That night he makes her read to him about a tree that once ran in great vertical veins of living ore from Georgia to Newfoundland, out through Canada, and past the Great Lakes to where they camp out together by lamplight. She tells him about giants four feet wide, their trunks shooting eighty feet straight up before the first sideways branches bothered to extend. Trees that stood in endless stands that darkened the air with pollen each spring, the clouds of golden dust raining down on the decks of ships far out at sea.

She reads to him of how the English first swarmed a continent that rose from the ocean overnight, seeking masts for their leviathan frigates and ships of the line, masts that no place in all stripped Europe, not even the farthest boreal north, could any longer provide. She shows him paintings of Pinus strobus, in hulking shafts as big as church steeples, so valuable that the Crown branded even those that stood on private land with the King’s Broad Arrow. And her husband, who spent his life protecting private property, must see it coming, even from the future: The Pine Tree Riot. Revolution. War, fought over a thing that grew on these shores long before humans came down out of trees.

It’s a story to match any fiction: the well-wooded land, succumbing to prosperity. The light, soft, strong, dimensioned boards, sold back across the ocean as far away as Africa. The triangular profit making the infant country’s fortune: lumber to the Guinea coast, black bodies to the Indies, sugar and rum back up to New England, with its stately mansions all built of eastern white pine. White pine framing out cities, making millions in sawmill fortunes, laying a bed of rails across the continent, building and pitching warships and whaling fleets that wander out from Brooklyn and New Bedford into the unmapped South Pacific, ships made of a thousand trees or more. The white pines of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota: split into a hundred billion roof shingles. A hundred million board feet a year, splintered into matchsticks. Scandinavian lumberjacks clearing a swath of pine three states wide, wrestling the colossal husks into rivers with tackle and boom, riding miles-long rafts of them downstream to market. A giant hero and his big blue ox cutting the pine to clear the Brinkmans’ neighborhood.

Dorothy reads, and the wind picks up. All the yard bends with complaint. Rain blows in. The small room grows smaller still. Night: the third part of every day that remains a foreign country. The house next door vanishes, and the ones just north of that, until the Brinkmans huddle up alone, out on the edge of a savage wilderness. Ray’s working leg thrashes against the sheets that hem him in. All he ever wanted was to earn an honest living, promote the general welfare, earn the respect of his community, and raise a decent family. Wealth needs fences. But fences need wood. Nothing left on the continent even hints at what has gone. All replaced now, by thousands of miles of continuous backyards and farms with thin lines of second growth between them. Still, the soil remembers, for a little while longer, the vanished woods and the progress that unmade them. And the soil’s memory feeds their backyard pine.