The silence would never change.
I had walked down this dirt path one year ago - that felt like ten. Never an official road; tree roots jutted out of the dirt, a few late summer flowers struggled through the dry wind, drinking the last moisture in the rivulets of a thunderstorm two days passed. The trail was worn by generations of feet that walked the centuries from the stone farmhouse to the orchard at the edge of the drive.
The silence would never change.
I had walked down this dirt path one year ago - that felt like ten. Never an official road; tree roots jutted out of the dirt, a few late summer flowers struggled through the dry wind, drinking the last moisture in the rivulets of a thunderstorm two days passed. The trail was worn by generations of feet that walked the centuries from the stone farmhouse to the orchard at the edge of the drive.
The land had survived development but the trees hadn't survived the blight that spread through the region putting most of the farms, any agriculture, out of business. Rotting trunks lay across the yellowing field giving it the look of a battle site decades old. The corpses were eaten away, returning to the earth. One bare tree stood against the sky. It was clearly dying; the lone survivor of all its brothers and sisters. Fruit probably hadn't ripened on its branches for years. The leaves had struggled on a little longer, finally giving up a year or two ago. Fading and failing, the tree would spend its last days gray and bare. Only a thin layer of wrinkled bark lay between it and the world.
I stared at the tree for a moment, trying to remember how it looked with leaves in the spring, with fruit in the summer. How like humans, the trees, their trunk-corpses seemed to me. This sentinel stood guardian over his fallen comrades, promising to keep watch while they journeyed to the afterlife. And here was I, the last of a ruined family looking over the broken land that hadn't been able to escape our combined fate.
We were tied to each other, though I didn't believe it at first.
“When this orchard dries up, our family line will have ended,” my father said.
“Dad, you can't dry up a bloodline.” I was always the scientist.
“Katie, there is more to it than genetics.”
We were walking under the orchard trees. They gave apples and pears in the autumn. They gave cherries in early summer. Blueberries bushes ran along the hedges – slender trees that had once grown wild and were tamed to profitable, fashionable fences -
then extinct, only bare skeletons lying in the dry earth.
Even a few peach trees had survived through the generations. But they were dying even then. To us, the fruit simply tasted sweeter, ripened faster. The trees produced more and more in a frantic effort for survival. We attributed it to our family's inherited green-thumb and rich soil.
“How old are these trees?” My younger brother asked, short of breath. His hair thin, blonde wisps that came out in clumps. My father handed us peaches and a cloth lightly sprayed with an organic disinfectant. I was wiping the fruit clean, holding it to my nose when my father began his story.
“They made it a law – when you bought your land and built your house you had to plant an orchard to show you intended to stay.”
“When was that?”
“1697.”
“Trees don't live that long.”
“The orchard of today is the new generation.”
I bit into the peach. It was sweet and the juices ran through my fingers and down my wrist. I licked the sticky liquid that streamed like tears. My father watched me before biting into one of his own.
“This is the last and oldest orchard in the country.”
I nodded. Even a ten year old scientist couldn't understand to the solemn tone of his voice.
“Nothing lasts forever.” The first apple tree to succumb to the blight was one hundred twenty years old. So long past it's life span, the death must have been natural. But it was rotting into the ground and infecting the soil.
I stepped over the fallen logs and wove my way through the grass to the tree. Everything was on fire. There was no green, no white and rosy blossoms. Only yellow and gold grass, gray and brown trunks, gritty dirt. As the evening sun started to glow low in the sky, it spread a fiery light across the land. I had to shield my eyes against its burning.
There was nowhere to look that wasn't in flames. The sky had lost all trace of blue and was full of pinks and oranges like a raging forest fire spanning miles. The ground was so dry it was only a matter of time before the land caught fire. I wondered if there was anything left to burn.
The geologist at the lab in Cambridge tried to explain to me the healing power forest fires could have on soil.
“It destroys everything and the ash is harmful for a while, but eventually it enriches the earth and everything starts to grow again. Better than before.”
I didn't understand geology and I was still a newcomer to botany. My expertise was genetics.
“Look at Hawai'i. With all of the volcanic eruptions the islands should be wastelands. Instead they are green, vibrant, tropical paradises.”
Ten months later, when the call came in about my father, about our orchard, I left geology, botany, and the lab behind me. Genetics weren't helping anyway. What I had trusted in to change the world had failed. It hadn't changed the world to how I wanted to see it. I haven't heard if Hawai'i is still a tropical paradise.
When I arrived with a plastic foot locker and an unemployment check, my father was cinematic; stretched out on a bed in the musty room of an abandoned house with one dedicated servant attending him. Except the picture-windows were open to fully view the old farm and the servant was only a male nurse the hospice had sent along with his dying wish – to die at home.
I was not part of the wish, but part of the law as the only living relative and heir to the farm. Property developers were already calling; no matter that the soil was rotten, the orchard dead. It wasn't fruit or earth they were interested in.
He never said a word to me and in two days the cancer won out. He stared at me with accusing and sorrowful eyes that roamed from me to the view of the dead land to me again. The grass was thin and yellow, falling limply like hairs down the sloping hills.
Nothing worked in Hampshire. He didn't have cable or a proper television. No one listened to the radio anymore. The phone line was only hooked up for local calls. In two days I learned about family silence. Silence so thick, thought couldn't penetrate it. The only sound was the movement of my father's eyes searching my face. I understood that I had failed; that Cambridge had failed.
After the two days, a different silence crept over me. Once the nurse and my father had gone it was me and a dead land. There were insects in the long yellow grass, but they quieted when I approached. There was wind, but nothing for it to rustle. Even the curtains that hung over open windows rested motionless and stale. The house, stone solid and unbending, sat in the center of my family's land. It was cold and hollow. Everything seemed to breath failure, reminding me of the promise I couldn't keep and my father's disappointment.
He wanted me to stay. How could I understand the problem locked in a lab?
I had petri dishes, a laptop with a genetic modification simulations program, a microscope, hygenic air-tight containers that would transport bark, soil, rotten fruit, seeds, branches, roots, everything I could take from the orchard but the entire tree. I was sitting on the front steps with the laptop reading about the latest modifications that had been introduced to the chestnut tree in North Carolina. No one knew if it would take yet, but the results were promising.
He was looking over my shoulder.
“Cambridge isn't Hampshire.”
“They're having the same problems with their trees. It didn't take long for the blight to spread.”
“If you leave, this land will die.”
“It's already dying.”
“I'm dying.”
The cancer diagnosis was two years old, he was losing the battle. First his prostrate, then pancreas, now his bones. It was a blight breaking down his body. Sometimes at night, when I closed my laptop and my eyes I thought about him and the orchard. My dreams would confuse them, and I would start to modify his genetics with the maple trees that still dotted the New England coast.
Was it in the soil? Was it in his blood? Was it what fed them that poisoned them?
The blight seemed to attack all parts of the tree and at random. Some started at the roots, the seeds, the fruit, the inner bark. It couldn't be possible that trees had an immune system and were breaking down the way humans do.
He was still standing there.
“We're all dying.”
“Damnit Katie. What do you think you're going to accomplish? Our genes are a lost cause.”
I rub my face with my hands, digging my fingertips into my eyes.
Lost cause. Our genes, not the orchard. My younger brother died of lukemia. In my twenties the gynecologist revealed the reason my periods were so irregular was because my ovaries were practically empty.
“They're having success in the States.”
“The United States is not part of this orchard.”
Endless arguments. He believed that his cancer, his children's infertility was related to the death of the orchard.
“You believe this land poisoned us.”
“We poisoned it. We're getting our comeuppance.”
I wanted to slam my laptop closed and throw it at him.
“How would me staying make any difference?”
“It's just the right thing to do.”
I didn't understand him and I didn't stay.
With my samples packed in my footlocker I drove to Cambridge and showed them to my colleagues. We pulled them apart, studied them under microscopes, entered data into computers and did tests. I wrote to my father asking him to send me any seeds or leaves or green bark he could find left. I asked for soil samples; nothing ever came.
There was no shade underneath the tree. Only the shadow of a skeleton – a starving almost-corpse. People in Europe were starting to starve as uprisings in Africa burned their outsourced farms to the ground. I wondered if they were trying to stop the blight before it began, knowing what my friend the geologist had known; fire is a cleanser.
I sat on the ground. Dry dirt crackled as I lifted a handful to my eyes and stared at the pile in my palm. A wind blew warm and thick, with nothing to slow it down. The dirt swept through my fingers leaving only a few crumbs. I tried to read them for answers.
Complete silence. Even the ghosts I once thought I saw as a child, walking under the autumn leaves had abandoned this place. Clouds were coming in to cover the sky and the wind was picking up. I sat and remembered why I had come.
This morning I woke with his face before me. He never spoke but there were flames in his eyes and smoke in the air. He wanted the orchard to burn. The house. And he wanted to burn with it. For months I hesitated while the container of his ashes sat by the front door with little ceremony, waiting to be scattered among the rotting logs. But I waited. I couldn't do it.
Thunder cracked in the air and far off I saw lightning two hills over. Wind shook the tree and the container in my hands. Lightning flashed again, streaks reaching into the clouds, streaks hitting the earth. I would wait until I smelled smoke. Fire couldn't cleanse our souls, but perhaps together, our ashes could cleanse this earth.
Holly Schwartz-Coignat lives in France with her husband. When she's not writing she's either running, cooking or struggling with the French language. She enjoys studying medieval philosophy but hasn't found a use for it yet. Other stories by Holly can be found in The Battered Suitcase, Foundling Review, The First Line and With Painted Word.