Contents
Title Page
Prologue
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Other Work
THE EVE TREE:
A NOVEL
RACHEL DEVENISH FORD
SMALL SEED PRESS
Other books by Rachel Devenish Ford
The Journey Mama Writings
Trees Tall as Mountains
Oceans Bright With Stars
First published in 2011.
Copyright © 2011 by Rachel Devenish Ford
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any way without the permission of the publisher, except in the case of short quotations for literary review or critique.
Cover Art by Chinua Ford
Small Seed Press LLC
PO Box 7775 #48384
San Francisco, CA 94120-7775
*
www.racheldevenishford.com
To my mother.
And to the memory of Andrea Ford, the mother I wish I could have known.
*
And to all those who struggle with the dark, slippery places of the mind:
I wrote this for you.
*
This book is based on the true story of a fire that happened in Humboldt County. However, all people, names, and places are fictional, works of my imagination. Any resemblance to real people and places is accidental and unintended.
All mistakes are mine. I made the whole thing up.
PROLOGUE
Humboldt County, Northern California
1943
The hills were plucked like chickens, and Catherine was breathless with fear. She stood on the ground beside her horse, tightened her hand around his reins. A dark gray haze covered her eyes. She saw racing white pinpricks. Her unsteady knees trembled. When the haze passed, the landscape was still changed beyond recognition. Enough trees had been felled to throw heaven off kilter, and she could still hear the ringing of the logger's saws.
Catherine and her horse were perched on the ridge of the hill that was thrust from the river valley below. On one side of the ridge, her house was cupped in one of the smooth plateaus of hill. On the other, the forest had stretched out for miles, rippling in small hills, eventually plunging into another valley. Now it looked like a terrible storm had passed through. They had cut so many trees down already, it couldn't be believed. Contracts, promises, and money changed hands. Small plumes of smoke wound into the air where the loggers had burned to make room for falling trees.
It was late spring. Beside her, two of the last of the wild irises waved in a tiny grassy bowl. They were flecked with sawdust. Catherine turned her head and saw that behind her all was like it had always been. Clumps of trees on hills, forest in the valley. The green of spring bathing everything. As she turned back to the desecrated slopes on this side of the ridge, she heard someone call the all clear, and she cringed, bracing herself for the crash.
Catherine knew that any falling tree made a sound, but in the last months she had learned that a hundred-fifty foot Redwood shook the very earth. It made a sound like dying, like what might happen if the stars crashed out of the sky. This one gouged a hole in the forest, and the crash scraped at Catherine's insides. A tremendous cloud of dust rose as the tree settled its groaning corpse into the ground, and as the dust cleared, Catherine saw a dozen men scramble over its long body, already working to cut it apart, carry it out in pieces. She felt sick. She turned away.
God in Heaven. She was the one who had called the loggers here. She mounted her horse and they climbed back to the top of the ridge, then descended, slowly, the horse stepping carefully on the new grass. In the distance Catherine could see the house, stock still beneath the protective oaks. She didn't look back as they came past the point where the logging was hidden from view. She didn't want to see it again.
She held her body still as she slid the saddle off her horse and heaved it over the saddle post. Eased the bridle off his face. Leaned her face against his.
Catherine had been up to the logging zone many times, but today was the worst. For a month now, she had wanted to change her mind, to say, "Forget about it, selling the trees was a bad idea," but she couldn't. She wouldn't back down.
She left the barn and walked up the hill to the house. The air smelled like advancing rain. One tree on the hill waved its limbs at her. It looked like a threat.
The house was cold, as though no one had taken care of the fire. She walked to the stove and saw that it had gone out. She rubbed her red hands together and piled kindling into a small tipi, lit it with a match. She set a few sticks on top, finally, one log. She sat back on her heels and watched it catch. Tiny flames snaked into grooves in the dried grains of the wood, snatching at them and hissing. Her throat thickened and ached.
She shut the stove, stood slowly. Went to find her mother.
Bertha was sitting in the gray living room in her rocker, holding her face in one hand, looking down to the river below. Mostly it was hidden from their view by the trees and knobs of hill that got in the way, but a glint showed here and there, flashing like the sides of many fish in the sun.
"Ma," Catherine said. She crossed the room and sunk down in front of the rocking chair. "You feeling all right?"
It took Bertha a long time to look at Catherine. When she did, her eyes were dark and sad.
"What did you see up there?" she asked.
Catherine stood and brushed at her blue jeans.
"It's chilly out," she said, "Temperature took a dive again. Like it's barely spring." She walked a few steps away, turned again, twisted her hands behind her. "Hope the tomatoes don't freeze."
"Catherine." Bertha rocked the chair violently.
"What do you want to know?" Catherine couldn't meet her mother's eyes.
"How much have they taken?"
Catherine stared at her mother's skirt where it ended and flapped against her thin legs, a few inches above her moccasins. They were crisp and new, Catherine had bought them the last time she and her mother went to the Pomo tribal land. With timber money.
"A lot," she whispered.
"How much?"
"I... I can't tell. They've taken a big swathe. Almost as far as I can see."
Through their feet and in their ears, they felt and heard another tree fall. Catherine's mother recoiled as though someone had hit her. She shrunk in her chair and gasped. Then she started to weep. Catherine was at her side in an instant, her hands on her mother's hair, strung through with all the gray that had appeared in this last year.
"Ma, Ma..." she said, but she didn't know what else to say. She held her mother as she cried and she felt nauseous with guilt. A long line of choices spread behind her, choices her mother had opposed.
Bertha took a deep breath, then sighed from her belly, a deep sigh, a dying sigh. She pushed Catherine's hand away.
"Tell them to stop," she said. "It's enough. It's enough."
Catherine stood and left the room, sprinted to the barn to saddle her horse and go to the loggers, tell them to stop. Stop the falling, stop the noise, bring them back. Finally she could make herself bend and undo this doing.
ONE
Humboldt County, Northern California
2005
Even the donkey was restless.
He was standing outside Molly's kitchen window, pawing the gravel in the driveway relentlessly until Molly was ready to scream.
"Jefé! Shhhhhhhh," she said, standing on tiptoe so she could speak through the window over the sink. He looked at her with reproach.
"It's alright," she said, but still he scraped the gravel with his hoof.
She ran a tiny stream of water over the last of the dinner dishes, turning the fragile plates on their edges in the dish rack. She was so tense she thought one might just shatter in her grasp, but no, they all reached the rack safely. She dried her hands on an old, threadbare towel and left the house, flip-flops crunching across the gravel of the driveway.
"Jefé," she said. His ears perked and he plodded over to her. She reached out for him, rubbed her hands under his bristly mane, making shushing noises. The donkey had been a colt when they found him, a remnant of a herd somewhere, or detritus of a family of settlers from long ago, perhaps, hunkered in these remote hills in Northern California. No one knew where he was from. No one had claimed him.
Molly was secretly jubilant; she'd fallen in love on the first day, the morning she untangled him from a blackberry thicket, sluicing the scratches in his dusty hide with aloe. He stayed on at the O'Leary ranch, spoiled and given to roaming wherever he pleased. He spent a few days with the cattle, a week or two with the goats or horses. Often, he drifted to the people. He lurked around the house like her little gray ghost.
She pressed her forehead into the side of his neck and he blew short whiffling breaths onto her hands and her bare legs. She smelled him; warm hair, dust, and the clean achy smell of grass, and she inhaled the new smell, the one that was troubling him. The awful smoke.
"It's alright," she said again.
Abruptly he tore from her and whirled away in a clumsy trot, lumbering toward the oak tree that stood below the goat barn. He pulled up there in the shade, his brief rebellion defeated by sheer laziness. He stood twitching flies away, disgusted with her. It wasn't all right. They both knew it.
She watched him for a moment with one hand shading her eyes, finally turning and trudging into the house when she saw he wasn't coming back. She let the screen door slam behind her.
"Jack!" she called from the kitchen, reaching for a bottle of red wine. She pulled the cork and poured the dark wine into a glass, watching it settle into stillness. There was a painful hum running through her, threatening a storm behind her eyes.
The fire was quiet now, the firefighters said. Just a small old growth fire, six miles off, creeping along, nothing to be afraid of. But the smell! In the morning when she awoke, fear was like iron in her mouth.
"Jack! Do you want some wine?"
Her husband appeared in the doorway, tall and barefoot, socks in one hand, standing in the space where the kitchen opened into the living room. His dark hair was wet from the shower, curling at his temples and on his neck. He had shaved, but his face wouldn't be bare for long, that bristly shadow would be back in a couple of hours. He looked tired, Molly thought.
"No thanks," he said.
"Are you sure? I'm thinking of sitting outside for a while."
"I'm sure."
She shrugged. "Well, fine," she said. "Will you keep me company?"
"Yeah... give me a minute or so," He stepped back down the hallway, disappearing from sight, heading toward their bedroom, deep in the ranch house.
Outside, Molly sat herself down on the steps. Sam, the old cow dog, looked up hopefully, one ear raised and one eyebrow cocked. He settled back onto his bed when he saw Molly wasn't going anywhere.
She sat like a bird, knees up and elbows tucked into her sides, taking small sips of wine, head to one side, taking stock. There was the carport with its four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles, the driveway with an ancient tractor she and Jack had the best intentions of repairing, there was Sam lying on his bed made of one threadbare vintage sleeping bag, the kind with patterns of ducks and lakes on yellow flannel innards. The dog was panting hard in the standstill heat of the afternoon.
She turned her eyes farther, to the vast undulating fabric of hills—golden now in the dry season—sweeping along and quickly becoming dimmer until they were hidden from sight by the haze that swathed their curves. She allowed her eyes to linger and rest there; allowed her heart the little bit of yearning she always felt when she looked at her hills. Before this smoke had invaded she'd been able to trace the hills until their distant blue lines leaked and faded into the sky. She lifted her hair from her neck to bring some cool air to the base of her skull.
Since she was a small girl on this ranch, Molly had loved the shadows that the hills cast in the late afternoon light, the dimples and ridges and the clusters of trees, the huge gnarled oaks, the way the grasses shifted from green to golden and back from golden to green again when the rains came. In spring the hills were blanketed in wildflowers, and when she was a child she would lie on her back, feeling the small petals brush her face, wishing they would grow to enclose her. Sooner or later she always started sneezing and had to jump up and stumble away. The flowers, yes, she had missed them during the eighteen years she'd spent away.
These days in wildflower season she and Jack took a day and let their horses wander, pointing out to one another the different species of flower faces.
Wildflower season seemed long past.
Behind her, the screen door opened and closed again. Her husband eased himself down beside her, folding up his long limbs. Molly was quiet while he slid his feet into his boots, sitting with his hands draped loosely on his knees when he was finished, looking out over those same hills, frowning.
"It's thicker today," he said.
He was talking about the smoke. She didn't want to think about it.
"I still think we need to grade the roads," she replied, knowing what his response would be even as she said it. Her shoulders slumped and she plucked her t-shirt away from her damp skin and fanned herself with it. They were both on edge, living in heat and fear, and trying to agree was so much effort, even in the best of times.
Jack shook his head. "We've had this conversation. We can't get to it now."
"I'm not talking about something stupid, this isn't planting flowers in the ditches, Jack! You said yourself that all those trucks will be coming one of these days…" She lowered her face to her glass. "If we're unlucky."
"We have to wait until this thing is over," Jack said. "That's all we can do, Moll. Filling the holes means days of work; picking up gravel, trucking it all over the ranch—"
"I know what it means!"
They were quiet.
Molly forgot what she'd ever thought about before the last three weeks, before their growing awareness of one of last month's lightning strike fires in the State Park; the one that didn't go out by itself the way old growth fires usually did. The fire that tapped at the insides of their skulls as it crept toward them with unbearable leisure.
They were on the phone all the time. Molly called Athena, their nearest neighbor, daily. Called because it took her a half hour to drive to Athena's house over the dirt roads that separated the plots of land this far out, and Molly was a goat farmer, she didn't have a lot of time. Athena never had anything positive to say about the way the fire was being handled. She was sure that there was conspiracy involved on the part of the government, that they were all in real trouble. Molly's friend Greta from across the valley thought they should wait it out, not panic until they had real reason to. But it was unlikely that the fire would reach Greta. Everyone had opinions and nothing seemed clear. Jack hounded the unruffled Fire Department. Their line was that the forest floor was under a hundred-fifty foot canopy, the forest was a damp temperate rainforest. They weren't worried and neither was the Department of State Parks. But the fire continued, and this morning, Vincent Conners, fire battalion chief, had called to make sure that they had their home at defensible standards.
"You need one hund
red feet of cleared space around the house," he told Molly over the phone. She shifted her feet, exasperated. Of course they kept the space cleared, mostly. A few things needed to be moved.
"Well, move them. And you should start relocating the animals."
It was confusing, the sudden change. They'd been told for weeks that they had nothing to worry about, and even now CalFire was insisting it was only a matter of precaution. After they stared at each other blankly for five minutes or so, Jack went for reinforcements, pulling his phone out of his pocket and calling their three grown children and Molly's mother, Catherine.
Catherine had inherited the ranch from her mother when she was only twenty-five, and she'd passed it on to Jack and Molly ten years earlier, bringing them from their home in San Diego. She then moved to a retirement community in Sacramento, surprising everybody. With disaster frog-marching toward them, everyone was coming home. They would be here in the morning.
Molly didn't want them to come.
She stared off into the distance, watching the changing afternoon light on the oak stand beyond the goat barn.
"I can't stand the thought of trucks skidding over these rutted pits we call roads," she said. "It's like we're in Honduras or something. And you called the family. They'll all need to drive around here, and they won't want to be launched into crater after crater."
"They'll understand." He reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear. She flinched and pulled away. "And you're exaggerating. Besides, your mother didn't fix the roads nearly as often as we do."
"Well? Why do you think she's struggling with arthritis now?" She didn't let him answer. "Because of bouncing around on pitted roads, that's why."
The Eve Tree: A Novel Page 1