"You all know that the fire is in Old Growth now, in the State Park, on the other side of our ridge." Everyone nodded. Molly breezed back into the room, handed Catherine the water, and let herself drop back onto the sofa with a thump.
"Right now it's moving very slowly. It's not big—Molly and I saw it the other night—but it's wide, and it's advancing. When you look at it you can hardly tell it's moving. I wouldn't think it was such a big deal if our neighbors and Cal Fire hadn't told me different."
Catherine swallowed her water and watched Jack run his hands through his hair. Molly had plucked a ball of yarn from a basket beside the sofa and was slowly winding it around her arm in perfectly even rows. Jack continued. "You know what the forest floor is like in old growth. Damp, dark, full of ferns and clover and wet earth with earthworms. Just up the hill is our second growth."
Molly looked up from her yarn and glanced at her mother, looking back down so quickly that Catherine wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't been watching for it.
"The second growth is another story entirely. It's on our hill, a southern exposure, and it is dry. It's a tinderbox: dry grass and young trees, just waiting to be torched. From there on in, the fire could simply roll through and raze us. That's why it needs to be stopped before it gets to our land."
It was only too clear. The flames would be magnificent. It would be a perfect union. The sun-scorched wood and dry moss would be caught up and engulfed, and there would be nothing left but the aching earth, bare, lonely and exposed. Again, the trees would be destroyed. Back to nothing.
"I'm following you…" Todd said. "So what's this problem with the park?"
"There's a code that the park needs to follow. Basically they won't allow bulldozers into protected lands to make a line that the fire won't jump over." He took a breath. "They want to put a line on our side though…"
"I'm sorry, what?" Todd asked.
"…just in case, they say." Jack finished.
"You've got to be kidding. You mean they're planning to wait until it's on our side before there's a break to stop it?"
"The official word is that everyone believes it will die out in the old growth." Molly looked up at Catherine again as she spoke. "But Athena and Warren are worried that it won't stop before it gets here and that it will simply escalate once it does." Warren was the neighbor to the west of Athena. His father had been here since Catherine's father died. Warren would know what he was talking about.
Catherine cleared her throat. All their eyes swung to her face.
"I know just what we need to do," she started, and Molly winced. "You just listen to me Molly, I lived here all my life."
"I know that, Mama."
"We need to get our own Cat down there in the State Park and make that line ourselves. Maybe make it double wide, just to be on the safe side."
They all stared at her, gaping.
"How could we do that?" Todd wanted to know.
She shrugged. "Easy enough. Under the cover of night if need be, but I doubt anyone's going to be out there now anyways…" Molly had already started shaking her head before Catherine was done talking.
"No." she said. "Absolutely not."
The room was a babble of voices, suddenly. Catherine was trying to be heard above the rest, but they were all so loud. She closed her eyes.
"Why not try it?" Todd was saying.
"We need to cooperate with what CalFire is telling us," Jack said.
Catherine opened her eyes. "That's not the way things are done here," she said. "You're still thinking like an outsider." There was silence.
"We're not sneaking into the woods at night like pot growers, Mama," Molly said.
"Oh, get off your high horse," Catherine replied.
"You get off your high horse. Calling Jack an outsider. We all know why those trees were planted in your lifetime, don't we? Why they're ready to burn now?"
"Molly!" Jack said. Molly subsided and put her face in her hands.
"Oh, Lord, help me," Catherine said, trying to rise from her chair. It was too soft and she was sunk too far in. She felt like she might cry. "You know how badly I feel about that, you of all people know," she said to her daughter. "The worst choice I ever made."
"We know, Grandma," Amber said. She left her chair and put her hand on Catherine's arm. Catherine had the urge to throw it off, resisted it. Jack whispered urgently to Molly.
Catherine spoke up again. "Everyone did it back then." They had all contracted their land out for the old growth to be logged. It was a terrible thing to hear, those giant trees falling. It aged Catherine's mother beyond her years. Perhaps the ringing crashes had made Catherine into who she was, had changed her forever.
She took a deep breath. "We stopped it, we stopped them."
"But not before that whole hillside had been bared," Molly said, as if she couldn't help it.
Catherine crossed her arms in front of her, feeling the place where her ribcage moved in and out with her old breath.
"It is what it is, maybe I'm to blame but none of you were here then, scratching in the dirt to eat, making rags out of your old clothes, working from sunrise till well after dark. How can you cast it up to me now?" Her voice seemed to be giving out on her, so she stopped talking. How could Molly bring up the one thing she knew would hurt her most? Ask her to come here to help and then blame her?
"I'm sorry," Molly whispered, putting her hand over her face. "I'm not myself right now, I—"
"Oh, when are you ever yourself?" Catherine snapped, finally driven to it. If she could get out of this chair without help she'd be away from here by now.
Everyone was quiet. The silence was thick, like the heat. Amber took her hand off of Catherine's arm and sat on an ottoman nearby. Catherine could see the swirl Amber had always had in her hair on the back of her head, since she was the tiniest baby. Amber picked up a magazine and started fanning herself with it.
There was a long pause.
"Here's what we need to do," said Jack, finally. "We need to pack up anything that will be taken with us in case of evacuation. We need to finish making the house defensible by taking anything away that's within a hundred feet, and we need to help direct traffic. The fire teams will be showing up tomorrow, and they'll have to be told where to go."
There wasn't a lot of vigor in the room. Molly sat with her hand over her face and Todd was staring at the ceiling. Amber still fanned herself slowly with the magazine, sitting with her shoulders hitched up around her ears.
"Alright?" Jack asked. Everyone mumbled an okay.
"Can we eat now?" Molly asked, her voice defensive.
Catherine watched her daughter acting like a spoiled teenager. Oh, how she wanted to believe that Molly would handle things right, that she was doing her best. But she didn't know what would happen with Molly, what kind of substance would show itself now that Molly was under pressure again.
All people had some sort of material running through them, something that held them up, kept them from folding into themselves. Catherine's felt like iron. Even when she wanted to let go, even when she was trying to let go, she could barely bend. Her late husband could have told you. But Molly's core was weak, flexible. A straw, or a reed. A daisy stem.
In the beginning, ten years ago, she'd been sure that tending the land and animals would strengthen Molly. Now, as she watched her daughter walk away with bowed shoulders, she wasn't so sure.
FOUR
In the kitchen Molly was greeted by dozens of corpulent tomatoes. There were bowls and baskets on every surface; one of the sink basins was full of them, there were two pails of them against the wall, and there was a basket of the small yellow ones sitting on the stove, a terrible place for them. Over the last couple of days she had been moving the basket to the floor when she needed to cook and then putting it back when she was done. She sighed. Just the sight of all those tomatoes wore her out. Her mother had sweetly reminded her that she needed to put them up. But it was too hot for canning—she couldn't f
ind the energy to do it. With threats of fire in the air she needed to curl up in her bed and cry, not pull out her mason jars and canning pots and get cheerily to work. But the tomatoes wouldn't be patient with her. She would lose them if she didn't do something soon.
She picked up the plates of cheese that Amber had cut, the sliced tomatoes and cold beef, and brought them to the table, then headed back to the kitchen for more. The blue plates were chipped from many years of spoons clinking and forks banging, from the antics of kids who sang and danced rather than eating the food that was on the table in front of them. She could see them now in her memory, dancing in their chairs with a spoon in one hand and a fork in the other, heads back and wagging from side to side, eyes squinted shut, singing their hearts out. They couldn't hear her when she tried to tell them to stop, to eat, to sit properly; her sharp words fell, useless, before they even reached the dining room table from the kitchen, hitting the ground like dying flies, halfway through the space between them. She remembered her heavy sighs, how angry she would get, slamming pots into the sink or stamping her foot on the floor to get their attention. It hurt to think about it. She looked at Todd now. He was in the living room talking with Jack very seriously. She had missed so many days of their childhoods by wishing herself through them. She stood in the kitchen and felt defeated.
There was a magnet on the fridge that one of them had made, some dough creation from a long-ago kindergarten craft time. She reached for it and turned it around in her hands. Who had made it? It couldn't have been Todd—it was pink and he hated pink from the day he was born. For that matter, the sheer quantities of glitter that covered it were a sign that Amber hadn't made it. It must have been Rain.
Amber wandered into the kitchen.
"Can I help?" she asked.
"Who made this?" Molly asked.
"Rain," Amber said. She watched as Molly smoothed the magnet with her fingers, reluctantly putting it back on the freezer door. It wasn't holding anything up at all. It existed there without a purpose.
"Can I put anything on the table?" Amber asked again.
"Hmm? Yes. There's a loaf of bread in the cupboard there. You can put that out, and the butter, too." Molly pulled glasses out of the cupboard and carried them to the table. The table was sort of a family joke; it had been handmade by Molly's grandfather and it wasn't really round, but it was supposed to be round. So someone was always seated at this slight hump that was on one side of the circle, and when they were younger, the kids used to fight over who got to sit on the hump side. They called it the camel table, although to Molly it had always looked more like an egg.
"Artisan bread," Amber read aloud from the brown paper around the loaf. "Artisan bread, artisan cheese. Lucky us."
Molly's cheeses were made with care in small batches, in her cookhouse beside the goat barn, crafted and packaged in beautiful papers. That was what made them artisan cheeses. She doubted the kids really got it that most people didn't grow up the way they had, with the freshest food and the most care taken in preparing it. They took it for granted because they were kids. Even in San Diego she had gardened, she had found the freshest food she could. It was all she knew how to do. She filled a pitcher with ice and water and threw some orange slices in.
"Food's ready, folks! Come and get it!"
Jack helped Catherine out of her chair and everyone drifted around the table, scraping chairs across the floor and settling into them. They held hands to pray.
Jack's hands were still just as beautiful as they had been when she'd met him. They were long and brown, square tipped with short, shell colored nails. Sometimes if he and Molly were in an argument and she felt like she was going to lose her cool, she breathed really slowly and stared at his hands: each line, the small dark hairs across the back of them, the neat cuticles, the calluses that ranching had brought to his palms. They reminded her that the two of them were not enemies, they were two friends, somewhat dusty, trying to work in sun and dirt, rain and weather. This was one of the reasons that she couldn't trust her mind; this sudden fight or flight rush that was so quick to pick her up and shake her whenever there were differing opinions airing in the room. Enemy! Enemy! her mind chimed in. No, hush, be still, she would mutter back. He has a familiar smell. And there are those fingernails.
He was praying. Molly had her own little prayer inside. A plea: Oh please. Oh Great God, please. This prayer was the most constant thing on her mind these days, maybe her only lasting thought before her mind skittered onto something else, water on a hot pan. She was so confused, her thoughts so tangled, that she couldn't say much more to God than that. She'd had many words for him in past times, thousands of words filling books and spilling out of her. But she'd been struck mute by the sky, smoky where no smoke should be.
Jack finished the grace and the family released one another. Dishes clattered as they passed the food around the table. Molly put the butter dish back in front of her, considered it, adjusted its angle by a fraction of a centimeter, moved it back. She arranged her plate so it was in the dead center of her placemat. The air was heavy. The sun seemed as though it wanted to break into the house and begin looting. This shade covering, the roof, was so fragile. She could picture the havoc if the sun began to pull shingles off, to reach through with a groping hand. All of them would get rosier and rosier until they began to blister. She looked up and met Jack's eyes. He was watching her move her plate slightly to the right and then a millimeter to the left. She blushed and reached for a slice of bread, layering it with beef, tomato and cheese and raising it to her mouth for a bite.
Making a dozer line themselves, that's what Catherine's big advice was? Molly had been living in the hills long enough to know the kind of trouble people could get into when they took matters into their own hands. But her mother always did think that she knew more than other people. She remembered how, against her husband's wishes, Catherine had always hauled Molly along on the most gruesome of farm errands as a little girl, so that she would learn about the value of life.
She thought of one day in particular, when she was four or maybe five. She was standing beside her mother who loomed over her, so tall, with hair whipping around her face where it had escaped from her braid.
Her mother had gently run her fingers over a hurt chicken's bloody feathers. There was a hole in the chicken coop and a skunk had got to this one. There were parts of the chicken outside that should have been inside. Molly's stomach moved up and down and flipped in a circle inside her. She turned her face away.
She squatted in the dust of the chicken yard with her arms wrapped around her legs. There was blood on one of her knees and she stared at it and tried to rub it off with one of her fingers.
"Damn skunks," said Catherine under her breath, but Molly heard. She listened and did not watch as her mother stood up suddenly and walked with the chicken over to the chopping block. A weak squawk and a thunk and still Molly did not look. She could hear the chicken flapping. She didn't like watching them get their heads chopped off, the way her older brothers did. They said that the chickens were already dead and that their muscles were the only things moving, but Molly was sure that they were trying to fly away without their heads. Her mama sighed, and only then Molly looked up, keeping her eyes steady on her tall mother.
"A waste. That was a good laying hen," her mother said. She was standing with her weight on one hip, the bloody axe still in her hand as she shaded her eyes and looked off and away. In a moment Molly heard her dad's car coming up the gravel driveway. She smiled; her dad was home and he was in the middle of teaching her how to play Crazy Eights. Molly's mom swung her hand down from her eyes and picked up the dead bird by the legs.
"Bill will be glad for the chicken for dinner, anyways," she said, and Molly smiled again, because it was true, and because she couldn't wait to hear him say, "Chicken for dinner? Wowweee." The roosters weren't ready yet, they were still just young ones. Her mama wouldn't kill them for another month at least. Fried chicken would be
a big surprise, but as they walked back to the house, dried blood on the hand that her mother held out to her, Molly could tell that her mother wasn't happy about chicken for dinner. Not really.
Not ever happy about much, Molly thought as she watched her mother now across the table. Catherine carefully chewed her small mouthful of food. For Catherine, death was a chance for learning, a part of life that no one could avoid, something they depended on in a way, as ranchers. It was the way Catherine herself had been brought up, after all. So Molly tagged along on sickening tasks and cried herself to sleep afterwards, with nightmares of a mother whose insides wouldn't stay inside her anymore.
Molly's own kids had already been half-grown by the time they moved to the ranch. Their lives had been so different from Molly's. Perhaps she had sheltered them. Catherine certainly thought so. Molly looked at them now. Amber and Todd lived in San Francisco, attending San Francisco state. Neither of them was clear on what path to follow, although Amber was studying design and Todd was studying psychology. They seemed to think they had all the time in the world. And Rain was working in a grocery store, singing in a band, not even making her way toward school, though she insisted she would. Where was Rain? As if in answer to her question, Todd looked up from his cell phone, which he had been typing away on.
"Rain will be here around dinnertime," he said.
They used to have a rule about cell phones at the table, but everyone was growing up and drifting apart, making their own rules. Molly didn't have the energy to argue.
Amber, out of all the kids, was the most like her grandmother, so set in her own views. She sat talking to Catherine quietly, and while Molly was watching, Amber looked up at Jack.
"Should we divide up the afternoon's work?" she asked.
"Yeah, we should. What do you think, Molly?" Jack said.
"About what?"
The Eve Tree: A Novel Page 5