by Lauren Wolk
“There aren’t any trees like this down there. None that I could build in, anyway. This is a nice patch of woods. And besides,” he said, “this place is far enough from home to give the kid a thrill but close enough to you to be safe. What do you say?”
“I say ‘Of course,’ of course.” She looked at the walnut tree carefully for the first time, looked at Joe looking at the walnut tree, saw him planning the house he would build for Rusty, and thought she had her answer. She was thrilled by it. To be thinking of tree houses, of building something that would last, he had to mean what he’d said. Belle Haven had become his home in the best sense of the word.
But she was wounded by this answer, too. Undone. For if she had anything to do with his decision, so did Rusty, and Angela, and Ian, and, for all she knew, the taste of Belle Haven’s corn, the music of its birds. Much as she valued her self-reliance, Rachel wanted to be at the center of someone’s world. At the center of Joe’s world. But she was not yet ready to make Joe the center of hers.
She did not know that he, too, was torn. That he prized his hard-won independence as much as he yearned for a bond that would not erode it. That he was wary of trusting too much. In these things, they were alike. But while Rachel was still somewhat cautious about Joe, he was reluctant to put all his faith in a town that could one day be swallowed by flames. He had made it his home, and he was prepared to invest in it his labor and his love, but he would not expect too much of the future.
He would simply stay as long as he could, for all the reasons he had given Rachel, and others, too. One of which lay concealed in a pocket of trees on the far side of Ian’s fields, where the fire had made its indelible mark and Joe, just as clearly, was carving his.
Chapter 21
By the time he discovered his sister’s gold, Joe had spent nearly a year in Belle Haven, riding the bicycle Rachel had lent him or hitchhiking to a dozen farms out of the fire’s range, harvesting whatever the ground yielded: strawberries, corn, cauliflower, beans, apples, pumpkins, fresh, fragrant Christmas trees. When snow flew, he shoveled it. When the breeze warmed, he pruned a thousand apple trees and cleared the brush from unkempt orchards, acre by acre. With time, his speech became more like that of his employers: soft, mumbled, loosely strung with a subtle, northern twang. And with the money he didn’t spend on his food and keep, he bought from Earl a sheaf of sandpaper in various grades and a small collection of carving tools, including a hatchet and a tiny plane.
The Schooner had taught Joe how to take care of the things he owned. The tools taught Joe how to cherish those few possessions that bridge the gap between the thinking mind, the prismatic idea, and creation: tools like the pen, brush, harp, camera, forge, or blade. His most valuable tool was the knife Rusty had given him for whittling. Joe had spent the winter and the spring carving litter from the woods—small branches, broken sticks, even logs—until he began to realize, like Michelangelo, that a sculptor or a carver discovers as much as he creates.
On the day that Joe had fled from Holly’s gold through the fields and into the forest, he had come across a graveyard the likes of which he had never seen. Here the fire had arched upward, scratched the surface with a blackened fin, and left behind not a crater but a small plot of dead trees like tombstones among the ferns. There were perhaps a dozen of them, quite perfect without their leaves, dead from the roots up, bloodless, not yet brittle. A single dead tree might have gone unnoticed, but a dozen, surrounded by their verdant neighbors, caught Joe’s attention. When he stumbled upon them on the day that he opened the box of gold, he saw, in those trees, what he might never have seen before Rusty’s knife had made him into a carver.
From the moment Joe had read Holly’s letter, his memory of her face had become as clean and clear as a reflection. And when he saw the murdered trees splintering the sunlight with their black shadows, he once again saw her face reflected. As he approached the trees, he took Rusty’s knife from his pocket and opened its blade as if he were breaking bread. He walked past the first of the trees, and past the second, stopped at the third, and with scarcely a pause, lifted his blade.
It was not nearly as easy as he needed it to be. He needed it to be quick and faultless, and when it wasn’t he had to struggle not to hack at the wood and ruin both the tree and the knife. He forced himself to go slowly and not to mind the delay. He convinced himself to stop often and catch his breath, blow on his blistering palm, and walk the blood into his legs. When it became dark, he wiped his knife on his pants, closed it, put it back in his pocket, and left the woods.
Early the next morning he got out of bed wearing the clothes he’d gone to sleep in, gathered up his carving tools, and walked through the soaking fields to the woods. The light was different now, and for a moment he could not see Holly in the monument of dead wood. But then yes, there she was, waiting. And he took up exactly where he’d left off the day before.
By the third day, Joe had lost his job as a bag boy at the A&P. Rachel, when she came looking for him, found Ian instead, sitting under the Schooner’s awning, smoking his pipe.
“There’s something the matter with him, Rachel,” he said. “He keeps going off into the woods, and he won’t talk to me.”
“Maybe he’s having second thoughts about all this,” she said, her belly lined with dread.
“I don’t think that’s it,” Ian said. “I think maybe he’s staking some sort of claim.”
She thought about this for a bit and then said, “Tell him that I was by, Ian. He’ll talk about it if he wants to.”
At the end of the third day, Joe came out of the woods and found his way home, slept the night through, and then went back out into the world to work.
He spent the first days of May in dirt of one sort or another, his boots heavy with mud, his fingernails so packed with earth that they ached. He helped a farmer plant potatoes in the rain and hang a new barn door. He turned over a vegetable garden for Mrs. Sapinsley, who lived next to the elementary school and had sciatica so bad she could no longer wield a shovel. He dug a new grave in the Baptist churchyard and then filled it back in the next day. And every evening, after he had fed himself and washed the dirt from his eyelashes, he gathered up his tools and hurried across the fields, scattering birds and big-eyed mice as he ran.
Rachel had not asked him about the silence or the absence he’d maintained for that handful of days. But after Mother’s Day Joe decided that it would cost him nothing to make a pact with her.
“I think I can make you understand why I’ve stayed in Belle Haven, Rachel,” he said to her one day in June. “But it will mean telling you things I’d rather not talk about, so don’t ask me any more questions after this.”
That afternoon Joe led Rachel to the woods on the far side of Ian’s sloping fields. He walked carefully, on the sides of his feet, as if he were stalking deer, compelling her to do the same. She was taut with anticipation and found that she had to make a conscious effort to breathe deeply. What is all this? she asked herself, unable to believe that Joe could have any secrets from her when he’d already told her so many.
Through the green galaxy of maple leaves, she thought she glimpsed a face up ahead, watching them, but in a moment it was gone. The light was growing brighter, she realized, and the undergrowth less dense. Someone—Joe, she presumed—had beaten a path through the ferns, which made their travel easy and certain. I’ll be able to find my way back here, she realized.
Then Joe came to a stop, moved to one side, and Rachel saw before her an austere collection of small, dead trees, all the more unlikely for the attendance of their robust neighbors. It was an eerie, quiet spot. The dead trees were very still. Very stark. She wondered why Joe had brought her here.
She looked to him for some clue, but he was standing as quietly as the trees, looking into their branches. So she turned to them once more, and that was when she saw what he had accomplished.
Given the chance, weather and time would camouflage Joe’s creation so well that a p
erson could walk right by it without ever knowing it was there. But although the wood was dead, it had not yet completely grayed and the places that Joe had carved were a different color from the bark he’d left untouched. It was this different color that drew Rachel’s attention. Once it had, she was so startled that for a moment her heart stopped beating.
She was immediately reminded, when she saw what he had done, of a photograph she’d once seen, of a cliff of red clay tumbling down into the sea. Nothing but mud, chunks of it, boulders of it. And then, when she’d stopped looking at the photograph so hard, she had seen among the rubble a fantastic sculpture of a mermaid sitting on a rock. The tide had taken most of her tail, but her magnificence had been unimpaired. Rachel had not forgotten that photograph, just as she would not forget this.
She had never seen Holly or any likeness of her, but she knew that this was Joe’s sister among the trees. It wasn’t just the imperfection of her face, although that made Rachel certain. It was the way Joe had carved her, so that she was less beautiful than striking, and with a look of such yearning on her face that Rachel crossed her arms over her chest.
Joe had carved the trunk of the small tree so that it merely suggested a woman’s body, but he had given her a face of such acute detail that for a moment Rachel found herself questioning Joe’s part in its creation.
“You did this?” she asked him.
“I can hardly believe it myself,” he said. “I’ve been carving things for months now, but I had no idea I could do anything like this. Nothing at all like this. I feel like a man who goes to bed one night a cripple and wakes up with wings.”
“I don’t know what to say, Joe.” She walked up close to the statue and, glancing at him for permission, ran her finger along its jaw.
“It’s not just carving this that has me so excited, Rachel,” he said. “It’s the idea that if I can do something like this when I never, ever suspected that I could, there might be other things waiting ahead. It’s incredible.” He ran his hands down a dead maple. “What if I had never come to Belle Haven? What if Rusty had never given me that knife? What if I had never found these trees? What if I’d lived and died without ever knowing how unbelievably satisfying it is to make something like this?”
He sat down and stretched his long legs out in front of him, tipped his head back so that the sun struck his face. “There have been lots of times in my life when I’ve done something beautiful in my head, but I’ve never come close to achieving the same perfection outside of my skull. When I was a kid, I thought up the most wonderful birdhouse, but when I tried to build the thing, I simply made a mess. French. That was another thing. After four years of classes, I could speak it so well in my head, but when I opened my mouth, it came out lousy. Although I suppose those things had more to do with inexperience than anything. But there’s more to most things than experience. If there weren’t, there would be thousands of Mozarts.”
He looked at Rachel to see if she understood what he was saying, but she was still gazing silently at Holly’s face. He trailed his fingers absently through the grass. “I’ve painted paintings in my head,” he said, “composed music, designed machines. All things that should not be so difficult to lift from my mind and make. That’s the only part I couldn’t do: make the thing, whatever it was.
“But there’s a synapse. I don’t know what to call it. A hiatus. Even in the making of a birdhouse, even if you know how to use a hammer and where to place a nail, there’s something else you have to have in order to do it right. With a birdhouse, maybe it’s nothing more than a knack. In the case of a symphony, a really good symphony, you have to have knowledge, and experience, and whatever bridges the hiatus. I don’t know what to call it.” He shook his head. “It sounds too pretentious to call it a gift. But I think that I may have been given a little piece of it. Just enough. And there’s only one thing that ruins it.”
Rachel turned away from the carving.
Joe pulled his knees up to his chest. He shook his head. He looked everywhere but at Rachel—the sky, the trees—and finally closed his eyes. His hands lay still in the ferns. Rachel could see his throat working.
“What ruins it?” she said, moving next to him, kneeling by his side. When he made a small sound in his throat and dropped his head into his hands, Rachel put her arms around him. He tucked his head into her neck, and Rachel was reminded of the night a year earlier when he had called his father.
He had never told anyone, not even Rachel, what he’d learned that night. But now he did.
“When I called my father last May,” he said, his voice terrible, “he told me that Holly had died.”
At which Rachel pulled back sharply to look into his face and then took him again into her arms, shutting her eyes. “Oh, my Joe,” she said. But he did not seem to hear her.
“He told me that she had been in a terrible car accident in San Francisco. Right after she arrived there. Right after she left home. She wasn’t driving. She didn’t have a car and I’m not even sure she knew how to drive. But there was a lot of fog. It was late at night.” He took a long breath. “No one was sure what happened. And I don’t really remember what else my father said about it. He told me a lot of things that night. He told me that she had already been cremated. Everything over and done with.” (And here again Rachel felt as if she had slipped backward through the months to arrive at the feel of cold water around her bare ankles and the sight of ashes moving like a bird’s shadow downstream.) “He told me that if anyone was to blame for my not knowing, it was me. I was the one who had left without a word. I was the one to blame for a lot of things.” Joe lifted his head. “And that’s what ruins this.” He looked into the gallery of trees.
“But I still don’t understand why.”
Joe gestured impatiently toward the dead branches. “Everything I’ve done here is tied to what I did back there.” He scoured his face with his hands. “If I hadn’t given Holly the money, she wouldn’t have left, she wouldn’t have gone to San Francisco, she wouldn’t have died. And if she hadn’t died, I might … I’m sure I would have left Belle Haven a year ago, or at least never stayed anywhere near this long. If she hadn’t died, I might never have discovered that I could do something like this.” He nodded toward the carving among the trees. “If she hadn’t died, if I hadn’t stayed in Belle Haven, maybe there wouldn’t have been anything to discover.”
“Is that what your father told you that night?” she asked, looking again into his face. “That it was your fault Holly died?”
“I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” Joe said.
“What a bastard,” she muttered, shaking her head. “You can’t avoid being involved in other peoples’ lives. Especially when they’re your family. But that doesn’t mean you’re to blame for Holly’s death, or that your”—she swept a hand toward the tree—“your ability is tainted by it.”
“It feels that way. Holly simply wouldn’t have died when and how she did if I hadn’t meddled with her life.”
“No,” Rachel admitted. “She wouldn’t have died then and there. But that doesn’t mean you killed her. It just means that you were involved in your sister’s life and therefore in her death.”
They sat together in the hot grass, considering the trees clustered around them. “It would be different,” she said after a bit, “if you had expected to gain something by giving Holly your father’s money. But you yourself told me that what you did was one of the few unselfish acts of your life. The first in a very long time. It was a risky thing to do. You didn’t do it for profit.”
“Of course not. What difference does that make?”
Rachel plucked a brittle frond from a dead fern and began to crumble it between her hands. She thought of Joe lying with her in the woods behind her house, leading her to the huge walnut tree where he had already begun to build Rusty’s house. “I’m sure it made a lot of difference to Holly. She probably valued your motives far more than she valued the money itself.”
; “That may be true,” he said impatiently, “but my sister is still dead. And I am responsible.”
“You had no way of knowing what would happen.” She cast the broken frond away from her. “Just as I had no way of knowing that my love for apple cider would get my parents killed.”
They sat together for a while longer, matching Holly’s gaze.
“Where is she buried, Joe?”
This startled him. It was a question he had asked himself more than once, but he had always imagined Holly lying next to their mother, safe again. Whatever else their father had done, however righteous he might have felt when his children had fled, surely he would have brought Holly’s body home.
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “But we had a family plot. It’s where all of us were meant to be buried. Holly must be there.” He watched a hunting spider lurch along his bootlace and disappear into the grass. “Why do you ask?”
Rachel chose her words. She wanted nothing less than to feed his guilty assumptions. “Did you ever look for anything about the accident in the paper? Was there a death announcement?”
Joe looked into Rachel’s face. He became completely still. “No, I didn’t look. Why would I look?”
Rachel shrugged. She laced her fingers. Waggled her head. “She was your sister, Joe. Didn’t you feel horribly … removed from what was happening?”
“Removed? That’s not how I felt. I didn’t feel removed. I felt as if I had exploded into a million parts. Even so, I would have done more than I did, if I could have. But she had already been buried by the time I found out. Everything was over and done with and there was nothing I could do about any of it. And a death announcement would not have put me back together again.”
“But didn’t you want to know for sure what happened?”
“Know for sure?”
She looked back at him. Saw how pale he had become. She realized that some small part of him had already faced the possibility that his father was not to be trusted. But she knew as well that it was unnatural to assume the worst of a parent … or a child.