The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  “Their parents,” Verity said. “They were only little kids at the time, barely old enough to know what was going on, but their parents were once on opposite sides of a little small-scale war here in town.”

  Disappointment curdled in Sorrow’s chest. Of course they were. March back through history to parents and grandparents and beyond, and all you would ever find were entire lifetimes of distrust and spite traded back and forth across the fence line.

  But Verity was talking, and Ethan was listening, and if Sorrow interrupted or walked away now, she would be the one who tipped the moment from cautiously curious into more dangerous terrain.

  “Devotion’s mother—her name was Joyful—she grew up during World War One.” Verity leaned against the tractor and hooked her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans. To Sorrow the motions seemed deliberate, a calculated picture of ease. “Before the war, there was a big family living here, a few generations all crammed in together. But then the influenza epidemic happened, and the war happened, and by the start of 1920 there was only Joyful and her grandmother Justice.”

  Sorrow walked along the cemetery rows in her mind. Justice’s ash tree had been struck by lightning long ago, but it had survived; its trunk was split midway up by a thick black scar. At the base of Joyful’s she had once found a rusty skeleton key for her favor collection.

  “It was a terrible winter that year,” Verity went on, “and not just for the Lovegoods. It was bad for the whole valley, although of course they blamed us, as usual.”

  “Witch weather,” Sorrow said quietly. The words felt cold in her throat, like the first startled breath after stepping outside on a winter day. Ethan gave her a quick look, but Verity went on as though she hadn’t spoken.

  “Joyful was only about twenty years old, but she wanted to find a way to support herself and her grandmother besides apples, so they wouldn’t have hard times like that again. It just so happened that was the winter Congress passed the Volstead Act. Prohibition,” Verity explained, before Sorrow could admit she didn’t pay nearly as much attention in history class as she should. “She became a bootlegger.”

  “No way,” Sorrow said, surprised. “Really?”

  Verity looked pleased. “She was very good at it. She and her husband—his name was Eugene Rosenthal. He was a musician more than a criminal, really. Trumpet player. Joyful was the brains behind the smuggling operation. For about ten years they had the fastest route for bringing Canadian liquor over Lake Champlain and down to Boston and New York. As you can imagine, not everybody around here was happy about that.”

  “No, wait, don’t tell me,” Sorrow said. “It was the Abramses.”

  “You don’t get any points for guessing that,” Ethan said, laughing.

  “The Abramses—they were two brothers—they tried to shut her down, but nobody much listened, so they decided to take care of it themselves.” Verity paused and tapped her fingers on the tractor again; Sorrow didn’t think she knew she was doing it. “They knew Joyful stashed her goods up by Peddler’s Creek when she moved them through town, and that’s where they were going to hit her.”

  “That’s in the preserve,” Sorrow pointed out.

  “It is now,” Verity agreed. “It was Lovegood land then. There are those small caves up along the creek—where the trail forks to the lake?”

  Crackling autumn leaves under her boots. Vibrant red and gold branches arching overhead. The cold bite of wind whistling along a steep granite face. She walked the path in her mind, and with every footstep the memory shimmered and rippled, as though the ground and trees and stones were made of water and she was moving through a reflection. There was a wooden sign at the trail junction. Left and up for Frenchman Peak, right and into the deeper, darker woods for Lily Lake. She stepped beneath the cool damp overhang of rock, where footprints scuffed the bare ground and the remains of a campfire had been carelessly scattered. She felt her sister at her back, a comforting presence, and remembered how Patience had grumbled about the litter, about the fire, about people ignoring the preserve rules. They had cleaned up the garbage, the two of them, and left it in a little pile to pick up on their way down from the lake. The day, in Sorrow’s mind, was gold and red. The last autumn they had together.

  “They’re not very big caves,” Sorrow said faintly. Cool air breathed through the open barn door. “Barely caves at all.”

  “Big enough to hide a few barrels of whisky,” Verity said. “And one day Joyful’s twins—they were nine years old—they were swimming up in the creek when the Abrams brothers found them. Naturally there’s some debate about what—”

  In the cave Patience had taken off her gloves to press her hands to the overhanging granite, and Sorrow remembered how oddly her voice had echoed, not expansively but dully, as though the stone were swallowing her words, and she had said, Do you think the mountains remember when terrible things happen?

  “They shot the little kids,” Sorrow said.

  Verity stopped. “Well—yes. That’s what I was about to say.”

  Sorrow hadn’t realized she’d interrupted. “Sorry. Yeah.”

  “One of the twins, Charles, he was killed immediately. The girl, Cherish, was injured, but she managed to get off a shot that hit one of the Abrams brothers before she got away.” The look Verity gave her was considering. “Have I told you this before?”

  Sorrow didn’t have an answer, so she only said, “I don’t remember. What happened?”

  But she knew this story. Every word Verity spoke was a burr itching at the back of her mind. She didn’t know the names, nor the details, but she knew the shape of it. She knew the way her sister’s voice had risen and fallen when she stood in that slanting cave and told Sorrow to listen, listen, and she took Sorrow’s hand in her own, peeled off her mitten, and pressed her fingers to the cold stone. Listen. Abramses and Lovegoods, parents and children, Prohibitionists and smugglers. Smashing bottles and hijacking wagons, burning fields and barns, setting stock loose and stalking the hills with guns in hand. Bodies dragged down from Peddler’s Creek and hastily buried. Shots ringing in the woods all through the night.

  Sorrow had never been able to hear what Patience wanted her to hear.

  “The townspeople called it Bloody July,” Verity was saying. “Something like twelve or fifteen people died altogether. They finally convinced the sheriff to do something, and he sent one of his deputies to arrest Joyful. Only the deputy was stupid enough to wait until dark, so nobody could see who was coming up the drive. Not that it would have made any difference—at that point they were shooting at anybody who came close.”

  “They killed him?” Ethan said.

  Sorrow had almost forgotten he was there. She made a fist, released it. The sensation of Patience’s hand covering hers faded. She missed it as soon as it was gone.

  “Nobody knew who fired the shot but, yes, they killed him,” Verity said. She pointed. “Right out there on the drive in front of the house. The sheriff called in the FBI to help, and they arrested Eugene Rosenthal for the murder.”

  “Why him?” Sorrow asked. “If they didn’t know who actually fired?”

  “Does it matter?” Verity said. She gestured broadly, sweeping her arm to take in the barn, the door open to the night, the land beyond. “Because he was Jewish. Because he was a jazz musician. Because he was from New Jersey and not from around here. Because it was right at the beginning of the Hoover years and the FBI wanted to prove itself. He was the one they decided to blame, but it never went to trial. He died in police custody.” There was the faintest crack in Verity’s voice. “They said it was suicide.”

  “He’s not in our cemetery,” Sorrow said.

  “Joyful let his family take him back to New Jersey,” Verity said. “And for the second time in her life, she went from being surrounded by family to having almost nobody. She had two surviving daughters—Pride and Devotion—but Pride left too, a few years later. She ran away. She came back as an old woman, but I don’t think my grandmother ev
er forgave her for leaving. She definitely never forgave the Abramses for their part in it all. Grandma Devotion wasn’t exactly the forgiving type.”

  Sorrow had been so lost in her memories of Patience in the cave by the creek she’d almost forgotten what had turned Verity down this story path to begin with. “Because she was the drive-a-tractor-into-the-pond type instead? Where does that come into it?”

  “Simon Abrams had a few children, but the only one who stuck around was George. And George got it into his head that he could finish the fight his father had started,” Verity explained. “He had this foolish idea that people might remember his father more kindly if Simon had been defending Peddler’s Creek from criminal trespassers, not opening fire on little kids playing on their own land. So he tried to prove that our land ought to have been Abrams land all along.”

  “Is there any truth to that?” Sorrow asked.

  “No,” Verity said. “Not a shred. It was all jealous squabbling. It went to court a few times, but there was no point after my grandmother put the western acres into a trust. That only made George more bitter. The way Mom used to tell it—”

  “Grandma?” Sorrow said. “You mean, when she was still—”

  “When she was still talking, yes. She told me every time they met George Abrams in town he would take out this watch of his—the old-fashioned kind, on a chain—snap it open, and tell them he was counting down the minutes until the Lovegoods were gone for good.”

  Sorrow opened her mouth to say, But that’s my watch. That’s mine.

  She stopped herself; she knew how ridiculous that sounded. She remembered the watch clearly, a prized favor unlike any other, and how happy she had been to find it, how proud she had been to add it to her collection. She could feel it beneath her fingers: the metal clasp, gritty dirt on the case, drops of stagnant water seeping through the edges even months after she’d plucked it from the orchard. She hadn’t known who it belonged to. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask, when she had believed so fervently the favors were the orchard’s gifts to her and her alone.

  Verity was saying, “It went on like that for a while, with George issuing threats nobody ever took seriously, until one day he was gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?” Sorrow asked.

  “I mean he disappeared,” Verity said. “People looked, obviously. The police came here. Devotion claimed she had caught him dumping lye in one of our wells—the one down in the meadow—and she ran him off. She said he’d probably skipped town because he was too much of a coward to show his face after getting caught. She boarded up the well, and nobody ever saw George Abrams again.”

  The sensation of water on her fingers was so strong Sorrow looked down. Her skin was dry. She shook her hand anyway, wiped it on her jeans.

  “Nobody in my family ever believed that,” Ethan said. “They’re all convinced she killed him and buried him somewhere in the woods. My dad and uncle used to go looking for his body when they were kids, like it was a game. The way they talk about it now, I think they’re still disappointed they never found a skull.”

  “They get that from their father, Eli,” Verity said. “It’s just venom and spite, passed down again and again. Pulling up fence posts around the pond was the least of what he did to get back at my grandmother—and my mother, after Devotion died.”

  “What did he do to Grandma?” Sorrow asked.

  Verity started to answer, got so far as parting her lips to speak before the stillness came over her and her hand flattened on the tractor fender. The hair on Sorrow’s arms prickled. It was only a question. Verity had been talking, she had been fine, telling a story in her rambling way, and Sorrow had only asked a question. She hadn’t said anything wrong. She didn’t know why those words would have dropped like lead weights, why Verity wasn’t answering. If there had been a line she wasn’t meant to cross, she hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t been looking.

  “Nothing as exciting as a Prohibition-era shoot-out.” Verity pushed away from the tractor and headed for the door. “Dinner will be ready soon. Come in and wash up.”

  Sorrow watched her go, a shadow moving between the barn and the house, the sound of her footsteps fading. She couldn’t feel the long-ago autumn day anymore, nor the touch of cool stone beneath her palm. She couldn’t feel the weight of the watch, and she missed it. She didn’t want to chase after Verity and navigate dinnertime around a mistake she hadn’t even known she was making. She wanted to take her memories somewhere quiet, turn them over in her mind, examine every shining facet. She wanted to remember again the feel of Patience’s hand on hers. But she was firmly back in the barn, and Verity had walked away, and she could taste the scent of rust and old hay in the back of her throat.

  A wrench clattered into a toolbox, and Ethan wiped his hands on a dirty rag. “Dinner?”

  Sorrow turned toward the door, then paused. “What was it you stopped yourself saying before? About Grandma?”

  He didn’t have to ask her what she meant. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid. My grandfather was totally senile by the time I was old enough to listen to him. I think he was confused, you know?”

  “About what?”

  “His brother Henry died in a car accident. It was just an accident, but Grandpa Eli had this thing about how it was all that Lovegood woman’s fault, everything was her fault, the Lovegoods had destroyed his father and now his brother and . . .” Ethan made a face and let out a short breath. “He was confusing your grandma with her mother. The same way he used to confuse the guy at the gas station with Richard Nixon. It was kinda sad, really. There was no reason to bring it up. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  The words rang with hollow familiarity in Sorrow’s mind as they walked back to the house. Shouldn’t have mentioned it. Shouldn’t have said anything. How many times she had thought that to herself, always so cringingly aware of saying the wrong thing. She felt a petty sort of satisfaction to learn that Ethan ran into those same traps, but the feeling was gone almost immediately. It wasn’t a contest. There was no prize for being the person who could run the obstacle course of Verity’s moods without tripping.

  12

  EIGHT YEARS AGO

  ON THE FIRST day of spring, Patience said, “Let’s go for a walk in the orchard.”

  Sorrow scraped up a spoonful of oatmeal and considered the view through the kitchen window. The day was gray and overcast, threatening rain or even snow. Sheriff Moskowitz had come by earlier to tell them about a fire in the Abrams barn, but he was gone now, and the house was quiet. They were alone in the kitchen: Grandma was tucked into her chair on the porch with her quilting frame, and Mom had gone upstairs.

  “It’s too cold,” she said.

  Patience bumped her shoulder. “It’s not that cold. Aren’t you bored being cooped up here?”

  “Maybe,” Sorrow said. They were all tired of being stuck inside through the gray days and cold nights. Tired of the howling wind, tired of the mud, tired of sweaters and scarves and boots, tired of barren branches and brown hills. Sorrow was ready for winter to be over.

  But she was nervous about going into the orchard. The sheriff had asked them about strangers lurking in the woods, about drifters and troublemakers. He had kind eyes but he’d fixed them on Sorrow when he asked some of the questions, almost like he could see right through her skin to her heart beating rabbit-fast underneath. He had only left after Mom told him they didn’t know anything and Abrams problems weren’t Lovegood problems and they didn’t want to get involved anyway. But the scent of his cologne lingered in the kitchen, and Sorrow was afraid he would come back.

  “Just a little walk,” Patience said. “It’s not raining yet. We can look for favors.”

  “I don’t want to,” Sorrow said, but Patience only laughed.

  “Get your coat,” she said. “You never know. We might find something.”

  When Sorrow was bundled up in her boots and coat, they tromped outside together. Sorrow skipped down the porch steps, saying, “Hi, G
randma. Bye, Grandma.”

  In her rocking chair, Grandma nodded and smiled. She was wearing fingerless gloves and a bulky sweater; one of her quilts was tucked over her knees, and on her lap was a journal, one of the many little books filled with words she never let anybody read. Another quilt, unfinished, was stretched over the frame, waiting for her careful stitching. The new quilt was a blush of soft spring colors: pink and green and blue, flowers and leaves and sky.

  Patience bent to kiss Grandma’s cheek. “We’re going for a walk. We’ll be back soon, okay?”

  Sorrow ran ahead. She followed the path around the barren garden, past the coop where chickens pecked in the mud, over the split-rail fence, and down to the old dirt road where the rusty pickup truck sat abandoned in a fallow field. There had been horses and cows and goats on the farm when Mom was a little girl, but the only animals they had now were the chickens.

  Sorrow stopped at the edge of the orchard to scrape mud from her boots. Drifts of snow lingered beneath the apple trees, slumped and dirty with a hard crust on top. Everything was brown and gray and still. The trees were naked, without a hint of their first buds, dusted with lacy frost from their massive trunks to their highest branches. She loved the orchard, but at the end of winter, in this cold, uneasy borderland between the stark white silence and the first waking whispers of spring, the quiet put an uneasy pinch in her chest.

  “Is Mom okay?” she asked when Patience caught up.

  “She’s fine,” Patience said.

  “She won’t come downstairs,” Sorrow said.

  “She was down earlier.” Patience’s breath misted in the cold. Beneath the brim of her green knitted hat, her hazel eyes were bright, her face pale. “She’s worried, that’s all.”

  “Because of the fire?”

  “Because sometimes she worries,” Patience said. “It’ll be fine. The fire has nothing to do with us. Race you to the graveyard?”

  She was off before Sorrow could reply. Sorrow sprinted after her, jumping over fallen branches and sliding on icy snow. Patience was taller and faster and soon out of sight.