The Eve Tree: A Novel

by Rachel Devenish Ford

  When they reached the ridge and walked the horses down the other side, to the property line, they could see that there weren't many fires encroaching just yet. One or two spot fires, taken care of already by the crew that Molly had heard being directed to the area. This part of the land was still old growth. Catherine hadn't logged all the way to the very limits of the property, or maybe the loggers had been unsure of the line. Jack and Molly milled around, watching the firefighters at action. Molly felt silly. Always panicking, always making the wrong call. That damn bulldozer, caught on the stump.

  "I need to get to the goats," she muttered.

  "Gerard's got it," Jack said. "He's bringing someone with him. I thought we needed to free you up until this is over."

  She stared. "What about the deliveries?"

  "You've been training him for years! Don't you think he can handle the deliveries?"

  "I don't like you taking over my part of the ranch, Jack Boscelli."

  "Ah. Now I'm taking over. Chill out, Molly."

  She shook her head. How could she talk to him when he was like this? She slid off her horse and walked away, right into a thicket, between some shady trees that let her through like friends.

  "Molly!" Jack called. She ignored him. Suddenly she yelped.

  She'd walked smack into a blackberry bush, its branches long and spiky. It held her tight, and as soon as she got free of some thorns, it gripped her with others.

  She started laughing, helplessly, as Jack caught up with her. He'd tied his horse outside the grove. He stood watching her, eyebrows raised. "I don't know what to do with you," he said.

  "I don't either." She was so tired. She thought of the butterfly she'd seen earlier and tears came to her eyes. A dark berry hung in the edge of her blurred vision. She reached out and picked it, popping it into her mouth. She sighed. "So good."

  Jack ran his fingers through his hair, stretched his hands up to the sky. "God, tell me! What do I do with her?"

  Molly giggled, picking another berry. The thorns were still holding her captive. Jack came to her and began pulling them away from her shirt. It seemed to Molly that the long creepers of the blackberry bush swept around him without touching him. He was impervious. She kept picking berries.

  "This bush will be burned, Jacky. We need to eat them now." He put his hands around her rib cage for a moment and she felt the heat of his hands through her T-shirt. He looked into her eyes. Then he released her and picked some berries himself.

  Their hands became purple with juice. Some of the berries were still slightly sour. They tried some green ones and made faces over them. The ripe ones tasted especially sweet, after the sour ones.

  "It's perspective," Jack said.

  "I was hoping it was grace," Molly said. "Suddenly they're sweeter!"

  "Perspective is a kind of grace, don't you think?"

  "Jack," Molly said. "That is profound." He laughed.

  The light was getting softer as evening came on. It was the time of day she usually liked best, when the shadows got longer and she wrapped up the cheese-making, walking slowly back to the house for iced tea, cold coffee, some wine with Jack, or Greta if she dropped by.

  Jack became serious. "You know this means it will be here soon, don't you? Tomorrow? The next day?"

  "Let's stop thinking about it."

  "We can't."

  "If you were Elijah, you could pray for rain."

  "Ah, I could pray for rain now. I have, actually. And people in deserts pray for rain and people in floods pray for a break."

  "It's too much to think about, you could just cry and cry."

  "It's perspective. Why should our small place be saved? Why should we, Americans in our wide spaces, be any different from anyone else?" She watched his face twist and then smooth over. "God will be with us. That's what he said."

  "Even if we cry and cry."

  "Even."

  "I read somewhere that a forest fire is shaped like a teardrop."

  "That's true, they are. Weren't you paying attention in the fire meeting?"

  "I was trying, but then I got mad and left, remember?" Molly lay all the way on her back to try to get berries from under the bush. They were all green, though. She made herself eat them. From under here she remembered being seven, eight, nine. Hiding in trees to get away from chores. Finding a fairyland in the shapes between branches. Molly pulled herself out from under the bush and looked at her husband. He was staring into the distance, finished with picking berries.

  "I tried to steal CalFire's CAT today, Jack. I'm sorry."

  He looked at her, open-mouthed. Looked at her for a long, long time without saying anything. Molly cleared her throat and looked down at her purple hands.

  "I'm sorry," she said again.

  There were footsteps. Furious stomping and crashing.

  "We. have. been. looking. everywhere for you," Amber said, hands on her hips. Todd, beside her, looked shaken. Rain pulled up in the rear, gazing all around and frowning. Three disapproving children. Molly fought the urge to laugh again.

  "Do you have any water?" Molly asked. "I seem to be dying of thirst."

  On the way back up the hill on Jive she left them all in the dust, finally shook them off. She wanted so badly to rid the hills of the covering of smoke, pick the ridges and curves up and shake them like a blanket. Riding fast was almost as good. She looked up as she rode, tipped her head back and saw the ancient oaks racing along, the knotted limbs like an old man's hands, black and massive against the sky.

  In the barn she unsaddled Jive, patted him on the nose and left the barn. The sun was setting. The colors through the smoke were otherworldly, the sun seemed to be bleeding as it left the sky, watery oranges, reds, and tired purples. The sky was bruised. She shivered. Her stomach was still so tight, it seemed pulled together with fear. Her thoughts were all over the place. She rubbed her hands on her sides as she walked to the house, walked into the kitchen singing tunelessly, "No one you know, no one you know, no one you know..."

  "No one who knows?" asked a large redheaded man whom she had never seen before. He was washing dishes at her sink. Without thinking she ducked her head back out the door to check if she had the right house, the way she would have if she were back in San Diego in the middle of a subdivision.

  "Who are you?" she asked. "Where's my mother?"

  "Is your mother the older lady? I knocked on her door down there, and she told me I could find some honey for my throat up at the house. Then I found this pile of dishes, and, well..." He gestured at the sink with a soapy hand as though the rest was obvious. "The honey really did make my throat feel better." He went back to washing dishes.

  Molly stood in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. Was this someone sent to talk to her about the CAT?

  "Are you a fire-fighter?" she asked as he set a tiny teacup on the dish drainer. She had been holding her breath as he washed it, his hands looked much too big to handle it carefully. The air in the kitchen was still. The roof seemed to be inching its way down to them.

  "No," he said, rinsing a blue platter that had belonged to Molly's grandmother, one that Catherine had given to Molly only reluctantly. Molly loved it. "I drive a water truck." He tugged at the brim of his cap and left a cluster of suds on the front of it, obscuring the K in Kings so that it read Ings.

  "We don't usually leave such a mess in our kitchen," she said, walking to pick up a dish towel. She began drying the dishes in the rack.

  He put up a soapy hand. "Don't you worry, I know. I see it all the time during fire season. Work piles up on top of work and all the usual stuff has to get shunted to the side just like you've got nothing better to do than talk to crews and clear stuff away from your house." He was scrubbing at the inside of a pot that had been used to cook oatmeal in the distant morning. Now it was the consistency of something that could hang pictures on the wall. Molly knew because she'd scrubbed it before.

  Here were Jack and the kids, crunching loudly across the driveway, ban
ging through the door like irritable ghosts. They surveyed her with curiosity, maybe even disapproval.

  "Hello," said the water truck driver.

  Jack stepped forward to shake hands and the man ran his hand down his shirt before offering it to Jack.

  "Hey guys, this is... I didn't get your name?" Molly said.

  "Blake," he said.

  "Blake. He drives a water truck and needed honey for his throat, so he decided to wash our dishes."

  Amber had her mouth open.

  "That's kind of you, Blake," Todd said, wandering over to the fridge and swinging it open. He stood gazing at the shelves for a minute. "What are we having for dinner?" he asked.

  Molly stared at him, then slammed the plate she was drying on the countertop. "I don't know! I can't do everything! Why does everyone have to eat all the time? Eat pickles." Todd gave her a look and went back to searching the fridge.

  "Calm down, Moll, no one's asking you to do everything," Jack said.

  "No, you just assume it."

  "I'm afraid I can't be much help there," the water truck driver told her. "I'm not a cook, just a dish washer."

  All at once Molly was angry with the water truck driver. She hadn't asked him to cook. She hadn't even asked him to be in her house! Though of course she was grateful for the dishwashing. Her stomach was feeling worse.

  Jack sat in one of the kitchen chairs and began unlacing his boots. Amber and Rain walked off, arguing or talking, Molly couldn't tell.

  "Where're you from, Blake?" Jack asked. He was only being polite, Molly knew.

  "Oh, Eureka. Live in a little trailer park there with my wife, Julie. She's fixed it up real nice for us, it's just so cozy you wouldn't believe it. Refurbished these chairs just the other day. I swear I thought they were different chairs when I got home. Julie, how many chairs do we need? I asked, but she had taken some fabric she found and completely covered them over, painted them too. She loved fooling me, just laughed and laughed. She's good at making things nice."

  Molly tried to get in-between the tines of the fork she was drying with her dishtowel. The towel was too thick; she got a thinner one out of the drawer.

  Jack sat and watched her, his hands on his knees now. Todd leaned against the wall and sipped a coke.

  "Is that right?" Jack said.

  What was killing Molly was the love this guy had for his little home, just a trailer. She held the fork in her hand for a moment before setting it down with piercing regret for all the times she'd been ungrateful.

  "Yep," the man said. "This, though, this right here is a piece of paradise. You folks sure are lucky."

  Molly looked through the kitchen window and in the dusk she saw little clumps of trees clustered like sheep on a distant hill. She carefully set a water glass on a shelf, making sure to close the cupboard door afterward, so he would know she really was a neat person, after all.

  Later, after Blake left, Molly did try to figure out something they could eat. Of course. For all Jack's talk, she noticed he wasn't leaping into an apron.

  They got the call from Vincent Conners: evacuate in the morning.

  "We're lucky he gave us the night," Jack said, when Molly protested. "We knew this was coming— that's why we've got the stack of boxes, the animals moved, everything ready."

  "What about the freezer?" Molly wanted to know. They had a side of beef in the deep freeze, butchered and packaged into neat lumpy shapes, wrapped in white paper. "The beef."

  Jack was quiet for a minute. "We'll have to get whatever coolers we can, fill them with ice and load them up in the morning."

  "That's not going to work!"

  "It'll have to work! If we lose the beef, we lose the beef, but we need to evacuate. The fire is coming, it's time to go."

  Molly turned away, shaking her head.

  When she went to the pantry Rain was right behind her. She'd been following Molly closely all evening.

  "We do have a lot of spaghetti sauce," Molly said at the pantry door, with Rain peeking in behind her, looking in at the rows of darkly glistening jars.

  "Yeah, we do," Rain said, and Molly turned to cup her cheek with one hand. Rain didn't pull away, she sort of nestled into Molly's hand, and Molly's heart seized up. She turned and took a sheaf of dry spaghetti noodles from the shelf. Handed Rain some jars of sauce. This was just like any other evening. She could do this. Rain heaved a big pot of water onto the stove. Heating all that water made the kitchen steam and sweat, but it would be quick and Molly was thinking of bed and sleep and dreams.

  She turned and caught Rain's wrist. "Hey. You okay?"

  "Yeah." Rain looked down, her black eyelashes smudges under her eyes. She was much taller than Molly. Her wrist felt like a small bird that Molly might cup in her hand if it crashed into a window and fell against the house. Rain ran her fingers through her hair, like Jack might, and it made her look so much like Jack that Molly's eyes filled with tears again.

  Rain went on. "Just, well. This is where we were happiest. I'm sad to leave it."

  Molly had a glimpse into the future, seeing who might be the one to take the ranch, if it survived. She mulled on it from time to time, thinking Todd, usually. But he always seemed to be slightly deflated here, he was fuller and expansive when he was away, like the time she had visited him in San Francisco and he grew taller and gleamed in her sight as he showed her around the city.

  "It'll be fine. We'll still have it," she said to her daughter now.

  Rain frowned at her. "How can you say that?"

  "I don't know. I don't want you to worry."

  She tried to open the jar of spaghetti sauce. The lid was extra tight, and as she strained at it she felt Rain reach to take it from her. Rain wrapped her long fingers around it and opened it quickly, then pried the seal off with a pop.

  "You loosened it," she said, her face an apology.

  Molly stood back while Rain poured the sauce into the pot that was waiting. How could she say it would be fine, when she'd been so angry at Greta for saying the same thing, at her mother for insisting on it? They all seemed to only want to placate each other.

  After dinner, huddled and sprawled on various chairs and sofas, they ate all the ice cream they could find in the freezer. Catherine seemed overtired, garrulous and old. Molly sat at the foot of her arm chair and offered her spoonfuls of ice cream, (to apologize, really, for what had happened at the barn) and Catherine accepted a few, then refused any more.

  Jack paced and muttered to himself, Catherine's head was lolled back in her chair; she appeared to be sleeping. Todd worked at getting everyone to play cards.

  "Come on, guys, what else are we going to do?" he asked.

  "Get some sleep," Jack said, midway through his trek from one wall to the other. "We have a lot to do tomorrow."

  "It's 9:00."

  "Don't you think it's a little callous to play cards at a time like this?" Molly asked.

  "The firefighters were, the other night."

  "Well, they make their living off of other people's misfortune." A chorus of protests sailed through the air and even Jack stopped mid-stride and shook his head at her. "Okay, okay," she said. "Let's play a round of hearts."

  They sat and played, Jack sitting a little apart, scribbling on a piece of paper, Catherine now fully asleep in her chair, Molly trying to remember to keep her cards hidden, the kids reaching into melting tubs of ice cream for another spoonful.

  Amber pulling a bottle of wine out of the pantry. "We'd better finish this off!" Todd leaving and returning with two jars of spaghetti sauce. "Lick off your spoons, kids, we can't leave these behind."

  Molly had a sudden memory of the psychiatric hospital, a memory that was sixteen years old this summer. It was all this joke cracking, this strange evacuation humor that had her thinking back to a small table with a green tablecloth in the common area of the hospital.

  Molly was so angry in the hospital. She had children at home, she didn't want to be locked up here, unable to get to th
em. Her breasts were drying up. They were so sore. Every day she had to express a little milk to ease them, but today they hardly hurt at all. It meant she was almost dry and she'd planned to nurse Rain until she was a year and a half, like the others. It wouldn't happen now.

  Two men sat at the table with her, playing a hand of Spades. She watched them, not really interested. Her lips were chapped and she couldn't be bothered to put Chapstick on them.

  "Be careful of Larry," one of the men said, gesturing with his cards to the other man. "Word has it," he leaned forward and whispered loudly, "he's crazy." He smiled, and Molly accidentally smiled with him.

  "Ah, but Alan," said the other man, tenderly laying cards in piles. "I'm not the one with bandages on my wrists." And the two of them laughed and laughed, Molly unable to stop herself from smiling along.

  It wasn't really funny, why did they do it? She supposed it built a bridge, a path to keep them out of the deep pit of shame that they could so easily fall into. They who had failed at living. Shame was deep for people like them, not something you could dip your toe in, something that would swallow you whole.

  Greta showed up at around 11:00, after Jack had escorted Catherine back to the guest cabin. There was a tired hippie girl caught in Greta's wake.

  "Harvest time," she said. "David couldn't come."

  The marijuana harvest. Molly should have remembered. She was sure she would have if she was watching people spend more money than usual in town, throwing down huge tips and ordering expensive bottles of wine with the freely flowing money.

  David wouldn't leave at harvest time unless there was a fire in his own bedroom. He had hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.

  "I brought one of the trimmers, though," Greta went on. "In case she can be any help."

  The girl was a transient worker, one of the kids who drifted through town at harvest time to find work. She was dressed in different shades of brown, like camouflage, like a tree in late fall, with short brown dreadlocks and eyes that leapt from surface to surface. She had deep dimples as she smiled at Molly and held out a hand.