She kicked through the grass along the fence, making her way back to the driveway, but instead of heading to the house, she left the packed dirt and stepped into the trees.
This was the oldest part of the orchard. These few acres between the house and the road were where Rejoice Lovegood had planted her first trees and nurtured them through hot summers and frozen winters. She had been alone then, before she met her husband and bore their daughter, Fearful, before Clement Abrams or any of the other white neighbors had arrived. There had been an Abenaki village down at the far end of the valley, Rejoice alone at this end, and nothing but forest in between.
According to the old stories born in the feverish depths of puritanical imagination, Rejoice had fed these oldest apple trees her own blood when it looked like they might not survive, and that was why they had endured so long.
Sorrow breathed in the scents of soil and moss, mud and grass, and the ever-present memory of apples. She tried to let the orchard soothe her as she walked, tried to let the sunlight and the canopy of green draw out the ache in her chest like poison from a snakebite. Two squirrels chased each other up a tree in a chattering burst. It was a beautiful afternoon, hot enough to make the shadows welcoming.
The day couldn’t be more different from the last time she and Patience had walked together in the orchard.
Sorrow’s steps faltered, and she exhaled softly, let the memory settle like snowfall over her thoughts. That cold day at the clawing, blustery end of winter. She had been bundled up in boots and gloves, skidding on soggy patches of snow as she chased after Patience with no hope of catching her. That girl she had been, not once suspecting how little time she had left with her sister, she had wanted to see the witch’s grave.
Sorrow turned to the north, took a breath, and climbed the hill.
By the time she reached the summit, her heart was racing and her calves were burning. She stopped in the shade at the edge of the clearing.
The oak that grew atop the hill was a massive black-barked monster, towering over the whole of the orchard. Its leaves were as big as dinner plates, its branches as fat around as whole trees. Bulbous knots protruded from its lumpy, deformed trunk. It was ugly, misshapen, and had been struck by lightning more times than anybody could count. Verity had once told Sorrow the black oak looked as it did because it absorbed all the blights and diseases that threatened the orchard, gobbled them up like a ravenous beast and swallowed them down into the soil where they could do no harm, and Sorrow, wide-eyed and credulous, had believed it. It was the biggest tree in the orchard, the biggest in all of Abrams Valley. Nobody knew how old it was; it had been towering and ancient already when Rejoice Lovegood first came to the valley.
The oak was surrounded by a barren patch where no grass or shrubs ever grew, and in a curve around one side of the clearing were six ash trees. They were very old and very tall, all the exact same age: one for each of the children Silence Lovegood had slain. Their father’s family had insisted the children be buried in town, far from their mother and the stain of her wickedness. Silence’s daughter Grace, the only survivor, had planted the ash trees for her siblings years later.
Silence herself was buried at the base of the oak beneath an uneven rectangle of white stones. She had neither a headstone nor an ash tree. She had only the roots of the black oak wrapped around her in a tangled cage.
They had come up here together the day before Patience died. Sorrow remembered the dull, cold dread she had felt about going back to the house and how important it had been to convince Patience to walk a bit longer. She remembered leaving the cemetery and hurrying around the hill, both wanting and not wanting a glimpse across the meadow to the burned Abrams barn in the distance.
Sorrow walked the perimeter of the oak’s clearing to the northern side. The apple trees were too tall, the orchard too lush for a view from this spot, so she picked her way down the slope until she met the orchard road. From there she could look along a wide gap between rows of apple trees and see the Abrams house on its hill: tall, white, a blinding spark on the landscape. The new garage stood beside it, the one that had replaced the old barn—it was whole, of course it was whole, but for the briefest flicker of a moment Sorrow saw a black wound in the corner where fire had eaten it away.
There, below, was the meadow on the property boundary between Lovegood and Abrams land, and there was the fence that separated them. From this distance the double strands of wire were no more than the merest pencil sketches. The Abrams side was mowed in long sweeping lines; on the Lovegood side the meadow was choked with grass and wildflowers so thick the leaning fence posts were half-hidden.
At the western end of the meadow was the old stone well where George Abrams might have died, and might still remain, rotted away to a skeleton. It was small and round and innocuous, its weathered lid a circle of silver wood.
And there was the cider house.
14
A MEMORY WAS a thing with no shape, no mass, but indescribable weight. Words spoken in cold winter air, secrets shared, a sprint, a chase, a smile, a favor, these things had their own gravity, distorting everything around them like the heaviest star, shaping time and space even when the heart remained hidden.
Sorrow and Patience had walked through the orchard together a hundred times, a thousand, in every season, in drizzling rain and blazing sun, howling wind and whipping snow. Every one of those walks was compressed to a single pinpoint of a single day: the last day of Patience’s life.
But all Sorrow felt now, standing at the edge of the meadow, was a nervous tremble in her chest. She should have come down here sooner, to this quiet place where Patience had died.
The cider house was a black ruin cupped in a meadow of vibrant green. Eight years of wind and rain and snow had washed the stench of smoke away, stamped the ashes into dirt, polished the blackened boards to a sheen. Wildflowers bloomed in the rich tangle of grass around it, and a thicket of trees huddled at its back. It was about half the size of the barn, with one story above the ground and a cellar below. The fire had brought down one of the long walls and half of the roof, but the rest of the building remained, a crooked, leaning skeleton of blackened boards and beams. There was grass growing inside, reaching for sunlight through the tumbling walls. A few yellow and pink flowers stood out against the charred wood.