• • •
“Spaghetti tonight,” said Sapatisia, coming in with bags of food and bottles of wine. “If you don’t like the food you get to be the next cook.”
Tom Paulin refilled the woodbox, stoked the stove, Charlene put a great pot of water on to boil, Jeanne and Hugdis chopped onions and green peppers, Felix sliced a large wrinkled pepperoni sausage into near-translucent disks and found bowls and forks. When Sapatisia mixed the sauce into the pasta she set the pot directly on the table.
As they ate they talked of their lives and families, but everyone kept looking at Sapatisia. To Jeanne, who had become an instant disciple, she seemed to stand for all that was good.
It was almost dark when they finished. Tom Paulin went outside while the rest of them cleared the table and Sapatisia rinsed out the teapot. Jeanne began to wash the dishes. Tom came back in and said, “The moon is coming up.” In the window they all saw the red moon, made ragged by sea fog, rising swiftly out of the ocean, paling as it climbed. It looked close enough to hit with a harpoon and seemed to draw farther away as it rose. Jeanne knew the moon’s apparent recession was only its rise above the distorting atmosphere, but suppose, she thought, that this time it kept going, becoming smaller and more distant like the waving hand of someone on a ferry.
• • •
The old stove radiated heat as they sat with their cups of tea and talked on, picking up on their earlier conversation about the tropics.
“It seems,” said Sapatisia, “you are all more interested in tropical than boreal woodlands?”
“They are more endangered, aren’t they? I keep reading that the forests of Sumatra will be gone in twenty years,” said Jeanne. “There is a sense of urgency.”
“And you think boreal forests are less threatened? A misapprehension. You are attracted to the romance of the tropics. There has been a lot of media attention lately — Disney Company roasted for using wood pulp from poached tropical trees to make children’s books. Hardwood floor companies suddenly swearing that they only use ecologically sound plantation-grown trees.”
She went on. “Charlene, you’ve spent time in Brazil and Colombia. How many trees and how many tree species would you say grow in Amazonia?”
“My God, who knows! The diversity is so great and the different species so scattered—”
Tom interrupted. “I read the Field Museum’s report last year that said sixteen thousand species and I don’t remember how many million trees.”
Sapatisia nodded. “And they estimate around three hundred and ninety billion individual trees in the Amazon basin.”
Tom looked at her. “How the hell can we understand those numbers? North America only has one thousand species. Sixteen thousand!”
Sapatisia crooked her mouth in a wry smile. “Yes, how do we grasp these enormous diverse numbers? But the report also said that half the trees actually belong to a much smaller count of two hundred twenty-seven species — the predominants, including cacao, rubber, açai berries, Brazil nuts.”
Charlene poured more tea. “Those are the trees humans have been growing for centuries. Aren’t there more of those species because human have nurtured them?”
Sapatisia shrugged. “Possibly. We just don’t know. Some people are sure those hyperdominants were in the catbird seat because preconquest indigenous people grew them. On the other hand, some think they were always dominant and are in a naturally stable state. Quite a nice little puzzle.
“And that’s the allure,” she went on. “The slippery composition of ecosystems in general. It is uncomfortable to live in a spinning world of hallucinatory change. But how interesting it is.”
Tom Paulin leaned forward. Felix thought he had loosened up since dinner — maybe it was the wine. “I’m thinking about the other end of the Amazonian stick — not the hyperdominant species but the rarities. The extinct species. I’m thinking about ‘dark diversity.’ Like dark matter.”
“Dark diversity?” Felix liked the sound of this.
“A little like absent presence — when you pry a sunken stone from the ground the shape of the stone is still there in the hollow — absent presence. Say there is a particular rare plant that influences the trees and plants near it. Say conditions change and our rare plant goes extinct and its absence affects the remaining plants — dark diversity.”
“But if conditions change again will the absent plant return?” asked Jeanne. “Are you saying extinction is not forever?”
“Sit next to me in the van tomorrow and we’ll figure out dark diversity and dark matter. Right now I need sleep.” He thought that she was not pretty but she had that soft beautiful skin color. And feelings. And a mind.
• • •
No one could sleep under such a moon. Its bitter white light destroyed repose. It was like acid poured over the landscape, seeping into every crevice.
• • •
Felix thought first of soil types, then of the unborn millions of tree cutters to come. And Sapatisia’s emphasis on how enormously important the work was, not just a job but a cause, a lifework. He had listened to Onehube — was this the big thing he, Felix, could do? A drowsy thought swam to the surface — he might now actually be doing it — forest work. Had he gotten around the barrier of college and even the university? Yes, he was at the edge of the forest. This was his start. They could not pull him back.
• • •
And Jeanne felt a stream of joy like a narrow sun ray breaking through heavy overcast, a sense that in this one day her life had become filled with leafy meaning. Because of Sapatisia Sel.
• • •
Tom Paulin in his travel-worn sleeping bag was remembering Afghanistan and lost comrades, men welded tightly by searing experiences that outsiders could never understand. There was dark diversity for you. He found civilian life unbearably lonely; he tasted the sour flavor of belonging nowhere but with the old broken group, forever stitched to each other like parts of a coat — the loneliness of a ripped-out sleeve, he thought. And then at Seeley Lake he had found the larches. Running from suicidal despair he had joined a work crew in an old-growth larch forest where lightning storms fried the summer skies. The Indians had burned underbrush to encourage grassy meadows for deer, but in the last century thickets of Doug fir crowded out larch sprouts. He touched one tree’s soft needles. A thought, unbidden, came — that one of his lost friends was inside that young tree. The burn of anxious grief for that fallen friend began to soften. The work crew had fired the built-up fuel load around the old larches, and the next year seedlings surged up in their thousands. He went on to different forests and in each of the young trees he saw the brothers he had lost. The more seedlings he planted, the more of them he resurrected.
• • •
Sapatisia tossed on her bed in the sleeping loft where once fishermen had stored their gear. It emitted a faint odor of stale bedding and old wool, of ancient seaboots and the wood handles of scaling knives. Every place in the world, she thought, had its own distinctive smell. The smell of old Mi’kma’ki must have been wet stones, sea wrack, pine and spruce, mellowing needle duff under the trees, a smell of salted wind and sassafras, of river fish and the people who lived in it, hair and limbs cleansed in the ever-flowing aromatic air. She rolled onto her side and looked down through a gap in the floorboards and saw moonlight shining on the teacups. She turned again and looked at the glowing sea.