That Old Chestnut

It’s not really a blight. It’s a parasitic fungus. It burrows in the bark, the stem, swollen cankers pressing out from the wood, slimy tendrils weeping from open wounds. Seeing the orange inflammation made me feel unclean, as if the airborne spores were prickling into my skin. “Why have I never seen this before?”

The woman I knew smiled a little, a glint in her eye. “I’m sure you have. You just didn’t know what you were looking at. This has always been here, as far as I know.”

I wonder if that’s right. If the blight had always been here, wouldn’t the whole forest die? But the woman I knew knows more than I do, and she knows it. I don’t ask her what I don’t want to know.

I didn’t ask her why she didn’t want me to meet her family.

I figured I already knew.

We drove for hours through the trees, skinny roads with no shoulders and no speed limit, my knuckles tense against the steering wheel while she slept. I didn’t have to ask her where we were going. There was only one way to go.

The light faded fast between the corpses of trees, dead leaves shedding from a vermillion sky, the hawks and owls changing shifts in the gathering dusk. I leaned forward over the dash, like the darkness was inside the car, and chased the pale yellow of my headlights on the winding asphalt. The woman I knew woke up suddenly, gasping, grabbed my arm. “Stop the car!”

I winced. “There’s nowhere to stop.”

“Just stop,” she said. “There’s nobody here.”

I followed her into the woods. She seemed to glide through the trees, like their river birch sister, while I stuck and snagged on every bramble and twig. Crashing after her over the underbrush, I caught up when she stopped by the wide base of a straight-backed chestnut. “Here,” she said, pressing my hand against the trunk. “This is my family’s tree.”

My fingers traced the outline of a branching chart carved into the bark, but it was too dark to read. “I never would have seen this. Where are we?”

Placing her hands on my hips, she shifted me one step to the left. From that slightly sinister perspective, I could see the lights of her family’s cabin, glowing up from the bottom of a crater in the hill. The woman I knew said, “We’d better go down.”

“What about the car?”

“We’ll have to say hi, they’ll have seen us by now.” She started down the slope, and I followed. I didn’t know the way back.

All her family had the same pale slender limbs, the same thin silk hair, slightly Cro-Magnon foreheads. They gathered around us, greeting her, sideways-glancing at me. They parted for an older man with a white goatee, who stuck out a blue-veined hand. “So,” he said. “You’re with my girl.”

I took my brown hand back. “As long as she’s with me.”

He laughed and clapped me on the back, pushing me toward the house, his airborne spores prickling into my skin.

The cabin smelled of wood smoke and cedar, pine garlands and boughs of holly woven in between the candlesticks on the mantle, the window sills, the dining room table. The woman I knew planted me by the fireplace and whisked away to the kitchen, her hand slipping through my fingers.

Girls in white dresses wheeled in from the outside air, gathered by the fireplace with pink pinions spread toward the flames. Some of the younger ones looked at me with open-mouthed awe, until the older ones slapped their hands and drove the flock, giggling, into the kitchen. Shrieking with glee around mouthfuls of pilfered sweets, they rushed out into the chilled wilderness.

“So,” said one of the boys. “What are you, exactly?”

Really? “I’m Filipino and Han Chinese, but my parents are white.”

“How does that work?”

I shrugged. “Pretty well, most Thanksgivings.”

“Boys, don’t ask what you don’t want to know.” The man with the white goatee sat down in the chair next to mine. “You know, they want us to introduce the Chinese chestnut, to crossbreed a tree that’s resistant to the blight.”

“Really?”

“But it’s an inferior tree,” the man went on. “Spreads out instead of growing straight up. Chestnuts have a completely different taste. Extinction by another means, if you ask me.”

But if the trees fall to blight, won’t there be no chestnuts at all? I did not ask.

The flock of girls returned, fluttering into the kitchen. Some of the boys turned off the electric lamps. The murky orange firelight carved deep shadows across the walls, knots in the timber staring through the flames. Were mine the only eyes that didn’t pierce the darkness? Were those identical blue lenses still looking at me?

The door to the kitchen burst open, the gold of a hundred candles flooding the room. The girls, trailing red sashes, were crowned with light, bearing heaped trays of cakes, buns, and pastry. One of the older girls—she looked so much like the woman I knew—offered up an apricot tart, glossy orange oozing into the pale short crust.

“See?” The woman I knew squeezed into the chair beside me. She steered my laden hand toward her and bit down into my tart, sweet stickiness dripping through my fingers. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

She had a habit of talking with her mouth full, something I thought was cute, endearing, when we were alone. Looking around the room, though, with two dozen mouths all chewing wide open, made the walls seem a little bit closer, the fire a little too hot. “You are beautiful,” I told her, and she granted me an apricot kiss.

I had to know where the bathroom was. The man with the white goatee gestured toward the widows, the woods. “Anywhere. Unless you’re feeling dainty.”

“I need a sink,” I explained, and was pointed toward a small door down a narrow hall.

I tried the handle.

There was no lock.

A pair of shame-faced teenagers pushed past me and fled.

I wondered how far it was back to the car. The woman I knew said we’d find it in the morning. Only her family were out in this neck of the woods, and they weren’t going to touch it. There was a bed made up for us next to the kitchen, and I stared at a dark ceiling, her hot breath on my neck, while owls called out the hour in the blighted woods.

I dream of fire. I dream of burning it all down. Setting flame to the forest, watching curling embers eat the tinder-dry leaves, superheated snail trails of blazing sap. I dream of black birds flying from collapsing branches, twig fingers clutching at the choking smoke.

I imagine all the parasites burning in their chestnut beds, screaming as they fail to ooze free.

I dream of the woman I knew, stepping out into a bare and ashen wasteland, surrounded by the rubble where her home used to be. In my dream, she is surrounded by a clear, blue sky, and fresh green shoots are at her feet.

And she hates me.

I woke up glad that the bathroom was anywhere. I stepped gently over the dark wood floor, wincing at each creak, and slipped outside. The bare branches let the starlight pool in the crater between the trees, and for the first time that night, I could breathe. I sighted the tall, wide family’s tree, and hiked up the slope to water its roots. Tracing my finger over the diagram carved into the bark was like running a maze with too many dead ends.

It had always been there.

I just hadn’t known what I was looking at.

They’d all been too familiar, too much alike to tell who was whose child, whose sister, whose wife. Furtive glances and snatched moments, a hand on a shoulder, a backside. A neck. This family’s tree did not spread.

When I threw up, it tasted like apricot.

The sound cut sharply through the quiet wood. I crouched, listened, holding my breath. I felt watched. I felt hunted. I felt blue eyes shining in the dark.

Sliding back down the slope, I pushed the front door open. Saw a flash of white goatee sneaking away from our room.

She was sat up in bed. Didn’t look in my direction. I didn’t ask her. I didn’t want to know. “I’m leaving.”

She remained unmoving, a petrified figurehead, polished wood glued to the bedframe. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

She’s right.

I don’t.

Chestnut blight does not affect the trees’ roots. Amazingly regenerative, the surviving root systems can produce sprouts and small trees. Surrounded by the toxic fungus, most young trees are infected before reaching sexual maturity. A few nuts are produced, perpetuating the cycle of growth and infection as the saplings die.

It is possible, in cases of a less virulent fungus, for an infected tree to produce a hardened callous, armoring itself against the wounding cankers, and surviving in a new, battle-scarred shape. It is possible, out from under the prickling spores of parasitic strangulation, for new growth to live again. There may yet be hope for the woman I knew.

All I know now is that the sun’s coming up.

Swollen orange clouds inflaming the sky.

And I still can’t find the car.