* * *

  —

  Charles Osgood, proprietor of Osgood’s Tree and Lawn, also Osgood’s Window and Siding, Osgood’s Oil, Osgood’s Roof and Chimney, Osgood’s Plowing, and Osgood’s Pool Service, was at that moment traveling to inspect a ruptured septic tank. It would just be brief, he said, though he’d also been asked to fix the A/C at another property, and then they had to swing by the Erickson place—there was something in the pool, a muskrat or whistlepig. Granted, Janet Erickson often exaggerated, he said, his speech picking up the momentum of someone a bit starved for conversation. Drank a little in the daytime, Janet did. Often called him for something in the pool, but it had always vanished by the time he got there. Of course, he had his suspicions why she was really calling. His voice rose in a falsetto: Mr. Osgood, however might I reward your services? Yes, once the rumor got out that a gent’s still got some gristle in his sausage, half the lasses in the county had a muskrat in their pool. Nothing new under the sun, though, he said. Oh, there were those who complained how the youth had been corrupted by dancing and fluting, or got their wigs up in a wad when the Fludd boy was apprehended with that ewe behind the Coopers’. As if no farm boy tupped a ewe when they were younger! Oh, things were far worse in the olden days, in his opinion, and if anyone disagreed with him, he asked them who’d been scalped of late. And he got ’em there—they just looked at him with the expression of a heifer who’d hit upon a fire beetle in its cud. Yes, he’d take a sheepy congress over a scalping any day, and wouldn’t even say the sheep was worse for it. One might ask why Ol’ Vic Cooper had sheep anyway if he was an investment banker in the city. An affectation was what it was, like the hayfields that he grew to get a farmer’s tax break. This was the same man who converted the old van Hassel barn into an indoor pool, so he could swim during the winter, on the four days he was there.

  “Can you imagine?”

  “No,” said Nora, who was beginning to wonder if she should have kept walking. The truck was going sixty, a dirt rake was leaning against her shoulder, and the old man was fully turned to her while he was driving. Had he said “gristle in his sausage”? She tried to place his speech, which now sounded like a Yankee farmer playing a deranged English lord, or maybe a lord pretending he was a backwoods Yankee fahmah, or maybe just someone who’d done a lot of traveling in his time, and was no longer certain where he was.

  It didn’t help that he appeared not to have a single tooth left in his head.

  “Me, I’m a vegetarian,” said Charles Osgood.

  “Oh…yes?” Right: he had been talking about sheep.

  “No, not a vegetarian…what do they call the other?”

  “Vegan?” she offered cautiously, deeply wishing he would keep his eyes on the road.

  “The very same. And I’ll tell you how it came about. See, once I was courting, and the lass, she was a…what do you call the ones with the armpits a wee bit…?” He lifted his arm so that she could see the tufts of hair.

  Nora, who rarely shaved her armpits either, was hardly in the spirit for this particular conversation. “I think a lot of women…”

  He waved his hand. “Yes, yes, I know, I know.” He raised a finger. “Suffrage, right?”

  “Well—”

  “Truly, nothing but the greatest respect for the weaker sex. Know too many men who tell their wives to go render the chicken and then put up a stink when they find a gizzard in her petticoats. A tough lot, they have, the women. And I should know—I raised two daughters, apples of my eye.” He paused. “But I was saying…? Yes! This lassie…what do you call her? Armpits, lute, sandals…Wait, how do you call those sandals with the little Puritan buckles?”

  “Um…Birkenstocks?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Was she a hippie?” asked Nora, trying to speed the story up.

  Charles Osgood touched his forehead. “And a bonny one she was. Oh, you’re a bright gal. ’Swounds!” He slammed on the brakes.

  With a clatter of rake and scythe, Nora slid from the seat and barely stopped herself from striking the windshield.

  “Drove right past the place where we were going!” said Osgood with a laugh. He put the truck into reverse, swiveled to look out the back window, and hit the gas again. Again, Nora lurched forward. “Careful,” he said, as if it needed mentioning. “No, um—”

  “Seatbelts?” said Nora.

  He slapped the dashboard. “Very good. Was going to say ‘yoke.’ ”

  The truck shot backward up the road. “So,” he said. “I was talking about the…Why do I keep forgetting the word?”

  Her eyes flicked anxiously between road and driver. “Hippie?”

  “No, hippie I remember. The one where a person only eats raw food…Ah, my memory! Plugged operculum, they say. Come, now, what’s the word? Milk from the teat, et cetera et cetera…”

  “Well, I said ‘vegan’ before, but…”

  “Vegan. Thank you. And, for a while, I went along with it, would go out into the barn and take suck with my hippie, just like Romulus and Remus, until she died of brucellosis.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Ah”—he waved—“I’ve buried a lot of them over the years.” A pause. “Ay, that sounded dreadful. Gave you a fright!”

  The main reason Nora was now frightened was that she was going fifty in reverse, next to a scythe. “Say,” she said, after a while, “I think we are getting close to where we started.”

  “So I bet you are wondering how a fellow specializing in trees gets into septic,” said Osgood.

  “This is where you picked me up,” said Nora.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” said Nora.

  He slammed on the brakes again. “Well, I’ll be…”

  In silence, they waited, dust settling around the truck.

  Osgood was thinking, scratching his head.

  “Are we lost?” asked Nora.

  “Lost? My dear girl! I’ve lived here forever. But, God, it’s easy to get confused…Used to be a big oak over at the corner…and a stream over here, but then it was diverted for the golf course…chestnuts all along the path, but they were dead after the blight…elms over by the crossroads, but now it’s a General Dollar…maples until they cut them down during the Japanese bowling-alley craze…And don’t go looking for cedars on Cedar Swamp Road or beavers at Beaver Creek…”

  “You were going to check on a ruptured septic tank. Then a muskrat.”

  “Ah!”

  “And then,” said Nora, “you were going to take me…” But where? To the police to get cited for driving on an expired license? To a motel she couldn’t afford? To call her parents at age thirty-one and admit her life’s mistakes? She turned to find Charles Osgood looking at her, and because she had no one else to talk to, it all came tumbling out.

  * * *

  —

  It was amazing how a story that once might have filled the very rich hours of a therapist’s company, or the quiet of many an insomniac night, could be distilled to a stranger in less than the time it took for him to down a second Mr. Pibb.

  When she finished, he was looking past her into the fields. He didn’t answer. Whether for the jostling of the truck, the warmth, or the effort to keep herself from breaking down and crying, she found herself beginning to feel a little nauseated. Usually, her insulin pump kept her sugars under control, but with the stress, or perhaps the soda, she suspected they were off. She looked down at the pump. The number hadn’t changed since last night. She tried to turn it on and off. No luck. Screen frozen. She took a deep breath.

  Charles Osgood reached for the gear shift.

  “Excuse me,” said Nora. “But do you mind waiting a moment? I have diabetes…I think my pump was broken in the accident. I need to do a finger stick…” She began to rummage through her backpack. Inside, it was a mass of wet notepaper and some old food wrappings and a hat and flashlight and a book, and she was suddenly gripped by the fear that she had left her backup monitor and test strips in the car. Trying not to panic, she began to empty the bag onto the seat beside her.

  The test kit was at the very bottom. She unzipped its case, relieved to find that it was dry. She felt a moment of self-consciousness as she wiped her finger with an alcohol pad.

  But Charles Osgood had reached over the pile of tools, and picked up the pamphlet from the MFA exhibition that had fallen on the seat.

  “Pray, what,” he asked, “is this?”

  She told him as she pricked her finger and transferred the drop of blood. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him squinting as he read the text. The monitor beeped, but the screen said nothing. Now her backup wasn’t reading either. She cursed under her breath. She would really need to find a pharmacy.

  “Do you think…” she began.

  But Osgood had put the pickup back into drive and continued along the road. “You asked how a man who begins in trees finds himself in septic,” he said again.

  * * *

  —

  It was a long story, he told her, but he’d try to make it quick. He had come to the land back when it was mostly woods, purchased a lot to raise an apple orchard, cultivated a variety he called the Wonder, probably never heard of it, most exquisite thing the world had ever tasted. Made Braeburns taste like sheep dung in comparison, and don’t get him started on the Red Delicious—My Red Arse would be a better name. But then the war came and he’d gone off to fight and left the place in the care of his daughters, and after a time, the girls had had a little falling out. By then he’d had what one might call a change in circumstances, and before he knew it the land was someone else’s, a woodlot had grown up over the orchard, and the new owners, all six in a row, had their own problems, so it wasn’t until recently, when the house was on the market, that he saw his chance again. By then, of course, he couldn’t afford to buy it; dollar didn’t buy what it used to. But when the land was sold to a new owner—a rather famous actor, he gathered from all the gossip in the neighborhood—he saw his opportunity. And that’s when he came out of what one might call “retirement” and left his card. Of course, it wasn’t hard to get hired. With all the locals being forced out of the area by the second-home market, there was almost no one left to do the work. When the neighbors learned about how—and he said the name of the actor—had found a guy to do his trees, he started getting asked to take care of other houses. And from trees it went to lawns and pests, and pests to fencing and siding, and on to heating and septic. He could barely keep up with all the work.

  Still, his real passion was for his orchard. And that was what he was getting to, the whole reason for the story. He still had some friends in the area, old folks like him, but they were busy with their own hobbies—painting, hiking, archaeology, balladeering, penance, et cetera. As for his daughters, well, with regards to apple trees, one of them had what one might call—to use a word he’d picked up from a book he found at the house some years ago—a “complex,” and it was probably better not to “activate it.” Best just to let her move her stones around. And the other daughter, well, she was in love with this Hebrew fellow, and making up for lost time, and it had been very difficult to get her to do anything, for fifteen years.

  Anyway, he said, he supposed Nora could see what he was getting at. Soon summer would be upon them, and with the apples fruiting, he would have to fix the fencing, else the deer would ruin everything. Could she imagine how many deer there were these days? Made one really miss the panthers. And Nora could stay as long as she wanted, could help him with the orchard. Needless to say there were many lovely—what did she call them?—spring ephemerals in his woods.

  They had driven quite a way by then, down the long road and into town, then up another road, which snaked past modern homes on sprawling lawns. Nora listened quietly.

  “And if he needs to use the house?” she asked, a little too awestruck to use the actor’s name.

  “Ah, but it’s been ages,” said Osgood. “He purchased the cottage as a second home when he was acting in a summer festival in Corbury Junction. He now comes just once a year, and he always telephones ahead, so I can get it ready. But then…Well, how should I put this? Unless you want to meet him, there is no need for him to know you’re also there.”

  Nora, puzzled, looked over at the old man, but for the first time, he was looking at the road ahead, as if he didn’t wish to meet her eye. And then she was afraid, not of Osgood, whose presence she suddenly felt she needed, but of something vague and undefined, as if the stakes were suddenly far greater than a roof over her head. Quietly, she thanked him. Yes. Yes, she’d like to stay, until she got back on her feet. There was just the question of getting a new infusion pump, more insulin.

  He didn’t answer her.

  “Is there a pharmacy nearby?” she asked.

  Charles Osgood was silent. Outside, as the road rose higher, the season seemed to be changing into earlier stages of spring. The road was lined with swaying, bright-green beeches. The forest floor still mostly bare. At last he turned to her. “I suppose you didn’t look inside your car?”

  “That’s not it,” she said. “I have everything. I just think some water must have gotten into the monitor, and I need a new one. Maybe just new batteries.”

  He shook his head. “I mean today, this morning: you didn’t look?”

  His face was infinitely kind.

  “Well…no. Why?…” She paused. She felt a cold wave, a kind of seasickness. “Is there a reason?”

  He looked at her again. It occurred to her that somehow the rattling had stopped, and the truck was moving so fast it seemed as if they were floating. The trees parted like a great green curtain. And he could see the understanding cross her face.

  She wished to ask him how it was and what the rules were. What she had brought with her, and what she’d left. How one crossed the boundaries, whom she’d meet, and would there come another end. But there was time for this, she knew—lots of time to study and learn how this new world worked. For outside, as they climbed higher on the road, something extraordinary was happening. She saw it first in the beech trunks, now unpoxed by canker, and in the elms that rose like fountains above the crowns of hickory and birch, and in the ash still with its skin, and—

  “Wait. My God. Those…those are chestnuts.”

  A yellow house appeared at the end of the road. The truck stopped and they descended and began to climb the hill. Rows of flowering apples stretched up toward the forest. Waxwings lifted from the branches. A woodpecker drummed on a tree, and Osgood, not breaking stride, saluted, and continued on his march. A wind came and filled the air with petals, and he led her through the orchard and to the forest’s edge. From there, a trail wound through the trees and stones and over fallen logs with high fans of upturned roots. Dozens of tracks broke from the path, and then converged again, but Osgood kept going, until they crossed a glen carpeted with ferns and clubmoss, to where a man was painting, his hat hanging on a nearby branch.

  Orchids and lilies and trillium on his canvas. Behind them, before them, walls of birdsong. The man turned, and, without speaking, rose and went to her, and they stood together and looked skyward as the canopy closed.

  Succession

  SHE stays. In the forest, the canopy grows thicker. Shield and ostrich ferns overgrow the spring ephemerals. Ruby-throated hummingbirds fly in from the south, swallowtails and wood satyrs flit between the dogwoods, and the songbirds find their mates and settle down to nest. In the mornings, in the forest, she can hear the caterpillars eating. Queen Anne’s lace begins to sprout up in the orchard, beneath the fruiting apples, while the young deer stare hungrily beyond the fence.

  In the house, she sleeps on a large, soft mattress, on the top floor, with a skylight and a view of the woods. She showers beneath a gilded spout, cooks meals of morels and ramps, and eggs she steals from neighbors’ henhouses. She does not need to eat, she learns, or shower, really, but she is relieved to know such pleasures remain. Just as she learns that she retains the joy of swimming, of diving deep into the dark water of the mountain ponds, unchained from breath. On warm days, she lies naked on the stones, and lets the sun pass through her, as she does the tumbling water from the falls. She spies upon the famous actor when he comes, sleeps by him in his bed, grows tired of his beauty, the hum of the air-conditioning, a gardener’s constant mowing of the lawn. She sleeps in bear dens, in empty tree houses, on the decks of warm, untended pools. Wanders through the fern and goldenrod and Joe Pye weed. Returns after the actor leaves.

  She notices. Indeed, she has no demands but noticing. There are no grant applications anymore, no meetings, unless she decides one day to haunt them. No email; along with immortality, metempsychosis, the taste of mushrooms once poisonous to life, it is one of death’s great virtues. There is loneliness. Though she has companions, they are no less complicated, no less insufferable than they were in life, especially those who can’t remember that they already told you the story about their bayonetting ninety-seven times. She hears the stories of the ones who went before her, the lovers, the captive, the soldiers, the mother and son. Who have returned to their people, or gone farther north to seek another hermitage. Others drift off slowly, to the sea, to haunt the places where they couldn’t be together, to tour the country in their roadster, hunting for treasures behind locked gates. Osgood stays.

  There are reunions. When the time comes, she goes to meet old friends, her parents, Luz, but she doesn’t tarry. She does not wish to miss what happens, the sequence of events.

  * * *

  —

  Three years later, somewhere, far away, a small plane disappears into the ocean. Once again, the Register of Deeds takes down his volume and spreads it open on the table. The succession resumes: the actor’s nephew for a season, for eight a local teacher, who sells it to a pair of weekenders. For four years it is the home of a woman and a little yellow dog, who barks at Nora gliding through the hallways. A couple fleeing fires on the far side of the country settle there one summer and rise each day to greet the world in little grids upon their screens. The lines go down after a heat wave overwhelms the local power station. Soon this happens regularly; the couple leaves. They are followed by a doctor with a rural practice. His daughter, her son. A man who sits for hours before a bedside mirror, staring at a darkness even Nora cannot fathom. A young woman, a graduate student in ornithology who reminds her of herself. Who comes one spring carrying a thumb drive onto which she’s transferred reels of film belonging to a great-great-grandmother she never knew. Looking for a world that she can’t see.