There is illness in the wind and unease in the soil. It has been here since 1904 when the first splotch of chestnut blight showed in our hills; it will be here until the last American Chestnut is dead. The trees fought hard, but their oak and pine neighbors haven’t hidden them, and their lapfuls of saplings die young. Once the cankers show, it’s over. The era of 500-year-old elder groves has passed. We now live in a graveyard of toddlers.

The chestnuts are dead. Not silent. We hear them crying behind pelt-tacked sheds, around foreclosed mines and closing food pantries, behind holler-claimed houses. They cry in the night; they cry at the dawn. No land is bereft of them, no hour left unwept.

Despite our own blights, we’ve tried to help the chestnuts. Why wouldn’t we? They fed us in the cold and shaded us from heat. We burnt, bent and harvested their cradle-to-grave bodies for years, but out of love; we needed them. They wanted us. 

Much has changed.

Every time Bessie Swanson sees her daughter, she tells her:

The trees are crying.

Maybe to remind her where she’s from. Maybe because she herself forgets. Through it all—the flood, the fleeing after, the pitying scholarship, the funeral (Bessie’s divorce)—if they’re speaking, Harper says, I know, Mom. It’s always disbelieving, only sometimes condescending. 

This time, with her door locks broken and back hurting, Bessie can’t say it. She wrings her arthritic hands. Fidgets in her rocking chair. Flies skitter across the fresh zucchini on the counter. Who’s sneaking in and leaving those horrible vegetables? It’s evil. It’s indecent. Bessie mutters, When I recall her, there’ll be hell to pay.

Harper, belly swollen, fingers ringless, picks at the tied curtains before giving her a concerned look.

Who cut down your chestnut trees, Mom?

Bessie licks chapped lips. Did she have something to say? There’s a blank, blank space, a nothing; ringing the nothing is fear. She fumbles with the third stale bagel stacked in her pocket. Her eyes water.

What trees?

Angel. Stop fucking with me.

No, Sis, I’m serious. I didn’t touch anything. The lawnmower was gone when I got back. I found it wrecked in the ditch.

With the keys still on the hook.

If I was going wild again, do you think I’d do such a pisspoor job?

Sissy rubs her face. The cousins stand before the ancient sawmill, boots caked in mud, calloused fingers blooming from fingerless gloves, both of them in Sissy’s coats, one of them at ease in its shape, the other more uncertain. A dead hillside of chestnut trees looms.

Dad’s going to flip his shit, Sissy says. Especially with you just out of rehab.

Angel’s exhale wavers. Her eyeliner draws bottomless gouges around her eyes. You don’t have to say anything. You’ve stuck your neck out enough for me. If he doesn’t believe me, I’ll take the blame. I need to show him I’m trying.

He knows you are. You know.

Rainfall seeps downhill, washing mineral sores left from mining as it goes. The land gurgles. The girls shuffle. Exchange a cigarette and uncertain smiles. One of them kicks the lawnmower wheel by her toe. They avoid discussing where the trees were—where the trees are.

Neither of them follows the torn, oil-flecked trail past the sawmill into the woods.

I ain’t arguing with a dumb bitch that don’t know what a Punnett square or p-value is. Trees don’t cry or walk. They don’t do no ‘talking’ outside of chain chemical reactions. The government and agriculture folks done spent millions more on saving those trees instead of us, and you know what? Even they don’t believe them damn chestnuts can think!

You should finish driving back to Morgantown.

And what, leave your schizophrenic ass with our mother? I bet you’ve been using her morphine patches. Her vitamins too. That’s why they’re gone. That’s why you’ve got homoeopathic bullshit on the brain.

Get in your damn truck, Eddie.

I’m drunk. Can’t drive.

You’re the one getting a PhD. Fucking figure it out.

Headlights splash against bark in a bright pulse of blood, an engine roars, a duffel slaps grass. The Elk River and all its mineral-soaked streams rush by, hurrying towards all the open roots, mouths and wells that await it. In the trailer, a woman made of pain is wailing. One of her sons—the younger one, eternal caretaker until tonight—stands in the drive, his nails biting into his palms. He watches his older brother swerve through their mother’s garden, crushing unpicked tomatoes and trellises. Squashes explode under his tires. Unripe chestnut burrs burst.

The teal truck straightens, then roars across the bridge.

Where’s the bird?

What?

Rusty Senior, hooked to an oxygen tank and wheezing, stays in his chair. Rusty Junior, still in his sawdusted uniform, walks to their drooping clothesline. He squeezes a weathered sock hanging from it. He frowns. Curls of wood stick in his lashes and coily hair; the moss beneath his boots squishes. Their family bustles inside.

The wren, Rusty Junior says. He turns the empty sock in gentle, saw-clipped fingers. He and his father are too young for all they’re missing. She hasn’t been sleeping in the sock anymore. Shouldn’t she have eggs this time of year too?

Something must’ve got her.

They stare into the darkening field. The twilight-striped wood beyond the road. It’s a bone thicket to Rusty Junior. A grove of dried loss. He wants to say, Maybe she finally left this shithole, because no one’s come to fix the house after the flood like they promised, no one’s assessed anything, no one’s ever come for them, but the wren’s always eaten worms delivered on bent wire, raised her babies in potted peppers, and slept in a laundered sock. They’ve made it good for her.

Something’s screaming in the hills like a baby slid out of it half-done.

Must’ve been the trees, Rusty Senior says.

They lock the door that night.

Jillian’s mascara is running, sweatshirt and bun melting off her, while Reese huddles in his varsity jacket. The friends sit in silence, sniffling as Jillian whips them around curves in the darkness, her inherited car groaning, crumbling beneath them.

It makes me so sad. 

Jillian speaks. Stares ahead. Reese’s gleaming paper clip braces and the gaps between teeth, absences of gleam, vanish. Cross after cross and guardrail-tied bouquet after bouquet slide through the headlights.

You can’t stand in line anywhere without hearing about someone sick or dying. Everywhere. Every day. In two seconds, Great-Auntie went from talking about her stolen mulch to that lump eating her stomach. Your uncle told you about his lungs in the stupid Kum & Go. 

Reese says, I think it’s normal.

They corkscrew down the mountain road, needling into its exposed granite side, asphalt and stale deer blood paving the way. Jillian wipes her nose.

My parents won’t even talk about my uncles since Eddie got the DUI and Theo got arrested in Charleston. Especially Theo. They only talk about Eddie now that he’s getting a degree. Theo’s the one taking care of Auntie Zora, and they pretend he doesn’t exist. I don’t know how they’re gonna handle Auntie being housebound with Theo. I really don’t.

Reese, remembering the middle school era when Zora’s house was a forbidden plague place, chews on his tongue. He can’t articulate what his and Jillian’s mental heaviness is beyond birds flying north for winter, woods walking, or a river flowing backwards. It’s unnatural. He recalls Theo’s wan, crumpling face when Jillian’s parents—more present and loving than his own—made them shun Theo in a Dollar General.

He can’t look at the idea that he and Jillian are next.

They said Theo’s name for the first time in years today. Jillian sniffles, face screwing up. It’s like he’s dead. It’s like we’re all dead. Lord, Reese. I have to get out of here. I have to get out.

…Jilly. It’ll be okay. You’re not alone. Reese touches her as they round the curve right into a tree-cut pair of headlights.

Right into a tree.

That night, we share a dream.

It enters our collective veins the way soot and pain do. We are standing together, dying, begging for the chestnuts’ aid. Without axes or baskets, we can’t force it. An oily river boils around our shins. Our feet are buried. Sores bloom on our exposed skin. The chestnuts, their faces made from shadowy whorls and peeled trunks, ever-changing illusions, stare at us.

Why? they say.

Do they actually walk, or is it just the wind? Our hard, unfinished children lay scattered on the pine needles.

We’ve never forgotten you, the trees say. You’ve forgotten us.

We’ll do anything to be better, we tell them. We mean it.

Will you?

They watch us rot.

When we wake up, it feels so real, we don’t think about it at all.

Harper is searching for black dresses when she hears the back door open. She stills, bent in the dim closet. Morning has wrapped the house in fragile, yellow light, but it has yet to bring heat; all that’s come is a shredded rabbit in the yard. Summer has not been dying as it should. Harper straightens, slower than before, scribbled lists of maternity supplies and budgeting math rustling in her waitress apron.

Her mother is napping. It must be old Zora, here to deliver vegetables to her sister-in-law. Maybe out of pity or desperation for control. Bessie has long forgotten that she gave Zora friendship or a house key. The head of a shadow creeps beneath the open closet door, then its shoulders. Footsteps and muttering lurch closer. Harper, nose sensitive, catches a whiff of earth. Below it, iron. Concern spikes through her before nausea.

Hello?

A shadow lies across her feet. She closes the door. 

Bessie stands a touch away from her, naked, leaf-tangled hair between her shoulder blades, blood on her crooked nose and in her eye, blood streaking sagging breasts, blood on lashed, wrinkly thighs, brown of the earth overwriting the brown of her skin.

They put their dead in me, she says.

Harper screams.

Bessie mumbles as Harper cleans her, nurses her and dresses her. She hunches on her worn loveseat while Harper makes a call, crying. 

Rus, I don’t know what to do. The lock was broken. Someone beat her. She at least fell into some briars. Can’t take her to the hospital or police after everything. What the hell is going on? … Can you? I’ve known you since high school. I know when you’re… Okay. No, I’m all right. Please, please be careful.

Harper cries in the wet-faced, dead-voiced way she always has, but her fingers curl in the landline coil as if tenderly seeking hair. She cradles her belly. Bessie laughs, her nose raw with broken veins and roots.

We ought to be helping, she says. We ought to have helped them. Now look.

The funeral for Jillian Hyer makes a grove of them.

The community gathers around the coffin, bent together, untouching. Sissy and Angel, who supplied the coffin wood, brood beside the family. They stand hand-in-hand, chins lowered. Their father weeps behind them. The coffin makers, junior and senior, stand nearby. They are intertwined with another family—Harper melds into Rusty’s side, one hand on her mother’s shoulder.

Reese, whiter than birch, banded with bruises, speaks after the reverend does. His parents don’t look at him.

The reverend says death is part of God’s plan, Reese says. Maybe I’m too stupid to follow it. I miss Jilly. I’m in pain. I haven’t learned anything at all.

Words and blame-stench, as sharp as drink, leak beneath Reese’s eulogy. Voices rise; a cup flies at the reception table. Two brothers quiet when other mourners turn. The bruised one looks away. Around them, poplars whisper.

I have a warning, Bessie mutters.

Then Jillian’s grandaunt Zora, squeezing a bouquet, rises to speak. A revelation lights Bessie’s face. She explodes from beneath her daughter’s grip.

It’s you! she screams. It’s you, you fucking bitch! I remember now! It’s you breaking into my house and leaving those zucchinis! Leave me alone!

The woods weep.

Two nights after the funeral, dogs are brought inside. Doors are locked. Laborers leave the woods before sundown. Though there’s light and dinner smoke, curtains cover unboarded windows; guns above mantles are loaded. Only whitetail and already-dead drug runners traverse the thin roads that night. Chestnuts rustle. Rattle. It’s windy out there, those listening say, although the sky is still. The sound of the dying drowns the countryside.

Around the hollers—

An old woman’s room lies silent.

Her daughter sleeps with a man, her belly against the small of his back, their dark hands restlessly knitted. The cost of their love echoes in medical bills, union dues, and long-spent scrip. They don’t want to pay interest.

A family house hums with dim music, doors locked, heads down. They understand hiding from neighbors. It isn’t their first time. They always pray it’s their last. They fear what the desperate will do.

By the river—

Squash goes unharvested. Condolence meals go uneaten. A woman denied her prescriptions lies shrouded in quilts and baby photos, waiting on her sons to return, praying the bumper dent on one’s truck means something else. She (again) resigns to living through this. 

Two cousins-turned-sisters drink Irish coffee from teacups. Fucking party at my funeral! one howls. Make them bury me in a dress!

And the other cries: I’ll outlive you, just to make sure they do. They pretend their exes are healing and their drinking water is clean.

Near the hills—

 A woman screams into her husband’s chest, undone homework underfoot. It should’ve been me, she and the trees say. It should’ve been me. 

Down the road, a teenager looks at his palms, bed unmade, and wonders (again) if he was born only to die.

In the woods—

Two men stand in clipped briars. One holds a flashlight. The other holds a tree parameter map. Burrs cover their boots. They argue about vanished groves, root holes, guilt, grief, familial mauling and drag marks in undertone until the eldest shouts. He points at a chestnut trunk sliced with teal. I told you I didn’t hit them! He weeps. It walked. It walked. 

The youngest doesn’t reply. He stares at the ruined figure ambling towards them.

In the graveyard—

Fresh soil settles on a ripening girl.

You don’t know what I did to have you. Do you?

The coat draped over Bessie sways. The brothers steady her as they slide down the slick hill, furrows of blood and duff behind them. A screech owl shrieks.

We won’t have service until the road, Eddie says.

I know. Theo chews his lip. Deer bones clatter against his boots. He stumbles when Bessie seizes his forearm. She digs her heels in.

Harper! One of her breasts, gnarled with burrs beneath the skin, swings free. You liar! You don’t know! Are you listening to me?

The brothers lock eyes for a breath, debating, before Theo says, Yes, Mom. I’m listening.

You should be! You’re expecting. 

The group creeps forward again. Bessie’s raw legs shake.

Would you eat a baby for your baby? she says.

Did you? Theo says.

I ate so many chestnuts. Bessie wheezes. I sold those coal people my mother’s house. I did about everything to have you whole. To not have that horrible crick water and baby bits come pouring out of me again. It’s the mines. They’re sick. They kill everything. Well, Harper? What’ll you do?

When Theo’s silence stretches, moral childlessness and hereditary nightmares heavy in his face, Bessie slaps him. He yelps in surprise, her blood on his cheek; the waning moon swallows their scuffling.

Harper! Answer me!

Leave him alone! Eddie seizes her hand before she can hit his brother again. He ain’t done anything wrong!

Bessie trips, plunging into the leaves on her knees, screaming.

Your people blighted the burr people! Then my people and my grandbaby’s people. Then the world committed to killing you. Now we’re together! Everyone outside doesn’t care. The burr people don’t care!

Theo gasps when the woods move. Roots tear from the ground, mistletoe-bloated limbs from the canopy.

I think I had something important to say, Bessie says.

The chain of phone calls and banging on doors brings us from our homes, but the flashpoint of fear drives it. We converge at the gravel road—young and old, singular and pregnant, pained and able—stuffed into boots and mended camo coats, flashlights shimmering in hand. Everyone lingers at the woods’ hem, afraid of its silence, until someone surges forward. Then we plunge into the trees, looking for what they’ve taken.

At first, we clamber past oaks, ashes, and pawpaws. We fling leaves at toadstools with our boots; we trample moss and rusted barbed wire. Our lights illuminate only raked earth. Then, the woods open. The moonlit truth spills.

We make a terrible discovery: we find what the chestnut trees made.

It’s an apothecary of awfulness. We see stews made from our vitamins, cleanses crafted from engine oil and ointments, poultices made from fly-blown fertilizer and ground wren chicks. We smell sap on stolen blades, bleach on the toadstools. The entire blighted chestnut grove, the dead and dying, the fertile and the falling, stand knee-deep in their efforts. Some have roots wrapped around Mason jars, cankers doused in cures, or trunks slathered in terrible salve.

Some now bathe in blood.

Bucked-and-limbed human trunk splatters the forest floor. Autumn’s colors have come early. Sopping rags hang from bark necks. Iron-dripping fingertips poke from hollow chests. The dying chestnuts stand dressed in three of our generations. Someone moans. Retch splatters black barren vines. Chestnut branches reach for us, breaking through shock and light. The woods close in.

How could you do this? one of our youngest cries. He already knows the answer. 

We all do.