by Jon Cohen
In the same moment, Harry staggered, theatrically, away from the wall. Amanda hurried after him and caught him in her arms. Looking past Amanda, Harry gauged Oriana. Now he knew which one of these two females presented the most danger. He was not sure what the danger was exactly, but something way out of his realm of experience was radiating off this little girl.
“Hold on, I have you,” said Amanda.
Harry dropped The Grum’s Ledger, on purpose, as if to break the electric connection between himself and the girl. Oriana scooped it up. She clutched the book, the mother clutched Harry—but it was definitely the girl who had a tighter grip on him.
Amanda took Harry’s head in both hands, searched her fingers through his scalp. He closed his eyes. “You have a big lump back there,” she said. While his eyes were shut, Amanda quickly studied him. Not a bad face...for a federal bureaucrat. Unhealthy, of course. Skin pale from too many hours beneath fluorescent lights. Nice build, but not enough muscle. Again, a side effect of bureaucracy. What he needed was a little mountain sunlight and some meat and potatoes. Not an offer, merely an observation. He winced when her fingers moved across the lump again. It was a large one. If this was Ronnie or Cliff, with their dense skulls, the lump would be nothing to worry about. As her fingers left his scalp, she thought, Good, thick hair. That, too, merely a clinical observation.
Harry opened his eyes, startled that she was leaning so close. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Nope. You need to go to the ER.”
Harry shook his head. “No, I don’t.” He did not want to leave this forest. He had come here for something. And he was beginning to think it was not suicide. He had to figure this out. He felt very alert and at the same time fuzzy-headed. And this mother and daughter were very distracting.
“Head wounds are not a joke,” Amanda said.
“Yes. No. Right.”
“If it’s a concussion, Mr. Crane, I will put you over my shoulder if I have to and take you to the ER.”
Harry looked at her. Excuse me? “Isn’t there a test? Don’t I have to fail a test first? The neuro test? Before you sling me over your shoulder?”
“You’ve banged your head before?”
“When I was nine. I fell out of the tree in my front yard. A Fagus grandifolia. That’s botanical Latin for American beech.” Maybe if he was very precise, Amanda the nurse would leave him be.
But on the words American beech, Oriana cocked her head. Now what? thought Harry. If she stared any harder at him, she’d bore holes through him. She was about to say something.
But Amanda spoke first. “Who’s the president of the United States?”
“James Buchanan,” Harry said.
Amanda looked at him.
“That was a joke.”
“I don’t do jokes,” Amanda said.
Oriana watched this man taking on her mother. If that’s what he was doing. Whatever was happening, it was refreshing not to be the one in trouble.
“See, the joke is, this is Pennsylvania,” Harry said. “James Buchanan was the only president born in Pennsylvania.”
“I’m still not laughing.”
He really did not want to be taken from these woods. That feeling was turning rapidly into a certainty. A kind of desperate certainty. “Penn’s...sylvania,” he murmured.
“You’re repeating yourself,” Amanda said. Her grip like a vise.
“No, no. Pennsylvania means Penn’s woods. After William Penn, the colonial Quaker guy? And, well, if you think about it, since I work for the Forest Service, and I manage this land, in a way these are my woods now.”
To Amanda, it was the babble of a man with a concussion.
But to Harry, it was pure revelation. He went pale. “My woods,” he said. Because that’s what was going on. He suddenly understood what this place was, these woods, this specific forest. The wind in the treetops became Beth’s voice, whispering. Harry nodded and said the words aloud. “Harry’s Trees.”
“What?” Amanda said.
“This is Harry’s Trees. This place.”
“No way,” Oriana said. “Wrong. This is Oriana’s Forest.”
Amanda looked from Harry to Oriana, and back. She was having her own epiphany. “Say it again,” she said to Harry. “What you just said.”
“Harry’s Trees.”
Amanda released him and stepped over to the stone wall, where she’d placed his wallet. She held his ID card out to Oriana. “Meet Harold F. Crane—”
“Harry,” Harry said.
“Harry Crane. Of the Forest Service. He owns these trees.”
“Not owns,” he said. “Manages.”
“Right. He was out here managing his trees, Oriana.”
Perfect! thought Harry. Yes. That’s what he was doing out here. Not hanging himself from a sugar maple, but managing his trees. He unleashed the bureaucratic half of his brain. “Rangeland management, forest resource utilization, sustainable harvest, inventory and analysis—”
“Dull, government stuff,” Amanda said, cutting him off, a little taken aback by the torrent she had incited.
“Incredibly dull,” Harry said. “But that’s what I’m up to out here. That’s what I do for a living. Boring, unexciting tree stuff.”
Oriana arched an eyebrow. Harry avoided her penetrating gaze.
“So, Mr. Crane, let me ask you something,” Amanda said. “Other than the large amount of stolen candy and cookies out here, is there anything out of the ordinary about this forest? In your professional opinion—is this in any way an enchanted forest?”
What did that question even mean? His head was throbbing. Which he would not admit to this nurse. And...wait. Out of the corner of his eye—flashes of light. He must have hit his head hard, because this light he was suddenly seeing was incredibly weird.
“Mom. Mom,” said Oriana.
Harry blinked. What the hell? In the distance, multicolored beams of light shot through the forest. Either this was a very enchanted forest, or he was dying from a concussion.
“Mom! He sees it!”
Harry broke into a run toward the light.
Amanda didn’t react quickly enough. She grabbed for him, but missed. “Goddamn it,” she sputtered. Because she’d forgotten. She’d forgotten all about it.
Harry wove in and out of the trees toward the source of the light that was bouncing crazily off branches and tree trunks and rhododendron. Amanda and Oriana were right behind him. Five hundred yards from the wall, where the forest of sugar maples gave way to a large grove of quaking aspen, he stopped short. Stunned and out of breath, he clutched the trunk of a sapling, and looked up at the mighty thing before him.
Oriana and Amanda skidded to a halt right behind him. All three stood staring.
“My tree,” he whispered. Because there it was, the one that had been in his childhood yard, a gigantic American beech. It stood now, right in front of him, regal and alone amid a stand of quaking aspens, a giant among spindly attendants. Big gray elephant-thick limbs reaching toward the afternoon sky branched a thousand directions into a massive canopy.
“Fagus grandifolia,” said Oriana.
“How did—?” No, wait, this beech had five limbs branching off its main trunk, and the one in his old front yard had only three. And held within these five immense fingers, as if in the palm of a giant’s hand, was something he had only imagined as a child. A staircase with a bent-wood railing curled three times around the tremendous trunk, spiraling forty feet up to an ornate tree house the size of a large shed. It was perfectly imperfect, as if the tree itself had built the house, organically and over time, perhaps with the assistance of a band of carpenter elves. The tree limbs passed through the floor and up out of a multigabled roof. The exterior was a lopsided octagon, the sides going off every which way, woven in among the branches. And the source of the light Harry had se
en? It was the sun winking off windows of all sizes and shapes—triangles, ovals, rectangles—half of them encrusted with multicolored shards of glass as bright as rubies and emeralds.
“It’s illegal. We get it, we know,” said Amanda.
“My dad built it. Isn’t it amazing?” chimed in Oriana. “The afternoon sun always makes it light up. Like a magic sparkler!”
Amanda cut in. “But we understand this is government land. Definitely this was wrong.”
Harry turned to face them. His mouth was dry, and he was dizzy, not just from bumping his head, but from all of it. From everything that had rushed in on him in the last fifteen minutes. But now he knew what to do. He had been handed his get-out-of-jail-free card.
“I would like to sit down,” he said. “I see a chimney in that tree house. It looks cozy up there. I’m betting there’s a chair. And I would like to sit.”
“There’s a cot, too,” said Oriana. Amanda clapped a hand over her mouth and hugged her close.
“Yeah? A cot? Great. Because actually, I’d like to lie down. Not in an ER, but up there,” he said to Amanda. “I would like you to take me up to that large, cozy, illegal structure, which is on my government land, and I wish to stretch out and rest. My back hurts, but it is not broken. My arms hurt, but they are not broken. And yes, there’s a bump on my head. I’m bumped and scratched, but I’m fine.”
Amanda nodded.
Oriana squeezed free of her mother and said, “There’s a stove up there, and water, and whatever you need.”
“Excellent. And something else. I’m a little light-headed because I haven’t eaten lunch.” Harry walked over and plucked a mini Snickers from a nearby laurel bush and held it up. “So if there are no objections...” He tore off the wrapper and popped the candy into his mouth. A beam of shimmering light reflecting off one of the windows lit the empty wrapper, bathing his face in a golden light.
Oriana stared at him. The Harry Crane list she was creating in her head got one item longer. Hawk, lottery ticket, book, Snickers, American beech. Gold.
Harry looked at her. “What? What now?”
Oriana led the way up the spiral staircase.
7
The tree house was a single room, somehow both small and inexplicably large, filled with nooks and crannies, and pierced by the tree itself, the exposed limbs like columns in a Greek temple. A pair of dusty skylights looked into the canopy of the beech, which rose at least a hundred feet above the tree house. In two or three weeks, the branches would bear pale green leaves and the bright sun would give way to dappled light.
The tree house was implausibly shaped and lit by an abundance of odd windows, but it was simply furnished, which somehow enhanced its otherworldliness. A cot. Two hand-hewn Adirondack chairs. A triangle-shaped table, a little kitchen area with an old, cast-iron potbelly stove.
Harry was stretched out on the cot, shivering beneath a wool army blanket. On the other side of the room, Amanda knelt in front of the stove touching a match to a small pyramid of birch bark and pine straw kindling. Oriana sat in one of the Adirondack chairs at the foot of the cot, the Field Guide to North American Trees: Eastern Region in her lap. She’d taken it from the low bookcase beside the door. The bookcase was stuffed with field guides of every type: mammals, insects, fish, ferns, geology, stars and planets. She had been quizzing Harry for the last five minutes.
The fire caught and blazed to life. Amanda added larger sticks and a small log, adjusted the flue, and stood up. “That’s enough, Oriana. Let Mr. Crane rest.”
“It’s okay,” said Harry. “I like to talk trees.” What he actually liked was that the girl’s busy brain was occupied and diverted.
“White ash,” said Oriana.
“Fraxinus americana,” said Harry. She was trying to stump him on Latin names.
“American basswood.”
“Tilia americana,” said Harry. “Tell you something about basswood. The flowers have a lot of nectar, and honeybees love them. In some parts of the US they’re known as the bee-tree. Also, in William Penn’s time—”
“Penn’s...sylvania,” said Oriana.
“Right, in Mr. Penn’s time they used the inner bark, which is called bast, for weaving baskets and mats.”
Amanda listened to the back and forth. “Let him rest, and keep your eye on the stove, Oriana, don’t let that fire go out. I’ll be back soon.” But they barely heard her. Amanda went out the door and down the spiral staircase. She was headed back to her house to get antibiotic ointment, Band-Aids, ibuprofen—the nurse in her could not allow Harry to remain untreated—and something warm for him to eat.
“Pignut hickory,” came Oriana’s voice.
“Carya glabra,” answered Harry. “Pignut hickory, by the way, is also called—you ready?—sweet pignut, coast pignut hickory, smooth bark hickory, swamp hickory and broom hickory. It’s got a pear-shaped nut that ripens in midfall. Wild animals love it.”
Amanda paused at the base of the big beech, listening with satisfaction, because this was a gift—the tree man introducing a degree of order and reality back into Oriana’s forest. And dullness. She didn’t want to sound cruel or anything, but really, Harry Crane, federal employee, rattling off his tree facts, was kind of boring. But somebody had married him—he was wearing a wedding ring. Probably another federal employee. Amanda started off through the woods.
Up in the tree house, Harry reached behind his head and touched one of the big columnar branches that passed through the room. A quality that always amazed him about trees: the constancy of their temperature. In winter, trees are never cold to the touch, and in summer they give off no acquired solar heat. It spoke to their essential aliveness. They were not rocks growing warm in the midday sun or streams that froze over; they were as self-regulating as the human body. It was a small leap to imagine that trees had souls.
He patted the tree and let his eyes drift closed. The girl had stopped peppering him with tree names. He could hear her moving around the room, fiddling with the stove. The room had begun to warm up.
Oriana peeked out an oval-shaped window. She watched her mother disappear through the trees, glanced at Harry, then zipped over to the bookcase. The field guides had belonged to her father, and they were battered and smudged from use, like everything he had owned. Books were not sacred objects, they were useful tools. When Dean went into the forest with Oriana, they’d take one along. He wanted Oriana to be a creature of the forest, but not a dumb creature. He would quiz her, just like she had been quizzing Harry Crane.
She pulled out The Sibley Guide to Birds. The illustration on the cover was a magnificent red-tailed hawk in flight. Oriana’s heart soared. Over the last year, there were a lot of creatures Oriana thought Dean might be. Maybe he’s this, maybe he’s that. A beetle, a bat, an owl. Now she knew, she had seen him with her own eyes—Daddy, wingèd, was a red-tailed hawk.
She had read so many fairy tale books searching for clues. But the answer had been sitting right here, in one of his books. It was so perfect. In flight, wings spread, the great bird on the cover was powerful. Big in the chest, immensely strong in the shoulders. Like Daddy. And the red of the tail. Daddy’s red.
Oriana touched her lips to the hawk on the cover of the field guide.
Persevere. See. Believe. For the last year, she had done that, and at last Daddy had rewarded her.
She put down the bird guide and picked up The Grum’s Ledger, which sat on the armrest of her Adirondack chair. She walked over to the cot, opened the book and held it inches from Harry’s nose. She jostled the cot with her foot. “We need to talk fast, before Mom gets back.”
Harry’s eyes startled open. The grum was staring at him. Oriana had opened The Grum’s Ledger to the first page, to its single illustration. In black ink, drawn by the same unsteady hand that had written the text, was an old, hairy goblin-like creature—the grum—sitting a
top a mountain of gold coins staring forlornly into the eyes of whoever might read the book.
“Is this you?” she said. “Are you a grum? Tell me yes or no.”
Harry pushed the book away and sat up. “Hey. Jeez, what’s wrong with you?”
“I mean, it’s possible you’ve turned into a grum, that would make sense in a way. But you don’t look like a grum. Well, you do in the eyes and maybe the nose, but you’re too big. And not hairy enough. But creatures transform into other creatures. Are you a grum?”
“Are we playing a game here? I don’t have kids,” Harry said. “I don’t do kid-speak.”
Oriana narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t say yes or no. Which I bet is grum-speak for yes.”
“Leave me alone, okay? You may have forgotten, but I recently fell from a tree and hit my head.” He tapped the back of his skull, gingerly.
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t fall. I saw what happened. I saw everything.”
Well, here we go, thought Harry. Now he was in the deep shit. He fought the overwhelming impulse to get out of this tree house and run back to his car, because this Oriana meant business. On the other hand, you know what? So did he. Beth had guided him to this forest. He’d found Harry’s Trees, and he was damn well going to stay here. Although if Amanda the nurse discovered he’d tried to string himself up, she’d haul him off to the ER. No, worse. He imagined a rural psych ward. They probably still had straitjackets up here in the mountains.
Oriana stepped back from the cot. Eyeballed Harry like Sherlock Holmes scrutinizing a clue through a magnifying glass, then laid out the facts of the case. “Okay. So. Number one—Harry Crane tries to hang himself and my dad saves his life. Why?”
Her dad saved my life? What? thought Harry.
“Number two—Harry Crane finds The Grum’s Ledger and Oriana Jeffers finds the lottery ticket. Why?”
Harry’s armpits went slick with a sudden cold sweat. The lottery ticket. His unlucky talisman. “No, no! You need to give that back. Don’t mess with that thing. Really.”
“Why?”
