Tree Gods

By R Lee Fryar

Once, we Drus were as the Dryads: eternally in our roots, one forever with the forest. But we not content. We longed for form, to set us apart from the trees. So the Dryads gave us the bodies of men, and trapped our spirits in mortal flesh…

 

Holly Hillwalker has never dealt well with the curse of the Drus. He hates his humanity, and never more than now, when the magic of the forest is failing and it's up to him to save his people. Tristan Grueder, part-owner of the local sawmill is coming back to town, and a cloud of blood and death follows in his wake. Holly will do everything he can to stop him.

 

Tristan has no idea of the hatred the forest holds for him and his family. They're just trees. And his sister's business is in trouble. He's going to help her get their company on solid financial ground again and then he's leaving. Tennga, Georgia has never felt like home to him, and there's nothing that could ever convince him to put down roots there. Until he meets Holly Hillwalker.

 

It's a bad time for a lonely man to find his soulmate. It's a terrible time for a would-be King of Trees to fall for a human. And if there's one thing the enchanted forest won't tolerate, it's a human and Drus in love. The forest issues an ultimatum.

 

He who is to be king must bring the man here to the sacred spring to die…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Midnight Meadow Publishing
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781956037333

Book preview

Prologue

Death was in the water. He could taste it.

Holly spread his leaves wide, seeking answers on the breeze, but on this September morning, the wind swept down the mountainside, whipping both questions and answers away. Below the steep walls of his cove forest, the valley kept its riddle, a dangerous puzzle he needed to solve. He stretched from the depth of his roots to the top of his evergreen branches. Not long now. He could feel it. The heat of the summer waned, and with the nighttime chill came the urge to walk, to shed his bark and assume the shape of a man again.

He shuddered in his heartwood, and the tremors ran out to the end of his long branches. He’d never conquered the dread of his humanity. He’d seen too much horror with his man’s eyes, felt too much pain with his man’s heart, and known too much loss with his man’s mind. But humanity was the curse of his kind—the curse of the Drus.

In the wilds of Georgia, he and his brothers had walked for many centuries of turmoil. He’d seen his forest die before—under the axes and fires of the men who raped his mountains and killed his Dryads. He’d been the one who led the fight to save them. He’d also been the one who called for retreat when the losses became too great. He knew the taste of death—no one better. 

Holly dug deeper into the rocky soil of his hillside, tasting the water and the oily, slick flavor tainting it. What could it be? Men with axes? The sawmill in the nearby town of Tennga made that a continual possibility. Fire too, and flood, but those were local events and unlikely to disturb the Dryads. This felt different. The whole forest felt anxious, like the quiet stirring of leaves before a storm. He twisted inside his newly formed body, its confinement a seed surrounding him, trapping him in futility. He had a week left until emergence. Until then, he was helpless. In his tree, all he could do was taste, feel, and speculate.

But whatever the source of his uneasiness, it would be a matter for the King of Trees. Oak had been king since Holly relinquished both his old body and the title. By the wind and the water, he must be king again. But the forest had a long memory where his past failures were concerned. Root to crown, they knew him. Far too many failures. Still, no king worth his sap would let death creep into the forest like a snake into a nest of young birds as Oak had done.

Holly settled in the dirt, but not in his heartwood, and brooded, full of the fear trees felt but already burdened by the cares of his man’s mind. 

Death was in the water. He must stop it.

Chapter 1

Tristan was following the migration. That’s what Daniel would say if he were driving. But Daniel was back in Vermont, and Tristan was alone, making his way across the Blue Ridge Mountains along with the autumn flock of tourists in pursuit of the fall colors. But they were staying behind while he pressed onward, drifting south into Georgia where the leaves were still green. Only the maples had begun to change. Their bright yellow leaves fluttered in the breeze like party streamers. His birthday was tomorrow. There would be cake. Sam would insist; his sister was always one for family traditions. If only Daniel–

Tristan huffed and slowed to a granny-crawl behind a red Subaru taking every curve in the road like a Texan, slow and wide. He didn’t tailgate, though. He was in no hurry to go home.

If he’d had the courage, he’d have turned around and raced back to Vermont, hammered on Daniel’s door, and demanded answers. Men didn’t just grow apart slowly until they had nothing left to hold them together, and suddenly, without warning, tell the other there was nothing there, had never been anything there: no love, no relationship, no desire. They certainly didn’t drop that particular bomb on the night when one of them proposed. The cruelty hurt like a knife in the gut, and he didn’t know why Daniel had done it. Not ready to be married, indeed. He was ready. What the hell he’d done to be jilted like this—

Texas came to a full stop as a six-point buck in velvet bounded across the road and vanished into the undergrowth. Tristan stopped too. He reached for his jacket in the passenger’s seat and unwrapped his phone with Sam’s latest text displayed on the screen. He tapped twice.

Almost—

Texas started up again. Tristan set the phone down. He wished he hadn’t promised Sam he would come. 

I need you, though, she had said, in the kind of Georgia peaches voice he’d never been able to resist. They won’t listen to me—that’s clear enough. Not a day after I post the schedule for the town meeting, Oak storms into my office, telling me he’s going to shoot anyone who comes onto his property. And he’s going to block the roads, spike the trees—you remember what he’s like.

Tell him to call his congressman if he doesn’t like the project. I have next to nothing to do with it anyway. Tristan pounded down two aspirin with a shot of tequila. How could he say no to me? I love him. He loves me. He said he loved me.

I did tell him. Didn’t do any good. Now he’s threatening to bring every Hillwalker to the meeting to protest.

What do you want me to do? The sawmill is your business, Sam, not mine. I should’ve sold my half to you when Mom died. Nobody there even remembers me—

Oh, Oak remembered you all right, Sam broke in. ‘If your brother were here, girl, he’d not cut down our biggest trees for some old ship. He’d know better. He’d leave us in peace.’ Sexist pig. 

And I’m supposed to turn Uncle Oink into Santa Claus, ho, ho, ho?

They listened to Dad. They’ll listen to you, especially when you can explain the environmental impact stuff. I just want you to come in for the meeting and answer their questions. That’s it. You don’t have to stay long—I know how much you hate Georgia.

I don’t hate Georgia, he lied.

"Please? I’ve got a lot riding on this thing, Tristan. I don’t ask for things like this often, and surely you can take the time to help. It’s the Constellation for God’s sakes. You love old sailing ships. Even Andy said you would. Just come for the weekend if that’s all you can spare me. I know you don’t want to take too much time off work. Saving it up, aren’t you? Although, why the hell you think the Appalachian Trail would make a good honeymoon, I’ll never know."

His stomach churned. It’s not me Tris, it’s you. Don’t you see that? No, he didn’t see that, and he didn’t see why Daniel had waited until he proposed to say such a thing. He would go crazy trying to figure it out. He needed space to think. Even Georgia would do. I’ll come.

Tristan? Are you okay?

His big sister knew him too well. I’m fine.

Something wrong?

I’ll come, okay? He had hung up on her, sat on the couch, buried his face in his hands, and cried. He hadn’t sobbed like that since his mother died.

Two days stopped the tears. Nothing would stop the pain. He’d have to bury it. Bury it like he buried everything else in the graveyard where his mother and father rested. The looks. The whispers. All the insults hissed at him when they weren’t yelled in his face. Rural Georgia was no place for a gay boy to feel at home, and as a gay man, he’d hoped he’d never face it alone again. 

When he made that turn off the main highway, the one that would take him through downtown, he felt fifteen again, stammering through his coming out speech in front of his bathroom mirror, terrified, sick to his stomach. Mom. I’ve got something to tell you. I like other boys. I’m gay.

She’d hugged him and told him she knew. Told him he should never be afraid to be himself. Bare-headed from chemo, she’d long since decided life was far too precious to waste a single minute being anyone other than herself. Sam supported him, too. The rest of the town? No. Bigotry was in the water down here. It was in the air, on the wind, ground into the fabric of the community like the red clay. It would never change, no matter how long he stayed away.

Tennga had been a scar on the road when he left it, and it was the same gouge in the woods he remembered. The highway hurried through it, taking the shortest possible route between the clapboard relics of two rival general stores, both sagging in at the corners, old men glaring at each other, arms folded on an argument concluded years before. The vacant barber shop still stood, candy-cane pole flaking off in pieces, broken glass gazing off into space where the town’s one restaurant used to be. It must have burned while he’d been gone. Long weeds already grew in the cracked foundation. The gas station hung on, open, except on Sunday. The bait shop next to it promised ‘open on Sundays’, but without the S. The town didn’t even have a traffic light. 

Nothing ever changed here. People lived in the town, they died in the town, they were buried in the town, and unless an heir claimed the bones of their lives, their lives died. But they didn’t rest in peace. They festered, sitting on the edge of the road like the buildings—eternal rot. In Tennga, life lost all meaning, or maybe it never had any meaning to begin with. Except for the sawmill, there wasn’t much purpose in living. 

Like the town, it hadn’t altered much from the last time he’d seen it. Two stories of faded oak siding. Skeletal juniper bushes at the entryway. The glass doors, still there, even the one with a long crack down the center. The afternoon sunlight caught the sliver and turned it white. He’d been how old when that happened? Ten? The oldest of the Hillwalkers—Old Holly, with the long silver hair and angry green eyes—picked up a rock when Tristan’s father threatened to run him out of town and hurled it solidly at the front door. Dad had been fond of that story. A foot to the left, and it would have hit me in the forehead. I tell you, I wish it had. That creep belongs in jail along with the rest of ‘em. Dad had never fixed it. Neither had Sam. It was a statement. The Hillwalkers might fight Grueder Sawmill, but they’d never win. They’d never shut it down. 

For Tristan’s part, he’d have sold out long ago. He’d planned on cutting all ties to the family business when he tied the knot with Daniel. Tristan clenched the wheel. He had to stop thinking about Daniel.

Sam waited for him on the front porch, parked in one of the wicker chairs Mom might have set out yesterday. Same white basket-weave, same lilac-colored cushions. She kept everything the way Mom liked it, right down to the wild hydrangea vine rioting over the veranda where another southern lady might have planted wisteria. Live oaks flanked the long gravel driveway on both sides. They didn’t keep their leaves, not here, but it wasn’t Georgia without live oaks, Mom said, and so there they were. Mountain laurels, tipped with sunset fire, filled the flowerbeds in front of the rounded portico in front of the house. Nothing changed here, either. But this was the kind of sameness that welcomed. He got out of the car, stretching his compacted spine to its limit. 

Sam bounced down the stairs to meet him. She’d knotted her long brown hair in a summer bun at the nape of her neck. Tendrils drifted over the collar of her long-sleeved shirt, a red plaid flannel he’d given her for her birthday two years ago. Didn’t have to send the posse out to look for you after all. 

He laughed. You’re going to melt in that, he said, sweating as he pulled his suitcase out of the back seat.

I’ll have you know it was sixty-two this morning. Like to froze to death. She hugged him, laughing too. You made good time. I was waiting on you to text and here you are.

I’d have been faster if I hadn’t got behind all the rubberneckers in the mountains. Think they’d never seen a tree before.

She clicked her tongue sympathetically. At least you get great gas mileage, even with the stops and starts. But I thought you said your Tesla was blue.

He glanced at the car. "It is blue. Or it will be after I wash it. Roads were a cloud of dust once I got off the blacktop."

We haven’t had a drop of rain in three weeks. Rained all summer, though. My tomatoes got rot. Come on in. Got supper ready for you and everything.

You know better than to wait supper on me.

She waved his concern away. I’m used to it with Andy. A doctor’s hours aren’t regular, not in a rural practice. 

He followed her up the brick steps to the oversized front door that always stuck. Ostentatious, his mother used to call it. His father called it showing your class. Sam yanked hard to get it open. He grinned when she cursed. You could replace it.

I’ll replace it when I replace the sawmill door, and not before. 

Is business that bad?

Her brown eyes didn’t sparkle at his joke. Business is business. No better or worse than usual. We’ll manage. Her jaw jutted out and her lips tightened in a determined look he remembered very well.

You look like Mom when you say that. I’ll carry my luggage upstairs, shall I?

Leave it down here for now. It’s your birthday. Eat first. She pointed him to the dining room table, as ornate as the front door and big enough for a family of ten to sit comfortably, but there had seldom been more than three. He passed through the living room, glancing at the familiar red plush sofa, the overstuffed recliner where Andy liked to watch football on the wide-screen, and the fireplace. The family pictures stood on the massive oak mantelpiece, along with his mother’s statue of a running horse she’d had since she was a girl and the ornamental clock. But one thing was missing.

Where’s Half-Man? he asked, taking his father’s seat at the dining room table, long vacant.

Like I’d leave that monstrosity sitting where everyone could see it. For God’s sake, Tristan, the ladies from the church come over sometimes.

You didn’t throw him out?

Of course not. He’s up in your bedroom. You look good, Sam called from the kitchen. Still working out every day?

Yes, he lied. He hadn’t been to the gym since the break-up with Daniel. How is Andy?

Busy, Sam said. He’d have been here, but he’s still in Atlanta at a conference. He said tell you happy birthday and asked you to go fishing with him on Sunday.

On the boat or fly fishing?

You know Andy. He loves that boat.

Sam handed him a plate clamped in a towel. Steak, potatoes, and green beans from the garden. She sat next to him. And I made your favorite, Italian cream cake. How’s Daniel?

The tenderloin had been cooked just right, warm and red in the center, but he tasted blood when he swallowed. He set his fork down. Well, about that...

Her face fell. What happened?

There weren’t words for what had happened, not when he was still screaming inside. I proposed. It didn’t work out. The hollowness in his voice would have to fill in the gaps.

Oh, Tris. I’m sorry. She’d been leaning toward him, elbows on the table. Now she sat back and looked away, as if he’d somehow become a stranger. 

Me too. I’m sorry. What kind of comfort was that? If Andy had jilted her almost at the altar, Tristan would’ve held her tight and let her cry on his shoulder, and he’d sympathize when she asked him what kind of ass makes love to a person only to leave them in the end. He’d have answered, too—the kind of ass who wasn’t worth thinking about. But Daniel wasn’t an ass. He was a wonderful, intelligent, confident man, and Tristan loved him with everything he was, and Daniel had loved him. At least, that’s what he’d thought. 

He choked down another bite of steak. Well, I didn’t come all this way to bore you with my sob story. Which of the almighty Hillwalkers will I be preaching to tomorrow? I’ve been rehearsing my speech most of the way.

I don’t know how many will come. I’m still holding out hope they all catch some kind of virus and stay home. Oak will be there, certainly, and Willow. Margo will make him come.

Margo? What’s she still doing here? I thought she’d go back to Macon when she retired. 

Sam rolled her eyes. Retire? She doesn’t know the meaning of the word. She’s still substitute teaching at Chatsworth. Willow’s support would be nice, but it’s Oak you need to impress. When old Holly died, he became the patriarch, I guess, not that any of the Hillwalkers talk about it. They’re more secretive than ever these days, and twice as combative.

You’d think survivalists would be having a banner year, Tristan said with a snort. It’s their kind of politics.

Sam shook her head. I don’t think politics matter to them. I’m not sure they even vote. All they care about—have ever cared about—is their goddamn trees. Dad couldn’t figure them out, and neither could Mom, although Lord knows she tried.

Mom always said there was something worth understanding in everyone, even the Hillwalkers.

Anyone who tries to understand that family deserves sainthood. If it was just their trees they were funny about, I’d understand. But they’re bullying anyone with a tree to be cut. Everyone in this town is afraid, and I don’t exactly blame them. Cake. She got up and went back to the kitchen to cut obscenely large slices for them both.

He pushed his plate away. He’d left all the potatoes and three-quarters of the steak. The meat would weigh like a brick in his stomach. If he stayed much more than three days, he’d need to tell Sam he preferred salad to these heavy dinners. Daniel was a vegetarian, and he’d adopted the same eating habits for the entire time they’d been together. He closed his eyes. He had to stop thinking about Daniel. He had other things to think about. The Hillwalkers for instance.

The Southern-correct term for them was eccentric. The less polite version held they were a weird religious cult, doomsday preppers, and one day the mountains would blow up when their secret arsenal exploded. They never came to town to make anything but trouble, they never worked, they never darkened the door of a church, and they didn’t bathe either—if he remembered Willow well enough. Margo might’ve tamed him down, but last Tristan remembered, the hairy, greasy old coot was leading fly-fishing trips up the Conasauga and getting into trouble with Game and Fish for not carrying a license. As for Oak, if he was anything like old Holly, he’d be a regular ax—sharp-tempered, snarling, and impossible to reason with. But somewhere between tonight and tomorrow evening, he needed to find a way to do exactly that.

We should sing, Sam said, setting cake in front of him.

Let’s not and say we did. I can’t think of much to sing about. 

They finished the cake in silence.

Afterward Tristan carried his bags upstairs to the room he’d left years before, hung up his clothes in the closet beside his abandoned sculptures, parked his glasses on his dresser, and fell asleep in the bed he thought he’d never sleep in again.

Chapter 2

Tristan did not wake rested. His bed felt more or less as comfortable as he remembered, but it was shorter. He’d put on two inches in his first year of college when he should’ve been done, and he harbored a suspicion he was still growing, albeit more slowly up than out. 

He rose, scratched his back, stretched, and wandered into the bathroom. Sam had set out the guest towels. He ignored them and fished under the sink for the house ones. He decided to shower before breakfast, which was a good idea. He’d been too tired to rinse off the night before, and he still smelled like travel. But then he decided to shave before coffee, and that was a mistake. He nicked his upper lip once and his chin twice, dabbed the blood up with toilet tissue, and went back to his room to dress, already in a foul mood.

He’d gone to bed thinking about the Hillwalkers and they were still on his mind. He’d dreamed about them all night: half-wild men in deerskin jackets and dirty pants, all running through a dark forest and tossing hand grenades at him as he ran naked through the woods. When the missiles struck him, they turned into pine cones that stung like bees. That’s what he got for eating steak and cake when he wasn’t used to either, he supposed, but it was unsettling having those green eyes glaring at him through his dreams the way his own brown ones stared out at him from his dresser mirror. He pulled his shirt over his head, frowning almost as much as the statue of Half-Man, posed beside the alarm clock.

It was an awful sculpture—even he could admit that—but he’d been very proud of it once. The little man leered sadly up at his huge misshapen penis from the wreck of his face dripping down into his testicles as he knelt in supplication to either God or state. Tristan hadn’t been able to separate the two when he shaped Half-Man out of clay and anger at the age of fifteen, and he hadn’t cared to. He’d been more interested in the effect than anything else, pushing his raw emotions around like the raw material, a boy hiding behind his art when the closet couldn’t contain him anymore. Back then, effect was pretty much all he had. Nobody listened to a teen who wasn’t either rebellious or depressed, and he kept a foot in both camps to be on the safe side. He’d been labeled as a troublemaker from the eighth grade on—an irrational, emotional, fucked-up kid and gay to boot.

He straightened, buttoned his shirt up to the collar, and glanced at the tie hanging on the chair. He’d wanted to be an artist back then; so dead-set on it that he’d planned to go to Italy to study. Stupid, really, and even more so for a boy raised in this backwater. He’d been lucky to find out the facts of life when he did, otherwise, he might have ended up stuck in Georgia like Half-Man here, collecting dust because he was too grotesque for Sam to dust him now and then. Environmental law was a good field, a safe profession, and one he could be good at. He liked nature. He liked being out in it anyway, and conservation and protection of natural resources were important. And in law school, he’d met Daniel.

His hands stuttered. He yanked his shirt tail out, turned Half-Man away from the mirror, and went downstairs.

Sam was in the kitchen, looking as grumpy as he felt. She handed him a cup but said nothing. She’d never been a morning person.

He went out on the deck to drink his coffee and sat down on the dew-drenched steps, not caring about the damp. It was a cool morning, although soon enough September heat would return to cook the life out of what was left of Sam’s garden. The morning sunlight cast strange, orange and yellow stained-glass patterns through the faded plants. She’d told him about the rotten tomatoes, but she’d decided to let them struggle along, perhaps hoping for a change. They straggled up the poles, forlorn skeletons with a few leaves, and fewer sad, green spheres clinging to them. Purple-hull peas stabbed their dark pods like a final saber charge from the reddening leaves, and tired squash vines crawled with their bugs through the dried corn stalks on a mission to reach the compost pile before they died. 

Tristan drank the sob before it could escape his throat. It shouldn’t remind him of Daniel, but everything did right now. He’d had a garden himself, two whole rented plots that were his pride and passion. But gardening took too much time on weekends, Daniel said. So, Tristan gave it up. In return, Daniel dragged Tristan to every folk music festival in Vermont until the snow flew. And Tristan had been happy to go, happy because Daniel was happy, and happier still to check into the million and one little bed and breakfasts Daniel liked, where they could make love until the sun came up the next morning. 

The coffee scalded his tongue, and he stuck it out to cool it, setting his cup on the step next to him. What the hell had gone wrong? What had he done?

He didn’t tell you why? Sam shouldered him over as she sat beside him. He didn’t say anything? The last time he was here, everything seemed fine.

His shoulders tightened. I don’t want to talk about it, Sam.

Don’t shut me out.

I’m not. He glared defiantly at the weathered steps leading from the deck down to the yard and the garden beyond. It’s not over anyway. He said he wanted to be friends. He wasn’t angry with me. In a way, that made it worse. Eight years they’d been together. Never a fight between them. Never an argument. Everything was perfect until it was a disaster, and Daniel didn’t even blink when Tristan’s heart imploded. 

A ladybug, bright red and covered with freckles, lit on the porch railing, fanned its wings, and promptly tumbled into his coffee cup. It backpaddled desperately; he fished it out. When is the meeting?

"At seven. It’s getting dark earlier now, and some people have cattle and chickens to take care of after work. 

Not the Hillwalkers. They never worked before.

They still don’t, unless coming into my office to scream at me about our loggers counts. Not that we have that much going on right now, not with them screaming in the face of anyone who wants a tree cut.

I thought you said business was no worse than usual, he said, dumping the ladybug into a dilapidated geranium. 

Sam’s nostrils flared. There’s no construction in the area and hasn’t been for the last twenty years. We need this project. We’re one of the only sawmills that can handle the big trees needed for the reconstruction and one of the few places with two-hundred-year-old oaks still available. But the way the Hillwalkers act, you’d think their great-great-great-grandfathers planted those trees.

But they’re not the only ones, Tristan said, or you wouldn’t be needing me. You could have got any hotshot environmental lawyer from Atlanta up here to show them the reclamation documents.

She turned to face him. No. They aren’t the only ones. I need you to talk to Margo.

"Margo? Surely she’s for it. This is a big deal—restoring Constellation the way it should be done. Or does she want to see more layoffs?"

Sam shook her head. Margo knows it’s what’s best for Tennga, but she’s taken up some of Willow’s views since he moved in with her. I want you to bring her around. Show her we’re going to do this right. It’s one thing if the Hillwalkers raise hell. They always do. But if the history teacher goes green on us, we’re in trouble. She taught half the people in this town, and if she didn’t teach them, she taught their kids. Speak to her. Make her realize it’s a good thing. If you can convince Margo to let the project go ahead, Willow might even get Oak to cooperate. The best trees are on Hillwalker land. They’re always on Hillwalker land.

I’m not promising miracles.

I’m not asking for any. Sam stood and dusted imaginary dirt from her faded jeans. I... I really am sorry about Daniel, Tris. He’s not the right man for you, that’s all. One day, you’ll find someone who is. The sliding glass door closed with a snick behind her.

He finished his coffee while the crows jabbered in the woods behind the yard. Find the right man. He’d had the right man, yes, and lost him, too. He’d been planning the wedding for a year—the time it took the two of them to get into shape to hike part of the Appalachian Trail. It would be the perfect honeymoon for two men who loved nature and each other. He’d picked the perfect restaurant—Daniel’s favorite authentic Italian place. He’d bought the perfect ring, red-gold with black carbon inlay and diamonds, so masculine, so rugged and strong, like Daniel. 

He proposed. 

Then perfect became hell—the darkness in Daniel’s face, the way his eyes clouded over, and he’d folded his arms over his chest. At that moment, Tristan knew, even before Daniel said a word, he’d made a mistake, that something was wrong.

You’re not right for me, Tris. We like the same things, we do everything together, but I’m not your missing piece. No, I’m not mad at you. I just don’t want to marry you. Can’t you understand that?

And all the while, the soft candlelight flickered on the ring in his shaking hand, witness to what he had offered and what had been rejected while Daniel ordered panna cotta for dessert.

Tristan pulled the ring out of his pocket and stared at it. Sam asked why Daniel had refused. The truth was, Tristan didn’t know, and he didn’t want to find out, not if it was something he couldn’t fix. Like himself.

He stood. If he sat here thinking much longer, he’d start crying, and crying never helped anything. He’d go see Margo. If he needed to grow the courage to face Daniel and ask the hard questions, he might as well start by facing off with the easiest of the Hillwalkers. 

He left the house after bacon and eggs, a hundred pounds heavier in grease and slightly nauseated. He wished he hadn’t cleaned his plate, but Sam seemed to need it. He was glad Andy would be home tonight. Sam could fret about him for a change. And she would. Got that from Dad. Mom never sweated a drop from anxiety that anyone ever saw, not even through the cancer, the long, slow kind that makes people forget the suffering until it’s too late to do anything or make amends. All through those difficult years, Sam boiled over with worry while Mom remained stoically patient, enduring the chemotherapy and constant doctor visits. Dad was out of misery already underground in his coffin. And there was Tristan, drifting. 

Margo had saved him. She was his teacher first, and then his anchor. She stopped him from floating away entirely, and she’d always been supportive. Maybe not this time. Only one way to find out.

He turned off the blacktop onto the dirt road winding into The Cove, a grassy valley sprawled in the lap of the mountains. 

Sam said there’d been no rain. Tristan expected to see most of the little brooks dried up, but when he drove into the hollow where Margo lived, every stream flowed full between its banks and the grass grew green as spring. All the trees held onto their summer clothes, although more than one monarch butterfly crossed the road in front of him, headed south. The mountains could be like that, dry and dead on the sunny side but lush as a rainforest on the back, one of the peculiarities he’d remarked on to Daniel, only to get the scientific explanation for the phenomenon.

He hadn’t said a word. How could he tell the man he loved that he was technically right and artistically wrong? It was natural, but he felt there was something uncanny about it all the same. Nowhere else did he have the sense of the world breathing but here, in these woods, along these rivers, and in these unexpectedly green valleys. There was a magic in it, whether you called it that or not.

The windows whined as he lowered them, and the intoxicating smell of living woods filled the car and sat down almost inside him. Even in Mom’s decline, she’d insisted her bedroom windows stay open. It was something her hillbilly family believed in—mountain air strengthened the lungs and gave life. Today, it seemed charged with a nebulous kind of energy that made him want to stop the car, grab a stick, and take off exploring like a ten-year-old boy. Deep uneasiness seized him, but he didn’t roll the windows up. Having invited the word magic, he wanted it to stick around, to see if it would energize him long enough to endure this short visit before he went home to see what waited for him in the lonely life Daniel had left.

When he pulled into Margo’s driveway, he felt better than he had in years, and that disturbed him almost as much as the unwanted bacon and egg breakfast. 

Margo’s farmhouse was an old white two-story, still standing on its original stone foundation with a wrap-around porch, deck chairs, a swing, and ferns dangling from every support in the structure. They swayed gently in the morning breeze. A dog was digging industriously under an azalea bush—a waddling log of an animal with the long ears of a Bassett hound and the square head and happy smile of a golden retriever. When Tristan stopped, it yodeled and trundled its way over, wagging a fringed tail. He stooped and scratched the waiting ears, and the dog’s tail became a frenzy of joy. It whined like it had waited years for attention, although the dog’s girth and shining head spoke of hours of petting and ample food.

Sandy, if you are in that flowerbed again, I swear— Margo came around the corner of the house. She hadn’t changed. Same iron gray pixie cut, same tight mouth stretched into a mocking smile, same bright blue eyes that saw right through the most hardened façade to the person inside. 

He waved. Morning, Ms. Crystal.

She came forward, hands on her hips. "Mister Grueder, are you here for my trophy tree? If you are, you can’t have it." The grin stretched all over her welcoming face.

Champion willows aren’t on my list, he said. But if they were, I’d know better than to take one from my homeroom teacher.

He held out his hand and she ignored it entirely, wrapped her arms around his chest, and squeezed until the air whooshed out. 

It’s so good to see you, she said. When Sam told me you were coming, I told her if she didn’t send you to visit, I’d haunt her when I died. Let me look at you. You’ve grown a foot since I saw you last.

"An inch maybe. It wasn’t that long ago. At the funeral."

Margo squeezed him again. You come right through to the back and we’ll talk. You look hungry. Men are always hungry.

His soured stomach lurched. I just ate.

Iced tea, then. And shortbread. You love my shortbread cookies.

Glad I lost ten pounds before I came, he quipped. I’m going to gain twenty this weekend.

Weekend? Margo stopped by the front door. No longer?

I’ve got to get back to Vermont. I have work.

Margo’s gaze pierced him. Work is all well and good, but you work too hard. And your sister too. She held the door open for him. You know I don’t like to say what’s right and wrong about your business, but there’s nothing I like about this project. There’re oaks enough in the woods without cutting down old growth. There’s so little left.

You can’t build a proper reconstruction out of young timber. They need full-grown trees for this work. It’s history we’re rebuilding here—you love history. I mean, you were the one who got me interested. 

And I still love it, Margo said, stopping in the dining room. But I love our forest more. So did you. At one time.

A knot tightened in his middle. I still do. That’s the reason I’m here. I won’t see it harmed more than must be, you know that.

But cutting down the biggest trees, skids, roads—

He laughed. Sam already intends to replant. They won’t take more old oak than is needed, and Grueder Sawmill will plant ten trees for every one we take. You should see Sam’s reclamation document—it’s all spelled out there.

She stared at him as if he’d