Hemlock Development Company has its headquarters right on 810E, in a tiny office that was reserved at the sale of the Schoolhouse Mine to the Unity Corporation. Schoolhouse Mine had once been a pit mine (not unlike Leona’s Dresden Mine) and was the project of Hemlock Development Company in the early part of the century. When the usefulness of quartz in the technological age advanced, Tom Hanford was able to sell the mine, and Unity Corporation has since expanded it into one of the most extensive mining operations in the United States. Silica of the highest quality from Hemlock’s rocks goes into computer chips and cell phones, powering the newly technical world.

Hanford keeps HQ for his development company in the same building, and has scratched out a large lot for his dozers, dump trucks, and other machinery, but the mine no longer belongs to his family. Still, it is not uncommon for people to assume that Tom owns Schoolhouse Mine, which may or may not have been the source of some of last night’s confusion, when protestors visited the headquarters near dusk and slashed tires, broke windows, stole safety gear, and what’s worse, spray-painted their agenda on the sides of vehicles. To top it off, they damaged windows, siding, and vehicles belonging to Unity Corp, no doubt thinking they belonged to Tom.

And the paint is the wrong color. Harris sighs. Sitting in the sun, up two bucks of scaffolding, he considers just using the paint anyway, save himself a trip. But then he pictures his brother’s trucks rolling up and down highway 810 everyday with a two-toned reminder of the vandalism that made the paint job necessary, and reconsiders. He gathers up the bag and begins to climb down the scaffolding, thinking of his mother. She had taught her boys to value each other, and to hold each other up. Even when Tom and Harris were coming of age, and it was clear who was the more pragmatic leader, and who was the more sentimental, there had never been competition or ill demeanor between them. That’s why Harris has insisted on covering up the graffiti himself. Despite his utter uncertainty about the situation at hand, he wants to show Tom that he is not faltering in his loyalty.

“Need help?” Manuel, Tom’s equipment foreman, is hurrying across the gravel lot, sweat lining his brow.

“No thank you Manuel. I bought the wrong color,” Harris shares. “Gonna go back and exchange it.”

“Oh okay. Well, happy to help, sir, if you need.”

“Thank you, Manuel,” Harris waves, and Manuel gets into his beat-up car, and rattles out down the highway. Harris, alone in the lot now, is struck by the loneliness of his brother’s work, compared to the bustle and communication of managing the Tanawha Lodge. In a way, he envies the difference, though he can’t quite identify the longing that he feels, standing in the August sun. The wind blows, turning up leaves and lifting a fine granite dust into the air. A yellow butterfly hovers in it, seemingly unable to command direction with its flight. Harris coughs, knows the butterfly will die under the slight weight of the dust on its thin wings, knows it will thunderstorm later, despite the sun above him now.

Some of Tom’s trucks are already out on the road, going about business with skulls and crossbones tattooed on their flanks, or “USE BEETLES” written in huge letters across the side of some. But the dump truck still out of commission reads “FREE MAYA M.” in black paint on both sides and the back. Maya. Harris feels a burning sorrow to think that the complexity of saving hemlocks has become about Maya and Tom, when clearly it isn’t.

Harris hesitates, turns back toward the scaffolding and begins climbing it again. He figures painting over the words with the wrong color beats leaving them another day, and he can come back tomorrow with the better yellow. He goes back to work, one hand holding his shirt over his mouth, the other hand spraying the neon yellow paint. If his partner Neil were here, he would scold Harris for not having a proper mask, but Harris begins to enjoy the haze of yellow paint, the sound of the aerosol release, the canvas of mustard and neon steel that spans his visual field. Work that takes over the whole body is good work, the kind he has been missing as he tools about Tanawha Lodge, overseeing the activities of his employees, checking in on guests with a welcoming smile. He stops and allows the fine yellow spray to finish falling over his silver hair, his glasses, and his clothes. He hasn’t covered a fifth of the vehicle side. He sits down and takes a few breaths absent of paint fumes. Gathering the bag of paint cans by the handles, he drops it down to the ground, lays down on the scaffolding and looks up at the muscular clouds, allowing a memory to form.

∞

October 11, 1988: Harris is lying down on hard pavement, looking up at a grey monolith of sky. People mill around him by the hundreds, shouting, laughing. Neil, the magnetic man he has attached himself to recently, is tracing around Harris with a broken piece of chalk. The energy in the air is high voltage. Neil shouts,

“ACT UP! FIGHT BACK! FIGHT AIDS!” just as he connects the line at Harris’ heel.

“Now do mine,” Neil says, smiling. As another protestor pulls Harris up from his place, Neil writes Harris’ name in the chalk outline, and lies down next to it.

“ACT UP! FIGHT BACK! FIGHT AIDS!” They are expecting 2000 people. Maybe more. But all that Harris can think about, here in the parking lot of the Federal Drug Administration in Maryland, is his father.

Harris does not have AIDS. If he did, he would be wearing a white t-shirt and a white bandana, and be locked elbow-to-elbow in the front of the crowd. If he did, he would be dying. But instead, he is among the many who are afraid of getting AIDS, afraid of his father finding out that he is gay.

Neil is planning to get arrested. The crowd will cheer for him when he does. Someone is blowing a whistle, raucous and high, and someone is speaking on a PA system, and someone is on the awning above the office building door, hanging protest signs and lighting little fires. More people are here than there are in all of Hemlock, and more noise and more energy than Harris has ever imagined. He is electric with excitement. He is here. He is out here. This is Neil’s world. This is Neil’s fight. Neil, who came from California after his mentor died, on a wave of anger and fear.

Harris watches Neil push into the crowd toward the doors, pulling off his jacket. His muscles are taut, and they push handsome lines through the black Silence = Death t-shirt Neil got at the last die-in in New York City. Harris follows him, giving in to his enchantment. Bodies close in around them and the autumn air grows thicker. Harris takes off his hat, as they move closer to the line of police officers, some standing with hands in their pockets, laughing at the crowd. Neil reaches back and pulls Harris forward, just as he did the first night they met. He points at the line of policemen. One of them is wearing latex gloves, as if he may be infected with AIDS at any minute. Neil is laughing about it, but Harris is suddenly angry. He lunges, blind, past Harris, into the line.

“He’s wearing gloves! He’s wearing gloves!” Harris yells. His chest has a fire in it. He is yelling, other people are yelling, and they begin to advance on the line. The whistle continues to blow. The crowd is laughing at the cop, cheering Harris’ anger. Someone pushes forward, shoving Harris into the line of policemen. He topples over, catching himself with his hands.

“You alright brother?” One of the activists in white is sitting, elbows linked with other activists at the doorway. His shirt reads: PERSON LIVING WITH AIDS. The protestors are all being arrested. Harris looks up over the line of policemen, searching for Neil, who he finds, smiling, fist in the air. “SHAME! SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!” they yell at the officers, the building, the government. Power. Harris is being grabbed around the waist. He looks back to find the officer in gloves, his mustache a thick brown stain.

Harris is being arrested. He is the last in a long line of men being taken to a paddy wagon.

The last man in white grabs his hand and is saying, “Yes! YES!” to Harris, and shaking his arm by the elbow. “Yes, man!”

“WE’RE GONNA SEIZE CONTROL! WE’RE PISSED!” the men in white are screaming. The whistle continues to blow, shrill and high and piercing. Harris looks back again to see Neil rushing toward the cops and the line of men headed to the paddy wagon.

“Get BACK! GET BACK,” the cop yells at him, but Neil does not obey. Harris is dizzy, he is giddy. He is thinking of his father. Neil’s lips are on his lips, Neil’s fingers are grasping his fingers.

“I’ll be next! Way to go Harris! Way to go! I’ll be next!” Neil is shouting, and the crowd behind him is cheering as Harris is taken away.

But Neil does not get arrested that day at the FDA, and Harris is bailed out by his brother Tom, who has been trying to phone him because their father has died.

“Harris what are you doing in Maryland?” Tom’s voice is worried. “I bought your ticket from New York.”

“I’ll get back to New York.”

“Get back to New York. Then get back to Hemlock. OK?”

“Yeah. OK.”

On the flight back to Charlotte, Harris thinks of his father who will never meet Neil. His father will never know that Harris loves a man. Harris is ashamed and relieved, and Neil is jabbering beside him on the airplane. Neil will come first to visit Harris in his “cute” hotel. Then, exactly one year after the death of Harris’ father, on the anniversary of Harris’ arrest when ACT UP and ACT NOW seized control of the FDA, Neil will move permanently to Hemlock and into Harris’ life. Neil, who is brave and radiant, and unashamed. Alive, the way Harris felt, lying on the Maryland pavement.

∞

Benji,

It sucks in here, but that’s on purpose, so joke’s on me. I’m getting lots of letters. People are so amped! I can’t believe it, ███████████████. It’s like on one side of it, I’m so broken that this is going down as attempted murder, and I’ll probably lose any appeals on account of the █████ man, but on the other hand people are paying attention. This lady from Wild Earth Magazine wrote to me. I think she’s coming to visit soon. Can you believe it? It helps, you know? Thinking that at least something is happening, and people are waking up, even if it means I have to waste away in the slammer. Anyway, the lawyers are already working on appeals, so I still have hope that I can get out of here before I die. I miss everyone at the shop. I miss just seeing everyone about to have their normal day and making them the same drinks over and over. Even the sad people, like that lady Julia who comes in with her cute kids and just stares out the window while they play. Anyway, I guess you’re getting to know all of them now. I’m glad for you. Anyway, that’s enough of my ███. I love you too. Write me back. I know you will. Love Maya

Benji folds the letter for the seventh time and puts it back into his portfolio. Maya’s letters, mixed in with the paperwork of his investment clients. How fitting. Fitting to the confusion of his life right now. The morning is already hot and still, and his glasses slide down his nose as he reads and re-reads the note. Reading her words leaves him with the strangest feeling. Deep love for her, love that he hadn’t been able to feel or express for so long, and also…what is it? Fear? Is Maya delusional? What does she actually think is going to happen? And does she really think she’s coming home? Either way, he just feels sad. Sad and lonely and angry. Confused.

He stubs out his cigarette, and waves to Mason, driving past on his morning errand. Without thinking, he puts the cigarette butt and the letter into his portfolio and pushes his way back into the shop.

∞

Within the elaborate shells of giant living hemlocks pulses a rushing vascular thoroughfare. The trees grow with incredible patience, but signaling from root to branch tip is lightning fast. Dye that has entered a tree’s system can filter down to the finest of root hairs in less than five minutes, evidence of the tree’s busy internal circuitry. And this, this nervousness and rushing up of the nutrients the soil provides, and the scampering intelligent redistribution of those nutrients to every growing cell, is what allows the chemical pesticide imidacloprid to deliver a lethal gulp of sap to the woolly adelgid pest.

When imidacloprid entered Tom Hanford’s body, the effect was similar. The poison radiated throughout his system within minutes. At first, he was unaware of it, and then he thought he had a bad case of the stomach bug. But the effect the poison had on his body was more than even an educated toxicologist would have expected. What Maya didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, was that a heavy dose of imidacloprid, coupled with Tom’s daily medication, would render his liver incapable of dismantling the poison in his body. When his daughter Katie found him, he was staggering from his office, agitated, sweating, and incoherent. Flying toward his flailing body, she felt his heartbeat as if the muscle existed on the outside of his sturdy frame. She made two phone calls. 9-1-1, and Uncle Harris.

∞

Mason hurries just a little. He knows Wayah doesn’t care when he gets there. She’ll have everything packed up and ready for him, but he likes to hang out with her a bit. He likes to linger. He clutches his gift for her— some smoked hams from his farm and a crazy old tool he found at an antique store. He turns up Roseboro Road, heads toward the Blue Ridge Parkway, his windows rolled down and the radio low. It’s a muggy morning, Mason has to make his own breeze.

Wayah is an old woman who lives in a long, low house, bermed into the side of a mountain. The only way to get to her is on foot, and you have to know the way. She lives on her own in the woods, on land that is recognized by most as the property of the National Park Service, in the Cherokee National Forest. Everyone in Hemlock knows she’s there, and everyone in Hemlock, for the most part, leaves her alone. She has told Mason of a few run-ins with tourist kids, but she doesn’t seem too broken up about it. But then again, Mason hasn’t seen Missus Wayah upset herself over anything.

He has been coming out to Wayah’s for about six years now, initially at Katie’s request. Wayah grows, forages, and prepares herbal medicines for clients at Katie’s bodywork and yoga studio. Mason had been commissioned to place orders and pick them up since back when he and Katie were a couple. Very nearly engaged, the thought of it now causing him to whistle a low note of relief.

Over that time, Mason has come to love his visits with Wayah. Her soft, murmuring voice and her steadiness seem more authentic to him than anything he’s ever encountered. Wayah’s just Wayah. Untarnished by the world, or so it seems.

He comes up to her shack whistling, just so she knows that someone is coming, and that that someone is him. She’s already sitting outside, smoking a pipe she’d made herself, and sitting on a little stool (maybe she’d made that, too) by the crooked door. She smiles at him, revealing tiny, worn teeth. He stoops low and hugs her, breathes her smell of tobacco and incense. Despite the weather she always seems to be wearing a thousand layers of clothes, her thin gray hair ever neatly pinned.

“Hey lady,” Mason says as she holds on to his neck.

“Watchu bring me?” She says, happy, gesturing her pipe at the hams on a string, looped around Mason’s thumb.

“Just a little meat.”

“Sgi^[1], boy. In the house?”

“I’ll take ‘em in there, Wayah. I want to show you something.”

She waits. Puffing.

He produces the little device from the antique store and holds it out in his palm. It is a press, rectangular and lightweight, made of hard rubber. The top plate has ten even rows of five round holes, about the size of a nail head. And the bottom plate has half-inch stubs that push through the holes in the top plate, to stamp out little tablets. It’s a medicine-making machine from the past, though Mason cannot discern when.

Wayah puts her pipe into the folds of her skirt and takes the device from him.

“It’s for making pills,” he says.

She runs her nimble fingers around the chamfered corners, and over the perforating stubs.

“How does it work?” Mason asks.

Wayah stands up slowly and moves inside the house, toward the long table where she keeps pretty much everything. Wayah sits down and puts on an old pair of glasses taped together at the center, turns her attention to a large mortar and pestle, filled with a small amount of white powder. She adds a bit of water to the powder and begins to mix it rhythmically.

“What is it?” Mason asks.

“Kuzu root,” Wayah says. “For drunks.”

She adds a dash more water and a thick paste forms. She picks up the plate with the holes in it and fills all the holes with the paste, taking so long doing this that Mason begins to think he might fall asleep. As if knowing, she says,

“Get coffee,” and gesticulates toward the “kitchen” area, which is a series of basins and an old propane camping stove. Mason wonders where she gets gas canisters. In a old percolator on the stove, he finds the coffee. When he gets back to her table, she’s waiting for him. The holes on the top plate of the tablet maker are full, and Wayah eases it down over the perforating plate. The stubby pins shove up through the holes, producing tidy tablets of the paste at the top of the pins. Wayah smiles.

“That’s it?” Mason says.

“Let it dry, yes.” Wayah says. “Thank you. I like it.” She beams up at him.

“Well, good,” Mason says. “Good. That makes my day, friend.”

—

^[1] The English spelling of a Cherokee word for thank you

“Well, that was awkward,” Mason says, regarding Leona through half-mast eyes.

Leona laughs, “Was it?” She hadn’t been prepared to see Katie, and she doesn’t really want to talk about the encounter.

But Mason does. “Leona, Tom is going to be totally fine. Totally. And Katie’s not blaming you for a second for what Maya did to her dad. You gotta know that.”

“Maybe so,” Leona says. “I just don’t know. Everything’s different now.” A new silence descends, the animals having moved farther out into the pasture and away from the fence once the muffins and scones were consumed.

“You mean you’re different now.”

She looks at him in a hard way before gathering up the burlap coffee bags, the dry scratch of their fabric feeling as uncomfortable as the moment. Mason is tall, so looking at him seems to involve more effort than looking at someone her own height, and it leaves her feeling exposed. She looks away again. “I have to go.”

The swell of insect song coincides with Mason’s retort. “Well, that’s exactly what I thought you’d say,” he says. “Because you are an absolute mystery these days. And I’m worried, you know? Because you used to have spunk. And you damn sure used to have opinions.”

Leona huffs. “Of all people, you are going to be on my back about this?” He had been her friend possibly longer than anyone, besides Maya. If anyone has the right to be on her back about this, it is probably Mason. She resolves not to show it—a new skill she is cultivating. She draws her chin up slightly and puts a hand on one hip.

He counters, authoritatively. “Are you telling me nobody else has? You left school, for chrissakes. Leo, you worked so hard! What were you, like four minutes from a PhD?! You left Jeff and Cora without hardly a word. He’s broken, Leona. Tore up. And now what? You’re going to sling Maya’s coffee and hang out with your dog? When does life start over!?”

“Jeff and I have talked,” she blurts, but the sting of tears threatening stifles any elaboration. Leona feels angry, but everything Mason is saying is true. She just doesn’t have any good reasons for disappearing from life. And she can’t come clean, even with him. Not about her illness. All these admissions would require swift action. She wants the opposite. She wants a lengthy, uninterrupted, open, and unexpectant pause. On everything.

“It’s complicated, OK? And it’s all just too much, Mason,” she tries to explain. “Everyone is just so heavy-handed. Maya. Tom. Jeff. Even dad. I can’t be like that. I just…I-I just want quiet. Or something. I don’t know.”

She feels his eyes locked onto her, but to look up at him again will shatter the protective resolve. “I gotta go, Mason,” she says, more to the burlap bags than to him. The grass feels deep and entangling now, as if to lift her legs through it to walk would be met with resistance.

Mason backs down, sensing it. “No, don’t go,” he counters again. “I’m sorry, OK? Look, I get it, it’s all been a lot. You’re allowed your space. You don’t have to talk about it. I didn’t mean to be heavy-handed, like you say. We all just miss you; you know? Don’t leave. C’mon, let’s have a beer in the pasture. You can tell me all about the bugs and the weeds and shit.”

Leona doesn’t want to tell him she’s stopped drinking. She looks up at him finally, and into the bright sun at his back.

“All right. It’s all right,” she says, squinting. She drops the bags and starts up the hill. Mason follows. “I just can’t answer anyone,” she continues. “I don’t want to.” She pauses, listening to her breathing before adding, “I don’t know why she did it, OK?”

His long strides instantly put him slightly past her as they walk. He turns toward her, now. “Leona, of course, you don’t know why she did it. Don’t nobody know why, except for Maya.”

Cicadas hum a high octave all around them. Mason swats at some fruit flies in the thick summer air, looks at her intently. “I mean, why does anybody do what they do?”

Leona stops as well, smiles up at him, offering no response.

He chuckles. “See? That’s the million-dollar question, right there. The whole entire quandary, my friend.”

After three rounds of deep breathing, Katie Hanford can hold her breath for almost two and a half minutes and feels as awake as if she had just had coffee. Her fingers tingle from the oxygen saturation in her cells. The technique is simple: Breathe deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth, producing a panting sound. Repeat thirty times, then hold your breath for as long as you can. Three repetitions per session. Some of her clients feel light-headed after such a prescription, and so she has started to dial down their breathing regimens. But on her own time, she is reaching junkie status. Her drug of choice: pure oxygen. And if she can get to a quiet place at least three times a day to breathe and center herself, so much the better.

This is an especially ecstatic day. The sun is bright, the sky blue, and the inevitable summer humidity hasn’t yet climbed to its height. She has just returned from a retreat near Asheville, and has had four blissful days of vegan food, yoga, and silent meditation. Closing her yoga studio for a light break in business had been so scary, but what a perfect idea it had been. With her sleek, white-blond hair in a neat ponytail, and her chiseled features fresh from a splash of cold water, she points her car toward Craven Lane to check in with Mason before work starts up again tomorrow. She bumps up the rutted road through the trees, and as she rounds the bend toward Mason’s trailer, she sees him, tall and muscular, standing by the fence with her old friend Leona McDonough. Well. Mason waves to her, and Katie waves cheerfully back. Leona looks down at her shoes. No matter. Nothing will kill Katie’s cleansing high. She emerges from the car, fresh and smiling.

“Hey y’all,” she calls.

“Hey Katie,” Leona says, sounding a little flattened. She is wearing baggy jeans, a baggy t-shirt, and sandals. Katie wonders why Leona doesn’t try harder. She really is a striking person, but she does seem to do her best to disguise it.

“How was Asheville?” Mason asks.

“Awesome, as usual,” Katie replies. “What in the hell are y’all doin’?” The two are standing at the fence with every single sheep and hog that Mason owns gathered around them.

“Benji sent me with all the old baked goods from Tsuga’s Coffee to give to Mason’s animals.” Leona says. She gestures to crumpled burlap bags on the ground, from which she and Mason are pulling days-old scones and muffins. The animals accept them with slobbering thanks.

“Oh, well that’s a good idea,” Katie says quickly.

No response. The humidity climbs palpably, while the movement from the animals produces a dungy scent and a cloud of light dust which emanates around them.

Mason fills the space. “I was just telling Leona,” he says. “This deer out on 810 yesterday morning popped out of the woods and ran alongside my truck close to a mile! Right next to me. Right by my window.”

“Oh, come on,” Katie says, grateful for the turn of conversation. One can always count on Mason to be approachable, cheerful, regardless of the situation.

“No shit,” says Mason. “It really jolted me, I’m telling you.”

“Well, that’s a sign, you know,” Katie shares. “What do deer symbolize? I’ll have to look it up.”

“Huh,” Mason says, and then spits in the tall summer grass, laying over itself.

He is so thick sometimes, Katie thinks.

“Well look, I don’t want to interrupt,” she says. “I just turned up the road to check in with you, make sure you’re up for a little run out to Missus Wayah’s tomorrow? I’m opening the studio early and I just can’t get out there in time. Besides, she kind of creeps me out.”

“Oh, please Katie, that lady is sweet as buttermilk pie. I can hit her up first thing tomorrow.” He squints at her. Friendly and authoritative as he is, Mason does have a way of making her feel silly.

She defends her stance. “There’s stories about her, you know,” Katie says. “What I don’t understand is: How she can just live in the National Forest? Like, how is that allowed?”

“Allowed…” Leona mumbles, still not making eye contact.

“Oh Leona, do you know her? I bet you do, the way you roam the woods.”

“Uh, no, not really… only met her once. By accident.”

“I see.” Katie feels her once best friend has become an obstinate stranger. Standing in the bright sun, Leona looks a bit like her mother. The thought gives Katie chills. Time to go.

“Well, I’m off. Thank you, Mason. See you around Leona. I hope!” she says, then turns on her heels.

Heading back down Craven Lane, she gulps the air. Why does seeing Leona feel more awkward now, in the aftermath, than it did in the height of the moment? Now, Katie’s father is healing, and she no longer feels the jolt of shock from his assault being committed by a long-time family friend. Now, Maya has been sentenced, and Katie has had a long heart-to-heart with her childhood best friend Leona…so why does it all feel so much heavier? And why is Leona visiting with Mason when she barely even shows her face at all anymore? Sure, Leona and Mason have always been friends. But so have Leona and Katie…the heat of the day begins to close in around her, and she feels tiny beads of sweat breaking out at her hairline.

Try as she might to move on, the bitter feeling of everyone having taken sides irks at her. And so, is that the way of life? One person’s justice (no matter how perverted) always equals suffering for someone else? Surely not. Her yoga, her meditation, and her practice are showing her that there can be peace in all things. Movement, positive movement. Isn’t that the way? Why the nagging and incessant energy that dwells in the pain? She rolls down the driver-side window to get more air and to create an escape route for tormenting thoughts, incessant flies of an endless season of heaviness. On top of it all, she regrets her gossip about the old woman, Wayah. Katie hadn’t been rude, had she?

“I am fucking made of positivity,” she says out loud. She rolls down all the windows, then, speeding down 810, lets the oxygen rush in.

∞

M,

What’s new? Here, it’s the same, I guess. The big news is that █████ showed up at an event the ALC held over your dad’s research near Holloway Mtn Rd. You have a fanboy, apparently. Surprise, surprise. Maybe you knew that already? Your dad is pretty broken up still. I’ve started doing coffee with him on Sundays, which is weird, but it’ll get better. Anyway, the shop marches on, and I still haven’t quit smoking. Yeah, sorry. You kind of stressed me out so…plans are postponed, I guess. Leona’s taking shifts, which is cool, so I can keep eyes on her. She’s been like a █████ ghost otherwise. I finally let up and quit complaining about the dog. Everyone misses you and its actually kind of boring other than your little army coming around all of a sudden. By the way, could you remind them to tip? Write me back.

I love you.

-Benji-

Benji folds the letter into an envelope and files it toward the front of his leather portfolio. He tucks his mop of black hair behind his ears, takes off his glasses and uses his shirt tail to clean them, squints at the shop around him. It is busy, a la summer mode, a line to the door revealing mostly teenagers, with a stray little brother or sister tagging along here and there. He shoves the rest of his paperwork into the portfolio without zipping it, rises to get a look at Leona behind the bar. She’s taking an order, and sees him over the sea of customers. She puts the pen into her mouth and raises her hand high over their heads to motion him over. He gives her the thumbs up, pulls a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, gesturing. She rolls her eyes and goes back to the order. Benji slips through the back room past the dish sink, overflowing, and out the back door into the sun.

A carpenter bee is buzzing sentinel at the threshold of the back stoop, and seems to square off with Benji, who stares back, reaches for his lighter. His shoulders sag to find it missing, and the bee hums away hastily as soon as Benji begins to walk toward the alley to see if any other smokers can help him. He finds only sneakered teens. He crosses the shared parking lot and passes behind the dumpsters to the fish shack, rounding the back of the small building to the loading dock. Sure enough, a couple of the summer workers are having a break.

“Hey y’all got a light?” he asks them, hopping over the curb.

A black-haired girl in rubber boots tosses him a lighter. He’s seen her before, over at the shop.

“Hey, what’s up?” He says. “Thanks.”

“No worries,” she says, as he tosses the lighter back. And then, “How’s Maya?”

“Good as can be, I guess,” he says, to which she shrugs, nodding. No one ever asks him about Maya in public, but these kinds of private check-ins never end. He doesn’t even know this girl’s name.

“Got to get back, thanks again” he says, waving over his shoulder as he parts, returns to the back porch of the coffeeshop to smoke in private, or at least with the resident bee as his only company. Under the buzzing, he muses that in fact, the most surprising thing about Maya being gone, aside from how lonely he is without her around, is just how many people ask about her. True, she was always the one behind the counter at the shop before. Why wouldn’t they know her? Benji had wrongly assumed that her interactions with them were cursory. The depth of her relationships with people astound him daily, and fill him with a well of sadness even deeper than the one created by the loss of his own connection to her. He wants to try to tell her in a letter or maybe on a visit sometime, what he now knows.

“’Sup Benji,” the hairdresser next door interrupts his thoughts. “Leona’s fairly slammed in there.” She tips her coffee toward the line inside.

“Yep, I’m on it. Thanks,” Benji waves. Benji stomps out his cigarette, then bends to pick up the stub, adding it to the trash. Maya had engrained this into him, to the point where he regularly picked up strangers’ butts on the sidewalk. Why does everything remind him of her today? Irritated, he swats at the bee with an exaggerated motion before re-entering, and makes his way behind the bar. Leona moves to the espresso machine and lets him take orders.

“Glad you made it to work,” she jokes.

“Go on,” Benji says, knowing he deserves it. But the two of them say nothing else for the next hour, Benji taking the orders and Leona filling them. At last, the line thins down.

“I can stay through the after-lunch rush,” she says, “but I can’t open and close.”

“That’s totally fine. Thank you,” Benji says. “I have all these investment meetings today after lunch, so that’s perfect.”

“You know, you might want to think about getting some more summer help.”

“I will. It’s just so crazy. I thought that after everything went down with Maya that we would take a hit. But we’re busier than ever.”

Leona doesn’t respond, moving toward the bar as a woman approaches, over-smiling and looking like the last thing she needs is caffeine.

“Hi there. I’m Alyssa. Do you know Maya McDonough?”

Benji looks up from his work. Who in the fuck are all these people?

“Sure, I’m her sister,” Leona says, unsmiling.

“Oh perfect! I’m writing an article about her for Wild Earth magazine. Would you be willing to talk with me?”

“No thanks,” Leona says. Benji produces his business card.

“Look,” he says. “Today’s a crazy day. I can’t deal with this right now. Call me tomorrow.” He pulls out a cigarette and heads toward the back room. Leona stares at the woman, who continues her olympic smiling, pockets the card, and leaves.

∞

Hemlock trees do not stand out to most. Long and drooping, and less symmetrical than other conifers, they don’t make good Christmas trees. When burned, the timber throws sparks, and if harvested for building the wood is knobby and knotty. The Eastern Hemlock, Tsuga canadensis, can be found in groves and stands, in moist cool ravines, enjoying north-facing slopes. The Carolina Hemlock, Tsuga caroliniana, is native to the Southern Appalachian Mountains, more likely to be found in mixed stands in dry soils, and preferring rocky cliffs and ledges. They are mountain trees.

The oldest known stand of eastern hemlock trees sits southeast of the second green at Tanawha Lodge’s golf course, at the eighteenth hole. Hemlock, North Carolina, a town nestled in the high country of the northwestern part of the state, owes its name to the stand. However, when the ancestors of Tom and Harris Hanford trekked into the area’s wilderness in the late 1800s, they did not notice the trees specifically, focusing instead on the rugged beauty of the landscape as a whole, its fullness and wild, the generous water, and the cool air.

The purpose of the Hemlock Development Company, which they founded soon after, was to build communities here, strictly for tourism. Some believe it is pure happenstance that the stand of hemlocks for which the town is named managed to escape destruction and ended up on the edge of the golf course instead. Nevertheless, visitors to the high country who have no interest in golf mill about the green through the summer, only to visit the Eastern stand. Most are disappointed. A stand of hemlocks is not like a grove of bamboo, or an orchard of fruit. It’s a gargantuan, sloping thicket of forest, and aside from the wooden marker nailed to the entrance of the trailhead off the eighteenth green, most visitors do not stop to marvel at the hemlocks themselves, or otherwise commemorate their trek. Unless they are scientists or some other such enthusiasts who have come to look for the adelgid, the insect pest that plagues the hemlock, they simply file through, gossiping with each other as they hike the 1.2-mile loop, taking photos at the bridge over the stream, and proceeding to the Tanahwa Lodge’s ice cream shack, or one of its three restaurants.

Sam McDonough preferred it that way. He’d take respectful groups, or individuals who seemed interested aside and offer information or intrigue specific to the hemlocks. Did they want to come for a hike and look for the adelgid’s ovisacs or signs of predator activity using black light? Did they want to attend training equipping them to collect the adelgid’s predator beetle? His passion inspires visitors, but for the most part, they are now pulled to Hemlock by other, more dramatic turns of events involving his eldest daughter Maya. The sadness of it weighs on him, like the heaviest snow drift.

Because of Maya, he is not surprised to see several unfamiliar faces at the pavilion when he returns from his nightly walk in the stand. The space is dimly lit, and before entering, he takes off his thin, wire-framed glasses and cleans them on his button-down shirt, untucked. He runs callused hands over his unshaven face, smooths his gray hair, and adjusts his signature low ponytail. Surveying the crowd, he looks for potential activists, come to pepper the event with Maya’s agenda, notes several unfamiliar people sitting in the back row, not mingling. Sam nods at them as he walks past, but they remain stoic. Seeing his youngest daughter Leona across the room, he stays his gaze in her direction.

“Dad, hey,” Leona says, lifting onto her tip toes to hug his tall frame.

“Surprised to see you here, hon,” he says, nodding to acknowledge Roger and Cesar atop ladders. Then, lowering his voice,“Look, Leo, there’s probably going to be a scene.”

“I’m sure there will be, Dad. I wasn’t planning on staying.”

“Stay. Please?” He smiles down at her.

Someone is flickering the lights, and Bolete appears, running across the pavilion with a deer’s pelvic bone in her mouth. Cesar is laughing, and Leona pulls the dog to the outskirts of the group. Jeff begins introducing the evening, seeing Leona and nodding in her direction, even as he is saying “Since the late fifties the hemlock woolly adelgid has been sucking the sap out of these majestic trees…” She looks away from him, pretending to concentrate on the selection of a seat.

“Ladies and gentlemen, with the generous support of private donors, the Tanawha Lodge Conservation Foundation, and grants administered by Avery Land Conservancy, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve realized the recovery of nearly eighty percent of the Holloway Mountain tract, a sampling of forest that Dr. Sam McDonough has been stewarding for nearly seven years.”

The small group breaks into applause, and then one of the stoic observers in the back, a pale and lanky fellow with greasy hair shouts,

“DIRTY MONEY!”

The listeners stifle, and heads turn to the rear. The young man is escorted from the pavilion by Roger, where the protestor hovers in the shadows, Bolete softly growling at him.

Sam stands, waits for other outbursts, though what follows is a tense quiet. Every now and then someone from the audience glances back over his or her shoulder looking for the protester as Sam begins to speak.

“Hello!” His voice booms, and most of the audience members smile, reflexively. “We’re here tonight to celebrate a small but mighty victory, and to ask for your continued help in saving the hemlocks…”

Leona feels herself drifting back to Dresden mine, hearing the water falling off the pit walls and into the pool below, feeling the barest warmth of the sunlight on her skin. Her father’s powerful, kind voice is comforting, but hearing the story of the hemlock nauseates— a recent recurring reaction. For most of her life, the hemlock and the forests of the southern Appalachians had been her driving force, the central component of her happiness and awe. Growing up with Sam McDonough as a father was to inherit a lifelong and magical fascination with the forest, and she had nurtured that inheritance as if it was her own breath. Now, she is tired. Tired and sick, longing to escape. She imagines herself lying in a shallow boat on the murky waters of Dresden mine. Her arm drapes over the side as she lounges, and the sun ripples. The lacework of the tree canopy and the rim of the rock pit are all she can see, and she feels safe there, afloat and hidden.

Jeff, from his chair behind Sam, is watching her. Though it pains him, he still cannot resist her tiny cheekbones, and the entire dark mess of her hair, which could never decide to be either curly or straight, and so it was both. She is so lost in thought that she does not notice him watching her, which is fine with Jeff.

Neither Jeff nor Leona is fully aware of Sam, as he wraps up his summary of the project, and prepares to take questions from the audience. An eager-looking older woman in athletic clothes is asking Sam how to get involved in the next phase of his project. The question launches him into an excited soliloquy about his all-time favorite topic: bugs. Two bugs in particular: a soft gray parasite called the Hemlock woolly adelgid, and an unassuming looking black beetle called Laricobius nigrinus.

∞

The hemlock woolly adelgid is a tiny, sapsucking invasive bug that affixes itself to the base of a hemlock tree’s needles and begins to feed on the tree’s rich sap. As it feeds, the tree senses its attacker. In response, the hemlock tree cuts off all messages to the limbs with the affected needles, redirecting its nutrient-laden sap to unaffected parts of the tree. But twice each year, the woolly adelgid releases thousands of offspring into the forest, and while the larvae of the adelgid can survive on other conifers, they thrive primarily on hemlocks. Inevitably, more and more limbs are infected. As the trees shut out limb after limb, attempting to starve the pest, and as the leaves under attack turn brittle and fall, the tree is cut off from its energy-producing needles. Once infested, a hemlock tree can die within as little as three years.

First introduced into U.S forests by way of ornamental weeping hemlocks from Japan, the adelgid has spread over the last half century to become a decimator of both the Eastern and Carolina Hemlock. In Hemlock, North Carolina, the tree is a matter of identity. Sam, a pioneer in controlling the hemlock woolly adelgid by natural means, is known for his work collecting and releasing Laricobius nigrinus, a beetle that naturally feeds on hemlock wooly adelgid, into the infected trees. After his success in releasing the beetles on one of his local research tracts, he is preparing a citizen-led science crusade to save the threatened trees. As if entomology isn’t thrilling enough, the notion of captivating the minds of the tennis-playing citizens of Hemlock is almost titillating to him.

But despite the rapture in Sam’s voice, Leona is asleep, breathing evenly with her head tucked slightly down. Embarrassed, Jeff wishes Bolete would abandon vigil of the bratty teenager and rouse her, but the protestor leans against the pavilion’s pillar, waiting, and Bolete keeps up her guard. The youth seems unconcerned, at one point even flipping a slice of salami from the buffet table toward the dog’s snout. Bolete ignores it, leaving it to coax ants from the summer grass, and that is the end of the young man’s appeals to the animal.

“Anyone wanting to sign up for collection training, please visit the Avery Land Conservancy table at the back of the pavilion after we wrap up. Jeff here will get you on the list,” Sam says, gesturing to Jeff, who straightens in an exaggerated effort to look present. Leona slumbers on.

“Any further questions?” Jeff asks the audience.

From the back row, a hand shoots up. The youth leaning on the pillar stands up and drops both arms by his sides.

“Yes, Doctor,” the questioner begins. “We respect your work, and would love to be involved, but we are wondering whether the research will continue to accept funding from the Hemlock Development Company.”

The audience stirs, and Jeff stands halfway up. Sam waves him down with a gentle motion of his hand and assures the crowd with his broad smile.

“Thank you for your question. Mr. Tom Hanford of Hemlock Development Company is recovering well, as I’m sure you know, and I believe he does plan to continue supporting the project,” Sam says.

Several heads turn toward the back, anticipating the questioner’s response.

“Does it not seem a paradox to you, Doctor, to accept money for the natural restoration of the forest from a company intent on destroying the forest?”

The onlookers rumble again, and this time, Sam’s placating is less successful. Meanwhile, Leona has begun to drool, her head tilted to the side.

“I assure you, our alliance with Hemlock Development Company is far more complicated than that. I’m sorry, I’m not sure we’ve met,” Sam says. “If you’d like to speak about this after tonight’s event, I’d be happy to….”

But the teen in the back erupts.

“WHAT ABOUT MAYA?!” He thunders. “WHAT ABOUT YOUR OWN DAUGHTER?!” his voice shakes with anger, and he begins to advance forward in the pavilion.

Roger and Cesar appear from nowhere, stepping out in front of the agitator. Bolete begins barking, which finally awakens Leona, who discovers nearly everyone around her standing up and facing the back of the pavilion. She stands up now, too, fumbling to control her hair, and scans for the dog.

“Sam, you don’t have to answer that,” Jeff is saying, walking to join Roger and Cesar. “Please leave. Ma’am, please take your son and leave. We won’t be taking any more questions.”

“He’s not my son,” the questioner replies. “But we will gladly be leaving.” She pushes her way to the end of the back row, under the eyes of bewildered onlookers. The angry young man has not advanced at the sight of the three men waiting to restrain him and stands looking into the eyes of the audience members closest to him. His own eyes are pale, rimmed with red.

The parting woman puts a hand to his shoulder. “C’mon,” she says softly. She stops just past him but keeps her back turned, waiting for him to decide.

He turns to join her, along with three other people from the back row.

“Yuppy scum!!” he hollers, as they exit the pavilion and break into a run across the golf course toward the road. Bolete runs after them, her short legs helicoptering windward. But the sound of Jeff’s familiar whistle bears into her ears, and she stops in the wet grass, panting, Leona a few paces behind. Scooping up the dog, she walks back to the pavilion, where most of the crowd has dispersed. Only Roger, Cesar, Jeff, and a few board members of the Land Conservancy remain, all standing at the edge of the pavilion, looking out at the departing agitators as if watching a derby. Sam sits in one of the folding chairs, elbows on his knees, and Leona goes to him.

“It won’t be the last of it, Leo” he says softly.

Jeff sits down beside them. “I’m sorry Sam. Leona…” but he can’t look at her. “We’ll be better prepared…next time,” he says.

Leona puts her hand on her dad’s shoulder. “Time to go.” He looks up at her, puts a hand around her waist and stands to make it look as if they are dancing. Her darkened face alights in a smile.

∞

Leona throws together a pastry dough laden with cold butter, wraps it in waxy parchment to chill in her empty refrigerator. Convincing Bolete to stay at home, she strikes out through the screen door, onto her bike, pedals down off Holloway Mountain Road, to the underworld of Dresden mine.

Few people come down to Dresden mine because it is private property, and haunted. The old pit in the earth is filled with murky water, and more water falls around the edges in a constant trickling stream. Rumors hold it’s depth is more than a thousand feet. Leona walks around the hole’s rim, touches all the trees, scans for hemlock. Mostly she touches poplar, sourwood, rhododendron. Crouching down, she disturbs bits of the forest floor, clearing the thick mulch of detritus to reveal the soil below. She makes six small holes, scoops out bits of the soil, and then mixes them together on a flat bit of ground cleared of leaves. She produces small plastic vials from her shorts pocket and deposits pinches of the earth into each. She relishes how haphazardly she pockets the vials, and how un-scientifically she plans to gaze upon the soil samples under her microscope when she’s home. Since leaving graduate school without explanation last fall, she has reveled in her practice of avid, undocumented, instinct-driven curiosity science. Secretly, she wonders if this may be the only way to witness the undiscovered and misunderstood truths of the world.

After securing her samples, she follows a trail of shining orange downhill, until she is rewarded with larger and finer specimens of chanterelles. With fingers close to the ground, she eases the mushrooms up, feeling their silent release from the earth. She returns to the rocks below to sit once again, the mushrooms wrapped in her shirt.

She lounges in the depths of the mine’s embrace all afternoon, alternately closing and opening her eyes to reveal the splendors that light affords. She studies bubbles in the water, waits for them to produce frogs or snakes, their flat slick heads emerging, then disappearing again. In the places where the sun pierces the dense treetops, it shines on the sides of the mine pit in striped peals of light. Corresponding strips of lichen cling to the rocks in these places, and Leona can tell time off the side of the granite, the way her father had taught her to do by looking at the light on the sides of hemlock trees. That had been the first day she felt the forest breathing within her. How old had she been then? Eight? Dad holding her by the knees, her thin legs straight and stiff, as he lifted her up high above his head so she could touch the needles and see the seed cones with their panicles open wide, like ladies’ skirts. She and her sister, Maya, had collected two tight cones, hot gluing earring hooks to each for their mother. They’re so ugly they’re almost cute their mother had said, touching them briefly as they dangled from Maya’s small fingers, and then walking away.

Maya. A confused swell of anger and sorrow and grief ripples over the surface of of the waters as Leona thinks of her sister. Maya who loves trees, maybe too much. Maya, who wants to be a hero. Maya, who chose violence. Or, maybe, had ended up just as damaged and destructive as their mother.

“Could you love her even if she does? Turn out just like your mother, that is.” This question, voiced by a therapist Leona had seen just after Maya’s sentencing, hangs in the summer humidity. Instead of answering it, she had quit the therapist, and everything else in her life, just before losing her vision.

The sun changes its angle and the cove becomes darker, colder, stirring Leona from her brooding. She thinks of Bolete, dinner, and her promise to help Cesar with the lights for the event. She runs up the rock, pedals furiously home. There, she browns up butter and fries the chanterelles with black soil still clinging to them, and cracks two eggs in the pan. With the dough she’d made earlier, Leona makes a bubbling blackberry galette. She and Bolete eat the whole hot thing, the deep purple ooze rimming the dog’s white snout.

∞

She is late arriving to the pavilion, with Bolete running after her, and Roger and Cesar are already more than halfway through rigging lights above tall posters, hung from each of the pavilion’s columns. The posters detail a seven-year project in the forest to save the Eastern and Carolina hemlock trees. Recently, the project has seen a significant victory. Tonight’s event will update the community and celebrate the progress.

As she approaches the bottom of Cesar’s ladder, he throws her a bundled cord and begins to climb down.

“Heyyy Leona,” he says in his deep, accented voice, like he’s gearing up to sing a song about her. He smiles.

“Hey now, Cesar, sorry I’m late.”

“It’s OK, glad you made it,” Cesar says, taking the cord back from her and coiling its length in his capable hands. He studies her slyly, his cap tilted, a question.

“You follow along with me, and hold this,” he said. “Roger up top will thread it through while I hang the cages, and we’ll go along much faster this way.” She takes the cord from him, understanding that Cesar is teasing her somehow; She is not needed for this job whatsoever. Still, she does as she is told, and they go along silently. Eventually, Cesar begins a gentle query.

“I have been reading these posters, Leona,” Cesar says. “Don’t see your name anywhere on them.”

“No, Cesar, this is Sam’s, er- my dad’s research. And Jeff’s, really. I helped with some of the collection, of course, but no, I’m not on there.”

“Well. Your father is down around the green doing some kind of something.”

“I’m sure he is. And Jeff. And Harris, right?”

Cesar wordlessly confirms, as people begin to file into the pavilion, and Leona imagines eyes burning into her back. She tries to smile at a few folks, but mostly she keeps her head down.

“Cesar, why’d y’all need me tonight?” she mumbles as he begins to step back up the ladder.

“We just like having you around these little affairs,” he says, smiling. “Hard to make sense of them, otherwise.”

Leona laughs at that, dopily holding the cord. She didn’t really want to see Jeff, her ex-husband, although she wouldn’t mind seeing her father. But Harris Hanford just raises a feeling of remorse in her chest.

Cesar comes down the ladder and closer to her. He hesitates. “Situation around your sister is difficult, no doubt. But you can’t hide in that cabin, or off in the woods forever,” he said softly. “Might as well look busy, no?”

She blushes. With one hand on his shoulder, she steps past him and up the ladder, leaving him standing pointlessly with the cord hanging loose in his fist. He throws back his head and laughs so hard, she imagines leaves falling off of trees.

∞

That very same dawn, rock and dust hop up and chatter against the undercarriage of a Ford pickup, as Mason Raft goes to get his mama coffee at McDonalds. She won’t drink the brew Mason makes at home, and she won’t accept a cup from the local coffee shop. And so, Mason rumbles, down the rocky private road to his family’s farm, powering onto Highway 810 just as the first light spills over Grandfather Mountain. At first, he had loathed the journey. There’s always something to do on a farm, and early is the best time to do it. But Claudia Raft is immovable on all matters, including her morning coffee, and Mason is all balance, choosing his battles, taking no sides, smooth on all sides, especially when it comes to politics and his mama. Besides, he has come to treasure this journey, forty minutes from his door and back, and almost no one on the roads. In late summer 1996, in Hemlock, North Carolina, an empty road is a rare pleasure, where tourists normally pack the streets, flocking over the trails, splashing in waterfalls, dizzy on the mile-high swinging bridge at Grandfather Mountain’s summit. Downtown becomes impassable from 10 am until well after dinner, and who wants to risk running down a toddler in Madras shorts with a muddy F250? Not Mason. This way, he does farm errands early, gets Claudia’s coffee, has time to think.

He comes fully alive on Main Street, running hands over his shaved head, checking his symmetrical reflection in the rearview. Today will be hot and busy: A big vegetable harvest for the Tanawha Lodge restaurant, several deliveries and sales calls, tiny edible flowers to pick for tonight’s hemlock tree event. If time allows, there is surely boundary clearing, the endless beating back of summer’s vining chaos and thick grasses from the farm’s fence line. Mason prefers negotiating with plants over people, having talked his way out of helping the maintenance team prep for tonight’s hemlock event. There will be a scene on account of Maya McDonough, and he doesn’t want to get involved any more than his mamma wants to drink the local coffee.

Mason flashes his signature smile, waving to Benji at Tsuga’s Coffee, Hemlock’s local shop named after the Latin genus of its namesake tree. Benji tends to unlock the doors at 6 am, then sit out front for his morning cigarette while the first urn fills with brew. A few drags in, he is there to wave at Mason as the white Ford lumbers past. No hard feelings are harbored or hidden about Mason’s lack of loyalty to Tsuga’s. And Mason knows that small towns are buoyed by a catamaran of reliable qualities: Loyalty on one side, judgment on the other.

In the dusty cab, tipping down the grade where close mountain and forest will soon open into wide valley, Mason wonders whether he possesses neither loyalty nor judgment, and perhaps these lacks are all that keep a man happy and in business in a place like Hemlock. He smiles at this, his foot heavy on the accelerator, but then a doe springs from the forest at the road’s edge in a flash of limbs, halting abruptly in the opposite lane. Mason brakes quickly, on high alert, ready for an erratic move from the deer, or imagining another vehicle tearing around the pass and into her soft flank. But no one comes, and the doe waits, commanding silence with her watching.

Mason keeps his eyes on her in return, begins advancing slowly. Usually, when he meets a deer on a mountain road, there is a fast, fearful fumble before the creature disappears. But this doe is stark still, moving only her neck to follow him, as Mason eases the truck forward. He moves at a crawl, stealing glances into the rearview for fear of one of Tom Hanford’s dump trucks lumbering into the back of him. Steering carefully to pass the doe, he readies his foot on the accelerator, and as he increases speed, the deer follows, pulling herself astride his window, running with him. Mason feels a rush of fear, then awe. His eyes widen, but he keeps steady, stealing glances at the creature. The clash of hair on the contours of her face, black eyes, black nostrils. She stays with him most of a mile, and then just as suddenly as she had appeared, she slips back into the darkness of trees.

Mason stops again, mid-lane, eyes feral and roving. He sighs, glances again in the mirrors, gains speed again. “Damn!” he shouts through the open window, laughing. Damn. Later, he’ll find Leona and tell her. Or better yet, Old Wayah. She’ll have something to say about this.

∞

Barefoot and bare-legged, Leona McDonough is alone in the pre-dawn shadows, picking blackberries with her eyes closed. She wades through a sea of dewy grass, cocooned in the sounds of rustling critters and tuning crickets, of fat water droplets sliding over the soft frontiers of leaves. Pinpricks of moisture in the morning air make a cool wind across her skin, while hot still air descends, scooped up and dumped out by the beating of innumerable bird wings.

It is late August in the southern Appalachian Mountains, and just months earlier, Leona had gone temporarily blind. Though the spell had passed after 266 days, Leona’s doctor anticipated her blindness would return. With this grave mystery living inside her, she practices, terrified and thrilled. Reaching into darkness for ripe fruit, her picking feels more like an asking, each berry, more an offering. While Leona’s appreciation for the sounds and textures of the forest had taken deep root in childhood, blindness had urged her senses to bloom wildly and receive.

Her dog Bolete, fat, short-legged, named after a swollen-capped mushroom, is busy at her feet, a staccato energy Leona can hear under and amidst the layers of vines. With a few gentle squeezes of a berry between thumb and forefinger, she judges ripeness and general size, and sometimes can guess over the presence of drysophila eggs, laid in the berries by a spotted winged fly.

The bass rumble of an ancient diesel pickup truck barrels down highway 810, and someone approaches through the open grass.

“Oy, gal. Save some for the guests, hear?” Cesar, gardener at Tanawha lodge, appears with a thin, wide smile as Leona opens her eyes.

“Hiya, Cesar.” He hands her three ears of corn, wet from the morning and tight in the husk.

“If you pick before dawn,” he says, gesturing to the headlamp strapped to his forehead, “the sugars are higher.” Corn is Cesar’s passion. Maize, as he calls it. He comes from Mexico every summer to work the land at Tanawha Lodge with seeds sewn into his pant cuffs. The corn this morning is sweet and fresh, while some others he grows are dry. Glossy jewels.

Leona nods her thanks, nestles the ears under the berries in her basket. “Don’t worry, me and Bolete only need enough berries for a little pie we’re making.”

“Going to the hemlock tree event tonight, then?” He asks, eyebrows up.

“Oh no. I’d likely think to die first,” she says, and though she is quick, isn’t kidding, Cesar laughs a rickety laugh, wipes his face on his damp-sleeved arm.

The morning sky is being born behind him, the persistent hot sun will soon threaten the enveloping mist. Leona stares into it. Cesar looks at her intently, as if to see what she sees: a dream of the coming evening, and a confusing series of scratches on the blue tinged horizon that blip and tumble like lightning. She furrows her brow to stay with it. This thing is a threat, or the idea of one. Maya?

Cesar’s voice dismantles the projection.“Well, here’s the thing. Later I’ve got to hang some lights for ‘em. And Mason can’t help, so me and Roger need some extra hands. Come on near sundown, will you? You can be gone before it starts, I promise.”

Leona slumps, but she cannot refuse. “I will,” she says.

Cesar nods. “Enjoy the day,” he says, and turns to disappear into the lingering mist.

∞

During the pandemic, I wrote this novel called Hemlock, and I’ve decided to release it in serialized form in this section on Substack. A year after I finished the book, Hemlock was longlisted for the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Afterward, I spent some time querying and looking for an agent to represent my work to publishers, which ended up being a time-consuming and daunting task that produced no results. I have very little time to write, even though writing may arguably be one of my greatest gifts. I realized I was spending all the free creative time I had doing research and querying, seeking legitimacy through publication, and had no time left for birthing new writing anymore. So Hemlock sat silent and waited. When I go into the woods sometimes the hemlock trees whisper to me, and roan lilies and chanterelles shine as if to suggest that it’s a real shame, not to share this story. I’ve decided to listen to them. I don’t write for legitimacy, or to fit in. I write expressly because I do not fit in, and anytime I have sought or achieved legitimacy within the dominant culture of my time, I have longed to escape it. I write to connect with others, to remember beauty, to contemplate ideas. To set ideas free so I can grow and change and create and seek all over again.

So, welcome to Hemlock. It’s a book about identity, activism, a small community, and a kind of tree. I’ll release the very short chapters sequentially, as they are ready. Thanks for being here. I hope you enjoy the book.