Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [149]
“All right, no need to get huffy,” he said.
“I agree. I don’t need that much firewood anyway. I’ll take the wood from this one, you take the oak, and we’ll split whatever Jarondell charges us to cut up both.”
He knew better than to accept her offer without thinking it over first. He gazed up into the dimness of her woods and was surprised to notice a sapling waggling its leaves in the breeze, uphill from the creek. “Why, look, that’s a chestnut, isn’t it?” He pointed.
“It is. A young one,” she said.
“My eyes aren’t good, but I can spy a chestnut from a hundred paces.”
“That one’s come up from an old stump where a big one was cut down years ago,” she said. “I’ve noticed they always do that. As long as the roots keep living, the sprouts will keep coming out around the stump. But before they get big enough to flower, they always die. Why is that?”
“The blight chancre has to get up a head of steam before it sets off other little chancres and kills the tree. It takes eight or nine years out in the open, or longer in the woods, where a tree grows slower. The fungus inside there is more or less proportional to the size of the trunk. But you’re right, they’re just about sure to die before they get up enough size to set any seeds. So biologically speaking, the species is dead.”
“Biologically dead. Like us,” she said with no particular emotion.
“That’s right,” he said uncomfortably. “If we consider ourselves as having no offspring.”
“And unlikely to produce any more at this point.” She let out an odd little laugh.
He didn’t need to comment on that.
“Now, tell me something,” she said. “I’ve always wondered this. Your hybrids are American chestnut stock crossed with Chinese chestnut, right?”
“That’s right. And backcrossed with American again. If I can keep at it long enough I’ll get a cross that has all the genes of an American chestnut except for the one that makes it susceptible to blight.”
“And the gene for the resistance comes from the Chinese side?”
“That’s right.”
“But where did you get the American chestnut seed stock to begin with?”
“That’s a good question. I had to look high and low,” Garnett said, pleased as punch. No one had asked him a question about his project in many a year. Once Ellen had talked her niece into bringing her third-grade class out to see it, but those children had acted like it was a sporting event.
“Well, such as where?” she asked, truly interested.
“I wrote letters and made calls to Forest Service men and what all. Finally I located two standing American chestnuts that were still flowering, about as sick and old as a tree can get but not dead yet. I paid a boy to climb up and cut me down some flowers, and I put them in a bag and brought them back here and pollinated a Chinese tree I had in my yard, and from the nuts I grew out my first field of seedlings. That gave me my first generation, the half-Americans.”
“Where were the old trees? I’m just curious.”
“One was in Hardcastle County, and one was over in West Virginia. Lonely old things, flowering but not setting any seeds because they had no neighbors to cross with. There are still a few around. Not many, but a few.”
“Oh, I know it.”
“There were probably plenty, back in the forties,” Garnett went on. “Do you remember when the CCC was telling us to cut every last one down? We thought they were all going anyway. But now, if you think about it, that wasn’t so good. Some of them could have made it through. Enough to make a comeback.”
“Oh, they would have,” she agreed. “Daddy was adamant about that. Those two up here in our woodlot, he was determined not to let anybody get. One night he stopped a man that was up here aiming to cut them down and haul them off with a mule before the sun came up!”
“You had chestnut trees in your woodlot?” Garnett asked.
She cocked her head. “Don’t you know the ones I mean? There’s the one about a quarter mile up this hill, just awful-looking because of all the dead limbs it’s dropped. But it still sets a few seeds every