The Return

The flight east reversed the landscape. The Cascades fell away, the Douglas fir giving way to the dry ponderosa pine of the eastern slope, the pine giving way to the sagebrush steppe, the steppe giving way to the Rockies, the Rockies giving way to the plains, the plains giving way to the Appalachians, the Appalachians giving way to the Connecticut hills, and the hills were green, deeply green, the green of a June canopy in full leaf, the green that Wren had been seeing her whole adult life and that looked different now, looked both smaller and more precious, the scale reduced from the old growth of Oregon to the second growth of New England, the trees a hundred feet instead of two hundred and fifty, the trunks two feet instead of ten, the forest younger, simpler, more intimate.

She had not checked the falling axe on the return flight because the falling axe was on a stump in the North Santiam drainage, the handle vertical, the edge in the heartwood, the tool in the place where it belonged. The absence of the axe made her luggage lighter and made her feel lighter and the lightness was not metaphorical but was physical, the actual weight of a five-pound axe head and a three-pound hickory handle removed from her possession, the eight pounds of inheritance set down on the stump where the inheritance had originated, the tool returned to the source.

Dale picked her up at the Hartford airport. He was standing at the curb in his truck, the engine running, the window down, his arm resting on the door, the posture of a man who had been waiting without impatience because waiting was what Dale did between tasks, the stillness between the movements, the patience that was not passivity but was readiness.

"How was Oregon?" Dale said.

"Big."

Dale nodded. He did not ask more. He drove. The highway ran south through the Connecticut River valley, the tobacco farms on both sides, the shade tobacco growing under the cheesecloth tents that covered the fields, the cloth filtering the sunlight to produce the thin, elastic leaves used for cigar wrappers, the farming a form of arboriculture — managing the light to control the growth, the same principle that Wren applied when she thinned a canopy to let light into the interior.

"Anything happen while I was gone?" Wren said.

"Storm on Tuesday. Wind damage. I got calls from four homeowners. I told them you'd be back this week. Tomás took a pruning job on his own — the Hendersons' lindens on Prospect Street. He did fine. Clean cuts."

"Good."

"Margaret Blackwell called. She wants to talk to you about something. Didn't say what."

Wren looked out the window. The trees along the highway were sugar maples and red oaks and white ashes — the ashes still alive here, the emerald ash borer not yet arrived in this stretch of the valley, the ashes green and full, their canopy intact, the trees living on borrowed time, the beetle coming, the beetle always coming, the beetle's range expanding year by year, the map of the infestation spreading like the staining in an increment core, the infected zone growing, the uninfected zone shrinking.

She thought about the ashes and the elms and the hemlocks and the chestnuts and the catalog of loss that defined the eastern forest, the species being erased one by one, the forest simplifying, the diversity declining. She thought about the old-growth forest in the Opal Creek Wilderness, the complexity of five centuries of growth, the multiple age classes and species and the fungal network and the fallen nurse logs and the standing dead snags and the whole system operating at full capacity, the forest as it was meant to be, the forest before the cutting.

And she thought about the cutting. She thought about Glenn in the forest, the saw running, the trees falling, the stumps multiplying. She thought about herself in the Connecticut yards, the saw running, the trees falling — no, not falling, being lowered, being rigged, being controlled, the method different, the result the same, the tree going from standing to not-standing, from alive to not-alive, from tree to wood.

The same and not the same. She had gone to Oregon to understand the difference and she had understood it and the understanding was this: the difference was not in the method or the scale. The difference was not between felling and rigging, between clearing and removing, between old growth and second growth. The difference was in the reading. The difference was in the kneeling at the stump and counting the rings. The difference was in the acknowledgment — Glenn's acknowledgment, Wren's acknowledgment, the recognition that the thing being ended had a history that was longer than the person ending it, that the tree was older than the cutter, that the rings outnumbered the years of the life holding the saw.

Glenn had acknowledged this. Glenn had knelt and counted. And Glenn had kept cutting. And Wren acknowledged this. Wren knelt and counted. And Wren kept cutting. The acknowledgment did not stop the cutting. The acknowledgment was not an alternative to the cutting. The acknowledgment was the thing you carried alongside the cutting, the weight you bore while you did the work, the conscience that ran parallel to the saw, the two things — the knowing and the doing — traveling together, never resolving, never canceling, the contradiction carried to the end, which for Glenn had been a stump in the North Santiam drainage and for Wren was still in the future, still unwritten, the last ring not yet formed.

Dale dropped her at her farmhouse. She carried her bag inside. The house was the same — the kitchen table, the drawer of cores, the window looking out at the backyard oak. The cat was on the counter, indifferent to her return, the cat's indifference a form of constancy that Wren appreciated. She fed the cat. She opened the drawer and took out the bag with Glenn's ring and the Polaroid and the Alderman elm core and she added the new cores — Glenn's tree, the western red cedar — and closed the drawer. The drawer was full. The cores were accumulating. The records were building.

She showered. She stood in the kitchen in a towel and looked out the window at the oak. The oak was in full leaf, the canopy dense and green, the crown spreading over the edge of the field, the branches heavy with the weight of a June canopy, the leaves dark green on top and pale beneath, the two-toned foliage creating a shimmer when the wind moved the leaves, the dark and light alternating, the canopy alive with the motion of the air and the photosynthesis of millions of leaves.

She had never cored this oak. She had assessed it — sound structure, no decay, no disease, a healthy tree. She had decided years ago not to core it because coring was an invasive procedure, the bore hole a wound, and she did not wound healthy trees for curiosity. But she thought about it now. She thought about the rings inside the oak, the record she had never read, the history of the tree she lived with, the tree that shaded her house and creaked in the wind at night and was the last thing she saw before she went to bed and the first thing she saw when she woke.

She decided not to core it. The rings were private. The rings belonged to the tree. The record would be there when the tree came down, if the tree came down, and if the tree came down it would be after Wren was gone, because the tree was healthy and she was thirty-four and the tree would outlive her, and the person who read the rings would be someone Wren had never met, someone who would kneel at the stump and count the years and find the year Wren had moved in and the year Wren had lived here and the years would be indistinguishable from any other years, the rings anonymous, the tree's record not noting who had lived beside it, only noting the rain and the sun and the temperature and the growth.

She got dressed. She called Margaret Blackwell.

"Wren. You're back."

"I'm back. Dale said you called."

"I want you to come see the stump."

"Is something wrong?"

"Nothing is wrong. Come see it."

Wren drove to Litchfield. She turned onto the road and passed the Blackwell property and pulled into the driveway and parked and walked across the lawn to the place where the oak had stood.

The stump was there. Three months after the removal, the stump was unchanged — the cut face pale, the rings visible, the bark intact around the circumference. The grass around the stump had grown tall, the June growth thick and green, the grass pressing against the bark of the stump the way the lawn pressed against the base of every stump Wren had ever left, the grass reclaiming, the lawn advancing, the organic boundary between the tree's space and the grass's space shifting in favor of the grass.

But around the stump, in a circle, Margaret had planted flowers. Daffodils and tulips — the spring bulbs, planted in the fall, she must have planted them in November, six months ago, the bulbs going into the ground while the oak was still standing, Margaret planting flowers around the base of a tree she knew was going to be removed, the flowers a preemptive memorial, a garden planted for the after.

The daffodils were past their bloom — the flowers brown and drooping, the leaves yellowing. The tulips were still up, the red and yellow petals bright against the gray bark of the stump. The circle of flowers around the stump looked like a wreath, a ring, a lei placed on the surface of a grave, the flowers honoring the tree the way flowers honored the dead.

Margaret was on the porch. She came down and stood beside Wren at the stump.

"I planted them in October," Margaret said. "The day after you told me the tree was going to come down. I went to the garden center and bought a hundred bulbs and I planted them around the base. I wanted them to be here when the tree was gone. I wanted something alive in the space where the tree had been."

"They're beautiful."

"They're flowers. They'll last two weeks. The tree lasted two hundred and fourteen years. But they're what I have."

Wren looked at the flowers and the stump and thought about the rings inside the stump, the two hundred and fourteen years of record, and the flowers outside the stump, the two weeks of bloom, and the ratio between them — the tree's life to the flower's life, ten thousand to one, the tree having lived ten thousand times longer than the flowers would bloom, and yet the flowers were here and the tree was not, the brief thing persisting where the enduring thing had been removed.

"There's something else," Margaret said. She walked to the barn. Wren followed. Margaret opened the barn door and the disc was there on the wall, the cross-section, five feet across, the rings labeled with Margaret's tags. And below the disc, on a table, was a slab of wood — a plank, two inches thick, three feet wide, eight feet long, the surface planed smooth, the grain of the white oak visible, the figure striking, the rays prominent, the quarter-sawn pattern that white oak was famous for, the pattern called tiger stripe or cathedral, the medullary rays reflecting light at different angles, the surface alive with pattern.

"The sawyer milled the logs," Margaret said. "Boards and planks. The wood is drying in the barn. I'm going to have a table made. A dining table. From the trunk of the oak. The table where my family will sit will be made from the tree my family planted."

Wren touched the plank. The wood was smooth and cool and the grain was tight and the rings were visible in the surface, the end grain showing at the edges of the plank, the rings continuing through the thickness of the plank from one face to the other, the record present in the lumber, the tree's history embedded in the board, the table that would be made from this board carrying the rings of two centuries in its surface, the people who sat at the table eating on the years of the tree's life.

"That's right," Wren said. She did not know what else to say. It was right. The tree becoming a table was right in the way that the stump with the flowers was right, the transformation of the tree into something that continued to be present, to be used, to be touched, the tree's physical material persisting in a new form, the wood still wood, the grain still grain, the rings still rings, the tree gone but the wood remaining.

"Will you come to dinner?" Margaret said. "When the table is finished. This fall, probably. Will you come and sit at the table?"

"Yes."

"And bring your mother. Dale said you told him your mother is a librarian. I'd like to meet her."

"I'll bring her."

They stood in the barn with the disc on the wall and the plank on the table and the boards stacked against the far wall, the wood drying, the air in the barn smelling like fresh-cut oak, the tannic acid, the smell that Wren had smelled three months ago when the saw was cutting and the sap was spraying and the branches were swinging on the ropes, the smell that was the smell of the tree's interior, the smell of the hidden wood, the smell of the rings.

Wren drove home. She drove through Litchfield and down Route 209 to Morris, through the hills, past the farms, past the stone walls in the woods. The evening light was golden on the fields and the barns and the trees, the long light of June, the light that lasted until eight-thirty, the longest days of the year, the solstice approaching, the sun at its highest, the days at their longest, the trees at their fullest, the canopy at its maximum density, the forest at its peak.

She pulled into her driveway. She got out of the truck. She stood in the yard and looked at the oak in the backyard, the oak that she had decided not to core, the oak whose rings were private, the oak that was alive and whole and standing in the evening light with its crown full and its branches reaching and its bark intact and its cambium working and its sapwood conducting and its heartwood standing and its rings accumulating, one per year, one per year, the record building, the history growing, the tree adding a layer around itself each season the way a person added a layer of experience around themselves each year, and the layers were invisible from the outside and readable from the inside and the inside was private and the privacy was the tree's right and Wren respected it the way she respected any living thing's right to carry its history in its own body without being asked to show it.

She went inside. She fed the cat. She sat at the kitchen table and opened a beer and looked at the drawer that contained the cores and the ring and the Polaroid and the evidence of the lives she had read and the lives she had ended and the life she had inherited and the life she was living.

She was thirty-four. She was the age Glenn had been when he died. She was alive. She was in Connecticut. She had been to Oregon. She had seen the stumps. She had left the axe. She had brought back the cores. She had learned what she needed to learn, which was not a fact or a technique or a piece of arboricultural knowledge but was a thing about her father and herself and the work they shared, the thing that Ray had told her and that the forest had shown her and that the stumps had confirmed: the work was the same. The feeling was the same. The contradiction was the same. And the work continued.

She finished her beer. She went to bed. Outside, the oak stood in the dark, the leaves still, the canopy a dark mass against the stars, the tree standing the way it had stood every night since before Wren had moved in, the way it would stand every night after she was gone, the tree standing because standing was what trees did, and the standing was the work, and the work was the life, and the life was the rings, and the rings were the record, and the record was the tree.