebook about the hazards he encountered and the lessons he learned. Glenn had survived fourteen years of the most dangerous job in America. Glenn had been careful and careful had not been enough because the widow-maker had been above him and he had not seen it and not seeing it was not carelessness, it was the limitation of being a human in a forest, a small body in a vertical world, the line of sight blocked by branches and bark and canopy, the dead branch invisible until it moved and by then it was too late.

"I know," Wren said.

They sat at the table holding hands. The clock ticked. The snow outside was white and deep and the trees in the yard were bare and dark, their branches holding small caps of snow on the upper surfaces, the snow white on the dark bark, the contrast sharp, the trees standing in the winter the way they had stood in every winter, dormant, waiting, the buds formed and sealed, the growth paused, the life inside the wood reduced to its minimum, the heartbeat slowed to nearly nothing, the tree not dead but not alive in the way it was alive in summer, the tree in a state between life and death, the state of waiting, the state of endurance.

"Will you go to Oregon?" Jesse said.

"I don't know."

"You should go. You should see where he worked. You should see the stumps."

"Why?"

"Because you cut trees for a living and you've never seen what it looks like when an entire forest is cut. You remove one tree at a time and you think you understand cutting. You don't. You don't understand what your father did. You don't understand what it means to walk into a stand of trees that have been growing for three hundred years and cut them all, every one, until the hillside is bare and the stumps are standing in the sun and the soil is drying and the stream is warming and everything that lived there is gone or leaving. You need to see it. You need to stand in a clear-cut and look at the stumps and understand what it means to be the person who does that. And then you can decide whether what you do is different from what he did, or whether it's the same thing at a different scale."

"It is different."

"Maybe. Go and see."

Jesse let go of Wren's hand. She stood and began clearing the table. The conversation was over. Jesse had opened a door she had kept closed for twenty-two years and had said what was behind it and was now closing the door, not sealing it the way she had sealed it before but closing it gently, the way a person closed a book they had finished reading, the story told, the pages released.

Wren helped wash the dishes. They stood side by side at the sink, Jesse washing, Wren drying, the routine they had performed since Wren was old enough to hold a dish towel, the choreography of a two-person task that required no discussion, the hands knowing where to go, the dishes moving from soapy water to rinse water to towel to shelf, the system efficient and silent.

"Mom."

"Hmm."

"The box in my garage. Dad's things. There's a notebook in it. His field notebook. It has his last entries — the trees he was going to cut the week he died. Species and diameters and locations."

Jesse's hands stopped moving in the water. Wren could see the stillness enter her mother's body, the way stillness entered a tree before it fell — the moment of zero motion, the instant when the forces were balanced and nothing moved, the hinge holding, the lean paused, the tree standing between upright and falling, between standing and gone.

"I know the notebook," Jesse said. "He always carried it. Green cover."

"Rite in the Rain."

"He brought it home every night and wrote in it after dinner. At this table. At this —" Jesse stopped. She looked at the kitchen table in Litchfield and Wren understood that she was seeing the kitchen table in Mill City, the other table, the table where Glenn had sat and written in the notebook and Wren had done her homework and Jesse had read a library book and the three of them had occupied the same space without speaking and the silence had been comfortable because it was the silence of people who were done with the day and were resting in each other's presence.

"He wrote about the trees," Wren said. "Not about anything else. Just the trees. The species and the sizes and the locations and the notes about what went wrong and what he learned."

"That sounds right. He wasn't a man who wrote about feelings. He wrote about wood."

"So do I."

Jesse looked at her. The look was long and direct and contained something that Wren could not name — recognition, or acceptance, or the compound emotion of a mother seeing her dead husband in her living daughter, the resemblance not physical but behavioral, the shared language of wood, the shared habit of recording the work, the shared compulsion to know the trees by their names and their numbers and their grain.

"Yes," Jesse said. "So do you."

Wren drove home in the late afternoon. The snow was blue in the fading light, the shadows of the bare trees falling across the road in long dark lines, the trees casting their shapes on the ground the way they cast their shapes on the world, the shadow a projection, a flattened version of the three-dimensional structure, the complexity of the crown reduced to a two-dimensional pattern of light and dark on the snow.

She drove past the Blackwell property. She slowed. The oak stood on the hill, bare, its branches dark against the gray sky, the crown a network of lines, the die-back visible now without leaves — the south side sparse, the branches fewer, the west side beginning to show the same sparseness, the tree's decline written in the absence of branches, the way a sentence could be read by its missing words, the meaning in the gaps.

Three months. March. The tree would come down. Wren would climb it and cut it and lower it piece by piece and the stump would be there and the rings would be there and two hundred and fourteen years of history would be visible in the cross-section, and Margaret Blackwell would stand in the yard and watch, and Wren would count the rings, and the counting would be a reading, and the reading would be an ending, and the ending would be the beginning of the after, the period without the tree, the space in the yard and the sky and the landscape where the tree had been.

She drove home. She went inside. She opened the field guide and sat at the table and began to read.

Douglas fir — Pseudotsuga menziesii. The dominant tree of the Pacific Northwest. Not a true fir — the name was a misnomer, the tree in its own genus, Pseudotsuga, false hemlock, the naming confused from the start, the tree defying classification the way it defied the limitations that other trees accepted, growing to three hundred feet, trunks fifteen feet in diameter, the largest trees in the world outside the redwoods and the sequoias. The bark on old-growth specimens was a foot thick, deeply furrowed, the furrows forming a pattern that reminded Wren of the canyon walls she had seen in photographs of the American Southwest, the bark its own landscape, its own terrain.

She read about western red cedar — Thuja plicata. The tree of life, the tree the indigenous people of the Northwest had used for everything — houses, canoes, clothing, rope, baskets, ceremonial masks. The wood was light and soft and straight-grained and rot-resistant and smelled like pencils and could be split with a wedge into boards as thin as shingles, the tree providing shelter without milling, the tree becoming a house with nothing more than an axe and a wedge and the knowledge of the grain.

She read about western hemlock — Tsuga heterophylla. The cousin of the eastern hemlock she treated in the Cavendish ravine, the western version larger, taller, the same graceful drooping tips on the branches, the same shade tolerance, the same preference for cool, moist sites. The western hemlock was not being killed by the woolly adelgid — the adelgid had not yet reached the Pacific Northwest, had not yet crossed the continent, the western hemlocks still living in the absence of the pest that was killing their eastern relatives.

She read about the forest. The old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest was a thing she had never seen and could barely imagine from her experience of the eastern forests, which were young — two hundred years old at most, the forests that had regrown after the colonial clearing, the second-growth forests that covered the hills of Connecticut, the trees she climbed and pruned and removed, trees that were middle-aged compared to the old growth of Oregon, which was five hundred years old, six hundred, eight hundred, the oldest Douglas firs pushing a thousand years, trees that had germinated during the Crusades.

Glenn had cut these trees. Glenn had stood at the base of a tree that had been growing since the Middle Ages and had made the undercut with the falling axe and the back cut with the chainsaw and the tree had fallen and the ground had shaken and the stump had been there, five feet across, six feet, the rings uncountable without a magnifying glass, the history too long to read in a day.

She closed the book. She put it on the shelf. She went to the garage and stood in front of the falling axe and the box of Glenn's things and looked at them in the dark, the shapes barely visible, the axe handle a dark line against the lighter wall, the box a dark rectangle on the shelf.

She went back inside. She opened her laptop and searched for flights to Portland, Oregon. She did not book a flight. She looked at the prices and the schedules and the maps of the Cascade Range and the Santiam Canyon and the Opal Creek Wilderness and the roads that led from Portland into the mountains where Glenn had worked. She looked at the distance — three thousand miles, five hours in the air, the distance that Jesse had put between herself and Oregon in 2004, the distance that Wren had never crossed.

She closed the laptop. She went to bed.

The field guide was on the shelf. The axe was in the garage. The oak on Blackwell Hill was standing in the dark with its dead branches and its dying sapwood and its three months of remaining life. And Wren was in her bed in her house in Morris, Connecticut, thirty-four years old, the age her father had been when he died, and the year was ending and the new year was coming and in the new year she would bring down a two-hundred-year-old tree and maybe, maybe, she would go to Oregon and see the stumps and stand in the place where her father had worked and look at the clear-cuts and the regrowth and the old growth that remained and understand something she did not yet understand, something about the inheritance of the saw and the axe and the work, something about what it meant to be the daughter of a man who cleared forests, a woman who removed trees, a person who carried the same tool and used it differently and did not know whether the difference was enough.

She slept. The trees stood in the dark. The winter continued.