The Trees

"It’s a really weird book in a wonderful way. It predates the beginning of At the Edge of the Orchard by about thirty or forty years—I read it as research for this book—and it’s about this family called the Lucketts. The family, with five or six children, moves into this heavily wooded part of Ohio to hack out a living there. There’s a lot of detail about dealing with trees. The trees are so strong and permanent that in order to survive there, you have to uproot the trees and they’re constantly pushing their way back in. It was in this book that I began to understand how hard it is to uproot a tree. If you’re going to plant a field full of something, you have to clear the land first, and the trees do not want to give up their roots very easily. It’s hellish getting them up. You start to wonder why on earth this family has moved to this place when it’s so difficult. Towards the end, one of the younger daughters disappears. She’s gone to bring the cows home, and she doesn’t come back. Her older sister Sayward’s theory is that the trees have taken her—they’ve snatched her and they’ve eaten her. It’s really spooky and strange, and also really well told, and unusually told too. Exactly, and the trees here take the place of the fairies. In reality, what probably happened is that Native Americans took her, but Sayward can’t quite cope with this, so she blames the trees instead."