He wonders: What makes the bark twist and swirl so, in a tree so straight and wide? Could it be the spinning of the Earth? Is it trying to get the attention of men? Seven hundred years before, a chestnut in Sicily two hundred feet around sheltered a Spanish queen and her hundred mounted knights from a raging storm. That tree will outlive, by a hundred years and more, the man who has never heard of it.

“Do you remember?” Jørgen asks the woman who holds his hand. “Prospect Hill? How we ate that night!” He nods toward the leafy limbs, the land beyond. “I gave you that. And you gave me—all of this! This country. My life. My freedom.”
But the woman who holds his hand is not his wife. Vi has died five years ago, of infected lungs.

“Sleep now,” his granddaughter tells him, and lays his hand back on his spent chest. “We’ll all be just downstairs.”