At the Edge of the Orchard

California: 1853-1856

ROBERT GOODENOUGH WAS WORKING in a field north of Sacramento when he first heard about giant trees that were even bigger than redwoods.

He and a handful of other men were raking up hay ahead of a summer storm that growled way in the distance but never seemed to get closer. It was just one of dozens of jobs Robert had taken since quitting gold mining two years before. He didn’t mind the sun on his back, the sweat stinging his eyes, the endless repetition. He had coped with such things many times before. Life was often simply the repetition of the same movements in a different order, depending on the day and the place.

What he could not stand was the constant chatter of the man raking to his right: hours of dull stories about the gold he had found and drunk away, or the high prices to be paid for anything in California, or the trials he’d had on the overland trail to get here from Kentucky. These were all familiar tales to Californians, only enlivened by an unusual style of telling or a twist in the tail. The raker had neither of these, but doggedly pursued his stories with more persistence than he did his raking.

Robert gripped his own rake harder and harder to keep himself from punching the man to shut him up. Then the raker commented, “I’m goin’ to git myself back to Kentucky one of these days real soon. I had enough of California. Seen all there is to see. Seen the biggest gold nugget in the world, weighed twenty-three pounds. Seen the ocean and didn’t think much of it. Seen the red trees nice and tall, but I miss hickory and dogwood and tulip trees back home. I don’t need to see more. I’m done here.”

“Bet you ain’t seen the big trees over at Calaveras County,” said the man working on the other side of the raker. “Now those are some trees. Take your average redwood and triple it across, that’s how big they are.”

Robert paused in his raking. “Is that by the Calaveras River?”

“Naw-up the Stanislaus River a ways,” the man replied.

“Up the Stanislaus? You mean down it, don’t you?”

“I mean what I said.”

“East up it? Not west?”

“Yup, east.”

“How far up the river?”

“Don’t know. Up into the hills.”

“But there aren’t redwoods up in the mountains. You only find them on the coast.”

The man shrugged.

Robert fixed him with his bright brown stare that he knew rattled people. “You actually seen them?”

Now the man frowned, annoyed to have his authority questioned. “Heard about ’em from somebody when I was in Sacramento.”

“The only trees I need to see are the dogwoods next to my daddy’s farm,” the raker interjected. “Them’s the prettiest trees you ever saw in the spring. I got me a pain jest thinkin’ ’bout ’em.”

Robert took up his rake again and pulled the hay into a pile that would eventually grow into a haystack. He asked no more questions, for he had no interest in pursuing rumors about giant trees that had not actually been verified by eyes on trunks. The other man could easily be repeating descriptions of redwoods Robert had seen along the coast. Anyone would remark on their height and call them giant. Robert had seen trees he estimated were at least 350 feet high. And a trunk three times the width of the average redwood: what did average mean? Robert had seen tall redwoods and also small ten-year-old trees that were like pines but with red bark.

Yet the man’s words stayed with him. Vague about the size, he was at least clear that the location was up in the hills of the Sierra Nevadas rather than down on the coast. Robert had not seen redwoods further than fifty miles from the ocean, and puzzled over the idea that there could be any so far inland.

When the harvest was done and it came time to move on, he did not go north or west to look for work, but headed south and east, crossing the Mokelumne and Calaveras rivers, and reaching the Stanislaus River without even acknowledging to himself that this was his destination. He began to follow it up into the hills towards its source, and soon the rumor was substantiated. “There are giant trees all right,” a man who worked for the Union Water Company told him. “Found by a hunter supplies meat to the company. Was chasing a grizzly up there and came upon a grove of the biggest trees anyone’d ever seen. He’s dined out on that story for the past year. Thought everybody had heard it by now. Where you been?”

The man had also not seen the trees himself, but could give detailed instructions as to how to find the grove, which convinced Robert there was something to the story. He still thought the trees must be the redwoods he was familiar with, just unusually wide ones, and far from the coast.

As he got closer to Calaveras Grove, talk grew louder and louder until it seemed every person Robert met couldn’t wait to tell him about the mammoth trees. It was strange that no one had actually taken the time to go and see them. But then, Robert knew others didn’t care about trees in the way that he did. Finally he reached Murphys, a mining town set up by the Union Water Company about fifteen miles from the grove, and there found someone who had visited the trees. The man said little about them. “You got to see for yourself,” he explained, shaking his head as if disbelieving his own memory. “I can’t describe ’em.”

In the morning he saddled his horse-an unpredictable speckled gray he’d bought off a miner after Bolt, his constant companion since Texas, got stolen by Indians. He hadn’t named the gray, and wasn’t sure he ever would, since naming something tied you to it and made it more painful to lose, as he’d discovered with Bolt. Apart from his other caprices, the gray was not fond of climbing higher than foothills and balked and sidestepped much of the way up to Calaveras Grove. The road was in surprisingly good condition, for two brothers had staked a claim on the land where the giant trees grew and built the road for the visitors they intended to attract.

When Robert arrived at the edge of Calaveras Grove, he dismounted and stood, hand on his horse’s neck anchoring him. In his travels Robert had seen many things that had given him an ache deep in his chest, like a splinter of sadness needling into his heart: prairie that swept far out of sight; a single elm tree that made the sky behind it seem like the bluest he’d ever witnessed; a tornado cycling across the green-gray horizon; snow-covered mountaintops that hung overhead like white triangles. Now he was seeing another.

Two enormous trees stood on either side of the track, a natural entrance to the wood beyond. They were not as tall as redwoods Robert had seen on the coast, but they were much wider-as wide at their bases as a cabin. They dwarfed a person with their girth and the volume of wood they thrust towards the sky. If you stood far enough back to take in the whole of the trees, you didn’t feel how enormous they were. If you came up close, though, you couldn’t see their lowest branches.

Robert left the gray and walked up the path, feeling as he did that he was shrinking into a speck beside the two trees. He put a hand on one to steady himself. The tawny red surface was spongy and thickly fissured, a fibrous bark that shed easily and turned into red dust Robert later found in his clothes and his hair, under his fingernails, on the back of his neck, in his saddlebags. The forest floor around the trees was thick and springy with thousands of years of rotting needles, muffling his steps. And it was quiet, for there were no branches anywhere near him to rustle in the wind. Branches only started to grow from about a hundred feet up, and the bulk of them were so high over his head that it strained his neck to look at them for long. They were small in proportion to the gigantic trunks.

Robert had no words for the awed, hollowed-out feeling that swelled inside him.

The speckled gray did not like the trees. Robert might admire them, but the horse saw anything outside the normal range of nature as a threat, and protested by snorting and stamping and rolling his eyes. Robert had to catch the reins-the gray kicking at him as he did-and lead him away to a spot out of sight of the giant trees, among the ordinary evergreens. There he hitched him to a young fir, away from the larger sugar pines, which sometimes let drop their heavy sticky cones that could break bones. It took some time to calm the horse.

When he was quiet at last Robert left him and went back to the grove. It was also full of pines, but dotted among them were the gigantic trees, some nearby, some in the distance. Many of them were as big if not bigger than the sentinels at the entrance. The grove was no longer quiet and empty as it had been when he’d arrived. Some of the men who had described Calaveras Grove to Robert had mentioned that there was work going on up there: the owners were building a hotel for visitors to stay in, as well as other attractions. To get deeper into the grove Robert had to go past a group of men who had just appeared and begun to hammer and shout. He moved reluctantly towards them.

Then he saw the stump, looming several feet above him. A ladder leaned against it, and Robert climbed up and gazed at the surface. It was twenty-five feet across and rough, though a man was busy filing it smooth while two others were building a set of stairs that would take people more easily to the top of it. Robert studied the hundreds of rings radiating out from the center. He did not step onto the stump, vowing to himself that he never would.

His vantage point at the top of the ladder allowed him to look around. From there he could see the whole of a long, long trunk of a tree, extending from where it had been felled far into the woods, so large that Robert had not even noticed it when he walked past it. Closest to him the bark had been stripped, and the trunk looked naked and vulnerable. Further along it other men were scrambling around, building on top of it a basic cabin and a long low house, with the trunk serving as the floor.

Robert climbed back down from the stump and walked around it. Next to it was a huge chunk of the trunk, almost three times Robert’s height, that had been cut from the rest of the tree and isolated. Nailed to the side was a hand-painted sign reading “Chip Of the Old Block.” Its flat surface was scored with deep grooves, made, Robert supposed, by whatever they used to cut down the tree. He could not imagine how that had been done, and the small part of him that was not horrified by the desecration was fascinated by this technical challenge.

Now he followed the full length of the trunk, counting over a hundred paces from the stump to the jagged end where the tip must have shorn off as it fell. He hailed one of the workers to ask what they were building, and discovered the structures would soon be a saloon and a bowling alley. Robert had been many places, but had never heard of a bowling alley. According to the worker, they had them back east.

“How’d you bring down such a big tree?” he could not resist asking, though he did not add, “and why?”

“Auger pump,” the man explained. “They brought one up from a mining camp, added an extra length to it and drilled holes into the trunk all the way around.”

“I was there,” another worker added, glad to have an excuse to stop sawing. “It was a few months back. Took twenty-two days, and even when we finished drilling, the tree didn’t come down. Wouldn’t come down even when we drove wedges into it. Even when we butted it with another tree. Nothing. Then we went off for dinner and crash! Down it came. Spooked deer and brought rabbits out of their holes. I never saw birds go so crazy.”

“Want work?” the first man said. “We need the help.”

Robert shook his head, for the first time in his life turning down work. He did not want to be paid to climb all over a felled redwood.

The man grunted. “You’re the second fool to turn your nose up at good money today. You two brothers?” He jerked his head towards a tall man with a dark beard and hair sitting on a rock off to the side of the trunk. He was studying the tree intently, occasionally writing something in a notebook perched on his knee. As Robert watched, he jumped up and picked his way through the tree’s branches, which were scattered around the trunk, some detached by the fall, others still part of the trunk. Their needles were surprisingly still green, though it had been cut down some months before. The man squatted by a branch, felt the needles, then took a magnifying glass from his pocket and looked at them through it. After a while he sat on the ground, the needles in his lap, and began to sketch. He seemed unaware of being watched.

Robert found his behavior almost as interesting as the giant trees themselves. He had never seen someone look so hard at a tree before, noting every aspect of it. Now the man was on his feet again, picking up small cones and bringing them up to his magnifying glass before dropping them. Now he was on his knees, scratching at the shaggy bark on the trunk. Now he was walking along the trunk in long, even strides, counting.

Robert did not join him immediately, but left the workers and went to stand some distance from the man. He would let him approach when he was ready. The man finished measuring but continued to walk back and forth, gradually getting nearer. Robert smiled to himself: it was like waiting for his gray to settle and allow himself to be saddled. The man’s black hair was tinged with gray but was surprisingly glossy, as if he used macassar oil in it, and it was short and stood straight up, in contrast to most frontier men’s long hair, pressed down by their hats and lank with grease and sweat. His beard closely followed his cheeks and jaw. As he drew closer, Robert took in the low brow and deep-set eyes and long nose making a decisive T in his strong, stubborn face. He was probably in his late forties, a good twenty years older than Robert; but it was not easy to tell, for traveling aged men in different ways. Robert himself was lean and wiry, but with a face as rough and scarred as the redwood stump. Only his clear brown eyes remained youthful, tagged with crow’s-feet from squinting in the sun.

Eventually they were standing side by side. The man held a cone in his hand in a familiar manner that suggested he did so often. This is a man who knows trees, Robert thought. “I counted one hundred and two paces,” he said.

“Ninety-five,” the man corrected. “Though I am a little taller than you, so I’d take fewer strides. I estimate it’s three hundred feet long-three-twenty if the tip were still on. Not as tall as the coastal redwoods, but still tall. But its girth is what is so extraordinary.”

“Are these redwoods different from those along the coast?”

“These are not redwoods,” the man replied, firm as a schoolteacher. “Never call them redwoods. They’re sequoias. Same family but different genus and species. They’re wider but not as tall as redwoods. The canopy shape is different: sequoia branches are shorter and hug the trunk, while redwoods’ upper branches grow straight out, their lower spread out and then down. And the needles-see?” He leaned down to pick up a branch that had been shed. “Completely different. The sequoia’s are like scaly strings. Redwoods have flattened needles more like those of pines. And the cones.” He handed Robert a green cone he held; it was about the size of a chicken egg. “Redwood cones are smaller than these-maybe half the size.”

In this rapidly delivered lesson Robert detected an English accent, sifted through gravel. It was not a fresh-off-the-boat accent, but had tinges of Spanish in it, and of traveling to many places where a man’s mouth was pulled in different directions.

“It’s much dryer here than where the redwoods grow near the coast,” Robert remarked, wanting to keep the conversation alive.

The man nodded. “Heat’s opening up the cones so the seeds come out. Like this.” He picked up a dry brown cone and shook it. “See, the seeds are almost all gone.” He tossed the dried cone into the undergrowth. “Can only collect the green ones.”

“Are you? Collecting them?” Robert noticed for the first time that there was a sack at the man’s feet.

The man frowned-though it didn’t change his face much, as his brow was already low and tight across his nose. His eyes were so narrow that Robert doubted he would ever glimpse their true color. “You with the Laphams?”

“Who?”

“The brothers who staked a claim on this grove. You working on that?” With his head he indicated the building activity behind them.

“I don’t know anything about that. I’ve just come to see the trees.”

The man picked up the sack, dropped the green cone in, then turned his back, bent over and picked up another one.

“I don’t even know what bowling is,” Robert added.

The other paused, then tilted his head slightly to one side as he responded. “It is the most ludicrous game imaginable. You set up little logs in a formation, then roll a wooden ball at them to knock them over. Apparently these trees are not enough entertainment for visitors; they must have other attractions to keep them occupied.” He held out his hand. “William Lobb.” Robert shook it. “Now, are you going to help or just rest your feet?”

They started with the felled tree, scrabbling among the branches for any green cones they could find. The sequoia cones were distinctive and easily discernible from pinecones. Like chicken eggs, they were round at one end, tapered at the other, and fit snugly in the palm of the hand. The scales were arranged close together in a way that made them look like someone had scored a pattern of diamonds onto the surface.

Lobb was so familiar with the cones that Robert was astounded to learn he had arrived at Calaveras Grove to see the giant sequoias only a few hours before Robert himself. He would soon discover, though, that Lobb was a walking encyclopedia of plants. He had seen so many seed cones in his time that when he found a new one he naturally slotted it in among the cones he had already catalogued in his head, adding to and comparing his knowledge.

Robert collected half a sack of them from around the tree, then William Lobb rummaged through them, pulling out a few that were half-chewed. “Chickarees got at them,” he explained, throwing them into the bushes. “Don’t collect those. You ship ’em like that and they’ll germinate on board, or rot.”

Robert frowned, puzzled by everything Lobb had said, but not wanting to ask too many questions. He grasped at the most immediate. “Chickaree?”

“Pine squirrels-those noisy little things you see all over. Listen a minute and you’ll hear one.” They stood still, and soon a chattering began in a small sugar pine nearby. Robert looked up and watched the tiny squirrel with its reddish fur, pale belly, and dark stripe separating the two.

“They spoil too many cones.” Lobb threw a half-eaten cone at the chickaree and it flashed out of sight.

When they had stripped the branches of the fallen sequoia bare they moved further into the grove to the standing trees. There were about a hundred giant sequoias in Calaveras Grove, scattered among other trees within the area of a mile or so. Each one they arrived at astonished Robert more rather than less. Though freakishly large, somehow they did not announce their presence, except with a flash of orange in among the younger trees, until you were up close. Robert wanted to stop at each, steady himself against it with his hand, and look up. William Lobb was less inclined; as Robert discovered later, he had seen many unusual trees in his travels, and while he appreciated them he was also unsentimental, and brisk about his business.

There were fewer green cones around the live sequoias, as they mainly clung to the branches. Robert was beginning to think it would be impossible to fill the sack when William Lobb stumped off to his pile of equipment and returned with a shotgun. After loading it, he raised it, aimed high into the tree, and fired. There was a crack, and in a moment a branch swung loose and slowly tumbled down, knocking against the trunk and other branches, and showering them with needles and cones. Robert ducked. The Englishman chuckled. “Best part of the job.”

He left Robert to pick up the cones and went back to his equipment, returning with a spade and some metal pails. “We need a few seedlings,” he explained. “Often the seeds won’t germinate in a new country and climate, but seedlings might continue to grow.” He tramped through the undergrowth several times around the tree before he was satisfied he’d found a healthy foot-high seedling. Then he began cutting into the thick duff around it, made up of decomposed needles and red dust from the bark. “Course it’s much harder to transport them,” Lobb grunted as he worked. “Often they don’t survive the crossing.”

“Crossing what?”

“The ocean. Won’t like being brought down to San Francisco much either. Worth collecting some, though, especially with a new species.” He lifted the seedling and lowered it gently into a pail, adding soil around it and tamping it down with his fingers. When he was satisfied he picked up his spade again to find another.

Robert had collected all the cones he could around the tree, and began looking for seedlings to help out. It turned out not to be as easy as he had expected. Few seedlings grew under the giant trees, as there was little sunlight. Those that did grow were not what he first thought. When he pointed out a potential seedling, Lobb shook his head. “That’s incense cedar. Lots of them here.” He gestured at taller, thinner trees around them with red bark and deep furrows similar to the sequoias. “Go and feel the bark of that one. See? Much firmer than the sequoia. And the needles may be scaly but they’re flatter than a sequoia’s, like they’ve been ironed.”

They moved on to another sequoia, William Lobb handing Robert the gun to shoot down more branches. Robert took careful aim, aware that he was being judged and must not miss. He was used to hunting-it was how he ate his way across America-but he had never deliberately aimed at the branch of a tree. When he pulled the trigger, the slug struck the sequoia branch and it cracked but did not fall.

“One more’ll do it,” Lobb said. “Right at the base.”

This time the branch fell, as well as another shower of needles and cones.

There was a shout from the distant builders, and a man detached himself and hurried through the trees towards them. William Lobb swore under his breath. “So much for that. Fun is always paid for, one way or another.” He picked up his spade and began cutting the matted turf around another seedling, which to Robert looked like an incense cedar. Clearly he had a lot to learn.

Lobb did not look up as the man arrived, short and sweaty and out of breath, though he had not come far. Robert did not have William Lobb’s insouciance. He stopped picking up cones and stood with the sack at his feet, his hands dangling in guilt, though he was not sure what he had actually done wrong.

“Here, now, what was that shooting for?” The man fingered a long moustache that cut the lower third of his round face from the rest. He wore a ratty silk top hat pushed back from his forehead and a shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows, its whiteness revealing his trade: he was a money man, not a worker. “What are you doing there?”

Lobb continued working. “Digging.”

“Yes, but what are you digging? And why are you digging? And shooting too. There is no gold here, sir, if that’s what you’re looking for,” the man added, pulling a grubby handkerchief from his pocket and wiping his hands and then his brow. “Perhaps you’re new to this business and misunderstand the nature of gold, but I assure you there is none under these trees. You’re better off going to the river and following it down a ways. Though I’ve not heard of any gold found in the Stanislaus for a good two years.”

He stopped, expecting William Lobb to stop too. But Lobb kept slicing the ground around the seedling, then lifted it and placed it into one of the pails. Robert went back to picking up cones. The man fingered his moustache again, then held out his hand. “Name’s Lapham. Billie Lapham. I got a claim on this land.”

William Lobb ignored his hand. Robert felt a little sorry for Billie Lapham with his hand left suspended in the air, so after a moment he went over and shook it.

That seemed to perk up the money man. “Which is why I want to know when someone’s shooting on my land, and digging on my land, what it is they’re doing,” he continued.

“This is not your land,” William Lobb said.

“Oh, it is, it is. I got the papers. I can show you, back at camp.”

“This is Indian land, if it’s anyone’s.” William Lobb spoke as if he hadn’t heard Billie Lapham. “Those Miwoks encamped just south of here-they’ve been here longer than you. It’s theirs, or it’s God’s land-take your pick.”

“No, it’s mine, mine and my brother’s. We’re building, see, for the tourists. A saloon, a bowling alley, and farther back we’re extending the cottage to make it into a hotel. The Big Trees Hotel.” Billie Lapham listed these achievements proudly. “Wait a minute, is that trees you’re digging up?” William Lobb had placed another sequoia seedling in a pail. “You can’t dig up trees! What are you gonna do with them?”

Lobb paused. “What, aren’t there enough trees here for you? I noticed you don’t seem much concerned about the big ones since you’ve gone and cut one down to make it into-what? The floor of a bowling alley.”

“Well, now, it wasn’t me that cut it down! It was others decided to do that.” Billie Lapham wiped his hands again. “But there were good reasons why they did that. Educational reasons. People want to see how big the trees are, and it ain’t so easy, standing up close to ’em, did you notice? With a stump that big, though, and a trunk that long, you get a better idea of the size and scale of the thing. I figured with it already down like that I might as well make something out of it! The Great Stump is gonna be a dance floor, you know. And they only cut down just the one. We’ll protect the rest.” He must have been criticized before to be so well versed in his defense. Then he tried to flip the argument. “And I want to protect what’s growing too.” He gestured at the seedling in its pail. “If you dig these up and take ’em away, we won’t have them in the future, will we?”

William Lobb stopped digging; it seemed incredulity halted his spade. “You think these giants’-he waved at the trees around him-“are going to let these little ones survive? There’s no room. Look around you! Once these trees established themselves, nothing could grow to any height under them. I’m doing these seedlings a favor-giving them a chance. They might actually grow up somewhere.”

“Wait a minute, now,” Billie Lapham protested, smoothing his moustache. He was a man full of twitches. “You planning to plant ’em somewhere else?”

What else would a man do with seedlings he’d dug up? Robert thought but kept to himself, smiling into the sack of cones.

“I can’t allow that,” Billie Lapham continued. “Oh, no! You’re stealing trees here to grow a grove to compete with this one. No, sir, I can’t allow that. Not at all.”

William Lobb grunted. “Even if I planted a grove a mile away, it would take a good five hundred years before it would look anything like this one. Your bones and my bones would be dust long before that. Anyway, you can rest assured these trees won’t compete with this grove: they’re going to England.”

Billie Lapham looked taken aback only for a second. “England! You plant redwoods there, nobody’ll come from there to see Cally Grove trees.”

To this ridiculous argument William Lobb did not bother with an answer. A fourth seedling landed in a pail, a little more roughly than the previous three.

“They’re sequoias,” Robert murmured.

“What?” Billie Lapham turned to Robert as if only just noticing him. “What did you say?”

“They’re not redwoods-they’re giant sequoias.” Robert found he enjoyed correcting Billie Lapham, even if he did not really know what he was saying.

“Of course they’re redwoods.” But William Lobb’s indifference to his authority had clearly shaken Billie Lapham’s confidence. “They got to be-the ads I’m running in the papers say they are.”

“An advertisement does not decide what a tree is called,” William Lobb said. “The California Academy of Sciences decided it is a different genus from redwoods and have named it a giant sequoia, with a Latin name to follow shortly. Redwoods are coastal, and tall and relatively thin, though still huge compared to other trees. Sequoias are in the foothills, and are wider and shorter.”

“Look here, now.” Billie Lapham cycled through all of his nervous tics, smoothing his moustache, then wiping his hands and brow. The gestures seemed to give him strength. “Are you planning to dig up more than them four pails? ’Cause I’m gonna have to charge you.”

William Lobb stopped digging and stabbed his spade into the ground, close enough to Billie Lapham’s feet to make him jump. “I’m done here,” he said to Robert. “When you’ve filled another sack, bring them over to the stables.” He pulled up the spade, took the four pails and hooked them over the handle. As he strode off, holding the spade horizontal so that the pails hung in a row, the seedlings bounced in time to his step.

Robert watched him go, aware that Billie Lapham had now turned towards him. It occurred to him that William Lobb had handed him his second job-negotiating with the owner of Calaveras Grove. Robert was not a negotiator, but if it meant working for Lobb, he would have to do it. From watching animals he had learned that he must not show weakness. And so, as Lobb had done, he did not look at Billie Lapham but continued to toss cones into the sack. At the same time, he considered the situation from the other’s point of view. Robert had never owned land, but he thought back to the Goodenough farm in the Black Swamp. If someone had come along and dug up apple seedlings on their property, and gathered seeds from windfalls, how would his father have responded? What would he have expected? A payment, at the very least. Robert tried to recall what John Chapman had charged for seedlings, so long ago. He thought it might have been five cents a seedling. Not that such figures really helped: California prices had been blown all out of proportion by the demands of the gold rush. When he was a boy back east, with a dollar fifty you could buy a whole barrel of hard cider. Here that amount would buy you one dinner in Sacramento. A pound of flour had been ten cents; now it was forty. Tobacco that cost six cents in New York was a dollar in California. But then, two years ago men were making a thousand dollars a month from gold, more than his father would have made in ten years.

It was impossible for Robert to place a value on trees; to him they stood apart from commerce. In pondering the price of a sequoia seedling, he recalled that John Appleseed himself-the consummate tree salesman-had been inconsistent about his prices. For no reason he had sometimes charged James Goodenough six cents a seedling rather than five, yet had also been known to give away bags of seeds.

It had been some time since Robert had thought about apple trees. He had not allowed himself to-when he did it made him feel sick and empty.

He did not want to value each sequoia cone or seedling. And he did not want to haggle. There must be another way. Robert looked up at Billie Lapham, who was once more mopping his brow, readying himself for the negotiation. Before he could touch his moustache as well, Robert said, “We’ll pay you five dollars for the seeds and seedlings we’re collecting from Calaveras Grove.”

Billie Lapham stroked his moustache. Clearly he didn’t know the value of the trees either. “All right,” he said, then seemed surprised at himself for agreeing. “Wait a minute-where would you collect ’em if I said no? There ain’t no giant redwoods-sequoias-anywhere else. Are there?”

“You’ve already agreed.” Robert stood and held out his hand. Billie Lapham hesitated, then took it. Obviously he was not much of a haggler either.

Robert spent the rest of the day collecting cones while William Lobb took more notes and sketched the trees. Lobb also gathered branches, needles and bark, carefully preserving their structure. “These I’ll dose in camphor and send to Kew to be studied,” he explained.

“‘Q,’” Robert repeated. “What’s that?”

“A botanical garden outside of London-the finest in the world. They collect and study all sorts of trees and plants. I always instruct Veitch to send them new discoveries. They’ll want to see the sequoias.”

Robert nodded, trying to imagine people interested enough in plants to study them. But then he thought of his father grafting the apple trees, how methodical he had been, and it didn’t seem so strange.

They camped just beyond Calaveras Grove rather than near the others-“so I don’t have to listen to braggarts all night,” William Lobb muttered. After they’d eaten and were sitting by the fire, Lobb smoking a pipe, Robert shyly asked if he could look at the leather notebook the Englishman had been using all day. When Lobb handed it over he held it to the firelight and leafed through the many notes and the drawings of the Calaveras Grove sequoias. Overviews Lobb had done of a whole tree, sitting several hundred feet away in order to see it from several angles. Drawings of the trunk, the bark, several different branches, the needles, the cones, the habitat under and around it. He had also sketched clumps of trees, and several sketches that could be put together into a panorama to give an idea of the size and scale of the whole grove. In some of the drawings Lobb had included a small figure standing next to the sequoia, wearing a hat similar to Robert’s own. He had never seen himself in a drawing, and though it was unsettling, he was pleased to be in William Lobb’s notebook. There were also sketches of the cones, as well as notes about their collecting: the date and location and elevation of where they had been picked up.

“What will you do with the seeds?” Robert asked, handing back the notebook.

“Send ’em to England.” Lobb stowed the notebook away. “The English will go crazy for these trees. They already love the redwoods I’ve sent back, and lots of the California pines. These sequoias will be the kings of many an estate in Bedfordshire or Staffordshire or Hertfordshire-if they survive.”

“Is the weather the same?”

William Lobb snorted. “No! Plenty of rain, not much sun. The redwoods seem to be doing all right, though: some of the seeds I collected a few years ago have been growing in England. But these-it’s dry here, with fires that pop the cones open so the seeds can get out. That will never happen in England. And it’s high up here-the beginning of mountains such as England doesn’t have. It will be a gamble. But if they take…” He tossed a pinecone into the fire.

“What do the English do with the trees?” Robert persisted.

“Plant ’em on their property.”

“Don’t they have trees in England?”

William Lobb chuckled. “Of course. But they want new and different, you see. The wealthy landowners have been busy creating ‘tableaux’ on their grounds.” At Robert’s blank look, he added, “They lay out trees so they look like works of art rather than just letting nature grow as it will. Now they’re demanding conifers, for they love exotic trees that remain green all year round. They set off the broadleaf trees, with their changing colors, and provide structure and life when everything else is bare. There are few native conifers there-only the Scots pine, the yew, the juniper. So I’ve been sending as many as I can from California. Some of them are even creating ‘pinetums’ on their property where they plant and show off a variety of conifers.”

“You send trees to England.” A thought was stirring deep in Robert’s mind, like a fish swimming below the surface of a lake.

“Yes, saplings sometimes, though they often don’t survive the journey. Seedlings are better-being smaller they don’t snap off so easily. But you may as well send seeds, that’s best. Even then, many seeds never grow. You might plant a hundred and get twenty seedlings from them, and of those, five might grow into saplings, and two into trees. That’s why I have to collect so many cones-as many as my horse can carry. Your horse too, if you’ve the time to ride to San Francisco. I assume you do or you wouldn’t be out here just to look at trees.”

It took Robert a moment to understand William Lobb was asking him to work for him for longer than just that day. Before he could answer, Lobb added, “I’ll pay you, of course. It’s worth my while to be able to collect and carry twice as many cones.” Clearly he’d thought Robert’s hesitation was over money.

Actually Robert would have helped him for nothing. He had been hesitating because the thought was now surfacing. “Have you ever heard of a Golden Pippin?” he asked.

“Of course.” William Lobb had finished his pipe and was taking off his boots. He seemed unbothered by the swerve in conversation. “I’m more of a Cornish Gilliflower man myself, though. I prefer my apples with a bit of red on ’em.”

“Are Golden Pippins common in England, then?” Robert tried to hide his disappointment. From the way his father had talked, he’d always assumed that Golden Pippins were very rare, known only to the Goodenoughs.

“Common enough. Not as common as a Ribston Pippin or a Blenheim Orange, but easily found. You know George Washington had them brought over to Mount Vernon? They didn’t thrive, though-not the right climate.”

“The Goodenoughs’ trees did.”

“Did what?”

“Thrive. We grew Golden Pippins in Ohio, and Connecticut before that. My grandparents brought branches from England and grafted them, then my father did the same when he went to Ohio.”

“Really?” For the first time, William Lobb looked at Robert with genuine interest. “Your father was a grafter, was he?”

Robert nodded.

“My brother and I used to do a bit of grafting at Killerton, back in Devonshire. What was the yield of yours?”

“Ten bushels a tree.” Robert allowed himself to think about the Golden Pippins for the first time in years. “Have you ever tasted a pineapple?”

“Pineapple?” William Lobb chuckled. “I ate them every day in South America. Got tired of them. Why?”

“That’s what our Golden Pippins tasted of: first nuts and honey, then pineapple. That’s how Pa described it, anyway. I never tasted real pineapple. Not sure he did either.”

William Lobb was staring at him. “Where did the Goodenoughs come from in England?”

Robert frowned. He wanted to say he couldn’t remember, but he knew that was not an acceptable answer to someone like William Lobb. He tried to think of what his father had said, so long ago. “Herefordshire,” he dug out at last.

Lobb suddenly laughed, a great bark, almost a shout. “Pitmaston Pineapple,” he announced.

Robert raised his eyebrows.

“Pitmaston Pineapple,” William Lobb repeated. “That’s what your father grew. It was a Golden Pippin seedling that originally grew in Herefordshire, had an unusual taste and a local following. Several years ago a man growing it in Pitmaston exhibited it at the London Horticultural Society. Gave it the name ‘Pitmaston Pineapple’ because of the pineapple finish. I’ve read about it but never had one. Been out of England too much to keep up with apples.”

“I didn’t know apples could change their taste.”

“Well, they go from sour to sweet sometimes.”

“I know. One in ten seedlings turns out sweet.” Robert repeated his father’s words.

William Lobb nodded, pleased. “If they can change from sour to sweet, there’s no reason why other tastes can’t change: from lemon to pineapple, for instance.” He pulled a blanket from his bag.

“So an English tree has come to America,” Robert spoke his thoughts aloud, “and now you are sending American trees to England.”

“True. There is a commerce in trees, just as in people. But a Pitmaston Pineapple growing in Ohio?” William Lobb chuckled, wrapping his blanket around him in preparation for sleep. “That’s almost enough to make me go there, just to taste it!”

In the morning they collected more cones, then loaded their horses with what they had gathered. The gray did not like carrying the four bulging sacks, which were light but bulky, and spun round and round to try to fling them off. The clanking of the pails that held the seedlings also made him skitter sideways. Lobb watched these antics with amusement while his own horse-a big buckskin mare with black stockings, seeming dumb but probably as smart as her owner-stood stolid and indifferent, though she carried more complicated baggage. In the end Lobb had collected four sequoia seedlings and two larger saplings, all in pails which he hung all over the horse so that she resembled a traveling trader, bumping and jangling with her load of tin. This was apart from saddlebags and a leather box of drying specimens that hung from her and bumped her side. Lobb had to ride with care, sitting ramrod straight, but like his horse he seemed used to it.

Robert found it hard to leave Calaveras Grove, not knowing when he would come again to see the giant trees. When he glanced back at the tawny bark beyond the smaller trees, his chest felt tight. He was glad, then, to be riding with William Lobb, as it forced him to look and think ahead.

They took the road down to Murphys, a route that should have taken only a few hours but with William Lobb took the whole day. He was constantly distracted by what he saw, and stopped to inspect what looked to Robert like nondescript flowers, taking quick notes and making sketches and pressing them between the pages of his notebook. Some of them Robert knew: lupines, pussypaws, cow parsnip. But others he was unfamiliar with, like the fiddleleaf, a purple-flowered plant with sticky oval leaves that Lobb was keen to collect. Still others even Lobb didn’t know. It occurred to Robert only later that this might have been the first time anyone paid real attention to some of those flowers-that Lobb was studying them and in fact would eventually give them their name.

He also had Robert dig up a few more seedlings-not of sequoias, since they had moved out of range, but of incense cedars and ponderosa pines. He watched closely as Robert placed the spade near the first cedar seedling, paused, moved it a little further away, then hesitated with his foot on the top of the blade. “Go on, lad,” Lobb said. “A firm foot and a clean slice is what you want.”

Robert cut swiftly through the duff, four slices around the seedling, and pulled it out in a square of dusty, needly soil.

“That’s right. Now, pop it in the pail.”

He directed him in digging up three more seedlings, then must have felt Robert had mastered it, for he moved on to showing him how to press flowers for drying. By the end of the day Robert was beginning to understand the rudiments of plant collecting.

From Murphys they traveled along other roads and paths that led through the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas onto the flat plain of central California. The shift from the conifer-dominated mountains down through the hills covered with dried golden grass and clumps of evergreen canyon oaks meant there were few opportunities for collecting, as the oaks were of no interest to the English. William Lobb was dismissive of them. “No reason ever to send scrubby things like these to a country famous for its oaks. Ah, the oaks of England-now there’s a tree. If redwoods are the backbone of California, oaks are of England. Huge, gnarled, full of personality. Do you know Charles II hid from soldiers in an oak tree in Shropshire? The tree was so popular that afterwards people killed it by taking bits of it as souvenirs. A lesson for Billie Lapham in that.”

It turned out William Lobb was quite a talker. He and his brother Thomas had grown up in a quiet village in Cornwall, and both had then gone on to have remarkable lives as plant collectors. Over the ride to Stockton, Robert heard all about Lobb’s travels, to the northern and southern parts of California, but also further afield, to Panama, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil-indeed, all over South America. He heard of snow and steep mountain passes, wars and assassinations, illness and delay. Robert himself had had adventures, of course; it was impossible to cross America as he had without incident. He had been thrown in jail and hidden from Indians and almost drowned crossing rivers and been stalked by wolves and wildcats. But Lobb’s travels were several notches more exotic, made even more so by the matter-of-fact way he described the harsh landscape and blizzards and brutal sun and the encounters with locals and the shootings and the government revolutions.

He underscored his stories with bitter and sarcastic remarks about James Veitch, the English nurseryman who had sent William to South America and California and Thomas Lobb to Asia to discover and collect plants. “He hasn’t got a clue what Tom and I have to go through to get plants for him-to make money for him. I doubt he’s ever set foot on a ship, or camped in snow, or ridden for twenty hours a day. He complains when the stagecoach from Exeter to London gets stuck in the mud! Dolt.”

Mostly, though, Robert heard of plants: long lists of Latin names he didn’t recognize, not even when William Lobb showed him sketches in his notebooks. Passiflora mollissima. Embothrium coccineum. Tropaeolum lobbianum. Crinodendron hookerianum. Tropaeolum azureum. Araucaria imbricata. The common names were equally exotic. Passion flower. Firebush. Lantern tree. Flame flower. Blue nasturtium. Monkey puzzle. The last name made Robert smile. “A Chilean pine,” Lobb explained. “Peculiar looking. Doesn’t have needles, but thick shiny spines grow all over the branches and on the trunk too. Someone looking at one growing in Cornwall said it would be a puzzle for a monkey to climb it-those spines are sharp, draw blood. Silly, really, as there aren’t any monkeys in Chile. But that’s how they are back in England-lump all the faraway countries together, have ’em share plants and animals. At least the name’s a good one.”

As he listened, Robert began to understand how limited his knowledge of plants and trees was. He knew birches from aspens, beeches from hornbeams, maples from sycamores. But he could not tell all of the Californian pines apart, the gray pine from the coulter, the bishop from the knobcone from the Monterey. William Lobb spent a long time by the fire that night describing the pyramid shape of the bristlecone fir, its beautiful dark green color, its singular cones with their leafy bristles. Robert had never even heard of it, much less seen one.

That night he lay wrapped in his blanket, head on his saddle, and let the names stream through him. Begonia. Rhododendron. Amaryllis. Mallow. Fuchsia. He didn’t know any of them, and wanted to.

By the time they reached Stockton they had lost one of the sequoia saplings, which snapped off when the buckskin shied at a partridge fluttering out from the undergrowth. Lobb was sanguine about the loss. “I fully expect to lose the other one as well,” he said. “If we don’t lose it on the way to San Francisco it’ll likely die on board the ship taking it to England. The seedlings stand a better chance. But seeds are best.”

From Stockton they took a steamboat down the San Joaquin River to San Francisco. Robert had seen these steamers going up and down the rivers between Sacramento or Stockton and San Francisco, but never been on one himself. Nor had the gray. Predictably, he rebelled against the floating sensation under his feet, rearing and kicking as Robert led him on board and managing to knock over the other sequoia sapling and trample it. “That’s one to your horse, one to mine,” William Lobb remarked, throwing the broken tree into the river.

The gray continued to buck and kick in the rickety stalls until Robert held him around the neck and put a sack over his eyes. At last the horse grew calm, and Robert was able to rejoin Lobb on deck.

As the boat paddled down the river, they stood together and watched the scenery pass by. Miles and miles of flat, fertile land stretched out before them: grasses browned from the long summer sun, broken by oases of green where there was water and people had settled and built farms. Occasionally they saw groups of Indians walking with baskets full of acorns, or riding in groups, a long string of horses paralleling the river. They stopped and watched the boat, which was still a novelty even though there had been steamers up and down the San Joaquin for several years now. Young boys fishing abandoned their poles and ran along the bank, racing the steamer. Robert could feel himself being pulled west, a sensation he’d had for much of his life.

“Where do you stay when you’re in San Francisco?” Lobb asked as they watched the boys on the bank grow tired and turn back.

“I’ve never been.” Robert was ashamed to admit that he had been in California almost four years and not yet been to its biggest city. Gold had been like a magnet that held him fast to the Sierra Nevadas, even when he was no longer mining it.

“Ha! You’ll either love it or hate it. I can guess which.”

They crossed the San Francisco Bay and headed towards the shore, Robert marveling at the wide water, the hills, and the hint of ocean beyond. Landing at one of the quays, he and William Lobb were swept up into the bustle of hundreds of men loading and unloading ships from all over the world. They did not linger, however; Lobb led them away from the docks and into the city.

Riding through the streets, Robert discovered that of all the cities he had been to-Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Salt Lake City-San Francisco was by far the worst. Its geography should have made it beautiful and eye-catching, for it was shaped by hills and water so that every part of it boasted a dramatic view. Instead it turned out to be a rough, muddy, smelly place, stripped of trees because they got in the way of the rapid building needed to house the burgeoning population, which had grown from one thousand to thirty-five thousand in four years. Buildings were laid out in a rough grid pattern and crammed together in rows that tiled up and down the slopes. There was no grace to all of these right angles so at odds with the city’s natural surroundings.

They passed dozens of saloons, with men staggering in and out of them, and riding fast up and down the streets like water pouring through a sluice. Robert recognized the greedy, impatient, desperate, careless character of miners on a spree, here to spend their earnings since there was little to do up at the mining camps. They seemed to need to match the speed of their spending with their earning, and had come to San Francisco to drink and whore and gamble ferociously; then, pockets empty, they would clear off back to the camps in the hills and on the rivers in pursuit of gold once more. Robert was not sure it was a good idea for a city to be so full of deluded dreamers.

William Lobb clearly had no interest in the city apart from its docks. He was not a gambler or a drinker, and he had given the few women they’d come into contact with little more than a glance. Indeed, he did not seem to like people much. “This city is a horror show,” he announced as they rode, “but its docks are essential. Two or three times a year I pack up seeds and seedlings and saplings and dry samples to ship to England.”

“Where are we going?”

“Corner of Montgomery and California. I’ve got an arrangement at a boardinghouse where I can store equipment and seeds and plants. Here it is.”

They pulled up in front of a house where a woman was leaning in the doorway, smoking a cigar. Tall and broad-shouldered, with red cheeks and scrubby, colorless hair, she wore a filthy pinafore that managed to make her look less rather than more feminine, and she did not wear a cap or hat or bonnet. There were few women living in California, and one way to do it was to ignore what was expected of you. The rules were different here: there were none. That was why many people were tempted to stay: the strict boundaries set by their families and communities and churches back east were nonexistent here. Robert had met many husbands who had decided not to return to their waiting wives, who reveled in the gambling and the whoring and the freedom.

The woman did not move, but let the men get down from the wagon and come to her.

“Hello, Mrs. Bienenstock,” William Lobb said. “Is there a bed available for this lad? He’s helping me.”

“No vomit on my stairs,” Mrs. Bienenstock directed at Robert. “You get sick inside my house, you’re out.”

Robert nodded; there was no other response to such a statement.

“We’ve got a special consignment,” Lobb continued. “It won’t be here for long-just till I find a steamer heading for Central America.”

Mrs. Bienenstock puffed on her cigar. “The Uncle Sam leaves for Nicaragua in two days. Market Wharf.”

“Not the Nicaragua route. Panama’s more reliable.”

“The Columbus, then. Pacific Wharf in four days.”

“Excellent. We’ll just get these in, then I’ll go down to the docks and sort it out. Thank you, Mrs. B.,” William Lobb added deferentially. Robert suspected his landlady was one of the few people he treated with such respect.

Lobb’s room was at the back of the house, with a north-facing window. It was naturally dim, made darker by black cloth hung over the window, and was stacked with tin cases sealed with wax. Robert looked around the room, baffled. Lobb chuckled. “Here,” he said, breaking open a case so Robert could see the contents: hundreds of labeled packets of plant seeds. “Some hold dried specimens as well,” he explained. “I’ll send all this off to England shortly. Look, the cases are lead-lined to keep out moisture and light so the seeds don’t germinate. That’s why I keep it dark in here too.”

He took Robert next to the small yard at the back of the house, a scruffy patch of land full of scrap and garbage that smelled of shit from the outhouse. Mrs. Bienenstock clearly focused her energy on the inside where the rooms were clean, there were no fleas, and the guests were cowed by her enough to behave. “I keep seedlings and saplings I’ve collected back here,” he said, gesturing to rows of pails of tiny trees. “Mrs. B. waters them for me-easy money for her.”

Once they had added the pails of sequoias to the others out back, and brought the sacks of cones to Lobb’s room, the Englishman left to go back to the docks, and Robert was free to explore the city. The saloons and brothels did not appeal, however; instead he asked Mrs. Bienenstock where he could go to see the ocean.

“Seal Rocks,” she replied as she ran a heated iron across dried sheets in the kitchen. “Take Broad Street west and keep going even when it turns into a track.” She nodded her approval. “You can’t get up to much mischief there!”

Robert was relieved to find that Seal Rocks was well out of the city, away from the miners and the dirt and the noise. There were no buildings there at all, just the beginnings of a fort being built further along the point. Robert and the gray followed the track till it ended and the ground fell away and the Pacific opened out below him like a vast watery sheet reflecting an equally vast sky. Robert had seen the ocean before but it always astonished him. After thousands of miles locked into a land sucked dry of water, here was more water than he could ever imagine in one place.

The gray was not so astonished, but responded to the wide open space as he had at the sight of the sequoias: he neighed and bucked and kicked out until Robert turned him around and led him a few hundred yards inland, where he left him to graze.

He came back and sat on the cliff edge and watched the ocean for over an hour. Off the shore there were large rocks sticking out of the water that looked like giant seals’ heads with their pointy noses facing the sky. Real seals lay on them, lolling in the sun and barking.

Little by little, Robert’s awe at the sight of the ocean was joined by an undertow of sadness. He had reached the end of the country, and was as far from Ohio as he could get; he could go no further. The thought of having to turn around and face east filled him with such guilt and despair that he felt sick with it. Robert had tried to lead an honest life, even when surrounded by dishonest people, but no matter how cleanly he lived now, he knew he had made one mistake that he could never escape. That knowledge would follow him, east or west. All of this running made no difference.

Suddenly there was a roiling and spraying about a mile from shore, and an enormous tail appeared, fanning out and dipping below the water. He gasped, and watched the tail come and go as the whale swam towards the horizon that Robert himself would never reach. It was another reminder that he had to stop now and find a way to live with himself out here, or go back east and face what he had done.

Robert and William Lobb spent the next three days preparing and packing the specimens, mostly out in the yard with the weather fine-though Lobb first spent his own money on a sack of lime for the outhouse so that they could work without gagging.

He demonstrated to Robert how to lay the sequoia cones on a canvas sheet in the sun to let them dry. Each held dozens of tiny flat seeds which would be much easier to transport once shaken from the dried cones. “I’m showing you how, but I’m not going to do that with these cones,” Lobb said. “We can’t wait for these to dry-that’s three weeks of waiting when someone else might send some sequoias off to England before us.”

“Are there other tree collectors?”

“A few. Some I’ve even worked with here and there. Andrews and Parry are all right. I’m not worried about them. It’s Bridges or Beardsley or the Murray brothers who are more likely to beat me to it.”

“Have any of them been up to Calaveras Grove?”

“Not that I know of-but I wouldn’t put it past them! They could have gone up there just after us, and arrived back today and be on the Columbus tomorrow, same as us.” Clearly it was a matter of honor for Lobb to land sequoias on English soil first.

Given how casually they had handled the cones while collecting them at Calaveras Grove, William Lobb was unexpectedly fastidious about packing them. “The success of plant collecting lies primarily in the packing,” he proclaimed. “Doesn’t matter what you’ve collected if it arrives in England dead or rotten.”

First they padded the lead-lined tin cases with old newspaper Mrs. Bienenstock had saved for them. Then they put in the sequoia cones. Robert would have dumped them in by the handful, but Lobb placed each cone until they made an even layer, then put another layer on top of those, and another layer. When the box was full, he took a sack of sand he’d dug up from a beach and kept in his room, and poured it into the box so that it filled all the spaces between the cones. “Absorbs damp,” he explained. “These cases’ll be around water for a few months. If the seeds get damp they’ll rot or germinate. Can’t have that.” Finally they sealed the cases with wax.

William Lobb decided the seedlings must be shipped in a Ward’s case, and brought the wood and glass materials into the yard to build a small one. If it was constructed properly any plants inside were protected from wind and sea spray and could be brought on the ship deck to get some sun. They filled the bottom of the case with soil, then planted the sequoia seedlings, as well as a few other plants Lobb had growing. They watered them, then shut the glass lid. The Ward’s case would not be opened again until it reached England.

Robert puzzled over this for some time. “How do they stay moist?” he finally asked as William Lobb dripped a lighted candle along the seams of the case.

“Condensation,” Lobb replied without looking up. “The water can’t escape through evaporation, so it remains in the case. A plant can live months in a Ward’s case, as long as it doesn’t get smashed. It’s people who are more likely to damage the plants than anything else. I once had specimens survive in Ward’s cases all the way from Brazil, only to die from being left too long in the cold on a London dock. Seeds are always a better bet, as long as they don’t germinate.”

The next day Robert and William Lobb took their cargo down to Pacific Wharf, where the Columbus was docked. It would steam to Panama City, then the cargo would be carried by wagon across the Panama Isthmus to Aspinwall, where another steamship would head up through the Caribbean to New York. There the cases would be transferred to a ship bound for Southampton, on the south coast of England. In all the trip would take two to three months.

Once they had stowed the Ward’s case and the tin cases down in the hold and were back on deck, William Lobb took out his pipe, filled it with tobacco, tamped it down and lit it. “Go and get anything still in the wagon, would you, lad? I’ve got my hands full.”

Robert thought they had brought everything but he went back as directed. On the wagon bed he found a leather trunk with a brass plate fixed to one side, the initials WL engraved on it. He ran his finger over the letters and frowned. Shouldering the trunk, he hauled it on board.

William Lobb was standing in the doorway of a cabin, and gestured for Robert to put the trunk at the foot of the bed. When he straightened, Robert looked at his employer puffing away on his pipe.

“Aren’t you coming back to Mrs. Bienenstock’s?” he said at last, since it looked as if William Lobb wasn’t going to speak.

“No, Robert.” It was one of the few times since they had met that Lobb used his name. “I’m going back to England. I’m not expected for another year, and Veitch’ll be surprised to see me. But this is the most exciting find since the monkey puzzle. He’ll never believe me about the size of those sequoias unless I describe them to him face to face, and show him my drawings. In a letter he’ll just think I’m exaggerating. This way I’ll get a chance to look after the Ward’s case, make sure it gets out into sunlight now and then, and doesn’t get smashed or abandoned.”

“But-”

“Mrs. B. will set you straight. Now, I’ve got a thing or two to settle with the captain. They always try to shortchange me on fresh water. See you in a year or two, if the sea doesn’t get me, or a grizzly bear you!” With those words William Lobb strode away, leaving Robert standing lost on deck.

He did not wait for the steamship to set out, but walked in a daze back to the boardinghouse. He had assumed that once the Columbus sailed, he and William Lobb would saddle their horses and ride south towards the mountains around Monterey, where Lobb would teach him about pines. Now he had to discard that dream. All he wanted to do was saddle up the gray and ride away-away from the boardinghouse and San Francisco, away from redwoods and sequoias, away from the Monterey and ponderosa and bristlecone pines he’d hoped William Lobb would show him. The problem was, you couldn’t go west of California, and Robert had never run anywhere but west.

In his room he packed his few things. But when he went to settle up with Mrs. Bienenstock, who was in the kitchen grinding coffee beans in a hand mill, she shook her head and he knew William Lobb had paid it. More than that: she had money for him, and instructions. “You take his room, long as you don’t mind how small and dark it is,” she said. “Not so bad now those cases are gone. I’m supposed to pay you. You can have it all now, or regular like a salary. Which do you want?”

Robert stared at her, unable to speak. Mrs. B. shook her head again and turned the handle faster. “We better make it regular.” When he didn’t move, she added, “Come on, man. Time to paddle your own canoe. Go on, put your things in there. I’ll get you some fresh sheets.” As Robert went to obey her, he thought he heard her chuckle.

William Lobb had left his room neat and empty apart from a stack of brown leather notebooks and a letter. The notebooks were similar to the one Lobb had used at Calaveras Grove. That notebook full of sequoia drawings was gone now, of course: Lobb would have taken it with him back to England to show to his employer. But the other notebooks were full of everything he needed to know about California conifers.

He opened the letter-the first he had ever received. It consisted mostly of a list.

September 13, 1853

Goodenough-

Please collect the following:

5 sacks each of

Pinus radiata

,

muricata

,

ponderosa

and

attenuata

+ 3 seedlings each

3 of

Abies bracteata

+ 3 seedlings

10 of giant sequoias + 5 seedlings

4 of

Sequoia sempervirens

+ 5 seedlings

3 of

Pinus lambertiana

+ 3 seedlings

5 each of

Abies grandis

,

procera

,

magnifica

and

concolor

+ 3 seedlings

I have marked on the enclosed map where best to find them. Many you can collect near San Francisco or Monterey, but for the last listed you will need to go far north to the Oregon mountains and bring the cones back by ship to San Francisco.

Send all consignments to

William Lobb Esq

Veitch and Sons’ Exotic Nursery

Mount Radford

Exeter

England

Use Adams Express, on my account. When you ship specimens, always send me two notes-one on the ship carrying the cargo, the other separately on a different ship-to alert me of their arrival.

Yours faithfully,

William Lobb

He sat for a long time, rereading the letter and studying the list of trees. Lobb had not asked him if he would collect for him, but simply assumed he would. That assumption did not bother Robert. Given the choice between the aimless sort of existence he’d had the last few years, picking up farming and ranching here and there, and collecting trees for an employer, there was no doubt which he would choose. And he was flattered that William Lobb felt he was up to the job-indeed, had spent the last several days training Robert.

He smiled to himself. He was becoming a tree agent.

For over a year Robert collected for William Lobb without hearing a word from him. He worked hard to gather the quantities demanded in the letter, traveling in a wide radius around San Francisco, making another trip to Calaveras Grove-hiring mules to bring the sacks back to the city-and going north for the first time to the Oregon mountains. The gray finally resigned himself to climbing and carrying sacks of cones, though he still kicked and bit when his owner tried to hang pails of seedlings on him, and Robert had to devise leather pouches to put them in instead.

It turned out plant collecting was a solitary occupation. In the past Robert had enjoyed being alone, or so he thought. Actually he had rarely been alone for long: working in hotels, in stables, on ranches and farms, and as a miner, he had always been around others. Now, out in the woods or up in the hills or out on the flat central plain, he could go for days without speaking to anyone. His throat seemed to close up and he had to keep clearing it, singing songs aloud or reciting the Latin names of plants, just to check that he still had a voice. Araucaria imbricata. Sequoia sempervirens. Pinus lambertiana. Abies magnifica. He was surprised at how much he missed people. Sometimes he deliberately sought out miners’ camps, just to sit with others around a fire. When he needed familiarity, he went back to San Francisco so that he had Mrs. Bienenstock to talk to-or at least to be around, as she was more a grunter than a talker. Robert did not say much either, but they sat in the kitchen together, reading the newspaper, or out on the steps of the house, where she smoked her cigar and he watched passersby. Once she offered him a cigar and he made the mistake of inhaling. She chuckled about it for a week.

By the following spring he had collected and packed and sent three shipments of specimens and seeds, ticking off everything in Lobb’s letter. He didn’t know what to do then, and asked Mrs. Bienenstock. She didn’t even look up from mopping the kitchen floor, cigar clamped between her teeth. “Do it all over again.” So he did.

His next round of collecting was what brought him riding down a Sacramento street on a late spring day just as the sun came out from behind a cloud and lit up a woman in a yellow dress. She was standing by a wagon and watching as men loaded it with sacks of flour. Robert pulled up the gray with a start at the sight of Molly Jones.

Robert had met Molly five years before on a Texas ranch where she worked as a cook, with a side line in prostitution. She seemed equally at home in both roles, though she never called herself a whore. Sleeping with men was just another task, like scrubbing pots or gutting chickens. Robert had even seen her pause in the middle of preparing a pot of stew to step into the pantry with a cowboy and lift her skirts.

Molly had curly black hair, wide blue eyes, a substantial bosom and a cheerfulness that did not always match her circumstances. Robert had seen her continue smiling as she passed a corpse by the side of the road or after a customer gave her a black eye. “Robert Goodenough,” she repeated the first time she heard his name. “Now I am sure that ain’t right. I’m gonna have to check jest how good you are!” And she did, that night, finding him and leading him back to her room, which had the most comfortable bed on the ranch, and relieving him of his ignorance of women. Her bosom smelled like bread. “First one’s free,” she said afterwards, lying along her arm and smiling. “You can go now, honey,” she added as Robert sat on the side of the bed, hands hanging between his knees, unsure of the etiquette. Molly was helpful like that.

For a week Robert was in love with her, with her yeasty smell, her frizzy hair that would not stay in a bun, her lips a dark red like she had just been eating blackberries. Really he was in love with being so close to a person that you were actually inside their body. He could not get enough of that feeling, and visited her bed three more times that week. Between bouts they would lie in bed recovering, and Molly would ask him about his past. Robert dodged the difficult questions, said nothing about why he had left Ohio, about having to grow up fast, about being cold and hungry and tired most of the time. If he did not talk about it, he did not have to think about it, and could keep a dark curtain pulled shut between then and now. Instead he entertained her with funny stories about Jonah Parks, the charlatan medicine man he’d worked for in Indiana, like the time they went to jail after Jonah Parks stole a wooden leg and accidentally tried to sell it back to the owner. Molly loved that story.

She was more forthcoming about her own past: a childhood in Georgia, a mother dead in childbirth, a drunk father, a brother and sister killed by Indians while Molly hid in a haystack and watched. “You got to smile,” she said. “Otherwise you’d cry all day.”

After the fourth bedding, Molly took his money and said, “No more for a while, or you’ll run through your pay, with nothin’ to show for it at the end.” It was her way of warning him off feeling more for her than he should, and Robert knew she was right. He still went to bed with her occasionally, but he did not try to get to know her better.

Sometimes, though, when he was wrapped in his blanket during a starless night, or chasing the horizon across an endless plain under the brutal Texan sun, he remembered the dazed feeling he’d had during that feverish week of love, riding among the cattle with the sensation that everything in the world-every scrubby plant, every outcrop of rock, every cow and horse and man and cloud-all connected up along a path that led back to one woman, standing in a kitchen making biscuits. While he was feeling it he had not thought he could ever feel any other way. Once it was gone, though, he wondered how something so strong could fade to a ghostly trace, like a river that had flooded but now dried to a trickle, leaving behind only a flood mark of debris. For the feeling did fade, Molly became just another worker at the ranch, and when Robert left for California, he said goodbye to her as if they had barely met and certainly not shared a sweaty bed. For her part, Molly remained buoyant. “Maybe I’ll go to Californie too,” she said. “Find me some gold and put my feet up. That’d be the life, wouldn’t it? Maybe I’ll do that.”

It seemed she had done what she’d threatened. Robert sat on the gray on the Sacramento street and studied her. Molly was thinner now and more weathered-crossing America did that to a face-but still looked cheerful. She was turned away from him, and he could have ridden past and pretended their paths hadn’t crossed, and never seen her again. He thought about it, and then he called her name.

Molly gave a shout when she saw him, ran over as he dismounted and hugged him, laughing, then pressed his face to her bosom. It sagged a little now but still smelled like bread. “Why do you look so surprised?” she cried when she’d let him come up for air. “I told you I’d get to Californie.”

“You-are you prospecting?” he asked. It was hard to imagine Molly as a miner. And finding gold was harder now; most of what was left required extraction with heavy equipment and cooperation rather than one man with a pick, a shovel and a pan. Many miners had joined together into companies. The rest had turned reluctantly and headed back east, or stayed and become sailors or ranchers or farmers or merchants or pimps or whores or hustlers. California had once been a huge land with a few Indians and Californios living there; now it held hundreds of thousands of Americans, come for gold and looking for something else to replace that dream.

“Me a miner?” Molly laughed. “You think I’m gonna get these hands dirty? Naw, I’m cookin’ at one of the camps up French Creek, off the Cosumnes River south of Hang Town. You know it? I jest come to Sacramento for supplies. Miners don’t want to spend a minute away from their work, so they pay me good money to feed ’em. I’m keepin’ an eye out for which one’s found the most gold and managin’ to hold on to his money. That’s the one I’ll stick with. Ain’t found him yet.”

She’s a cat, Robert thought, landing on her feet. He was glad to hear she had work and a plan, and had avoided the gold fever that took over so many and ravaged them. But he was a little uneasy too: he thought he’d seen a flash of desperation behind Molly’s cheerfulness when she first caught sight of him, more pronounced than the simple pleasure of running into someone she knew. It was not easy for a woman in California, there being so few of them, and so many volatile men, but Robert preferred to think that Molly could take care of herself. He did not want her to want something from him.

“So how about you, honey? You prospectin’?”

“I did for a while, but I’m not now.”

“Didn’t think so. You sure don’t look like you struck rich. No watch, no new boots. And your horse…” Molly made a face at the speckled gray. “What happened to Bolt?”

“Indians took him.”

She chuckled. “Shame. They got a good eye for horses. What, they left you this flea-biter, did they?”

The gray seemed to understand her, for he jerked his head and whinnied.

Robert explained that he’d left prospecting and begun collecting trees for William Lobb to send back to England. Molly stared at him. “What do they want with our trees? Don’t they have their own?”

Robert shrugged. “They don’t have so many pines there.”

“You put ’em on a ship goin’ thousands of miles and they pay good money for ’em?”

Robert nodded.

“That’s the silliest damned thing I ever heard.”

Robert smiled. It was a common response when he told people what he did. “You ever hear of Calaveras Grove, sixty miles south of here?”

“Heard of it. Never been. There’s a hotel up that way, ain’t there?”

“Yes, and trees bigger than anything you could ever imagine. Think of the biggest tree you’ve ever seen-”

“An old pecan tree, back of my Pa’s cabin in Georgia,” Molly said immediately. “I used to sit at the bottom of it and jest look up and up. I loved that tree.” For just a moment she dropped her cheery mask and became pensive.

“Take that pecan and triple it in size, both how tall and how wide. That’s a sequoia.”

“Well, now, I’d like to see that. Maybe I’ll go to Calaveras Grove and see those trees.” She sounded like she had back in Texas when talking about California. They exchanged a few more words about people they’d both known in Texas and what had become of them. The men had finished loading the flour and were waiting for Molly, picking their teeth and spitting tobacco on the ground around the wagon.

“Well, good luck with your seed collecting, Robert Goodenough,” Molly said at last. “I can see trees suit you better’n cattle ever did.”

“I guess.”

“Come and see me if you’re ever up near French Creek.”

“Are you still making those biscuits?” Molly’s biscuits in Texas had been famous for their fluffiness.

“Of course.” Molly winked. “Remember, the first one is free.”

Robert had thought he would never get to French Creek and take up her invitation. There were no redwoods or sequoias there, only some sugar and ponderosa pines he could collect but which he could also find just as easily closer to San Francisco. There was no reason to go. Nonetheless, three weeks later he made the trip. Molly was so glad to see him that he knew then the flash of desperation he’d noticed in Sacramento had not been imagined. Indeed, it was in her eyes when he arrived and when he left. In between she kept him near her, brought him into her bed and had him take her over and over until he had slaked his pent-up energy. When they were not in bed he helped her cook, for he had no desire to mine or watch others do so.

Being at French Creek reminded Robert of the prospecting fields he had left three years before: the relentless focus on gold that made men both crazed and dull, and the many nights around fires spent talking about the minutiae of equipment-whether a rocker box caught more gold than an individual pan, or where to buy a balanced pickaxe-or endlessly analyzing the latest rumors of gold elsewhere that could empty out a camp by morning. He hadn’t liked it then, even when he took part in it, and he detested it now, when the gold was harder to find. The miners still working were more ruthless, even when they were meant to be cooperating.

They treated Molly far worse than had the Texas cowboys, who had been grateful to her for her food and her bed and her cheerfulness. The miners only cared about gold: how big the nuggets, how abundant the flakes, how easily they could find it. They were never satisfied with what they got, and always worried that they had missed the bigger nugget, the better claim. Anything that stood in the way of their search, even things they needed-food, sleep, sex-was at best dispatched with quickly. At worst, they turned violent, taking out on these necessities all their frustration at not discovering the gold that would cure their fever. They threw meat at Molly’s feet if it was too tough, spat weak whiskey in her face, swore at her. Yet she put up with it, watchful, waiting for the man most likely to allow her to live with her feet up as she wanted. She worked, and took men to bed, and was beaten, and waited.

Her bedroom at least was comfortable. Molly always knew how to make a nest for herself, with a thick mattress, a pillow filled with duck feathers, good sheets, and fringed shawls and painted screens for decoration. She took baths often, and kept out of the rain and harsh sun. She also had a knack for doing as little as possible without seeming lazy, getting others to help her with a smile or a tease. Robert doubted she had ever lifted anything heavier than a five-pound sack of cornmeal. She managed to get the seat closest to the fire without seeming greedy or ashamed to take it. Nor did she walk far, but wheedled lifts, either on horseback or, preferably, in a wagon, where she sat back and surveyed the land around her with the entitled air of a queen. It made the miners’ ill treatment of her all the harder to bear. While he was there he brought her coffee in bed each morning, as if to make up for the other men’s cruelty. He knew how to make only a crude version with burnt beans he’d hammered and boiled, but Molly acted gladder than she need be for this small gesture.

After breakfast on the third day, Robert saddled up the gray, Molly watching. “I’ve packed you food for the road, honey,” she said, “but you don’t have to go.” She did not plead, but Robert sensed the rising panic in her and struggled not to be infected by it. He did not let himself tighten the stirrups any faster. He respected Molly enough to hide his desire to get away. “I have seeds to collect,” he said.

“When are you coming back?”

She did not give him the opportunity not to return, extracting his promise to visit again within three months. Which is how Robert Goodenough became Molly’s backup plan in case a respectable miner did not emerge from the jackals she lived among. Every few months he stayed with her at French Creek for two nights-never more-pumped her until he was sore, then escaped back to his trees. He felt guilty for not falling back in love with her, but though he tried, he could not recreate that week in Texas when all the world led back to her. That feeling belonged to other people.

Robert was at the stables near Mrs. Bienenstock’s, checking on his horse. It was early December and he had just come back to San Francisco after another visit to Molly, leaving as the snow came, which would mean no visiting for months unless he wanted to risk getting caught in a snowdrift and freezing to death. Seeing Molly was still new enough that he thought he might risk it, though the gray was not fond of snow. The horse had stepped on a sharp rock on the final stretch of road. Robert had taken care of it as soon as they arrived, removing the gray’s shoe and scraping out the pus before applying a poultice. Now he wanted to make sure there was no infection. The horse seemed all right, though he was not the sort to communicate much. Perhaps he sensed Robert’s own lack of commitment, for he showed little affection for his owner. Robert had been around men who loved their horses more than their wives, and cried when they died or were stolen. Some swore they could feel their horses laughing under their thighs. Robert suspected that if the gray had a sense of humor, it was a dry one.

He sat back on a barrel, watching his horse and eating an apple-a Gravenstein, one of the few apples available in California. Newly picked, they were juicy and tasted of berries, but they didn’t keep well and by December were mushy and tasteless, with a disagreeably waxy skin. Robert grimaced, wondered why he was bothering, and fed it to the gray, who was not picky about the taste or feel of an apple.

“I got one you’ll like better.”

William Lobb stood in the doorway. Pulling an apple from his pocket, he tossed it to Robert. It was small and yellow and wrinkled, and Robert turned it over and over in his hand.

“Try it. I’ve brought it all this way for you, lad. Go on, bite into it.”

Robert bit, and though old and soft from its long journey, the apple still contained a trace of the distinctive honey and pineapple taste of a Golden Pippin.

“Thought that would make you smile. Pitmaston Pineapples have become quite the thing in England. Even Veitch is selling ’em, and he’s not much bothered about apple trees.”

Robert thought about shaking William Lobb’s hand, but such formality didn’t seem appropriate with him. They had only ever shaken hands once, when they first met. “Did the shipments I sent arrive?” he asked instead. “There were three of them, but I didn’t hear anything.”

“They did indeed. Didn’t I write to tell you? No? My apologies. Yes, they all arrived, and mostly intact. The Ward’s cases were fine, the seedlings fresh as the day they were dug up. You lost three cases of cones to damp, but that’s not bad out of a few dozen. It’s what you’d expect.” Lobb stepped over to the stall that housed his buckskin mare. Others had used her while he was away, but she had begun whinnying the moment she heard his voice. Lobb patted her and fed her an apple-not a Pitmaston Pineapple, Robert hoped, for it would be wasted on a horse.

“Did I collect what you wanted?”

“Yes. You mixed up the Noble Fir and the Red Fir cones-but that’s easily done, and easily made right,” William Lobb added when he caught sight of Robert’s face, perhaps understanding that after over a year away, what his assistant needed was reassurance rather than a list of things he’d done wrong.

“How are the sequoias doing in England? Did they believe you about the size?”

“Oh, they did, they did! The English love the idea of these huge trees. In fact, I’ve rather done Billie Lapham a disservice. His publicity of Calaveras Grove reached as far as Europe, and once they’d read about the Mammoth Tree grove, everyone wanted one. My timing was perfect.” Lobb continued stroking the buckskin mare. “Of course, at first customers were put out that there were no giant trees ready for them to plant-as if they expected us to dig up mature sequoias and send them by ship! But we grew seedlings quick enough, and that seems to satisfy them. It tickles them to imagine their great-great-grandchildren enjoying a tree whose size they can only dream of.”

“What about the seedlings?”

“Of the four I brought back, two are still growing; the other two perished after being transplanted into English soil, the like of which probably shocked them to death after the Californian soil they were accustomed to. I myself felt rather similarly.”

Indeed, William Lobb did not look quite himself. He seemed tired, the T of his face more prominent because of his sunken cheeks and hollowed eye sockets. Of course it was not surprising-three months on ships would likely carve out any man’s face. But there was something deeper than surface fatigue and illness. He moved stiffly, as if he didn’t have his legs entirely in control. His black hair was much grayer, and lank rather than glossy. His talk was also less modulated: his laughter seemed louder, and he swore more. Later when they went to an eating house-a place where rough talk was more common than kind words-his tone made customers glance over, though they were careful not to meet Lobb’s eye.

His anger at James Veitch made a vein bulge in his temple. “He’s milking me dry, like an old cow with withered dugs!” he exclaimed, shoveling ham into his mouth. “All he wants is for me to collect plants till my balls fall off, the cheating bastard. Makes his money from my knowledge with no respect for it!”

“How much is he selling the sequoias for?”

“Two guineas a seedling.” When Robert didn’t respond to the figure, Lobb added, “That’s eight dollars a tree!”

Robert widened his eyes. “We could buy a hundred and fifty apple seedlings for that price back in Ohio.”

“Yes, and do I see any of that money? Only a pittance!”

Robert let him continue to rant, hoping he would eventually empty himself of his bile and they could talk more sensibly about work. He did not really care about how much the trees cost, or even how Veitch was treating his employer. He just wanted to know if he would still be working for Lobb.

When there was a pause, Robert ventured to ask, “What will we be collecting next?”

William Lobb exploded. “Goddammit, lad, can’t a man rest without being pestered and bullied? I’m just off the boat, my legs hurt, my head hurts, I just want to sleep without your badgering!” He stood up from his unfinished plate and stormed off, leaving Robert to pay.

Lobb remained in his room for several days. If he hadn’t been there Robert would have made his own plans, but now that his sometime employer was back he felt obliged to wait for instructions from him. He hated being idle, though, and took to helping Mrs. Bienenstock when he could. He tidied up the backyard for her, and one afternoon they cleared mud from the road in front of the house-a futile effort since it would reappear with the next rain, but Mrs. B. insisted. “Standards,” she replied when he pointed this out.

As they worked, he asked her what was wrong with William Lobb. Mrs. B. paused, leaning on her shovel. “Spanish disease, of course. What do you think he got up to down in South America? It wasn’t all plants.” She gestured at his crotch. “Mind you don’t get it yourself, with your trips up to French Creek. It’s called the French disease too, you know!” Mrs. B. enjoyed teasing him about Molly.

She stopped chuckling, however, when she noted Robert’s stricken expression. “Don’t worry about him, man-he’ll be up in a day or two. I’ve seen some suffer much worse than him.”

She was right-William Lobb was up the next day. He said nothing about his outburst at the eating house; nor did he repay Robert for his meal. Instead he announced that they would go south to collect flowering plants. “Yellow flowers, that’s what Veitch says the English want now. Poppies, violets, primroses. They’ve already got ’em in purple, but now they want yellow Californian poppies and violets to plant near their Californian conifers. You know about trees-now it’s time I taught you about flowers.”

They spent the next eighteen months collecting a wide variety of flowers, shrubs and trees for Veitch to sell to English gardeners hungry for novelty, traveling as far south as Santa Barbara and as far north as the Oregon mountains. Or rather, Robert went north: William Lobb was less willing to go to more remote areas. Physically he suffered from joint pains and numbness and blinding headaches. Mentally he was at times confused and forgetful. Emotionally he was temperamental, sometimes shouting at Robert but most often directing his anger at Veitch, who he complained didn’t appreciate his skills as a collector. “Without me Veitch Nurseries would be nothing,” he ranted. “They’d be selling only roses and daffodil bulbs and box hedges. The most exotic plant they’d offer would be a subspecies of Sambucus nigra! I have brought them rhododendrons and ceanothus. I have brought them the fuchsias you see in every decent British garden. I have brought the monkey puzzle and the redwood. And what do I get for my trouble? Complaints and demands!” Yet he also fretted when he didn’t receive letters from Veitch asking for more seeds and specimens. “He’s found someone else,” he declared. “Bridges or Beardsley or some other biddable lackey who will work for him for less money.”

Robert learned not to listen, and to offer to go alone on the more strenuous trips. Sometimes Lobb agreed. Other times, though, his paranoia extended to his assistant and he became convinced Robert was trying to take over his business. Then he would insist on coming along, though he rode more slowly now, sometimes hiring a wagon instead of riding the buckskin mare. Though he learned a great deal from his employer, Robert was disappointed that they never rediscovered the charmed magic of that first trip they had taken together from Calaveras Grove to San Francisco, when Robert was the sponge and Lobb the river of knowledge he soaked in.

After a year of increasingly slow and difficult travels, William Lobb decided to remain in San Francisco at Mrs. Bienenstock’s and focus on the packing and shipping while Robert did the collecting. It was Mrs. B. who suggested the arrangement. “Jesus H. Christ,” she interrupted Lobb one day as he sat in her kitchen complaining of the aches and pains he’d suffered from their latest trip to Monterey. “Stay here and do the packing and let the young one run all over California for you! Don’t you always say the success of collecting is in the packing? You’re the boss-take the most important role and stop moaning!”

Lobb was silent for a moment. He still showed Mrs. B. more respect than he did anyone else, his mania miraculously abating whenever she gave him a look or made a sharp remark. “Maybe you’re right,” he agreed at last.

Mrs. B. raised her eyebrows. “Maybe?”

The arrangement suited Robert too. He could travel alone, visit Molly now and then, and enjoy small doses of William Lobb, tempered by Mrs. Bienenstock. He was, almost, happy.

The British mania for giant sequoias showed no signs of dying down, and Robert made regular trips up to Calaveras Grove to collect seeds. Whenever he had the chance, he took a few days to explore the surrounding area. He never told anyone-not William Lobb, or Billie Lapham, or Mrs. Bienenstock, or Molly-but he was looking for more sequoias. Lobb himself had suggested early on that there could be more growing somewhere along the mountain range at a similar elevation, but now his illness had eroded his adventurous spirit and he preferred to collect at known places.

It took three years of searching, but in the late summer of 1856 Robert at last stumbled upon more giant trees. He was picking his way through thick woods only five miles southeast of Calaveras Grove when the gray began to snort and whinny, then kick out with his hooves. Robert assumed he had seen a snake, but the horse was looking ahead rather than down. He dismounted and held tight to the reins, his heart beating faster. Though he couldn’t see anything-no telltale auburn presence in the distance-Robert sensed a difference in the woods ahead. It was quieter, with fewer birds and less rustling of leaves.

He dragged the gray through the trees until he saw the first sequoia, then tied up his horse with its back to the grove and its nose in a bag full of oats, and went to explore. Here were dozens of giant sequoias, more spread out than at Calaveras Grove, and even bigger and more beautiful. There were no raked paths or signs or laughing tourists spilling out of saloons or standing on giant stumps. He was amazed that no one had found the grove before him, though he had learned in his travels that people tended to stick to well-worn paths rather than push into new places.

Robert was the trees’ only witness, and he planned to keep it that way. He would not collect cones here: the grove would remain untouched, as trees should be. James Goodenough would have approved. It was even worth paying Billie Lapham for the privilege of continuing to collect at Cally Grove if that would keep these sequoias secret. Robert had come to like Billie Lapham, but he knew the businessman would want to lay claim to the new grove and expand his business if he could.

The next day he continued on to Calaveras Grove. As he arrived, passing the Two Sentinels that marked the beginning of the grove, he saw that there was dancing on the Great Stump. Indeed, there had been dancing on it every time Robert visited, and he had grown used to the sight, though he still refused to set foot on the stump himself. Californians loved to dance more than any other people he had met. This was the case both of gold rush miners and of Californios up from Mexico. It seemed once they arrived they caught two fevers: gold and dance. There was dancing everywhere, even when there were no women to dance with. At the mining camps he’d lived in, after a long day bent over pans, the men danced with each other or did a solo jig to a fiddle and a guitar.

Today there were just two couples, dancing a fast polka to the whistling of one of the men. They danced with their partners; then, after a signal known only to themselves, switched. Robert was always surprised by this unspoken fluidity. He was not a dancer. Despite Molly’s attempts to teach him a few simple steps, he had never been able to join dances after supper when the tables and chairs were pushed back, or outside by the fire. Instead he had stood or squatted on his heels and watched.

Now his eyes followed the women first, as they always did. One was round and buxom, and once she realized that Robert was watching her, she began exaggerating her movements so that her hips swayed and the arcs of her turns followed the curves of her body, drawing them in the air. He didn’t know if she intended to embarrass him or if she liked the attention, but he shifted his eyes to the other woman. Small, slight, with wisps of hair escaping her bun, she did not look at Robert, or the men who held her, or anyone, but danced as if she were not in the arms of a gold miner on top of a giant sequoia stump, but somewhere far away.

At least today there were only four of them. Robert had witnessed a Fourth of July cotillion where thirty-two people had danced on the Great Stump, with enough space for the musicians as well. The cotillion had made the newspapers in Stockton and Sacramento and even San Francisco, with a drawing of the dance published alongside the articles. They were more like advertisements than news, orchestrated by Billie Lapham to publicize Calaveras Grove.

His eyes moved from the women on to the dancing men. Both had the weathered skin of miners, their obsession with gold putting them outside in all weathers and giving them a reason to ignore the hail, the heat, the ice, the wind that chapped their cheeks and lips. It was not just skin that marked them as gold miners, though, for Robert also had the scoured face of a life lived outdoors. These two still had that trace of gold obsession haunting their eyes, eight years after gold had first been discovered in California, and six years since the peak of the gold rush. Their dreams were still full of those minute glittering flashes. It was a dream common to many, wherever they came from. Robert had met French and Spanish and German and Dutch and Chinese chasing that dream. He had met men and a few women from Maine and Florida, Indiana and Missouri, Wisconsin and Connecticut. He had met people from Ohio. He had even once met a man from the Black Swamp, who had lived there only briefly, long after Robert’s time. Robert almost asked him about the Goodenough farm, but stopped himself: the man was drunk, and besides, Robert was not sure what he wanted to hear. From their clothes and the fact that they were drinking French brandy-a flamboyant expense when so much cheap Cuban rum or local whiskey was available-it seemed these two had done well out of gold, had managed not to gamble away all of their earnings. This was rare; no wonder the women, with their pale indoor skin and well-cut dresses, were willing to dance with them. These were the kind of men Molly was looking for to take her away from French Creek. These were the tourists Billie Lapham had been trying to attract with his ads and his well-kept road and his hotel and bowling alley.

And here he was. “Goodenough! Ain’t you the man of the moment. There’s a gal been lookin’ for you.”

Robert turned around. Billie Lapham’s top hat was pushed back as usual, its brim partly detached from the crown, and he was stroking his moustache with one hand and reaching out to shake Robert’s hand with the other.

“Nancy wants to see me?” Robert said.

Billie Lapham’s face fell. “Nance is a little poorly-though of course she’ll want to see you, sick or not. Put your head around the door, make her smile again.”

Lapham’s wife Nancy was soft and sickly, with faded hair and a face wide at the cheeks and narrowed to a point at the chin like a cat’s. The first time he heard her cough, Robert had known what it meant: eventually consumption would take her. Every time he came to Cally Grove, he braced himself for Nancy’s absence, and was relieved to find her still greeting visitors on the front porch of the Big Trees Hotel, or sweeping the floor in the saloon, or washing glasses out back. She always smiled at Robert and seemed pleased to see him.

It also pleased Billie Lapham to see his wife happy. He was not the jealous type, but hospitable, inviting Robert to supper or for a whiskey, both of which Robert always accepted. Or he told him he could dance on the Great Stump for free rather than pay fifty cents like the others. This offer Robert never took up. But he was happy to establish with Lapham an easy business relationship that tipped over into friendliness, helped along by the five dollars he handed over as a fee each time he collected seeds there.

Billie Lapham fingered his moustache and watched the couples dancing their polka. “Just between us, Goodenough, I’m selling my share of Cally Grove and taking Nancy to live at Murphys. More people there who can look after her, rather’n her lookin’ after people.”

“Who are you selling to?”

Billie Lapham made a face. “Haynes bought me out.”

Dr. Smith Haynes had been Billie Lapham’s business partner for almost two years, and Robert had never taken to him. He was a harder man than Lapham, with a full beard, a long stare, a snug waistcoat and his hands always in his pockets. He insisted on being called “Doctor,” though Robert had never heard of him doing any doctoring. He treated Billie Lapham with unwarranted disdain.

What bothered Robert even more was his dismissiveness of Nancy’s role as hostess of the Big Trees Hotel. Haynes wanted a hostess to be everything Nancy wasn’t: loud, bosomy, funny and assertive. He wanted her to ply visitors with drinks, tell them jokes, flirt with the men and commiserate with the women. Nancy did none of these things, though she had a quiet charm that worked if given a chance. Haynes never gave her a chance, though. As she grew sicker and weaker, he glared as if she had deliberately contracted TB to provoke him. Of course he couldn’t fire her since she was his business partner’s wife, and Billie Lapham defended her robustly, if anxiously. “She’s improving, looking better, don’t you think?” he’d say to Robert in front of Haynes, and Robert would agree even when Nancy was clearly worse. “The customers like her,” Lapham would remind Haynes. It was true that visitors liked Nancy, despite her flat chest and lack of jokes. She was gentle, and she listened when they complained about fog obscuring good views of the sequoias, or fleas in the beds, or their losses at the card tables, or the blisters they got from dancing on the Great Stump’s rough surface. When she could she did something to help: stuffed mattresses with pennyroyal and rosemary to drive away the fleas, suggested excursions to escape the fog, appealed to her husband to install a sprung floor on the stump. Otherwise she sympathized with a smile and a cough. But Haynes felt it wasn’t enough. He would be delighted the Laphams were going.

“In fact,” Billie Lapham continued, “you’ll need to make a new deal with Haynes about the seed collecting. He always thought five dollars a time wasn’t enough for what you’re takin’ from the property. Me, I don’t mind. I know how much Nancy likes to see you. My wife’s smile is worth a lot more than the five extra dollars Haynes wants to charge you.”

“Thanks for the warning. I’ll come see you and Nancy at Murphys when you move.”

Billie Lapham nodded. “We’d like that. Now, this other gal…”

“What other gal?”

“The one I just mentioned was looking for you.”

“I thought you meant Nancy.”

“Naw, this was a visitor. She came yesterday and asked for you.” Billie Lapham grinned. “Looked urgent to me so I sent her to Nance. Women know the right questions to ask, you see. Best to find out from her. I’ll take you to her now-I want to check on her anyway.”

Robert followed him to the hotel, a sinking feeling in his belly. The last time he’d seen Molly, four months before, she’d talked about visiting Calaveras Grove to see the trees. So, as she had with her threats to come to California, she had actually done what she’d said she would do. While she was at French Creek Robert felt he could keep her separate from the rest of his life. If she came here, though, she would stay. Haynes would love her, and with Nancy going, Molly could be the hostess he wanted, with her laugh and her bosom and her big open bed.

Nancy and Billie Lapham slept in a small room at the top of the hotel where you would expect the maid to live rather than the proprietor. But that was how businessmen made their money-by renting out the good rooms and ignoring their own comfort until they could afford to think about it. Nancy lay in a bed that took up most of the space yet was hardly big enough for both of them. Though the window was open, the room smelled of milk someone had left to sour in the glass, of the chamber pot that was not emptied often enough, of a body confined. Robert wished he could carry her downstairs and put her in one of the rocking chairs on the hotel porch, but he suspected Haynes wouldn’t want her there, advertising illness to the visitors.

He stood in the doorway, hat in hand, while Billie Lapham woke his wife. Nancy whimpered, but when Billie whispered Robert’s name to her, she struggled to sit up. Her pointed face was white apart from two bright dots of red on her cheeks, as if she had been leaning on her hands. And she smiled. “Robert,” she croaked, “I’m so glad you’ve come.”

“Yes, ma’am, I am too.” Whenever Robert was with her he became formal.

“Don’t you ‘ma’am’ me. I’m your friend, not a minister’s wife. Come and sit with me.” Nancy patted the edge of the bed.

Robert glanced at Billie Lapham, who nodded. “I brought you a pitcher of fresh water, Nance,” her husband said. “Straight from the well, nice and cold. I drew it myself.” Throwing the sour milk out of the window, he rinsed the glass and filled it with water. “You want anything else?”

“No, thank you, honey. I’ll just visit awhile here with Robert. We got things to discuss.”

Billie Lapham chuckled. “You sure do.” His laughter puzzled Robert, as did Nancy’s widening smile. They seemed to be sharing a joke at his expense.

When Billie Lapham had clattered down the stairs, Nancy’s smile dimmed a little, and Robert frowned. He was often surprised at himself for caring so much about her. “How are you keeping, Nancy?” he asked, making sure to use her name.

Nancy raised her free hand and gestured to her bed-bound body, then let it drop. “Well, it’s obvious, ain’t it? I just get worse ’n’ worse. Did Billie tell you we’re moving to Murphys?”

Robert nodded.

“I’m doin’ it to humor him, really. Bein’ in bed there or here won’t make no difference to me. Might make him feel better, though-rest easier about me. And he won’t have to deal with Haynes any more. That man: I wish a sugarpine cone would fall right on his head.” Seeing Robert smile, Nancy became more elaborate in her revenge. “A big one, a foot long like they come, nice and green and heavy. And with the sap on it that’s so sticky you can’t get it off you, and the dirt gets in it and you can’t get that off either, so you go round lookin’ unwashed. That’s what I would like to have happen to that man.”

“Want me to shoot some cones off a tree when he’s passing under it?”

“You do that.” Nancy closed her eyes and leaned back into the pillows. “I’ll miss the big trees. That I do regret.”

Robert waited. After a few minutes he thought she must be asleep, the glass of water tipping in her hand. He took it gently from her and set it on the small table by her bed, where there was a Bible, a candle and a stack of handkerchiefs freshly laundered. One of them was crumpled; Robert could see specks of blood on it.

Then he froze. Behind the handkerchiefs was a small brown glass pot with a label that read: “Jonah Parks’ Respiratory Balm-for efficacious breathing.” Next to the words was a crude sketch of a woman holding a bouquet of flowers that Robert himself might well have drawn fifteen years ago, for the pot looked that old.

He reached over and picked it up, and Nancy opened her eyes. “Nancy, where’d you get this?”

“Oh, a visitor gave it to me last week, said it would help me to breathe easier. And it has! Why, have you ever used it?”

“No.”

Nancy looked at him more closely. “What is it?” When he didn’t answer, she sighed. “Robert Goodenough, you never tell me anything!”

“It’s nothing, really-just that I once worked for Mr. Parks.”

“Did you? That’s funny! Where was this?”

“Indiana.” Robert did not add that the balm was simply a mixture of beeswax, camphor and sassafras root cooked in a pot over a campfire-as was the snake oil, brain salt, cure for baldness, and all the other medicines Jonah Parks made up. Nancy wanted to believe it helped her breathe, and for that reason, maybe it did. He sat now looking at this piece of his past, and marveled that it had found its way to Nancy’s bedside table. Indiana was a long way from California, and Ohio ever further. And yet, what a small world this was.

Nancy’s eyes had drooped again and Robert thought he would slip out and let her sleep. When he got up, though, she grabbed his arm with more strength than he’d expected. “Where do you think you’re goin’?” she demanded, her eyes still shut.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“You think I’m gonna sleep when we got a woman to talk about? I was just restin’ my eyes, is all.” She opened her eyes and Robert sat back down.

“You know,” Nancy said, “when I first met you a few years ago, I couldn’t believe you weren’t married, or at least have a gal. ‘Somebody oughta snap him up,’ I told Billie. You’re a handsome fella-don’t duck your head, you are! You got the brightest brown eyes, would make any gal happy just to have you look at her. You keep clean, you don’t drink or gamble, and you listen to people. If you’d had any money to invest, Billie would’ve asked you to partner him running Cally Grove. We knew you’d look after these trees.”

Robert had never heard of this idea, and wondered how he would have responded if they had asked.

“Anyway, it’s too late now-we’re stuck with Haynes, and Billie and I are gettin’ out of here.” Nancy closed her eyes again. Talking clearly tired her, and Robert would have to wait and let her catch up with herself. He didn’t mind: he was in no rush to hear about Molly.

Nancy opened her eyes again. “So wasn’t I blown over to find out you did have a woman. Why didn’t you tell us, Robert? All this time I been worryin’ over you when I didn’t have to!”

“Well…” Robert couldn’t think how to describe his relationship with Molly in a way that would satisfy Nancy. “I didn’t think you minded one way or another.”

“Course I mind! I like to know you’re happy. ’Cause you don’t always seem happy, you know, except out in the trees. With people-with Billie and me, even-you don’t say much. Like I never knew till just now that you were in Indiana once. I always hoped you’d feel you could tell me things, if you wanted.”

“I-I know.” Robert felt his chest tightening, as it had whenever Molly asked him too many questions. “I just don’t think about the past much.”

Nancy could have asked why that was, but she seemed to know that she had pushed far enough. Instead she said, “So all those times you say you’re off collecting trees you’re actually with her?”

“No,” Robert protested. “Mostly I am collecting trees. It’s just now and again I visit her.”

“Sure.” Nancy was smiling again. Clearly she didn’t believe him.

“When did you see her?”

“Yesterday. We had a little visit. She sat right where you are now.”

Robert blushed and rubbed his head. It was hard to imagine Molly here with her curves and her laugh and her desperation. The room was too small. He was embarrassed too: Molly was not the kind of woman Nancy would expect him to be with. He was embarrassed, and he was ashamed that he was embarrassed, for it was disrespectful of Molly. He wished he could leave this hot, stale room, but he couldn’t walk away from Nancy.

“What did she say?” he asked.

“Not much-didn’t need to. She wants to see you, of course. It’s lucky you turned up when you did!”

“Where is she now?”

“I told her I didn’t know when you’d be passin’ through next, and that she should get herself a room and wait, and we’d try to get word out to you since it’s urgent. She said she couldn’t afford it, so I told her to rest herself here a day or two, then get a lift back to Murphys where the rooms are cheaper and more plentiful.”

Robert’s mind rested on the one word both Billie and Nancy Lapham had used: urgent. He could only think of one reason why it might be urgent. “Where is she-resting?”

“In the barn. Billie knows. I told her to keep out of Haynes’ way. That man would happily throw out a woman in her state, just like the innkeeper in Bethlehem. So she’s stayin’ out of sight.” Nancy’s speech was getting slower and more garbled as she grew tired, and Robert wasn’t sure he understood. Or he did, and didn’t want to.

“What do you mean? Nancy?”

Nancy’s eyes were closed. He waited with increasing impatience for her to rouse herself, but this time she slept. If he wanted to confirm why Molly was here, he would have to find her himself.

She wasn’t in the barn. Robert wasn’t surprised-it was stifling inside. Molly wasn’t in the stables looking at the horses as she liked to do sometimes at French Creek. She wasn’t on the porch, pretending to be a visitor having coffee. She wasn’t in the saloon, or the bowling alley, or at the Great Stump, or in the kitchen chatting to the cooks.

He returned to the barn again to make sure she hadn’t gone back while he was looking for her elsewhere. There he ran into a young hand, forking hay into a wheelbarrow to take to the horses. “You lookin’ for the lady?” the boy said. “The one like this?” And he made the gesture Robert had feared since Billie and Nancy Lapham had both smiled at him: the unmistakable curve of a belly carrying a child.

“You know where she is?”

“She was here, but she went to see the trees.” The boy grinned as Robert turned and stumbled out into the fresh air.

He had never asked Molly about babies. He’d never asked her much about herself since their first few nights together. As far as he knew she’d not had any. But nor had she made him withdraw early or wear something on his cock. He knew there were things women did to prevent babies involving hot baths and mustard or vinegar, or visits to doctors. They were women’s things he did not ask about, or feel he needed to know about.

If she was as big as the stable hand had indicated, she must have already been pregnant the last time he’d seen her four months before. She’d said nothing, though Robert tried to think back to how she’d been. Had her stomach swelled and tightened like a drum? Had her already substantial breasts gotten bigger? He couldn’t recall. His visits to Molly’s bed blended into one long session of sweaty flesh and rumpled sheets, of a release that only ever scratched the surface of his itch, no matter how often he entered her. That a child would emerge from that chaotic pleasure seemed improbable. But then, his parents had had ten children that way. He shook his head, standing in the sun, the sequoias flashing red in the distance.

He headed out to them. A trail wound among the big trees for the ease of visitors, but Robert ignored it, for walking through undergrowth did not bother him. Apart from making the path, Billie Lapham and his various partners had also named some of the trees, hanging signs on them. Visitors liked that, for they wanted a way to differentiate between the sequoias and make sense of them. So there were the Two Sentinels at the entrance to Calaveras Grove. Nearby was the Discovery Tree, which the hunter from Murphys first saw when he was chasing a grizzly bear; it was the sequoia that had been felled and now had the bowling alley built on it. Then there were the Three Graces, a trio of beautiful trees standing side by side. The Old Bachelor, a rough tree. The Hermit, a tree that stood alone. The Siamese Twins, with two trees growing out of one trunk. The Burnt Tree, which had fallen and been burnt hollow by lightning so a person could ride through it on horseback. Robert hated the signs; he hated the names. Occasionally he thought about stealing all the signs and burning them, but he knew they would just be replaced.

Another fallen sequoia had broken in two when it came down, and parts of it were half buried. Billie Lapham had measured these parts and estimated that the tree was the largest in the grove, at over four hundred feet long. Robert thought the length exaggerated, but Billie Lapham stood by his measurements, and named the tree Father of the Forest. Whenever Robert saw it he thought of his father, and so he avoided it.

He also stayed away from Mother of the Forest, which made him even sadder, for its bark had been stripped over a hundred feet up the tree, to be shipped to New York and exhibited for those skeptics who thought the sequoias were a tall tale. The trunk was naked except for the scaffolding it was still clad in. Robert assumed this was to show visitors how it had been done; otherwise he could not imagine why Billie Lapham would leave up something so ugly. For a couple of years Mother of the Forest seemed to suffer no ill effects from this stripping, but Robert had noticed recently that its foliage was thinning. He suspected it would eventually die, after hundreds, maybe even thousands of years free from human touch. Robert liked Billie Lapham, but hated what he and his partners had done in the name of promoting the Calaveras Grove trees.

There were other family groups: Mother and Son, with a larger and smaller tree, their foliage touching. Husband and Wife, leaning towards each other. The Three Sisters. He did not find Molly by any of these trees, though. Instead she had chosen to sit under the Orphans, two sequoias on the eastern edge of the grove, which stood so close to each other they seemed to have grown from the same root, with their branches entwined. She looked very small sitting under those giant trees, though when she saw him and struggled to her feet, already starting to cry, Robert saw that Nancy and Billie Lapham had been right about her condition. She was very close to having a baby.

They were wrong, though, about the other important thing. Very wrong. It was not Molly. It was Martha.

When he recognized his sister, eighteen years after leaving her hidden up an apple tree, a smile crossed Robert’s face like a crack in plaster. He smiled so hard his face hurt, and he realized that he had not smiled with such deep pure joy since he was a boy.