October was not an ideal time for his first visit to the Pine Barrens, Mary had allowed, and the brown landscape of Batsto confirmed it. Rain-darkened buildings of rough-sawn lumber, mud roads sucking at boot heels, trees in their phases of loss, all he despised of autumn gathered there. But every season has particular gifts! This was Mary’s claim and her new idea for a series of articles, “The Pines in All Seasons.” An editor at Harper’s Monthly had returned an encouraging correspondence, and Mary took all encouragement to heart. It was a quality Thatcher noticed because he lacked it. Rose hinted at his weak ambition, but the disease was more crippling than that: he distrusted praise, and took detractors at their word. Whenever he told Mary of his troubles at the school with Cutler, as he urgently wished to do today, he knew he was provoking her support so he might cement his little barnacle of confidence on that sturdy pier.
They turned from the road and tramped down a mucky lane where one log house was like the next, all with the same rutted yards, the same narrow rectangles of turnip and kale. He thought of soldiers he’d tended. When facing life’s end they always wanted to speak of where they’d begun it, a humble log shelter too kindly recalled, on some lane like this one where mud climbed a man’s trousers to the knees. Thatcher felt humiliated for the dressing-down he would get from Rose. He would try to spirit these trousers directly to Gracie and Mrs. Brindle, who made teamwork of boiling the laundry cauldron, neither of whom would bat an eyelash at the master’s muddy trousers. Where was the marital ease he’d expected in due time? His thoughts of his wife were a tangled thicket: Rose the irresistible opium and the bed of thorns, her exquisite scent, her not-quite-trustworthy graces. She had been amorous these mornings lately, probably thinking of another baby. And after, when he was drowsy with postcoital exhaustion, then Rose would grow energetic on the subject of household acquisition. Their own buggy and horse, now. For poor Aurelia, how was she to make social calls on her well-to-do friends?
Abruptly Mary halted and cried out, “Mr. Foggett, good morning!”
Foggett stepped out the door of his cabin in a red flannel union suit and trousers, the suspenders dangling, the boots unlaced. Well past nine in the morning.
“Well Missus Treat. Out for a day in the drear swamps, are we?”
“We are. This is my friend Mr. Greenwood, joining our excursion. I need to go back and check on my little ferns, if you will oblige us today.”
Foggett shouldered his suspenders, went indoors, and reappeared momentarily with a grimy shirt buttoned up beneath the braces. The boots’ brown tongues still lolled, a pair of panting dogs. He fetched his mare from behind the cabin and hitched his phaeton.
When he had the horse ready and the buggy dusted off with a gray rag, Foggett gave a hand up to Mary and walked around to mount the front bench beside her. Without assistance Selma clambered into the footman’s seat at the rear, still toting the oversize lunch bucket and small shovel she had carried on the train. Her pale eyes faced forward, the brittle hair poked like straw from every edge of her bonnet. Thatcher glimpsed the loneliness of these outings for the girl. Given Mary’s absorption in her botany, Selma would likely be forgotten until something required hefting and portage. Already Mary was chatting away with Foggett about the predicted frost. Thatcher took his place with Selma on the seat behind the driver, which was not much more than a sanded plank.
Foggett clucked and off they sped, throwing Thatcher backward to grip the bench and wonder how footmen did not get flung in ditches. Selma gripped the lunch pail on her lap like a young heir. He resolved to address her today as he would his students, if they were released by Cutler to the outdoors. Likely they never would be, given the grave state of relations with his employer. Thatcher could see what lay ahead of him in too much detail: a wife’s indignation, the cracks in a collapsing house. And Mary’s disappointment, for the damage inflicted by Cutler on his pupils. Poor long-faced girls buttoned up in their boots, locked in a schoolroom until they could be handed over to kitchen and marriage.
Trapped, Rose had flung at him that morning. In this suffocating house! As a girl Rose had loved to ride. More than anything, she said. On little lanes between farms and vineyards she would fly all the way to Mays Landing, bonnet strings to the wind, sometimes with friends, often quite alone. Her father had kept a little white gelding for her in a stable out on East Avenue, consumed by the debt of its keeping after he died. How was it fair, Rose demanded, that she’d begun with so much and now had to live with so little? When she had done everything ever properly asked of her? Thatcher was mortified for all he had failed to see on her behalf. Easy enough for him to find contentment in a pair of old shoes and a half loaf of bread, she’d pointed out; his fortunes had taken the opposite path. It was true. He’d begun in a cramped hovel and marched out into the world, a life that felt larger by the year. A better husband would have seen how Rose’s need for comfort differed from his own. A wife had greater wants, naturally, and could do nothing to help her own situation.
Mary turned around to draw Thatcher’s attention to the flora. “Wax myrtle!” she shouted above the clop of the mare and shrieks of the mail spring under them. They’d left the town now for the spotted daylight of a tall pine wood. Selma seemed to know what Mary knew. Already she held one hand out to be slapped by the waxy-leaved shrubs they rushed past, whose branches bristled with white berries. She held her little palm to Thatcher’s nose for a sniff of the myrtle fragrance. Ocean, lemon, candlewax.
“The early settlers used myrtle to make their candles,” Mary said loudly. “It’s a good wax, it doesn’t melt in hot weather. Thoreau wrote about it. He made some tallow as an experiment.”
So Thatcher’s intuition of candles was correct. He wondered if it came up from memory, and whether some of the crones in his childhood village might be counted to this day among Mary’s “early settlers.” Vaguely, darkly, he recalled every kind of broth being boiled from twigs and leaves. Old women with nothing, pressing succor onto motherless boys. “Is it the berries that give the wax?”
Mary nodded, a gesture nearly lost in the lurching of her entire body. All four passengers bounced in unison as their buggy flew, a precarious little craft on choppy seas. Foggett their captain grimaced in concentration.
“You boil the berries to render it and the oil rises to the top. So says Thoreau. What use he made of his tallow, I can’t tell you.”
Her familiar tone might suggest scorn, admiration, or that she’d kept a personal correspondence with the late Mr. Thoreau. Thatcher knew not to rule out any possibility. He observed the passing blur of a forest unlike any he’d known. The tall pines were close spaced and even, as if planted, with a low understory that mostly obscured the forest’s sandy floor. The road ran close to a river of deep red waters, an alarming color. Two men poled along in a flatboat maneuvering a net along the bank.
“Fishing?” he managed to ask.
Foggett pissed out a laugh.
“For iron,” Mary said. “They’re dredging up bog ore for the ironworks.”
Strange territory, thought Thatcher, of bloody rivers where men fished for iron. But the chemistry he could work out well enough: the water-soluble iron, the acid peat of the bog, the anaerobic decay of plant matter. Equals limonite. During the war he’d heard men say the best iron for cannonballs came out of the swamps, and his childish imagination had the glossy spheres rolling fully formed out of the mud.
In another moment the carriage hurtled into sunlight as they passed through a section of forest cut to the ground. Splintered trunks bled sap into turpentine-scented air. Crews of men moved about ant-like, hauling pine trunks and laying them upright against great smoldering hills of logs. Making charcoal for the iron smelting, he guessed. The forest closed over them again. Mary pointed out a grassy hummock covered in what she called Xerophyllum setifolium, its taxonomy recently revised by Professor Watson at Harvard. Did Thatcher know Professor Watson? He did not. And here was the small shrub Gaylussacia, named in honor o
f the chemist Gay-Lussac. This tossing of names would have annoyed Thatcher had it been between men, but he believed the plants themselves were Mary’s friends. Plants standing in for colleagues.
After a distance of miles, more than five, less than ten, and many more slashed clearings, a sinuous line of dense green grew visible ahead of them. He watched it as they approached, as distinct as a shoreline, much darker than the pine woodland. The blue-green reef turned out to be a wall of cedars. And their destination. Foggett let them down and negotiated with Mary the time when he would return there to collect them: three o’clock, she repeated thrice, and promised the man his payment upon their safe return, as usual. Mary wore no timepiece Thatcher could see, only her tin collecting box, dangling on its long purple ribbon like hefty jewelry. Selma shouldered the shovel and would not be separated from her lunch pail, so Thatcher insisted on taking the heavy plant press from Mary. Off they set into the dim cedar forest. Degrees cooler, instantly.
“It seems forbidding, I’ll grant,” Mary said cheerfully.
“The place for ghouls,” Selma suggested.
“Oh that’s picturesque, Selma. I will use it. The readers like to be frightened.”
“Why do they, Mrs. Treat?” Selma asked. “I can fair enough get a fright up at home when Pa has had the drink. Wouldn’t need to look for it in a magazine.”
“Darker and darker it grows as I cautiously advance, with an oppressive dread of something which I can not define.”
“Oh Mrs. Treat. Have mercy!” Selma shuddered.
Mary set an arm across the child’s shoulder. “I was only testing out my prose on you. We’re safe here and you very well know it.” Thatcher saw he’d been wrong to assume Mary ignored the girl. Here in the forest they were like mother and daughter.
“Where does your father come by the drink?” he asked. Both their faces snapped toward him and he reddened. “I’m only curious. Because of the temperance laws.”
“Millville,” Selma said. “They’ve got depravery and Italians.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
They continued on the carriage road, wide enough for three to walk abreast but at this point better suited for boots than wheels. The earth was damp sponge, like a trifle cake. His trousers were doomed. Mary had hitched her skirt with some sort of complicated tuck in the waistband so it did not drag in the mud, and Selma had worked a similar trick with her own. They must have done it in the carriage.
“What do you think of the Barrens so far?” Mary asked.
“That there’s more industry in them than many a Boston shipyard.”
“In that section we came through, it’s true,” she said. “In every direction out of Batsto the saws and dredges are eating away. Five years ago I could walk from the train into untouched forest inside of ten minutes. Pine woods as deep and quiet as they stood two centuries ago. We still have tracts like that standing, of course.”
“But now you have to hire Mr. Foggett to get you to them.”
“Now we must prevail on Mr. Foggett, yes.”
“Was Vineland a forest like this when Landis purchased it?”
“Much the same. Poor barrens. The moment they were discovered to be fertile instead of barren, their destiny was yoked to procreation.”
“So unenthusiastic for the captain’s Garden of Eden, Mary. Yours are the first shadows of doubt I’ve met since coming to Vineland.”
“The Garden of Eden might be well and good for the farmers and grape juice bottlers. Our forests will become the greatest gardens in the Union. And then farewell to the rare floral treasures none of us can save.”
“I suppose we all must eat,” he said. Selma thoughtfully bumped the lunch pail against her thigh as she walked. The ground grew wetter, the cedar darkness more dense.
“Look there,” Mary said, stopping suddenly. “Helonias bullata. Do you know it?”
Rosettes of sharp leaves poked from the ground. “I do not,” he confessed. The whorled clumps spread over the forest floor in a carpet of leafy daggers.
“Swamp pinks. It only grows here in the cedars, and only in a very few spots. You can see it’s rhizomatous. It spreads underground. This group extends two or three acres and then disappears. You will walk fifteen miles before you find the next clump.”
He wondered if she meant to do so that day. Mary was as animated by her Helonias as Rose with a new Godey’s Lady’s Book. This forest was home to her.
“Think how curious, Mr. Greenwood. It is scattered through this swamp, absent for miles, then cropping up again, always along a stream. What is your diagnosis?”
He diagnosed that she did not use his Christian name in front of the girl, and he should do likewise. Otherwise, nothing came to mind. He looked hard at the plant.
“I think we deduce it does not only spread by its roots,” she said in a lowered voice, revealing a secret. “I believe it also disperses its seeds through water.”
“This bog water! It’s acid enough to melt horseshoe nails.”
“Yes, nearly.” Mary’s eyes sparkled. “It would require extraordinary adaptation. Dr. Gray has a theory about the chemistry of it. He says it’s the lipids …” She faltered slightly, then pushed on. “A good example of natural selection to survival in a bog environment.”
“You’re surely right.”
Mary knew she was right. She knelt down to pluck a spent seed stalk while Thatcher watched. The childhood wasted in curtseying lessons, the grasp of taxonomy and chemistry entirely self-taught, and still she had marched her theories to the doorstep of Asa Gray. Whereas Thatcher, when he once met the great man coming through the door of the Harvard library, had gone pale with the effort of trying to say good morning. How did a person come to be Mary Treat? He could stand all day watching energy, logic, and indifference to judgment combine with such glorious force.
Selma took over the project of winnowing seeds from the stalks and shaking them into a glassine envelope produced from her apron pocket. Mary stood and brushed off her hands. “If I find other species that have similar chemistry in their seeds, it will support my theory. I’ve asked Mr. Darwin’s opinion and he agrees. I’ve sent dozens of seed samples to Dr. Gray to analyze.”
“A hundred, more like,” Selma offered from below.
“Not a hundred, surely. I can’t make myself a burden. Dr. Gray’s letters always complain of how busy he is.”
The seeds were collected and a live specimen tucked into Mary’s collecting box, and on they marched. She wore the tin vasculum over one shoulder so it bumped against the peplum of her jacket and Thatcher walked behind her trying not to covet it. He could not say why the little box moved him, it was not new, but very beautiful, made of pleated tin and painted leaf green. A little latched door opened on the front. He wondered if it had been a gift from her father. Or her husband, in happier times.
They marched over trailing vines of partridgeberry and shrubs of heath, and under fronds of the royal fern, Osmunda regalis, reaching higher than Thatcher’s head. Mary paused often to show him her favorites, the carnivores, and take collections. Along with the Venus flytrap she found glossy sundews and pitcher plants. She was happier in a dank bog than any woman or man Thatcher had known, under any shining sun.
The object of their day was to check on her little fern Schizaea pusilla, to which nature had assigned just a few lone spots on earth, including this one, where she was the first botanist to find it. It grew in a plot scarcely a mile across. Outside that zone it was seen no more. She had looked for it in all other parts of the bog, and concluded it existed in nought but its single home. Her search had been thorough and patient, she insisted, an unnecessary defense from a woman who could sit through a morning letting a plant digest her fingertip. Mary held herself to standards outside ordinary human existence.
“In the years since I discovered it, we have dug little clumps of my fern and transported them to spots with exactly similar soils and sun exposure, miles away, where we transplant them.” She patte
d her trusty vasculum. “We take the greatest care, I promise you. Don’t we, Selma?”
“Ma’am?”
“Our little ferns. We replant them so carefully, do we not?”
“Yes ma’am. Tender as baby mice.”
“We give them to the care of nature, but nature refuses to recognize any right to the change. She allows the plants to languish and die. We mark the spots and return in a few months to check their progress, but they fail to take root. Every time, they are shriveled like this.”
He gazed at the spot on the forest floor, copiously marked with ribbons, where one of her small transplants had breathed its last. Brown fronds plaintively shriveled, so small they would go unseen if not for her markers dangling from surrounding trees.
“Your belief is that the ferns should go forth and multiply?” he asked.
Mary considered the question. “Belief is the concern of religion. My observation is that they cannot. And so one has to ask, why would a species persist in only one small place? What element of a new environment impedes them?”
One has to ask. He recalled the day he first saw Mary prone on the grass.
They had traveled very far from the carriage road, following faint deer trails that netted the dense forest. How Mary knew which fork to choose, he couldn’t guess. Selma took the lead from time to time, appearing at ease, a little bonneted rabbit in its warren.
At last they emerged onto the relative openness of a stream bank. The canopy was still closed overhead but their line of sight, to Thatcher’s relief, extended fifty feet or more across the stream.
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