The Eve Tree: A Novel

by Rachel Devenish Ford

  The rim of his baseball cap was damp with sweat, and it was running down his neck and into his shirt. He cupped his hand and pushed the last bits out, exhaling and letting his back slump forward. All the tiny frustrating things were overlapping until his mind was cloudy with them. The broom being gone was not a big deal, but he felt like he couldn't take one more little obstacle. He stood up and jumped from the gate to the grass, sitting on the hillside for a minute with his arms slung around his knees. The ground radiated heat, the air had a breeze that felt good but was bad news for fire. From where he sat, he could see the ridge that bothered them all, the ridge that would lead the fire straight to their door.

  The male goats, the bucks, were above him now, dutifully filling their bellies with undergrowth. It was like taking one brick out of the Great Wall of China, keeping the bucks loose at this stage in the game. Still, he had to do something. At some point soon, they would have to round them up and bring them up to the old cattle barn. Speaking of which… he stood up and folded his arms across his ribs, looking down in the direction of the house. Was Molly done with the milk? It was about time to start loading the trailers. He glanced at the bucks again and a gust of wind, stronger than before, blew hot against his face. The entire flock of goats picked up their heads and stared at him.

  Goosebumps erupted all over his arms, and right then he saw the grey flecks that were sailing through the trees. He ran for it, throwing the truck into gear and barely letting the cattle amble out of the way before he was tearing down the road to get to Molly. Ashes on the wind would have her in a panic.

  He was almost to the goat barn before he saw her. Oh God, she was running up the hill toward him. The scene was spooky and beautiful, people standing on the road, the four red trucks waiting beside the house. The backdrop was swirled and dulled with smoke, hills fading into the haze. The smoke closed them all in on their small hill on the side of the earth.

  Molly was running full force in the heat, running up the road, her hair whipping behind her. She stumbled and fell, got up again and kept running. Helplessness and anger pooled inside him as he saw so many men witnessing the seams of his wife unraveling. Her face was red and wet with tears. He couldn't tell if she saw him coming. When he was close he pulled the truck over to the side of the road and turned it off.

  She looked up and stopped, smack in the center of the road, bending over with her hands on her knees. He slowly pulled a bottle of water from between the seats and stepped out of the truck, closing the door softly behind him. She was breathing so hard that he couldn't understand what she was trying to tell him.

  "Slowly, honey," he said. He held the water out to her as an offering, but she ignored it. "Wait till you catch your breath."

  She held one finger up, great sobs shaking her. When she spoke, her voice was broken in pieces, like splinters of kindling in front of the stove.

  "Ashes, Jack. Ashes."

  "I know. The wind changed, that's all."

  She shook her head. "I can smell it, we're too late. Ashes everywhere, soon all of this will be burned."

  "No. It's not much closer." He took a step toward her. "It's not here. The wind changed, bringing the ashes to us."

  "But the trucks…"

  "They were arriving today anyway, remember?"

  "I thought—I'm sorry. I was trying to find you."

  "I was coming. You didn't need to run." His heart was full of pity and irritation. "Here," he said. "Drink some water." She took the bottle and gulped at it. He could see her pulse, beating out of control in her throat.

  She turned to look down the hill at them. A couple of men stood looking back up. One was bending his head to listen to Amber. Jack watched Molly watching them. She looked lost. He went to her and put an arm around her shoulders. She shrugged it off and he turned away.

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  "Don't be."

  "I feel like I'm going to collapse."

  "Well, come on," he said, gesturing at the truck. "Collapse in here."

  The world looked a little better from behind the windshield, although the ash was disorienting. It looked like snow, but the sweat kept on dripping down his neck from under his hat band. He pulled his hat off and waved it over his head a couple of times before jamming it back on. Something was squeezing at his stomach painfully.

  "I thought I heard the fire crackling," his wife said quietly as he turned the truck on and slowly pulled it onto the road. They drove slowly forward. The fire brigade was waiting for them, eyes on the truck. Molly was looking at him, wanting him to offer understanding.

  "Anyone would have been scared," he said. It was what she needed to hear. She relaxed a little, beside him.

  He needed to touch her, to put his nose on the spot above her collarbone and breathe the scent of her in, but they took turns getting what they needed and it hadn't been his turn for a long time. She backed away as quickly as he approached her. She was the loveliest thing under heaven—she was the doorway to beauty, away from fire, away from burning and failure. Her laugh, her body, her softness, her smell. Wife. She was so much more than the fire that frog-marched its way across the forest. If she would only stay beside him, he could face anything, even losing the ranch.

  It wasn't that he thought she would walk away from him. She wouldn't do that. But something deep was going on inside of Molly with the advance of fire and smoke, something that splintered her. She looked like she was falling, or breaking. Something took her far from him, like the days before she went to the hospital, when she'd gone beyond his reach.

  They barely ever spoke of that time.

  It was the barrier in the road that he stepped around now, to get to her. A worry, like a plum pit in the throat. Would she break so completely that she couldn't come back together? Would her mind drift away untethered? That was the leaving he feared.

  The barrier had been diminished for years, ephemeral even. But now it took shape again, long and striped and obscuring his vision. At night he lay awake with it glaring in his face. If the fire destroyed the land, if it destroyed Molly, he really could lose everything.

  Dust rose from beneath his tires and filled the air behind them. He slowed and pulled to a stop beside the first truck, flicking the switch to put the window down. A man in a firefighter's flameproof yellow overalls stood beside the truck, large brown arms crossed in front of him. He walked to the truck and bent his head down.

  "Mr. O'Leary?" he asked.

  "No, I'm Jack Boscelli. But you've got the right place, the O'Leary ranch."

  The firefighter put one hand on the door of the truck and leaned in a little farther. His hand had black grit caked in all the lines and wrinkles, as well as under the fingernails.

  "I'm Vincent Conners," he said. "We spoke on the phone."

  "Yeah," Jack said. "Good to see you in person." They shook hands. "I missed you by a few minutes at that last meeting."

  Vincent's eyes moved to where Molly sat huddled in the corner, staring out the opposite window, and then away, as though he hadn't looked at her at all. Jack tensed.

  "Everything all right?" the firefighter asked.

  Jack smiled the kind of smile that doesn't invite further questioning. This was a closed door.

  "We're fine," he said. "Emotions are running a little high with all this." His gesture included the sky, the forest, the house, the hills, even the firefighters.

  Vincent wisely didn't pursue it.

  "I'm glad to see that you've been working on getting the house defendable."

  "Yeah, I've got my kids up here. They're helping."

  "Great."

  Jack glanced at Molly. She was examining the other trucks. The vehicle she was looking at held the convicts, the inmate work camp from the prison. The men sat in two rows of bus-like seats. Some stared back. One man spit out the window onto the ground. Jack, seeing his blank, bored face, didn't think he meant anything by it, but Molly shuddered like a leaf in a sudden breeze and looked away, then down at her hands.
She arranged them carefully in her lap.

  "I'm wondering if you could direct me to the ridge. We'll start putting in the line on this side today," Vincent said.

  "You have a dozer?"

  "For this side of the ridge. On the other side we have clearance for water lines and we'll get these guys clearing brush." He gestured at the inmate crews.

  Jack nodded slowly. There was soot even in the creases around the fire chief's eyes.

  "Preventative really. CalFire is hopeful it won't even get as far as the ridge at all," the man, Vincent, said.

  Molly made an explosive sound with her teeth, the first sound she'd made since they pulled up to talk with the Fire Chief. Jack looked at her, then laid his hand on her leg.

  "I'll be out in a few minutes to show you around," he said to Vincent Conners. "There's shade over by the barn you can get yourselves under. Have a seat if you like. Do you need water?"

  "No, we're all set. We'll wait for you then. We need to get going pretty soon…"

  "I won't be long," Jack said, the truck already in gear and pulling away. It was time to get Molly home.

  NINE

  Catherine had put all her things back in her suitcase when Jack knocked at her door and poked his head into the room. She turned, startled. He was in a state, breathing hard and red in the face. She glanced at the suitcase. Didn't want anyone to know she was moving until she'd already done it. But he didn't seem to notice.

  "What is it, Jack?"

  "I just had to show the firefighters around... need to go back out there. But I need to talk to you."

  "What is it?" she asked again.

  "Do you remember when you told me about Molly's father? That he had... emotional problems, too?"

  Catherine did remember that cold Christmas Eve, when Rain was still a nursing baby. Molly exploded in the kitchen, screaming, then stormed off to her room and Jack begged Catherine for some clue, some way to understand her. It was the winter before she went into the hospital.

  "Yes."

  "I need to know more. You didn't tell me everything."

  "This is about Molly."

  "Of course it's about Molly! She just… freaked out. She's taking a shower now, calming down, I hope."

  Catherine sat on the edge of the bed, and he slid down to the floor, knees up, like a teenager who happened to have gray in his curly black hair. His eyes were on her.

  "All right." She took a breath. "I loved William O'Leary. I loved my husband. My Bill. Sometimes people say differently." She watched his eyes. They were with her. "You're right. I didn't tell you everything. I didn't think I needed to. But I'll tell you now."

  She grasped the edge of the bed with her hand, pulled the comforter away and let it drop, waiting. For what? How should she tell this?

  "Bill was different than anyone I'd ever met. Anyone I've ever met since, even. I had cause, over the years, to... wonder about him. He was so different I wasn't sure if he was all right, somehow." She took a long breath. There was a cobweb in the corner of the white ceiling, but the spider was gone. "He wanted to keep on with his accounting business after we got married. I agreed to it, though later I wished he would ranch with me. That was my fault, I married someone and then I wanted him to change into someone else. But I was young. So I took care of the ranch, and hired on help, seeing as how we had his income too. He had to drive into town to work, and then days came when he wouldn't get out of bed to go to work. Those days sometimes stretched into weeks, into months. This was before he was sick with cancer. Once, when I'd been after him about getting himself back to his job, he spent half a month driving to one of the distant storage barns, curling up in the hay and pretending he'd been to work at the end of the day. I discovered him there one day when I went out to search for a wheelbarrow and spotted his car outside. He cried like a baby when I found him."

  Jack had his long hands wrapped around his knees. Catherine smoothed her hands over her skirt.

  "Those were hard days," Jack said.

  She nodded. "Those were hard days. You know, I grew up out here and I'm hard like one of these trees. I don't know that you can be the daughter of a settler and not be shaped like a buckeye sapling— tough and wiry. I didn't understand his weakness. But that's only half of it." She reached for her braid, felt its weight in her hand.

  "There were other times that he was perfectly fine. Beautiful times. But occasionally he'd get... riled up, or something. Full of so much energy that it seemed likely to split him open. It would ride him. He'd wake before dawn! Walk the hills, sometimes taking a horse, I was half afraid he'd spook it and it would throw him. Sometimes he'd run down to swim in the river. He couldn't, or wouldn't, stop talking. Crazy talk. Once he drove off to San Francisco, said he'd have a vision that he needed to find Saint Francis. I told him Saint Francis has been dead for hundreds of years! I said, it's a regular city, it's only named after him! He wouldn't listen."

  She stared at the printed flowers on the comforter for a long while before continuing. "When he came back, he told me he'd walked it on foot, looking for the old saint in the cracks between buildings, behind trash cans and under the bridge, even. In the end he'd been robbed and kicked around in an alley. He cried, but he was upset that he hadn't been able to finish his mission, not that he'd been beaten and robbed."

  "Oh, it was hard on the boys. I don't think Molly ever really knew, she was so young. I despised him for his weakness. I felt that I had the world on my shoulders, that I could never relax. Not only was there the ranch and the animals and the children, but I never knew what Bill would be up to. He was fine for months at a time, then suddenly he wasn't sleeping and he would wander off in the night like a ghost. I became an angry person, bitter right through. When he became sick, then I repented. At the end we had beautiful days together, all that love came back and collected." She watched him.

  "He was a wonderful person, Jack. Full of love and life, full of wonder, like a child. Molly is a lot like him."

  "Molly," Jack said.

  "Molly. She is like him and not. She's never had the same giant hills and valleys that he had, but from the first she was so much like him that it frightened me. If I look back and I'm truthful, I'd have to say I did my best to get it out of her. I wanted her to be more like me."

  "She is like you. I see it."

  "It's true. Even if she weren't, it would be fine. But I was afraid of that thing in Bill, the not right thing that would ride him. She had her own hills and valleys. Sometimes she would try to tell me something—I don't know, it just felt like she was speaking another language. There is something different in her. She has difficulty controlling it, especially when she's overwhelmed. This is what you see now. It's what you see." She was finished.

  Jack watched her, waiting.

  "Did you ever find a way to treat him? To fix it?"

  "No. But that's not the point! The point is that Molly is not Bill. She's fine, I'm sure of it. She's had her rough points, but she'll be all right."

  As she said it, Catherine became more certain. It was true. She'd seen the difference, hadn't she? Seen how the rhythms of land and animals had calmed her daughter.

  Jack stood, slowly. He put a hand on Catherine's shoulder and squeezed slightly.

  "Thank you," he said. He wasn't convinced, she could see. But it wasn't her job to convince him.

  Later, Catherine was breathing hard and her hands were shaking. She ran them over her arms again and again, pressing them firmly to her skin, trying to catch her breath and get everything inside still, as it should be.

  She was in the guest cabin, standing in the kitchen, which was white with large rectangular windows. It was flooded with sunlight, but not oppressively hot. No one had been here in a while, she could see. The cloth that was hung over the faucet in the kitchen had been wet at some time but now was stiff and molded into a cascading shape. She picked it up and it stayed in place. She turned on the faucet and it melted quickly, becoming ordinary terrycloth again. She squeezed mo
st of the water out and ran the damp cloth over the old easel of Todd's. She'd found it in the back of a closet in the house. It stood jauntily in the corner—she hadn't been able to get all of the legs level because of the slope of the kitchen floor. She put the canvas onto the easel and stood back and surveyed it.

  She was already as tired as if she had run a few laps around the barnyard and the paisley bedspread in the other room gleamed alluringly, but she ignored it. She didn't have time to pander to her old lady weaknesses.

  She unwound the bamboo paintbrush holder and stretched it out on the counter, then heaved the box of oil tubes from the floor to the table, rifling through it for the colors she had been thinking of all day. She hadn't known why she was packing all these things, but it had become clear to her, clearer than anything had been for years. Her palette was an old piece of cardboard. The room filled with the scent of oil paint, linseed oil and turpentine as she squeezed paint out of tubes and filled a couple of old mason jars with the solvents. Last, she carefully pinned the photo she had carried in her skirt pocket to the wall behind the easel.

  She stood back. The rhythm of setting up for this long discipline seemed as careful as the strokes themselves, part of something that she allowed herself, something she had never given herself before. Her heart beat a caution. Something was very important here. Something that needed a careful step, that needed to not be trampled.

  She dipped her brush and began mixing and daubing, hand flashing quickly between the palate and canvas at times, creeping at others. She lost herself. There was an old story, here, something that started a long time ago. Catherine felt the familiar pull to paint her way through this, to gain understanding of what was happening here, now. She worked color into the background with tears in her eyes. It was the girl Molly that she wanted to remember. The one that Catherine had lacked the will or the power to protect.