“You should be inside,” he said by way of greeting. “There’s weather comin’.”
“Youaren’t inside.”
“I ain’t a lady,” he said, stopping before me, whorls of steam lifting off his skin. He seemed to recognize the intensity in my eyes. “What is it?”
“I need to find Edith,” I said. “Would you come with me?”
Edith was to be found in the factory, sorting the goods Theo and I had brought in. Theodore was emptying a sack onto a metal workbench while she picked out the canned goods, the medicines.
Polly came stumbling out of her office, eyes near-deranged. She blinked in rapid succession as though trying to draw shapes from her surroundings. John came into the warmth behind me and Patrick.
“Edith,” I said, pulling the plaque out of the satchel, not revealing it yet. “Edith, what do you know about the three daughters?”
She didn’t look up from her ministration, but I thought her hands stumbled over the clothes she was sorting. “The three daughters?” she mused, then shrugged. “As much as anyone else I’d guess. My ma used to tell me to make wishes on ’em.”
“Mine as well,” I said, a weight falling heavily into my stomach. “And what did she tell you about the founders of Trent?”
She stopped then, looked over her shoulder at me, seemed to realize for the first time the people convened around her, listening. She eyed the plaque in my hand furtively. “What’ve you got there?”
I gave it to her, let her eyes fall to the names. “The three daughters were born of the name Trent?” I asked.
Edith shrugged. “So they say.”
“Sowhosays?”
“People here got a long memory,” she sighed. “The first Stewards—they came from this parish, see? That’s what the old folk think. Their grandmas and grandaddies taught them the same, that Trent were Idia’s birthplace.” She handed the plaque back to Nina. “But the Book of Belavere don’t agree. It don’t think there’s more’n one daughter of God, neither.”
“And what do you believe?”
Edith shrugged, her eyes straying over the factory. “Don’t matter much either way. Coppers here beat anyone tellin’ stories about it. The name Trent came from a woman named Joan, they say, who was one of the first Artisan daughters. But we ain’t supposed to think differently. Coppers even tried to cut down the tree, ’cause the kids would sit under it and make wishes.”
“What tree?” Patrick asked.
“It’s a kids’ fancy. But some believe it’s where she’s buried,” Edith said in an undertone, as though policemen might thunder in even now. “The thing is, the coppers can’t cut it down. Not even the wood Masons they sent from the city. Nothin’ fells it.” She said it with pride, a slow grin lifting a corner of her mouth. “Don’t know if there’s a lick of truth to it. The Stewards might’ve been a bunch of puffed-up fools, for all I know. But there’s somethin’ about that tree. We used to sneak into the woods at night, dare each other to get close to it, you know?” She shook her head. “Can’t touch it without gettin’ the shakes.”
Even now, Edith seemed doused in chills. She rolled her shoulders back. “If it’s a wish you’re wantin’, it still stands out there in the woods. The fire didn’t touch it none. But don’t get your hopes up,” she said, the moans of a man rising as he convulsed on his pallet. “Ain’t ever granted any fortunes to us lot.”
Partway into the woods, an oak tree towered, unmarred by fire, just as Edith had promised.
There was nothing about it that should mark it as a grave. No engravings, no discerning features. But still, it stood before us as a monolith, and in turn, each of us shivered.
Winter had taken its foliage. What was left was the spine, its branches reaching desperately outward, and perhaps that was the quality that made it somber.
The clouds overhead pushed down, turning the snow ashen, dulling sound. There were cold fingers on my neck, tracing the shell of my ear, but when I turned, no one was there.
“Bad omens, Patty,” John said, his eyes lost in the network of empty branches. “Bad omens.”
Miners were a superstitious lot. A shiver of wind was a bad omen, a crying swallow meant death. I used to laugh at how grown men cowered at the breeze.
But I thought John might be right. There was decay in the air.
And yet, the oak tree stood taller than any I’d ever seen. Wholly alive.
“It’s only a tree,” Theo said, rubbing his bare hands together. “Doesn’t exactly prove the existence of the three daughters.”
The clouds parted then, weak beams of light dousing the oak.
It bleached and shadowed in the gnarled wood, turning it monochromatic, as though an artist had used it as a canvas, turned a tree into a woman. A knot in the trunk became a hand clutched to her chest. The lines in the bark were now her head bowed, eyes closed, jaw defiant. Her body cascaded into the earth and the heavens both.
