The Forgetting Tree Read online

  Forster had the idea of building a crude lean-to at the foot of an off-ramp, stocking it with crates of fruit and vegetables, a blackboard with prices. More than the small amount of money it earned, he wanted to make their presence felt in the community so that people would want to buy locally grown rather than imported. Besides alternating the usual crops of Valencias in spring and summer, Washington navels in the fall and winter, he explored branching out into lemons, avocados, tangerines, and even blood oranges. An effort was made to innovate and modernize: wooden crates were replaced by cardboard boxes, and then recycled plastic. They stamped the family name below that of the grocer who demanded an exclusive on their harvest. All of it to no financial gain. Their lack of profitability only made Forster more intractable.

  Claire heard these problems in conversations over the dinner table, at the Saturday teas, watched the effect in Forster’s growing insomnia, his pushing himself to work longer and longer hours while she stayed preoccupied by the children, until Forster came home one night from the local bar, saying he would load his gun and go blast the local county-board supervisor. The man had been bragging, claiming he would drive all the last farmers out of the area in a few years. Forster accused Claire of not caring, cloistering herself in the house, ignoring the farm and their future. It was only partly true. She bit her tongue, wanting to say she had done her part, bearing the children and caring for them. The next Saturday afternoon, she motioned Mrs. Girbaldi outside.

  “I need your advice. The farm’s in trouble.”

  Mrs. Girbaldi looked over the trees, shaking her head. “You married into trouble. But now … get out.”

  “They won’t.”

  “Then get out there. Stave off the inevitable. But it will be gone one day.”

  “I don’t know anything about farming. I’m a housewife.”

  Mrs. Girbaldi tapped her polished pink fingernail on Claire’s arm. “Learn the land. I did when George passed. Everyone except you hates me for selling out. But I saw that’s the future.”

  “I can’t lose my home. I’m scared.”

  “Nonsense. Farming is as much a part of mothering as feeding them dinner or reading them a bedtime story. You might just like it.”

  * * *

  So Claire reluctantly gave over child-care duties to Hanni, endured the howls of departure from Gwen, tears from Lucy. Only Josh seemed happy and content both when Claire was close and when she was not.

  While Forster was in town, Claire went out for the first time on her own to talk with the foreman, Octavio.

  He looked at the ground and spoke in soft, mumbling phrases, not willing to look her in the face out of a mix of respect and discomfort. A woman boss out in the fields was not done. He worried how the men would react. But a careful alliance started when he realized she was as worried about the ranch as he was.

  One day, he asked her to drive with him to the edge of the ranch near the lake, an area of old trees that were past their prime fruiting days. They parked under the monstrous lemon tree that towered above them, and Octavio seemed so solemn and filled with importance about the place, she remained silent.

  “That is the reason we are here.”

  Claire looked at the tree, but chose not to spoil the effect by telling him they came there daily. She wanted his trust and loyalty. “How did it get that way?”

  “That is the original. That’s where they all came from.”

  “Why doesn’t it look like the other trees?”

  “This is the original rootstock. My grandfather planted it. This is what lives. All the grafts, the fancy fruit we attach, it lives only because of the strength of the original.”

  Claire didn’t think it mattered who took credit for the beginning. Who continued the ranch was what mattered.

  * * *

  Together Octavio and Claire walked the fields, he teaching her the growing cycles of citrus and avocado, soil conditions, irrigation patterns. Explaining bud unions, the joining of scion and rootstock, the merits of sweet-orange versus bitter-orange stock. He was surprised that her interest seemed genuine, and he warmed to the task of turning her into a farmer. She spent such long hours out in the orchards her skin tanned dark, her hair streaked pale gold. Calluses formed on her palms. Now she wore jeans more comfortably than dresses. Sometimes she fell asleep in her clothes from exhaustion. But she learned. Yields were low, and excess land had been sold, down to the last, undividable five-hundred-plus-acre parcel. Packers took too large a share of the profit. Forster at first resisted her help and then, relieved, came to rely on it.

  Despite the difficulty, Mrs. Girbaldi was right—she discovered the life suited her. Fit her in many ways better than it did Forster. While he saw only tasks to be accomplished, she fed regularly on the sensory. No longer in notebooks but in her body. Farming as physical an experience as motherhood. Small, intangible things. The burn of the sun mixed with the cool coastal air, the inked flutter of leaves, the hard, briny skin of avocado, grapefruit, and lemons. Oranges, small and green and unripe. It all gave such pleasure and tempered the hardship. The air at noon filled with the sting of citrus oil; the delicate golden skin of Meyer lemons, which broke easily under a crescent of fingernail. In the late afternoon, she took naps outside with the girls when they were toddlers, baby Joshua curled against her breast, all of them spread out on blankets under the trees like fallen, ripe fruit. She could, unbeknownst to Forster, place a pinch of orchard soil on her tongue and gauge the sweetness of the coming crop.

  * * *

  During those early years with Forster, she drank deeply from the well of their marriage, a balance of belonging and being needed, and she didn’t miss the life she had turned her back on. Except for her books. The sorrow of abandoning domesticity turned to relief. She felt her whole being expand with the freedom of spending her days outdoors.

  Forster teased that she would try to read a novel during childbirth if she could. He was about right because it was her only free time. As if observing another person’s life, she looked back to the time of school and books, working in her father’s store and reading away the long, idle afternoons, as meaningless now in the hard struggle of daily survival they faced. Her parents stopped asking her when she would return to college to finish her degree. A heresy to them that a course in soil science would have been more useful than one in English literature. But farming was so rich in the present that it was a chore to consider the abstractions of a book.

  In turn, she joked that Forster rested from working out in the orchards by dreaming of working out in the orchards. As the summer worn on, he grew thin and then thinner. When light-headedness took him to the doctor, stress was blamed. The doctor prescribed rest, a vacation, which was about as impossible to ask for as telling a bird to not fly. Claire tried not to show how scared she was. Despite their differences in temperament, the rigors of the work, she still felt a fierce passion for her husband that was returned. Escaping during the night, Forster and she would sneak out to the barn to make love in the loft, their only place of privacy, the slatted moonlight striping their bodies in silver. Life without him was impossible to contemplate.

  She would take more on herself, try to keep the worst from him. She took Octavio aside, told him to give the bad news only to her. The foreman wondered if she understood the burden she was taking on.

  * * *

  One afternoon, while Claire fed Joshua on the back porch, Hanni came and set down a cup of tea. Roles had reversed, Claire more and more assuming the role of matriarch.

  “I worry,” Hanni stated.

  Claire noticed the stoop in her back as she sat down. When had she grown old? “About?” Now Hanni’s abrupt style of speaking was her own.

  “We’re losing money. It can’t go on.”

  “Yes,” Claire said carefully, wondering why Hanni had come to her, not her son, for this conversation.

  “I can hardly say it aloud … should you talk to him about selling?”

  “Why not talk to him yo
urself?”

  “He’s too proud,” Hanni said, the usual mix of arrogance and humbleness. “You’re not.”

  * * *

  Claire could have gone to Mrs. Girbaldi, who understood money, but Hanni was wrong—Claire was too proud to admit their financial difficulties outside the family. After a sleepless night, Claire came up with a plan. Hanni and she fed the girls, gave Josh his bottle, then told Forster they were going into town to shop. Sofia came to babysit.

  “Don’t spend all my money.” Forster grinned, but strain was in his eyes. He went on his way to the fields with Octavio.

  Instead of shopping, the women went to the bank. The family only had checking and savings accounts; everything else was paid in cash, no credit cards. Feeling out of place, they stood clutching their purses at the counter and asked the teller if they could speak to a loan officer. Once they gave their name, a secretary appeared and shuttled them upstairs to a mahogany-lined office. The president of the bank, Mr. Relicer, a neurasthenic man in an expensive black suit, came in drying his hands with a paper towel. He moved sideways, crablike, around his deep desk, stooping with a small, curtsying bob.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you yet. I wasn’t invited to the wedding. What’s it been? Six years?”

  “Eight.” Claire shook his hand, his nervous dampness causing her to pull away and wipe her palm along the side of her dress.

  “Coffee?” he said, but when she looked up, his eyes were not on her but on the secretary. She realized it wasn’t a choice but an order. “Hold my calls. Baumsarg. I consider myself a bit of a Germanophile. The name means ‘coffin wood.’ In the Bronze Age, they fashioned a coffin out of a tree trunk. Strange, is it not?”

  Hanni coughed and stared out the window behind him. No help. She had gone away to that high ground of Baumsarg mulishness.

  “We’re considering taking out a loan for farm improvements,” Claire said.

  “Very wise idea, Mrs. Baumsarg.” The address confused Claire, thinking at first he was addressing Hanni.

  “Please call me Claire. It would be a temporary thing. We should earn out enough extra to pay it back within a couple of seasons.”

  Mr. Relicer shrugged as if the fact were inconsequential, as if he were a dear family friend that they had never known they had.

  “What amount are we talking about?” he said softly.

  Now it seemed as if he were their doctor, and they were navigating the gory details of some wasting disease. “I’m not sure just yet…” she said, looking at Hanni for help.

  He scribbled something down on a notepad in front of him. “Consider the request, within reason, a blank check. We are very interested in having the Baumsarg family as a client.”

  “Surely you aren’t going to advertise the fact?”

  They both laughed, he a little too loudly. She noted that he didn’t answer.

  Hanni stood up as the secretary came in to lay down a coffee service. “Where’s the bathroom?” she demanded.

  “This way,” the secretary said. Hanni bolted without a word to either of them.

  “Banks make her nervous.”

  “Why would that be?” They remained silent for the duration of his pouring the coffee. He scooped a heaping spoonful of sugar into his cup, stirred vigorously, the spoon making an annoying clink against the side. If he had been her child, Claire would have reached over and stilled his hand.

  “I’m glad to have this moment in private,” he said, and Claire flushed, feeling as if she were committing some vague infidelity. “The Baumsarg place is such a gem. I drive by it on my way to work each morning. I live in the development down the highway, Pepper Tree Estates?”

  Claire nodded, noncommittal. Thank God Hanni was in the bathroom. Old man Fuller had sold off his ranch years ago, and the developer turned it into the hated tract housing of Pepper Tree Estates. The locals all tried to drive another route so as not to pass by it. A faux-rustic sign of defeat. Fuller had made a fortune, retired to Montana, and now raised buffalo as a hobby. They bad-mouthed Fuller, but they also knew he had caved to the inevitable.

  “It’s just wrong, to me, to not leverage such a valuable asset.”

  “I think we need to get more automated, farm on a bigger scale.” Claire drank her coffee, her hand shaky. It had been a mistake to come alone. Relicer probably thought Forster was too proud and had sent her, that they were already that desperate.

  “Maybe it took someone new, fresh blood, to take initiative. To unlock the value of the place.”

  “Write down your terms,” Claire said. Her head had started to pound. Hanni was making her way through the door. “We better be going.”

  “What about your coffee? I have some chocolates from Switzerland I’d like to share.”

  She felt that every extra minute in that office was costing them some exorbitant percentage of interest. “So kind, but we’re wanted back. Young children, you know how it is.”

  “I understand.” He stood at his desk and studied her a moment. “I’ll have papers drawn up for a simple line of credit. The farm appraised as collateral. I’d be glad to drop by with the papers on my way home. For Mr. Baumsarg’s signature. Since we’re neighbors.”

  Claire shook her head. “I’ll bring the papers back.”

  He said nothing for a moment, simply scribbled on his notepad as he stood. “I’ll put down a flat amount, and when you want more, just call me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It shouldn’t be a problem for a pretty wife like you to convince your husband.”

  So he had seen through her ruse. She dug in her heels. “Forster was just too busy to come himself.”

  Mr. Relicer made a slight moue. He held out his hand but did not come around the desk this time, forcing Claire to retrace her steps, lean over the wide desk to shake his hand, which now was dry and hot. She felt as if she had been misled, the previous damp palm a ploy.

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Baumsarg,” he said to Hanni, speaking loudly as if she were a great distance away, or deaf. “An honor meeting you.”

  She wagged her fingers at him over her shoulder as she fled back out the door.

  * * *

  That night, sitting up in bed, Claire broached the idea.

  Forster jumped up as if scalded, paced the room. “The farm has never had debt.”

  “I understand.” She was already weary, knowing the contours their argument would follow.

  “That’s how we’ve stayed independent. My mother would die if she knew.”

  Claire waited a long, pregnant moment. “We’re on the verge of bankruptcy. We need it for payroll, equipment. Fertilizers. New tree grafts. Just to stay competitive.”

  “I’ll be the first generation to mortgage the place, to put it in debt.” Forster knelt in front of her. “I’m confused.”

  “We have to try this.”

  “If it doesn’t work?”

  She ran her roughened palm down the side of his face. “No choice but sell.”

  * * *

  That first winter there was record rainfall, and the spring yield was double. They paid the loan down halfway. The next fall, a second crop of lemons in, Claire felt a sense of accomplishment as she and Forster watched triple the usual number of packed crates, stamped with the Baumsarg name, being loaded on trucks.

  Forster just took her hand, nodded.

  But the following year was dry again. Only a few inches of rainfall. Drought conditions and some of the trees dropped fruit. Red scale infestation. Claire called Mr. Relicer, and the loan amount was promptly increased. As an afterthought, she invited him to their annual Memorial Day picnic, sensing the need for his goodwill. This seesawing would continue year by year for the next decade.

  * * *

  Summers she worked outside from dawn till dusk under the goad of debt, but even in California winters there was work to be done, especially as they implemented rotating crop harvests so something would always be coming to market. As the years pa
ssed, she was not there to take the children to the school bus, nor was she the one waiting for them in the afternoon. She did not bake cookies for them, Hanni did that, nor was she around to supervise homework. As soon as they were old enough, their after-school chores consisted of helping work the ranch, and their first memories of their mother always involved the groves. Frequently her first interaction would be to kiss their already sleeping faces good night. Josh liked to form a cave under his bed and sleep there, so she would climb down on her hands and knees, claustrophobic with the mattress only inches from her face, to kiss him good night. Usually he was cheating, staying up late, reading a comic with a flashlight. Sometimes they read together.

  “Time for bed, Josh.”

  “My name is Steve Rogers.”

  “Okay, bedtime, Steve.”

  “I’m really Captain America,” he whispered.

  “Now.”

  “I have to defeat Red Skull for the safety of mankind.”

  “Mankind can wait till morning.”

  She missed the children but felt she could recover her time with them later when things were easier.

  * * *

  One Christmas Eve temperatures threatened to drop below freezing, so instead of opening presents, Forster and she took the children out with them to tend the few remaining smudge pots illegally tucked away in difficult corners of the farm, stopping to listen to the humming of the big wind machines that would protect the nascent crop, tempting the children with the idea that Santa might make his way through the rows. Instead of lumps of coal, Joshua threw oranges at his sisters and hid in the dark. When he came out, his face and arms were black from the oily soot of the smudge pots. “Captain America to the rescue.” Claire scolded and laughed. Still days after, the handkerchief he blew his nose with turned black.

  * * *

  During this time, the surrounding farms continued to be sold, most at sky-high profit, more and more farmers surrendering, retreating farther and farther inland in search of cheap land, but more importantly in search of the freedom of a disappearing way of life. Split-level wood-and-brick ranch houses went up, then these, in their turn, gave way to large, gleaming mini-mansions with glass walls that deflected rather than invited. Indigenous eucalyptus and California pepper trees were chopped down; Italian cypress planted. Golf courses were carved out of the landscape. Fences went up, gates with intercoms and cameras, patrolled by snarling, box-headed dogs. A seismic change had occurred by the time Hanni no longer knew the names of their closest neighbors.