At the Edge of the Orchard

by Tracy Chevalier

  The man had also not seen the trees himself, but could give detailed instructions as to how to find the grove, which convinced Robert there was something to the story. He still thought the trees must be the redwoods he was familiar with, just unusually wide ones, and far from the coast.

  As he got closer to Calaveras Grove, talk grew louder and louder until it seemed every person Robert met couldn’t wait to tell him about the mammoth trees. It was strange that no one had actually taken the time to go and see them. But then, Robert knew others didn’t care about trees in the way that he did. Finally he reached Murphys, a mining town set up by the Union Water Company about fifteen miles from the grove, and there found someone who had visited the trees. The man said little about them. “You got to see for yourself,” he explained, shaking his head as if disbelieving his own memory. “I can’t describe ’em.”

  In the morning he saddled his horse—an unpredictable speckled gray he’d bought off a miner after Bolt, his constant companion since Texas, got stolen by Indians. He hadn’t named the gray, and wasn’t sure he ever would, since naming something tied you to it and made it more painful to lose, as he’d discovered with Bolt. Apart from his other caprices, the gray was not fond of climbing higher than foothills and balked and sidestepped much of the way up to Calaveras Grove. The road was in surprisingly good condition, for two brothers had staked a claim on the land where the giant trees grew and built the road for the visitors they intended to attract.

  When Robert arrived at the edge of Calaveras Grove, he dismounted and stood, hand on his horse’s neck anchoring him. In his travels Robert had seen many things that had given him an ache deep in his chest, like a splinter of sadness needling into his heart: prairie that swept far out of sight; a single elm tree that made the sky behind it seem like the bluest he’d ever witnessed; a tornado cycling across the green-gray horizon; snow-covered mountaintops that hung overhead like white triangles. Now he was seeing another.

  Two enormous trees stood on either side of the track, a natural entrance to the wood beyond. They were not as tall as redwoods Robert had seen on the coast, but they were much wider—as wide at their bases as a cabin. They dwarfed a person with their girth and the volume of wood they thrust towards the sky. If you stood far enough back to take in the whole of the trees, you didn’t feel how enormous they were. If you came up close, though, you couldn’t see their lowest branches.

  Robert left the gray and walked up the path, feeling as he did that he was shrinking into a speck beside the two trees. He put a hand on one to steady himself. The tawny red surface was spongy and thickly fissured, a fibrous bark that shed easily and turned into red dust Robert later found in his clothes and his hair, under his fingernails, on the back of his neck, in his saddlebags. The forest floor around the trees was thick and springy with thousands of years of rotting needles, muffling his steps. And it was quiet, for there were no branches anywhere near him to rustle in the wind. Branches only started to grow from about a hundred feet up, and the bulk of them were so high over his head that it strained his neck to look at them for long. They were small in proportion to the gigantic trunks.

  Robert had no words for the awed, hollowed-out feeling that swelled inside him.

  The speckled gray did not like the trees. Robert might admire them, but the horse saw anything outside the normal range of nature as a threat, and protested by snorting and stamping and rolling his eyes. Robert had to catch the reins—the gray kicking at him as he did—and lead him away to a spot out of sight of the giant trees, among the ordinary evergreens. There he hitched him to a young fir, away from the larger sugar pines, which sometimes let drop their heavy sticky cones that could break bones. It took some time to calm the horse.

  When he was quiet at last Robert left him and went back to the grove. It was also full of pines, but dotted among them were the gigantic trees, some nearby, some in the distance. Many of them were as big if not bigger than the sentinels at the entrance. The grove was no longer quiet and empty as it had been when he’d arrived. Some of the men who had described Calaveras Grove to Robert had mentioned that there was work going on up there: the owners were building a hotel for visitors to stay in, as well as other attractions. To get deeper into the grove Robert had to go past a group of men who had just appeared and begun to hammer and shout. He moved reluctantly towards them.

  Then he saw the stump, looming several feet above him. A ladder leaned against it, and Robert climbed up and gazed at the surface. It was twenty-five feet across and rough, though a man was busy filing it smooth while two others were building a set of stairs that would take people more easily to the top of it. Robert studied the hundreds of rings radiating out from the center. He did not step onto the stump, vowing to himself that he never would.

  His vantage point at the top of the ladder allowed him to look around. From there he could see the whole of a long, long trunk of a tree, extending from where it had been felled far into the woods, so large that Robert had not even noticed it when he walked past it. Closest to him the bark had been stripped, and the trunk looked naked and vulnerable. Further along it other men were scrambling around, building on top of it a basic cabin and a long low house, with the trunk serving as the floor.

  Robert climbed back down from the stump and walked around it. Next to it was a huge chunk of the trunk, almost three times Robert’s height, that had been cut from the rest of the tree and isolated. Nailed to the side was a hand-painted sign reading “Chip Of the Old Block.” Its flat surface was scored with deep grooves, made, Robert supposed, by whatever they used to cut down the tree. He could not imagine how that had been done, and the small part of him that was not horrified by the desecration was fascinated by this technical challenge.

  Now he followed the full length of the trunk, counting over a hundred paces from the stump to the jagged end where the tip must have shorn off as it fell. He hailed one of the workers to ask what they were building, and discovered the structures would soon be a saloon and a bowling alley. Robert had been many places, but had never heard of a bowling alley. According to the worker, they had them back east.

  “How’d you bring down such a big tree?” he could not resist asking, though he did not add, “and why?”

  “Auger pump,” the man explained. “They brought one up from a mining camp, added an extra length to it and drilled holes into the trunk all the way around.”

  “I was there,” another worker added, glad to have an excuse to stop sawing. “It was a few months back. Took twenty-two days, and even when we finished drilling, the tree didn’t come down. Wouldn’t come down even when we drove wedges into it. Even when we butted it with another tree. Nothing. Then we went off for dinner and crash! Down it came. Spooked deer and brought rabbits out of their holes. I never saw birds go so crazy.”

  “Want work?” the first man said. “We need the help.”

  Robert shook his head, for the first time in his life turning down work. He did not want to be paid to climb all over a felled redwood.

  The man grunted. “You’re the second fool to turn your nose up at good money today. You two brothers?” He jerked his head towards a tall man with a dark beard and hair sitting on a rock off to the side of the trunk. He was studying the tree intently, occasionally writing something in a notebook perched on his knee. As Robert watched, he jumped up and picked his way through the tree’s branches, which were scattered around the trunk, some detached by the fall, others still part of the trunk. Their needles were surprisingly still green, though it had been cut down some months before. The man squatted by a branch, felt the needles, then took a magnifying glass from his pocket and looked at them through it. After a while he sat on the ground, the needles in his lap, and began to sketch. He seemed unaware of being watched.

  Robert found his behavior almost as interesting as the giant trees themselves. He had never seen someone look so hard at a tree before, noting every aspect of it. Now the man was on his feet again, picking up small cones and br
inging them up to his magnifying glass before dropping them. Now he was on his knees, scratching at the shaggy bark on the trunk. Now he was walking along the trunk in long, even strides, counting.

  Robert did not join him immediately, but left the workers and went to stand some distance from the man. He would let him approach when he was ready. The man finished measuring but continued to walk back and forth, gradually getting nearer. Robert smiled to himself: it was like waiting for his gray to settle and allow himself to be saddled. The man’s black hair was tinged with gray but was surprisingly glossy, as if he used macassar oil in it, and it was short and stood straight up, in contrast to most frontier men’s long hair, pressed down by their hats and lank with grease and sweat. His beard closely followed his cheeks and jaw. As he drew closer, Robert took in the low brow and deep-set eyes and long nose making a decisive T in his strong, stubborn face. He was probably in his late forties, a good twenty years older than Robert; but it was not easy to tell, for traveling aged men in different ways. Robert himself was lean and wiry, but with a face as rough and scarred as the redwood stump. Only his clear brown eyes remained youthful, tagged with crow’s-feet from squinting in the sun.

  Eventually they were standing side by side. The man held a cone in his hand in a familiar manner that suggested he did so often. This is a man who knows trees, Robert thought. “I counted one hundred and two paces,” he said.

  “Ninety-five,” the man corrected. “Though I am a little taller than you, so I’d take fewer strides. I estimate it’s three hundred feet long—three-twenty if the tip were still on. Not as tall as the coastal redwoods, but still tall. But its girth is what is so extraordinary.”

  “Are these redwoods different from those along the coast?”

  “These are not redwoods,” the man replied, firm as a schoolteacher. “Never call them redwoods. They’re sequoias. Same family but different genus and species. They’re wider but not as tall as redwoods. The canopy shape is different: sequoia branches are shorter and hug the trunk, while redwoods’ upper branches grow straight out, their lower spread out and then down. And the needles—see?” He leaned down to pick up a branch that had been shed. “Completely different. The sequoia’s are like scaly strings. Redwoods have flattened needles more like those of pines. And the cones.” He handed Robert a green cone he held; it was about the size of a chicken egg. “Redwood cones are smaller than these—maybe half the size.”

  In this rapidly delivered lesson Robert detected an English accent, sifted through gravel. It was not a fresh-off-the-boat accent, but had tinges of Spanish in it, and of traveling to many places where a man’s mouth was pulled in different directions.

  “It’s much dryer here than where the redwoods grow near the coast,” Robert remarked, wanting to keep the conversation alive.

  The man nodded. “Heat’s opening up the cones so the seeds come out. Like this.” He picked up a dry brown cone and shook it. “See, the seeds are almost all gone.” He tossed the dried cone into the undergrowth. “Can only collect the green ones.”

  “Are you? Collecting them?” Robert noticed for the first time that there was a sack at the man’s feet.

  The man frowned—though it didn’t change his face much, as his brow was already low and tight across his nose. His eyes were so narrow that Robert doubted he would ever glimpse their true color. “You with the Laphams?”

  “Who?”

  “The brothers who staked a claim on this grove. You working on that?” With his head he indicated the building activity behind them.

  “I don’t know anything about that. I’ve just come to see the trees.”

  The man picked up the sack, dropped the green cone in, then turned his back, bent over and picked up another one.

  “I don’t even know what bowling is,” Robert added.

  The other paused, then tilted his head slightly to one side as he responded. “It is the most ludicrous game imaginable. You set up little logs in a formation, then roll a wooden ball at them to knock them over. Apparently these trees are not enough entertainment for visitors; they must have other attractions to keep them occupied.” He held out his hand. “William Lobb.” Robert shook it. “Now, are you going to help or just rest your feet?”

  They started with the felled tree, scrabbling among the branches for any green cones they could find. The sequoia cones were distinctive and easily discernible from pinecones. Like chicken eggs, they were round at one end, tapered at the other, and fit snugly in the palm of the hand. The scales were arranged close together in a way that made them look like someone had scored a pattern of diamonds onto the surface.

  Lobb was so familiar with the cones that Robert was astounded to learn he had arrived at Calaveras Grove to see the giant sequoias only a few hours before Robert himself. He would soon discover, though, that Lobb was a walking encyclopedia of plants. He had seen so many seed cones in his time that when he found a new one he naturally slotted it in among the cones he had already catalogued in his head, adding to and comparing his knowledge.

  Robert collected half a sack of them from around the tree, then William Lobb rummaged through them, pulling out a few that were half-chewed. “Chickarees got at them,” he explained, throwing them into the bushes. “Don’t collect those. You ship ’em like that and they’ll germinate on board, or rot.”

  Robert frowned, puzzled by everything Lobb had said, but not wanting to ask too many questions. He grasped at the most immediate. “Chickaree?”

  “Pine squirrels—those noisy little things you see all over. Listen a minute and you’ll hear one.” They stood still, and soon a chattering began in a small sugar pine nearby. Robert looked up and watched the tiny squirrel with its reddish fur, pale belly, and dark stripe separating the two.

  “They spoil too many cones.” Lobb threw a half-eaten cone at the chickaree and it flashed out of sight.

  When they had stripped the branches of the fallen sequoia bare they moved further into the grove to the standing trees. There were about a hundred giant sequoias in Calaveras Grove, scattered among other trees within the area of a mile or so. Each one they arrived at astonished Robert more rather than less. Though freakishly large, somehow they did not announce their presence, except with a flash of orange in among the younger trees, until you were up close. Robert wanted to stop at each, steady himself against it with his hand, and look up. William Lobb was less inclined; as Robert discovered later, he had seen many unusual trees in his travels, and while he appreciated them he was also unsentimental, and brisk about his business.

  There were fewer green cones around the live sequoias, as they mainly clung to the branches. Robert was beginning to think it would be impossible to fill the sack when William Lobb stumped off to his pile of equipment and returned with a shotgun. After loading it, he raised it, aimed high into the tree, and fired. There was a crack, and in a moment a branch swung loose and slowly tumbled down, knocking against the trunk and other branches, and showering them with needles and cones. Robert ducked. The Englishman chuckled. “Best part of the job.”

  He left Robert to pick up the cones and went back to his equipment, returning with a spade and some metal pails. “We need a few seedlings,” he explained. “Often the seeds won’t germinate in a new country and climate, but seedlings might continue to grow.” He tramped through the undergrowth several times around the tree before he was satisfied he’d found a healthy foot-high seedling. Then he began cutting into the thick duff around it, made up of decomposed needles and red dust from the bark. “Course it’s much harder to transport them,” Lobb grunted as he worked. “Often they don’t survive the crossing.”

  “Crossing what?”

  “The ocean. Won’t like being brought down to San Francisco much either. Worth collecting some, though, especially with a new species.” He lifted the seedling and lowered it gently into a pail, adding soil around it and tamping it down with his fingers. When he was satisfied he picked up his spade again to find another.

 
; Robert had collected all the cones he could around the tree, and began looking for seedlings to help out. It turned out not to be as easy as he had expected. Few seedlings grew under the giant trees, as there was little sunlight. Those that did grow were not what he first thought. When he pointed out a potential seedling, Lobb shook his head. “That’s incense cedar. Lots of them here.” He gestured at taller, thinner trees around them with red bark and deep furrows similar to the sequoias. “Go and feel the bark of that one. See? Much firmer than the sequoia. And the needles may be scaly but they’re flatter than a sequoia’s, like they’ve been ironed.”

  They moved on to another sequoia, William Lobb handing Robert the gun to shoot down more branches. Robert took careful aim, aware that he was being judged and must not miss. He was used to hunting—it was how he ate his way across America—but he had never deliberately aimed at the branch of a tree. When he pulled the trigger, the slug struck the sequoia branch and it cracked but did not fall.

  “One more’ll do it,” Lobb said. “Right at the base.”

  This time the branch fell, as well as another shower of needles and cones.

  There was a shout from the distant builders, and a man detached himself and hurried through the trees towards them. William Lobb swore under his breath. “So much for that. Fun is always paid for, one way or another.” He picked up his spade and began cutting the matted turf around another seedling, which to Robert looked like an incense cedar. Clearly he had a lot to learn.

  Lobb did not look up as the man arrived, short and sweaty and out of breath, though he had not come far. Robert did not have William Lobb’s insouciance. He stopped picking up cones and stood with the sack at his feet, his hands dangling in guilt, though he was not sure what he had actually done wrong.