(A short story for Monday. Coming up on Saturday, a meditation on the many ways of delaying your life starting, with reflections on a Rachel Kushner novel)
Just this time, Annie prayed, just this time, this hour. For the first time in a long time she was ahead of the chores. The windows were washed. The laundry was folded. The beds were made. The floors were scrubbed. The children were at school. Marc was out, buying supplies for his work trip. The phone was not ringing. And the fever tree grew on undisturbed in the back garden.
Perhaps, this one time, she could do something for herself. What that something would be she was not sure; these mornings snuck up on her. Most times she would just brew a cup of tea, sit down, and make a list of things to do for the rest of the week. She might as well have spent the time daydreaming, though. The world had many ways of overturning her plans.
Before the moment could slip away, she made herself grab the old Penguin paperback of The Ambassadors off her nightstand and bring it to the rocking chair by the unlit fireplace. She sat her tea mug down beside her and started the fourth chapter for the twentieth time. She didn’t need a bookmark, the spine creases opened the book right where she stopped each time. Annie hoped, just this once, she might get beyond that point. Then she heard tires splashing their way through the potholes on the acreage’s long gravel driveway.
Grace always needs something, Annie thought, already getting up to pull another mug out of the cupboard, drop in a bag of Earl Grey, and put the copper kettle on stove. She carried the paperback with her and set it down on the kitchen table. It might be a short visit, a quick stop to say “hi.” Grace normally was good enough to call first, giving Annie some warning, to take the apron off, and maybe have time to wring out the mop and throw the wash water out the back door. Now, with Grace and Ted unable to scrape together money to cover their three-month overdue phone bill, wheels on the driveway were the only warning Annie got.
The water in the kettle, already hot, was whistling before Grace came into view past the swaying beeches that lined the two-hundred-foot driveway. Annie shut the element off and poured the cup of tea, watching the purple minivan drive up, the rear window still taped over with plastic five months after the windstorm broke it. Annie stepped out onto the covered porch to greet her friend.
“Hi, neighbor,” Grace called. No baby in tow today. That must mean Mother Rayburn was spending some time with Tyler, her newest grandson, leaving her daughter-in-law free for essential errands: a perm by the looks of it. Her nails freshly painted light red, the black Louis Vuitton bag swinging from her shoulder. You can take the woman out of the city, Annie reflected, but not the city out of the woman. Grace pulled a strand of her own gray-brown hair out of her face and called “Hi neighbor!” back.
Grace stepped up on the porch and the two women hugged and pecked each other on the cheek. Up close, Annie could see Grace didn’t look quite as put together as she had from afar. There were purple bags under her eyes she hadn’t been able to cover with her concealer.
“Up all night?” Annie asked.
“You know it,” Grace said.
“Tea?” Anne asked.
“Please,” Grace said, following Annie into the kitchen, taking off her knee height black leather boots on the mud mat.
Grace set down her handbag on the table and sat down in one of the hand-carved kitchen chairs. She noticed the paperback and spun it around with a finger to see the cover while Annie brought their mugs.
“My God,” Grace said, “you’re reading Henry James. You’re ambitious.”
“Just books my mother left,” Annie said, “I’ve got this old musty Britannica Great Books set in our bedroom my mother bought back in the day. She added a bunch more books to it over the years, whenever she’d see something good at the library book sale. Don’t think she read any of them. I’m only pretending to myself I’m reading this one.”
“I hear you,” Grace said, “I haven’t read anything but our Bible and Dr. Seuss since I was pregnant with Andrew. Now him and the other two leave me no time for anything else.”
There was something there in Grace’s talk, that Annie recognized. Something Grace couldn’t just say, something Annie almost wished she wouldn’t. But she knew the deep exhaustion there, the helplessness in the face of demanding children, husband, and a rural home. Maybe because she had been the eldest, Annie had seen it often on her own mother’s face.
Rather than make her friend ask, Annie said it out loud.
“You look tired, Grace,” she said, “really tired.”
Grace seemed to deflate at that, a grateful surrender, stepping down from the act of being a Supermom. “It’s this damn colic,” she said, “the useless doctor and Marc’s mother and my mother and everybody says ‘it’ll pass, give it time, be easy on yourself,’ but they’re not there at three in the morning when Tyler’s just bawling, knowing he’s not going to stop till he passes out.”
Annie nodded. Her youngest, Ethan, had colic nine years ago, thankfully the only one of her four to suffer it. Marc got a vasectomy on Ethan’s first birthday; four was enough.
This might kill it, she thought, sensing the tree behind her back, out in the garden, this might be the thing that kills it and for what? A colicky baby? Mother didn’t cut the tree for that. It almost meant losing her lunch hour and possibly the rest of the day if the tree needed to be fed. But then the kinder voice came back, the one that remembered Grace was past being taught how to fish – you just needed to give her some when you were able
“I might have something,” Annie said, checking her apron pockets for her trimming supplies: the white rubber handled garden shears, the folding paring knife, and the unbleached cotton strips for bandaging after.
“Really, Annie?” Grace said, “if it’s not too much to ask.” Though they were friends, Grace wouldn’t have driven here on her way back from grocery shopping and a hair appointment in Kelowna just to chat for ten minutes over tea. Twelve years back her eldest, Kathy, was two and so sick with whooping cough she’d been turning blue. Tea from the fever tree’s bark set her right. At the first sign of health troubles of any kind, Grace was at Annie’s door. Annie hadn’t ever worked up the courage – maybe the cruelty – to say no, not to Grace, not to anyone.
Maybe the fever tree had come from that Garden, an antediluvian, prelapsarian botanical. It granted neither eternal life nor knowledge of Good and Evil, but its bark cured fevers and infections, its leaves knit together broken bones, and its rare, slow growing fruit granted wisdom.
Annie’s great grandfather ate the fruit of the fever tree back in the Old Country – which Old Country the family history never made clear. He wasn’t supposed to and swallowed down all the evidence, stem and seeds and all. The village women, the caretakers of the tree, had been saving it, perhaps for a visiting dignitary, perhaps for the dowry of the headman’s daughter. Saving it for someone more important, anyway, than Great Grandfather Stern, an odd jobs man of no fixed profession and of dubious parentage.
When Annie was a young girl, she’d seen the fever tree’s leaves and bark used only a few times – to set the broken rear leg of a German neighbor’s plow horse, once to stop the heart attack of another neighbor’s father, and one time to stop the stroke of Great Grandfather Stern himself, an ancient man nearly bed ridden when Annie was learning to talk. Some years after he passed away, she asked her mother and grandmother what wisdom he had gained from the fever tree.
Grandmother wouldn’t say at first, only mumbling that to fools all wisdom looks like folly. Annie flatly told her mother later that this seemed like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Her mother, who had known the old man, said that he was always very kind and patient, a friend to those less fortunate, that he never made a bad investment or was tricked out of his money, that he was able to soothe anger and sadness with a few words. Annie tried to hide how unimpressive that seemed. Even at nine those seemed like the way her great-grandfather might have always been, and she couldn’t see what the painfully slow growing medicinal tree in their back garden had to do with it.
If only, twelve-year old Annie had once joked to her grandmother as they pulled weeds from around the fever trees spaghetti-like roots, someone foolish had eaten the fruit, then they would know what wisdom it gave. For the first and only time, Grandmother slapped her across the face and called her an ungrateful girl. Then she told her the wisest thing Great Grandfather Stern had ever done.
Soon after he ate the fruit, Great Grandfather Stern had come to Great Grandmother Stern telling her to pack their things, and leave their ancestral village and its protective valley, to be beyond the sight of the smoke from its chimneys by nightfall. Great Grandmother Stern was certain this was because her fool of a husband had eaten forbidden fruit, an act so unthinkable the village had no prescribed punishment for it. He told her instead that he had pieced together what had escaped the headman and the council of elders: the cavalry billeted in the market town just outside the valley; the preaching in neighboring towns against the people of the valley and their sinful ways; the extortionate taxes ordered by the Tsar (or Sultan, or Khan, or Potentate, or Vizier, or whomever). There was trouble coming, Great Grandfather Stern said, trouble none of them would survive if they stayed. To the perplexed looks of his family and friends, and the scorn of his in-laws, he sold all his land for a pittance, and lashed the family possessions to his hay wagon. Great Grandmother Stern waited till he was setting their twin horses in motion to make up her mind and clamber aboard. That was what convinced her of his sincerity: that he was prepared to leave without her.
They read about the pogrom from a newspaper in Trieste cafe, the Old Country many weeks and hundreds of miles behind them, about how the cavalry had ridden down just before dawn, torches in hand, burning everything in the valley: barns, fields, trees, houses, animals, and people. The journalist, a young Socialist who had come from England to report about conditions of the tenant farmers of the region, wrote about a landscape of smoke and ash that stretched for miles, not a living thing to be found, not a bird calling out, not an animal noise, nor a human voice.
They had left with nothing but a trunk of clothes, some sacks of potatoes, a few dry loaves of rye bread, Great Grandmother’s wedding present of silver spoons, and a pocketful of coins. They no longer had land, nor any speakers of their dialect, nor any people to people to call kin. Only one treasure remained, in a thong around Great Grandfather Stern’s neck. For the first three days after leaving their valley, after each morning’s coffee, he would walk out to a secluded spot with a silver spoon, do his business, and then dig through the remains. He found only one seed, which he washed in a stream, dried, and stored away. He tried to return the spoons, but Great Grandmother Stern made him throw them away. Family legend was that, though she was pleased to have the fever tree seed, the use of her spoons was too much - she never kissed him for the rest of his life. She clearly submitted to him in other ways, because Annie’s grandmother was the first of seven children.
Three weeks of rough crossing in steerage class brought them to Ellis Island, where they were newly Americanized with the name Stern – their prior surname as lost to time as the name of Old Country. Now stewards of their people’s legacy, Great Grandmother Stern would not hear of the sole fever tree seed being planted in the used up, polluted, lightless soils between the tenement of Brooklyn or the Bronx, so soon after arrival they set out for the Great Plains. In Chicago, Great Grandfather made a living laying rail, hod carrying, and as an overly honest through paradoxically highly successful patent medicine salesman. This last work he undertook only to save up enough money to buy good land for growing fruit trees. Somehow, despite his warnings to his customers not to believe the extravagant promises on the label of Dr. Callahan’s Rejuvenating Tonic, his sales were brisk. This might have, perversely, been due to his blunt honesty about the tonic’s ‘secret ingredients’: 120-proof alcohol, opium, and cocaine. Even with his earnings, higher than his fellow salesmen because he was able to keep the fraud Callahan from cheating him, they found the Midwest soils unsuitable, the land expensive, the loans extortionate, and Chicago, that multicultural melting pot on the Great Lakes, inhospitable to two foreigners with no Little Country neighborhood to call their own, no political machine to which they owed their allegiance, and no national liberation struggle. All they had was their unappealing cuisine – fish cooked in diluted vinegar with cabbage, an Old Country favorite soon dropped and never eaten again by the family - the fever tree seed, and each other. With no great reluctance, they picked up and moved themselves and the hard white seed on another, less harrowing boat voyage, this one across the Great Lakes to Toronto.
In Ontario, they found a Ministry of the Interior keen to settle the mountainous valleys of British Columbia with ‘non-traditional’ (meaning not English or Scottish) immigrants. When the Interior agent found out that these strangely accented foreigners from the back of beyond were keen on fruit growing, he set them up with a cheap loan for a hundred acres on the northern shores of Okanagan Lake.
There, in the dry, warm, and mountainous lands surrounding that vast blue lake, they settled. They planted apple, peach, and pear trees, grew a market garden, and with painstaking care coaxed the single seed into sending up its first fragile shoot.
The hundred acres passed down through the family, divided and redivided with each generation’s passing on, the only constant being that the eldest daughter inherited the ten acres with the house and the fever tree.
The fever tree stood at the back of the garden, near the planter boxes of strawberries and trellis-climbing green beans. A warm spell in June meant that this July all the planters were full to bursting – the rhubarb and zucchini in wild profusion, the potato plants ready to yield their bounty to the root cellar, the green beans enough for a week of straight canning. Everywhere Annie looked was green and vibrant, except for the fever tree.
The rolling-pin thick trunk rose four feet out of the ground before exploding out into a profusion of tangling, intertwining branches like a dome, dividing and subdividing into smaller and smaller traces, every branch covered with black thorns. Scattered here and there, at the outer extremities, were finger length blue-gray leaves flapping in the light breeze.
The trunk bore scars all along its length. Those few near the top, the oldest, had been cut my Grand Grandmother Stern in the direst extremity: to stop a neighbor’s heart attack or to save a mother and child from a breach delivery. In the middle of the trunk were the handful of cuts made by her grandmother and mother, one to save her mother and her twin brother Thomas from bouts of whooping cough. The uncountable nicks and slices in the lower trunk were all Annie’s handiwork – gone for colicky babies, pinkeye, migraines, and postpartum depressions.
Annie’s anxieties about the tree were particularly acute on account of its handful of blue-green flowers, a growth only her great grandparents had seen before, delicate five-petaled shapes each a little larger than a thumbnail. She wished she had counted them when they first appeared. Now, with each passing day, there seemed to be fewer and fewer. Worse, the bees seemed to have no interest in what flowers remained, preferring the tomato plants within the fence and the wild clover outside of it. Perhaps, she hoped, like wheat, fever trees were pollinated by the wind.
She hesitated with the paring knife in her hands. Maybe the flowers had been pollinated and were dormant now, waiting to put forth their fruit in their due time. Then she remembered her guest in the kitchen and, gritting her teeth, sliced the thinnest piece she could from the trunk, collecting the curling bark in her hand. The inner wood of the tree, beneath the outer bark, was yellowing, no longer the almost paper-white Annie had seen as a girl. One more thing to worry about.
After pocketing the bark, she reached out a hand into the tangle of branches and grasped a handful of thorns, biting her lip as they pierced through old calluses and fresher scabs. Despite the half-inch thorns embedded in her palm, no blood flowed out and over the tree limb and down her wrists. She held her hand there, through the pain, seeing dark spots start to grow around the edges of her vision, till the tree had taken what it needed and the flow down her arm began, first a few droplets and then a crimson stream.
Walking back into the house, Annie wrapped her hand in the woolen bandages. Drained was the only word for how she felt – not the regular fatigue from cleaning and caring for a home, but a true draining, an active drawing away of strength. Her chair would not be enough; she would need to lie down, sleep, eat something. The afternoon chores were probably out of the question, and dinner would be a struggle. First, though, she needed to give Grace the medicine.
“Oh Annie,” Grace said when Annie came back inside, seeing her friend’s pallid color and the cotton wrappings on her hand, the white now a deep red, “does it really take so much?”
“Never know how much it’s going to need,” Annie said, shuffling into the kitchen, supporting herself against the counter, “can’t risk it running low.” Grace’s husband, Ted, was an agronomist with the Ministry of Agriculture. A specialist in fruit trees, he told Annie he had never seen anything like the fever tree. Annie had not told him the tree’s origins, just saying it had always been a part of the garden. Grace was the only one who knew it could be fed with blood, a secret it seemed fit to Annie to share only with women.
While she was still on her feet, Annie reached into a drawer and pulled out her mortar and pestle. She ground the bark, which seemed drier and crumblier than she had felt it before, which was worrying after the good rain the valley had last night. Maybe the feeding would help it. She poured the powder into a paper tea bag, folded it over, and handed it to Annie.
“Oh, Annie,” Grace said, pulling her into a hug. Annie returned it one armed, leaving her stinging hand hanging in the air. She heard the tap of a drop of her blood landing on the linoleum. “Thank you.”
“Remember,” Annie said as Grace stepped back, “five minutes just brewing, then put in a bottle. Pour in a bit of juice to cool it and help cover the taste.”
“You’re the best,” Grace said, grabbing her handbag and pulling her boots back on. Then she was out of the house, back into her van, and gone. Annie sat down heavily in the kitchen chair. The wooden seat was still warm from her friend. She felt cold, colder than the damp, overcast day could have made her. Each place she looked recalled an unfinished chore: need to use baking soda and a scrubber on the sink, need to check how many jars there are and estimate whether she would need to pick up more for when the peaches were ripe, need to replace the head of the mop, need to start defrosting a pound of ground beef for tonight’s supper. Marc loved her spaghetti bolognaise, and Annie always made it before he went away.
But first she needed to lie down. She would be no use to anyone if she tried to fight the dizziness and collapsed. Staggering up out of the chair, she went into the living room and lay down on the couch, pulling one of her grandmother’s hand knit blankets over her.
Despite the fatigue, despite the dizziness, Annie found could not sleep at first. At the edge of her awareness was the anticipation of tires on the driveway, ringing phones, her children squabbling or wanting something from her. Waiting for the world to reach out and demand more.
With no sisters, Annie had no way of knowing she bore different expectations than the other girls at school. From the time she was five she had helped in the garden, checking for aphids, watering raised planters, and looking on as her mother and grandmother assessed and reassessed the tree: did it need a stave and rope to support itself? Was it’s soil draining enough or too much? Would the deer want to munch on any of the leaves, and did it need its own separate fence, or would that stunt its already slow growth? Only after she came home from the sex education session in the seventh grade, where the boys and girls were divided to learn their respective destinies, did she find out what hers would be.
When she’d come to her mother, sheepishly asking whether she should use tampons or pads, her mother had silently gone into the bathroom and pulled out a wad of unbleached cotton and a plastic bag. Her monthly flow was needed to feed the tree, her mother told her. Women in the family had done it immemorially, back in the Old Country. Bringing wisdom to the world required sacrifice, and it was time to start doing her part.
As a result, Annie never wore white all through junior high and high school, preferring brown, black, and dark gray dresses to hide the stains that came no matter how cleverly she wrapped or how frequently she changed the cotton. She tried to trade help with trigonometry and algebra homework with her girlfriends for tampons, explaining her mother was a back to nature hippie, allowing no synthetic products anywhere near her family’s bodies. Her mother caught on though, till at sixteen Annie threatened to cut the tree down if she wasn’t allowed to deal with her periods her own way. Her mother gave in to her, through her grandmother thought this was an unforgivable surrender of authority to youth. She never said that about her mother’s indulgence of Annie’s brothers, who never had to help with the tree at all.
Dinner was a fiasco. The frozen meat she’d pulled from the freezer was only partially thawed by the time Chloe got home from high school. Annie filled up the sink with lukewarm water, leaving the meat to float in its freezer bag, hoping for the best as she chopped the vegetables. Chloe took off up to her room after a perfunctory “hello,” but Bruce and Blair, just off the bus from junior high a few minutes later, came demanding snacks. Annie tried to block them with questions about the state of their homework. When this threatened to start a fight, she gave in and let them pick a snack from the pantry, demanding that it be healthy but turning her back so she did not see them graze from the bag of chocolate cookies or something else appetite wrecking before going off to their shared bedroom. The meat was browned, and she had just thrown the onions, garlic, tomatoes, and carrots into the bubbling fat when Ethan got home from the elementary school. He had lost his Spiderman lunch box sometime between leaving on the bus and coming back on it. She comforted him, half her mind on the vegetables to make sure they did not burn in the thin metal stockpot, comforting him enough so he would go to his room and play.
The pasta water had just started boiling when first Bruce and Blair, then Chloe, then Ethan all came through the kitchen complaining that they were starving. Annie was just about to yell at them to leave her alone when Marc came through the door, a big smile on his bearded face. This distracted the kids, who ran to hug their father, eager for his attention as he was soon to be away. He wrapped them in his long arms, towering over all of them at six-foot-four. Annie turned and looked at him, this man she’d been married to for seventeen years, right from the end of high school, and thought to herself, well, this is your life.
The pasta was done and drained, and the mixed green salad on the table when she corralled them all to sit down. The twins demanded garlic bread, a demand she ignored. Ethan wanted help eating his spaghetti. Marc tried to tell him he was a big boy now, but when he threatened to cry Annie shoved her own food aside and shuffled her chair closer, grabbing up the fork to help him. Marc gave her his “you have to stop pampering that boy” look, but the look Annie gave him in return must have been fit to curdle milk because he turned back to his glass of pilsner and his conversation with the twins about his trip up north. Annie resigned herself to her own dinner growing cold, uneaten, and to having to sate her hunger later. It seemed to her she had rarely been able to complete a meal at her leisure, always leaving it either only a quarter eaten or bolting it down so fast she could not taste it.
“No, mommy,” Ethan said as she raised a forkful of carrots and lettuce, without dressing, to his lips, “I don’t like the salad.”
“If you don’t eat your salad,” Annie said, “then there cannot be any dessert.” She stated these things as rules of the universe, rather than using “you can’t,” old advice from some parenting book she had mostly forgotten, and that Marc had never even pretended to read.
“But I want dessert,” Ethan said.
“Then eat your salad.”
“Sweetheart,” Marc said, trying his best to look sympathetic, “it’s a special night. Can’t we skip the rules for just one night.”
To keep herself from screaming at him, Annie dropped the fork onto Ethan’s plate and stood up, turning her back on her family and walking into the living room. She kept walking, heading out through the alternate door onto the porch. The sun had not yet set, but with the overcast skies she could barely make out the trees along the edge of the property, lit only by an occasional passing pair of headlights. Thankfully, none turned down the driveway. Even if it were Grace, Annie felt she might have stabbed the driver with her pruning knife.
After a few minutes Marc came out behind her, placing his large hands on her rigid shoulders. He recoiled briefly when she did not relax, but then rested them there again.
“Hey, Annie,” he said. He knew from long experience not to try to turn her around. She wasn’t ready for a hug and an “everything’s okay” yet. She kept staring out into the darkness. “It’s not as bad as all that. The kid’s a picky eater.”
“Marc,” Annie said, knowing what she was going to say and already regretting it but saying it anyway, “you always get to be the good guy.”
Marc said nothing in reply, his hands motionless on her shoulders.
“Every time,” she said, “every time you go away it’s like this. You’re always so reasonable, always the one who is understanding. You think you can just go off for weeks at a time and come back and be the one to sort things out, or that you’ll make everything perfect just before you go away, anything that goes wrong becoming my fault.”
“Annie …” Marc said. He started to massage her shoulders with his strong thumbs but stopped when she stiffened further. “We’ve talked about this. There just aren’t that many management jobs, and you know me, I’m not fit for a desk job.”
“It’s not about your job, Marc. It’s about you.”
“Well,” Marc said, taking his hands off her shoulders, “I’ll handle the bedtimes. You just relax. Pour some wine, we’ll talk when I’ve got them off to bed.” He always handled bedtimes before he left – making sure the kids were in their pajamas, that they had brushed their teeth, then reading to them from one of their favorites. Tonight it was The Two Towers, the book he had been reading to them for the past two weeks. Even Chloe would sit in the living room and listen, sitting close to her father while he did his voices for all the characters, throwing himself into the description of the lands the scattered parts of the Fellowship crossed. They’d never let Annie pick up the book and read to them while he was gone. It was a special time with Dad. All times with Dad, Annie noticed, seemed to be special to the kids.
Marc headed back inside, closing the screen door behind him. Annie walked over to the edge of the porch, sat down, and cried.
With the children asleep, or at least confined to their rooms, Annie turned out the light and climbed into bed next to Marc. Even without the argument they’d had, they likely would not have made love anyway. In the beginning, when he’d first started taking these trips, they had, but now they were nearly routine, as much as Annie worried about him being safe when he was away. Marc would be headed out before dawn, and she wanted sure he got a good sleep beforehand. She rolled over onto her side, but was surprised when she felt Marc’s hand on her shoulder.
“What do you want, Annie?” Marc asked, propping himself up on his elbow.
“What do you mean?” Annie said, rolling onto her back to look up at the ceiling.
“Annie, I know how hard you work. With the house, with the kids. You’re a good mom, and a good wife. But you’ve been so damn damn unhappy for a long time. I just think you must want something you’re not getting. What is it?”
Annie thought for a moment. It was a hard question.
“I want Chloe not to get knocked up at seventeen and repeat my life.” She felt Marc recoil at that in the dark, but he let her go on. Many of their friends from high school, those who’d stayed in the Valley, were divorced at least once. As far as Annie had been able to tell, when the problem wasn’t obviously the woman, it was that the men just didn’t know how to even pretend to listen. Marc, a quiet man by nature, had always been a listener, especially to her. “I want Ethan to eat proper meals and stop getting constipated. I want Bruce and Blair to do their damn homework and not have their teachers calling me, asking me if they need tutoring when it’s not like I didn’t get straight A’s all through …”
“Hey,” Marc said, putting his hand on her arm, “I meant what do you want. You must want something for you.”
The question took her a long time to process. She just stared at Marc in the gloom, then looked out the bedroom window at the night.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said.
Marc stroked her arm. She went on. “I want that damn tree to fruit so I can plant another one and stop obsessing over it. I want to have a spare so anyone who wants can get their own and not come round always asking,, making me stress about every cutting.”
He rolled over onto her and hugged her. She hugged him back, squeezing him even though it pained her punctured hand.
“You don’t have to give me anything,” he said. “I’ll be fine. It’s paved roads, short hikes up hills and down into valleys. I’ll be fine.”
Annie just hugged him and wished him good night.
Annie figured she grew up twenty years in a night when the phone call came. It had been a cold October evening, and she had been lying on the thick rug by the fireplace, the logs blazing, doing her precalculus homework by the bright light of the flames. Her marks in the class were strong and Mr. Ioannidis had promised her a strong recommendation letter to the University of British Columbia. Her English and History teachers had promised her the same, though with her grades the letters would just be something nice to have. The guidance counsellors had sent her the financial aid paperwork, telling her that she was certain to get generous assistance. There were scholarship possibilities too. The provincial government wanted to be seen to be encouraging women to enter engineering and the sciences, so there was plenty of money waiting to be dispensed to worthy young ladies like herself. She had not yet told her parents, wanting to surprise them when her father got home from the British Columbia-Alberta border, where he was surveying for a new nickel mine.
Her mother was washing dishes in the sink, her arms up to her elbows in suds as she scraped out a pot, when the phone rang. “Annie, dear, can you get that, please?”
Annie got up and stretched, then walked over to the ringing phone. She pulled it off the hook and recognized the voice of Mr. Clemmons, her father’s boss. He was supposed to be with her father, two hundred miles from any telephone. Perhaps they’d finished up early, or they’d had to cancel and come back for some reason.
Mr. Clemmons recognized her voice immediately. “Annie,” he said, “please get your mother.”
Annie called to her mother, who wiped her hands on her apron and took the phone. Her face froze when she heard Mr. Clemmons voice, and she picked up the phone and its receiver and walked with it into the bathroom, closing the door behind her, the coiled cord sticking out under the door. Annie suddenly felt very detached from the world, as if she were standing a few feet behind herself. To give herself something physical to do she sunk her hands into the dishwater, picking up the scrubbing where her mother had left it.
Fifteen minutes later, her mother came out of the bathroom. In a grim but matter of fact voice, not meeting Annie’s eyes, she told her what Mr. Clemmons had told her.
There had been an accident. Her father and three other surveyors were driving their truck back from their surveying site to their base camp down a steep road in the dark. It had been raining heavily most of the day, and visibility was poor. Something must have happened, either an animal dashing in front of them or the road bank giving way, but the truck went down into a thickly forested ravine. The truck landed on its roof in a wide stream at the bottom.
Annie never ended up telling her mother about the scholarships or the letters her teachers wanted to write. Her grandmother had passed away when she was thirteen, and her brothers were all under twelve. She looked at her mother and the next day put away the college brochures, made excuses to her teachers, and started taking up more of the housework. A year later, Marc had gotten her pregnant and had gallantly proposed to her. She became another woman in the long family line, caring, protecting, nurturing looking after the tree.
Marc drifted off before Annie fell asleep. Remembering the phone call those many years ago, she recalled the most important thing she had been unable to do during the day.
On her way out to the back garden, slipping on her gardening shoes in the light coming through the window from the porch, she caught sight of her own face in the hallway mirror. Ordinarily, Annie’s regard for her own face was purely utilitarian – making sure her teeth did not have food caught in them, that a sore eye was not red with infection, or that she had brushed all of her hair back before putting in the elastic to hold it back. This time she saw her mother staring back at her.
In the corners of her eyes were the same crow’s feet setting in. Around her mouth were the wrinkles pulling her lips into a persistent frown. Recognizing her mother in herself was not unpleasant, however. So what if she had become her mother? All women probably did.
She did not even need to complete the thought to know she did not want Chloe to turn into her. It had been in the back of Annie’s mind she since her own mother died when Chloe was seven. Though all the children helped in the garden as they were able and knew the bark could heal fevers and soothe aches, she had never told Chloe the special relation the women in the family bore to the tree, had just bought her pads and told her how to use them. Three generations of women rooted to one place, caring for a sick, slow growing tree that to its misfortune worked miracles. With fruit that were supposed to be greater, more worthwhile, than any of the vitality it gave to the sick or wounded. She didn’t know what Chloe wanted to do, but Annie did not want her to be rooted here too.
Annie pulled the pruning knife out of the pocket of the apron hanging on its peg by the door and let herself out. The night air was cool and damp; more rain was likely on the way. Maybe it would help the tree grow a little more, replace what she was going to take tonight. Annie and her mother were not the only ones who had suffered for that night years ago.
She learned, years later, when Marc started working at the same surveying company, his connection to the family through his marriage to Annie securing him a place. Mr. Clemmons told Marc one night what had happened, and Marc had told her.
The other men in the cab may have been dead one the truck came to rest; they were certainly unconscious. Her father, however, had been alive. The other men, led by Mr. Clemmons, had found him after an hour’s long search along the sides of the road in the driving rain. Her father’s spine had been broken by the force of the fall; his legs useless. Annie had not been able to keep the images out of her head, of her father hanging there in the dark, the frigid water flowing in through the shattered wind shield and passenger windows, rising higher and higher into his hair, then over his eyes, up to his nose. At some point, they figured, he had been able to get himself out of his seat belt, falling into the water. But he had been unable to keep his head above the water or get out the shattered window. He had drowned there in the darkness.
Annie hadn’t had the boldness to start taking the leaves and bark when her mother was alive. Even on her deathbed, the breast cancer eating its way from her lymph nodes into her bones, her mother refused the bark of the tree. “It’s for others,” she would say, “that fruit must come forth.” Otherwise, Annie heard behind her words, it had been for nothing: marrying the man she had, staying in the same place her own mother had, never seeing anything beyond the tall mountains surrounding the Okanagan Valley, giving her blood and substance to her family and to the tree.
Unable to bear her mother’s agony, with the useless Dr. Preston withholding the morphine from her, fearful too much would kill her and that he would have to answer questions, Annie had finally walked out of the bedroom, past the gathered family eating cold leftovers who had come to pay their last respects, and strode out into the garden. Perhaps it was her imagination, or her memory embellishing, but the tree had seemed fuller at that time, more abundantly clad in leaves. Annie carved a long stretch of bark, like she had seen her mother and grandmother do only a handful of times before. Then she had brewed a pot of tea and carried it into her mother.
Her mother, her arms nearly skeletal, had risen from her torpor to knock the tea pot aside. The blue and white pot shattered on the floor, the coppery odor of the tea covering the sour smells of sickness and the stinging scent of the antiseptics. She was the only one who had ever refused to take from the tree when Annie offered it.
Though Marc never asked, Annie always folded a packet of leaves in an envelope when he went into the bush. With the leaves to chew on, her father’s bones would have reknitted, and he would have been able to pull himself from the stream, cry for help, be there for her mother and for her. She would insist to Marc it was “in case anything happens.” He would smile, take the leaves, and make sure she saw him putting them into his shirt pocket before he kissed her goodbye and drove off.
The sky had cleared some and Annie could see the garden in the soft, silver light of the moon. The fever tree towered above all the other plants of the garden. Annie strode up to it, remembering where she had seen a cluster of leaves earlier in the morning.
The tree was bare. The leaves were gone. Frantically Annie walked around, making sure it was not a trick of the light, of the foliage just being denuded on one side. But they were all gone. Crouching down on the ground, Annie saw the dried up remains of the leaves, wet through with dew, falling to slippery shreds as she picked them up. The flowers were gone too. Annie looked for the places she had seen them, but they were not there.
In desperation Annie slammed her left palm down onto a branch, the thorns stabbing into her flesh. The blood burst out in a torrent through the barely healed scabs and poured down her arm. None went into the tree. It was dead.
Just before her eyes filled with tears, she saw a round, dark shape set deep among the branches. A stray beam of moonlight, crosshatched by the branches, struck the rounded shapes’ wrinkled skin. It was a fruit.
Annie pushed aside the branches surrounding the dark mass, not caring where the thorns uselessly scratched her fingers and forearms. It was too small. Great Grandmother Stern had been clear about the fruits, drawn pictures of them for her daughter and granddaughter; Grandmother had shown them to Annie. The fruits of the tree were big and bulbous, the size of oranges, dark skinned, wrinkled. This mass was barely the size of a concord grape. There could not be any seeds in it. The tree had spent its last, spent the blood Annie had given it in the morning, trying to bring forth that fruit.
Tentatively, Annie pulled at the fruit, expecting it to be fastened to the tree as hard as a branch. Instead, it came away easily.
Before a phone could ring, before a van could pull into the driveway, before Marc or one of her children could call out for her, Annie popped the fruit into her mouth and bit down. It was tough and woody, like an unripe pear. She chewed hard, pulping the bittersweet insides and skin. Then she swallowed it down. There were no seeds.
“Something for me,” she whispered, “please, just something for me.”