North woods, p.30
North Woods,
p.30
There are meals in the house, of lush greens, impossible tomatoes, gathered from the farmers’ markets, grown in the garden, foraged from the woods. There is lovemaking in the room upstairs, and by a pool that appears, fleetingly, for fifteen years, before it sunders and spills its water deep into the earth. In the basement dug for shelter from the heat.
There is a murder. There are deaths from falls, from drownings, from hunting accidents. There is a suicide. There are two births, a wedding—many weddings; indeed, proving that one can’t escape one’s origins, the house becomes a “wedding destination” until Osgood hears of plans to clear the gnarled apples, and she helps him drag a deer carcass, rich with maggots, and leaves it in the bridal suite.
More skylights pierce the roof. Another ell is added to the eastern wall to make a “theater.” The floor is torn up, the windows are replaced. The garage becomes a barn again, the barn becomes a recreation room, the recreation room is subdivided into guest rooms, more walls go up, come down. It is a bed and breakfast, a “Center for Holistic Living,” a retreat for poets who convene each night to read each other poems about the last days of the world. It is a strange, bunkered barrack filled with blue-robed men and women who tear out all the wires, smash the televisions, burn them, and entomb the shattered, melted mass inside the earth. Call each other Patience, Perseverance, Fortitude, strip even the plants and animals of their old names. It is a hunter’s cabin, until the hunter goes off into the woods and doesn’t come back.
The pages of the Almanac turn. There are changes, warned of, and unexpected. Plagues of caterpillar, a thrashing worm, a porcelain fly attired like a gaudy polka-dotted marionette. There are good days, of cool winds, and murmuring warblers, and soft rains that leave the forest lush and damp. Monarchs, still, against all expectations. Many good days, filled with beauty, that give respite from what could be an unrelenting grief.
She waits. One by one the big trees fall. Soon the hemlocks are gone, the ash is gone; some years, she travels to see the sugar maples that hold on in Canada and Northern Maine. The apples still bear fruit, cuttings of cuttings of cuttings, grafted onto rootstock that can withstand the heat. Scarlet oak and pawpaw and sweet gum from the hills of Carolina fight to rise above the ranks of burning bush and multiflora rose until, again, the land is cleared to pasture cattle, sheep.
Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past. She has come to think of them as her private Archive, herself as Archivist, and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change. During her life, she’d dreamed about these ancient forests, but what she finds is glorious beyond imagination. Skies blackened by bird flocks, valleys full of grazing moose and elk. The glens echo with the songs of long-lost warblers (and by now, she’s learned them), children singing in Mohican, wolf howl. Rivers so thick with fish that she could walk on them. The ghosts of the damselflies, dryad’s saddle, elm trees: a thousand angels on a blade of grass.
Alone, she walks beneath the soaring chestnuts, lies out beneath the thunderheads, and lets the rain fall through her, on her, through her. Watches the wind baffle the once-maples, whip the fluff of milkweed bloom across the meadow, tear, one by one, the shingles from the roof.
Autumns, children—from where she does not know—come to steal the apples, behead the milkweed, and climb on one another’s shoulders to peer in windows swiftly vanishing behind the wild grape.
* * *
—
Far away, there are more changes, some terrible, some wonderful. People cease to come. It is not over—it is not so simple—but now these mountains are left alone. No more weekenders, no more ascetics. The few remaining holdouts, barricaded in their shelters, pass away, leaving their cans to rust, their guns to vanish in the crawling fingers of the creeper. When the trees fall on the road from Oakfield, no one comes to clear them away.
Kudzu and honeysuckle succeed the forest and the orchard, overrun the house. The roads grow choked with knotweed, tree of heaven, tearthumb. The apples wither in the darkness, yield finally to the heat.
Of the house, the ant and mold continue what they once began.
Osgood takes a bag of cuttings, kisses her upon the forehead, and heads into the north.
Still, she stays.
* * *
—
And then, one day, far away, someone sets a fire, clearing brush for game.
It is autumn, a dry autumn. They have gone from years of flood to drought, to flood to drought again. Now the flames find ranks of desiccated barberry, dead Callery pear, tangles of smothering bittersweet and privet, pine that once evolved to thrive in burning Georgia barrens. Fanned by the dry, south wind, it comes tearing over the country, consuming the forests that have grown up over the abandoned homes.
She is in the woods when it reaches the yellow house, or what remains of it, the jumble of wood and stone beneath June’s fern and snakeroot. She runs down the trail to watch the flames consume it. There is no hesitation. She is accustomed to indifference—it is what one might call the great lesson of the world—and yet she still expects a pause, some kind of recognition or acknowledgment. But the fire doesn’t stop. It takes two hours, and the house is gone. For a moment, a stillness hangs over the rubble, and then it all begins again.
For Ariana and Selah
Acknowledgments
For their patience, their love of words, their walks in the woods and in the snow: Sara, Rafa, Peter. For my mother and father, for listening to my stories since the beginning. For sharing his awe for the forests of Massachusetts, its ghosts and literatures: Kevin McGrath. For showing me where to dig my wells: Tinker Green. For Josh Mooney for companionship in the mountains. For time travel: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. For the Ashmead’s Kernel: Wyatt Mason. For my family, Debbie and Emma, Susan and Howard, Charlotte and Ed, Sylvia and Aaron, Pearl and Cotton, my nieces and nephews; and friends whose help and wisdom have found their way into these pages, particularly Robert Alter, Lyn Hejinian, Mariko Johnson, Tanya Luhrmann, Jill McCorkle, and Jed Purdy. For Carol Cosman and Heloisa Jahn, who knew this story as a seedling, and remain, today, acutely missed. And for my colleagues at Stanford, and companions in the New England woods: Caroline and Tim, Dina and Jeff, Elena and Eric, Jess and Dan.
For Figaro, for showing me where to dig.
For the planting and pruning: my editors Andy Ward at Random House and Jocasta Hamilton at John Murray. For guiding me down the right trails: my agent Christy Fletcher. And Evan Camfield, Melissa Chinchillo, Sarah Fuentes, Donald Lamm, Katharine Morris, Carrie Neill, Laura Roberts, Kaeli Subberwal, and Terry Zaroff-Evans.
For the means to write and explore: the New Literary Project and the Guggenheim Foundation.
For the work of William Cronon and Tom Wessels, whose words bear responsibility only for this book’s education, and none of its mistakes. For the good people at iNaturalist.org and the Merlin Bird app, who have made the natural world more legible. For Clarisse Hart and a tour of Harvard Forest. And for Professors Svihra (“Courtship of the Elm Bark Beetle,” California Agriculture, 1980) and Nelson (“Mating Systems in Ascomycetes: A Romp in the Sac,” Trends in Genetics, 1996), for opening my eyes.
Finally, enduringly, for my hosts, in the forests of northwestern Massachusetts and southern Vermont, on Mohican ancestral homeland, in the watersheds of the Hoosic, Deerfield, Housatonic, and Walloomsac rivers: among many others, the ash and beech, the striped maple, the sugar maple, the northern red oak, the hemlock, the clubmoss, the spring warblers, the flying squirrels, the porcupines, the boletes, the dryad’s saddle, the ostrich fern, the catamount, the wild apples. And for those human beings who have worked tirelessly to protect these and other forests, and continue to do so today.
By Daniel Mason
The Piano Tuner
A Far Country
The Winter Soldier
A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth
About the Author
Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, The Winter Soldier, and A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, adapted for opera and the stage, and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His short stories have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. He is an assistant professor in the Stanford University department of psychiatry.
danielmasonbooks.com
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_144910209_
Left to right:
The last Years Shoot of the White Figg.
The last Years Shoot of the Vine, Pruned after the usual Method of pruning.
The Black Mulberry in Bud
Two Years wood of the Non-paicel Apple
One Years wood of the Non-paicel Apple
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October—begins on Tuesday.
The farmer joyful now brings home the corn,
The yellow ears his well-filled house adorn,
The husking party jocund at the pile,
Strip off the husks, and laugh and sing and smile.
Agriculture, Husbandry, Domestic Economy &c.
The first week or two of this month is generally pleasant and agreeable weather, and favorable for business of most kinds, either in the city or country. Farmers may find enough to do; threshing grain, harvesting, ploughing, building wall, and sowing and harrowing in winter grain, will afford plenty of profitable employment in the field or barn, while spinning, weaving, and knitting occupy the industrious housewife and her amiable daughters within doors. The diligent mechanic is busy in preparing the necessary tools and implements and other matters for his customers, and all things go in harmony if they go on right.
As you treat your land, so it will treat you. Feed it with manures liberally, and it will yield you bread bountifully.
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Views of the same Tree, Taken on Three Successive Years, 1909, 1910, and 1911 Respectively. Wyncote, Pa.
[The branches have been cut off as fast as they were killed. The tree will die this summer (1912).]
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Brutkolonie des Fichtenborkenkäfers.
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SPORTING VIEWS, GAME PICTURES, Duck Shooting, Deer Hunting, Canoeing and Camping
PHOTOGRAPHED BY T. W. INGERSOLL, ST. PAUL, MINN
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Masterfully, toward female.
Given with one flap of wings, at a female on perch.
see p. 420.
One flap of wing toward female with each double note.
For circumstances, see p. 420.
Gently, toward mate.
Given by male when just about to tick female’s head.
Given on alighting on nest when female there.
For circumstances, see p. 420.
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MAY—begins on Wednesday.
May, like Arabia, breathes; her morning flowers,
New sweetened with the dew and evening showers,
Send forth a charming fragrance as they blow,
And causing health on every cheek to glow.
Agriculture, Husbandry, Domestic Economy &c.
In ploughing land for planting, should it happen to be on the side of a hill, it is best not to plough the furrows up and down the hill, but across it in an opposite direction, to prevent the rain that falls upon it from running down into the valley. In planting corn, some farmers lose considerable by planting the hills too far apart. About two and a half feet between hills, and three feet between rows, is far enough, if you drop four or five kernels in a hill. Four stalks in a hill are enough to grow, and if any be thinned out, it is best to do it before the roots get too much entangled with one another. If ashes be applied to corn on land broken up in the sward, it is best to put it on the corn just as it is coming up. Plaster may be applied at the time that ashes are, or later, or both.
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Daniel Mason, North Woods
