- The man who planted the Remnant Trees died in the dam wars in ‘33 or ‘34, though it might have just been he was old and the small growers wanted a martyr. His family was out by ‘35, to somewhere in Arkansas. I heard it was somewhere around Palm Bluff, but I’m not sure that that’s a real place. Long time since I’ve cared about places that far away, and longer since I’ve seen a map of Arkansas. It’s hard for me to imagine many palms in Arkansas. I was there once, you know? I went to a beautiful museum in the mountains, with hundreds of painted pictures and a billionaire’s sculpture collection, and while I was there it rained for three days in a row.
- Bullshit it rained for three days in a row.
- When I was your age, kid, it sometimes rained three days in a row even in Los Angeles. Even snowed occasionally on the San Gabriels.
The old man caressed the left donkey with the reins, and the left donkey took the kind of heed a donkey is wont to.
- You know what snow is, right?
- I’m young, but I’ve read plenty.
- You’ll probably see it sometime, if what I’m hearing is right.
The right donkey ably negotiated a colossal chuckhole as they turned back downhill.
- What is it you’re hearing, Rav?
- That we’ll have to go again. There are the Moise Lands up in Alaska, they say they’re still wet enough to grow things, and still expansive enough to live unbothered. You see what I see when we leave the Fairfax. There are a lot of desperate folks out there.
- Shit, Rav, I’m desperate. How do you think you got me coming with you to see these trees of yours?
- They’re not mine, you know. They belong to the planter’s kids, or their kids now probably. I don’t know them, I never have. I sent a letter to a colleague in Little Rock some years ago and asked him to find them if he could, but he wrote me back from somewhere in Carolina saying he’d been expelled before he could and advising me never to write again. His handwriting in English was beautiful, like he’d put effort into calligraphy. A wonder what we used to be able to do when we all had that time to read and think.
- I read, you know?
- And what have you read lately?
- How to Blow Up a Pipeline and a couple of the Army Doctrine Publications on Small Unit Tactics, Rav.
- Nothing less practical? Maybe to broaden the mind?
- Would they have sent me with you over the Grapevine to go see these fucking trees, Rav, if I wasn’t an incredibly practical person? Would they have sent me with you alone?
- In my childhood even the practical of us read literature and Torah.
- Yeah, yeah, my hands are the hands of the Torah.
The old man pulled the donkeys to the side of the road and adjusted the cowboy hat on his head so that it blocked the setting sun from his neck. He looked over and saw the algal remnants of Pyramid Lake and remembered it crystal and shimmering.
- Another hour and we should make Lebec, and we can find out if we can camp with Jimmy the Ghost. It’ll be such a pleasure to see him again, if he’s still there.
- Did you mean what you said about the Moise Lands? I’ve heard murmurs too.
- I was wondering when it would reach your folks. We’d want to go all at once and you’d have to take us to the Marina.
- They said the Marina wouldn’t work. It would have to be Pedro for a large enough wharf. The Boat is huge, so they say. A real Ocean-Goer. Called it HaTikvah, but I’m not sure if that was a joke.
The old man chuckled.
- I expect it’s both.
The left donkey stumbled, got back up into stride, and pulled them on. The old man looked out with concern. If either donkey went, they probably couldn’t make the grove. They sat in silence as he stared down the legs of the donkeys with the practiced eye of a man who’d been doing this his whole life. The sun fell behind the mountain. They saw and then heard a firework as the donkeys took an old freeway exit. There was a shift as the passenger’s rifle came out from where it had been hiding.
- I suspect that’s Jimmy!
- It better be, Rav.
They pushed on a little ways, and heard some movement and then a horse whinnied. The old man called out loudly into the twilight.
- Oye, Jimmy, ¿todavía tienes el caballo que me trató de matar?
There was a second rustling, the horse poked through some tall chaparral, and an old man, pale and with a scraggly silver beard groomed from his chin down to his belt, called from the top of the horse.
- ¡Rabbi! ¡Otro año y nos vemos como siempre! What’s your friend' s name?
– – – – –
- Your man Jimmy is crazy, Rav.
- Good morning to you, too.
- He lives nowhere, in an Adobe. He has like ten horses. His greenhouse has fucking tea bushes in it. He speaks English and Spanish and he said Russian too. He wouldn’t show me his card. He said he was Hidden, but it’s obvious he’s had recent visitors, and nobody Hidden lives in East Jesus like this. He’s crazy.
- I’ve known him for 40 years at least, kid. I drove to his place in a car, even, back in the early days. He’s always lived out here, always had the greenhouse even though he did used to have more tea bushes back when he was selling up and down the grapevine. He maybe speaks more than Russian, honestly, and I’m not sure he has a card. Does that clear it up?
- Fuck no, Rav.
- Oh ya, he’s not Hidden either, that I know for a fact. That he made up for you.
- Yeah, yeah, that I figured.
The donkeys strained against their harnesses as they went around the bend in shadow, and the road fell away.
- That’s the sign for the grade right there. Used to say 6%. Jump in the cab for me and hit the brakes if we get going too fast?
- Which ones are the brakes, again?
- Sit behind the wheel, it’s the foot pedal on the left. You gotta really press it, a lot of these systems were electric-assist and without the engine running they don’t work that great.
- Should I be worried?
- Nah, I’ve gone down here like ten times in this cart, it’s never a big deal. Can even leave the donkeys in the front. And I checked the brakes before we left Jimmy’s too. You were still asleep. Watch my left hand here on the windshield, and if I make a fist you push down on the brakes. If I leave it a fist, push down harder.
- Got it.
The wagon followed the donkeys down the hill, though the donkeys weren’t pulling. If either of the people guiding the donkeys had heard a stuck pig before, they might have equated the squealing. They turned the last bend and the valley opened out in front of them.
- Holy shit, Rav.
- There’s a lot of it, huh?
- Don’t believe I’ve ever seen so much of a place
- I do not believe that you could imagine what this would look like all green. When the water went counted in acre-feet to the men who poured it into nuts to sell in China and Alfalfa to feed to cows, mostly.
- I thought they grew food here?
- Before, yes, before. There were families who had little plots and grew oranges and peaches and avocados and such. Everyone could eat like that before the Dam Wars…
- And then they couldn’t, and we don’t even know what we’ve lost, right? I’ve heard the stories.
- Yeah, yeah, ok, no reminiscing. Just the remnant trees left. That’s why they don’t mind us heading here. There’s nothing useful anymore.
The old man caressed the rump of the right donkey and gave a light tug to the reins, and it pulled right.
- Gonna ditch this main freeway here and take the road toward old Arvin.
- Is that another friend of yours?
- Ghost town, actually. Used to kind of service some farms. The Resnicks, who were a shonde fur de goyim, bought up all the land around it and it was a company town for a while. Never really flooded, just started to disappear as the work dried up, and then got bombed by the Bear Flaggers in the Dam Wars. They had a whole squadron of old warbirds they stole from museums and they put them to as good of use as they could.
- Warbirds? Like, birds but for killing?
The old man laughed.
- Ah, sorry. That’s what we called vintage military airplanes. There was one, I was under it in Manteca when it was landing and I’m not sure how they got it to work, but I swear it’s the loudest sound I’ve ever felt.
- The airplane was loud?
- Apparently back when they built these they more wanted to make a point than actually hit you, or they thought that there was no getting away anyway. They bombed the life out of a bunch of these little towns.
- So there’s nobody in Arvin?
- If there was anyone there, you’d think they’d have noticed the trees.
The left donkey shuddered and stopped, and the right donkey obeyed his friend. The old man jumped down and brought a bag of water over and the donkey drank deeply and whinnied assent. The old man got back on, twitched the reins, and they were off.
– – – – –
- What the fuck is this, Rav?
- A lot of folks would tell you it’s a mirage, and keep moving, but not me.
The old man pulled lightly and the donkeys made a square turn to the left towards the trees about three miles away.
- Those aren’t really that many trees together, Rav. That’s not a thing.
- The brush can be deceiving, I agree. The chaparral and the tumbleweeds and such. They do a good job of deterring other folks who come out this way, and since nobody’s really in this part of the Valley anymore, no drones get sent, so far as I can tell. Otherwise someone would have noticed.
- Someone should have noticed when you kept showing up in October with all those fucking esrogs, I think.
- They don’t know our holidays.
- Whether they know our holidays or not, they should have figured out something was up when you came through the gate in Santa Clarita with a thousand pounds of citrus fruit from nowhere.
- The head iceman in Santa Clarita likes an old drink, called limoncello. They don’t make it anymore, except I do, every year, for him. Takes like a third of my annual allotment of ritual wine that I have to distill first, but I end up with enough for shabbats and holidays anyway, so this keeps us in what we need.
- I didn’t know you were Maccabi, Rav?
- Did I say I was?
- You said you give liquor to an iceman.
They pulled up and got out of the truck and walked over to the trees. They were heavy with yellow fruit which smelled like summer a hundred years before.
- We’ll only pick what we can bring with us, which’ll end up being between eight and nine hundred of these. Fill the sacks with the ones that look like they still have the little thing on the bottom end. I brought clippers, leave a bit of the branch on there. I’ve got 12 sacks.
- How many fucking trees are there, Rav?
- The grove’s about 10 acres. Why?
- How the fuck are there ten acres of citrus trees alive out here, Rav? We passed that nodding donkey rusting away like three hours ago, and we haven’t between there and here seen a single fucking tree! Who’s irrigating these? How are they still alive?
- About five years after I was told about this grove and started coming here I dug up a couple of pipes. Can’t say I think I’ve found anything that says the water went through them since the 30’s.
- SO HOW ARE THEY HERE?
The old man picked up a sack and started clipping low-hanging fruit. He looked at the bottom of each one, finding a little nub and discarding those without it. He looked to make sure they were plump and yellow, without big spots. Occasionally he’d take one of the ones he was discarding and scratch the rind and smell the fruit deeply. He dropped about one in ten.
- You know, Rabbis in choosier times would drop like half of these.
- How are any here at all, Rav?
- I like the smell of these ones. I love the shade of the grove. You know I brought Brahim O’Sullivan out here the third year I came, and had him sketch the whole grove for me. I have all ten of his sketches in my office.
- I don’t believe you.
- It was three weeks before the clearings up here. He wouldn’t leave, and so they left him. I think he ended up making it about four months longer. He left me a painting in the grove.
They filled the sacks, working methodically.
- We’re going to have to go when we get back, you know?
- I had heard maybe before the end of the year?
- Boat’s coming now. I only learned just before we left. When it doesn’t rain again this winter you know whose fault that’s going to have been, and then where will we be? Better to get going now when they might let us just leave.
- I won’t miss it. I have a plan to move us.
- You’ve been holding back what you know. So have I, I admit it. So have I. I don’t know that there’s any plan but to walk to Pedro down the 110.
They sat, backs against trees, and the young woman looked above the old man’s head and saw an oil painting of a young rabbi holding a citron in his left hand, with trees behind him nailed to the tree, faded a little and molding at the edges but basically intact.
- You know the train that brings the Calfresh through, Rav? I think the engineer is Hidden.
- No!
- He always wears a hat, he’s got a good long beard and hair, his shirts have torn edges sometimes
- So he’s a trainman?
- And the first time we fucked, Rav, I noticed his cock was cut.
The old man nodded, and then covered the sacks with a blanket in the bed of the cart and watered the donkeys.
- He could get us all?
- There’s what, like, six thousand of us left here?
- Closer to 10.
- It’s going to be hard for him. If we pack the train, we can fit maybe four in a night.
- They’re going to see the ship.
- It’s got fruit in it, we’ll fit in overnight and the next night, and they won’t ask while they’re unloading.
The old man thought. He touched the right donkey with the reins, and they set off back through the scrub.
- The ones with long pointy tails have no seeds, but the rotund ones do. You should be able to grow them from seed when you get up to the Moise Lands. I brought you because I know you garden. I asked for you by name, Samantha Malamud, at the meeting of the Maccabi, because you garden. Any gunslinger will do out here, because if we ever have to shoot we aren’t making it back anyway, but I need someone to know how to get these out of the ground when we get to the new place.
- You’re gonna be there, Rav, unless you call me Samantha again.
- There’s no room for men my age on a boat like that. I’ve seen the sketches and so have you. We’d be lucky to have eight thousand actually fit. I’ve made peace with it. Just make sure they actually use these for ceremony this year.
- You can come, Rav, everyone loves you.
- Everyone loves tradition, but you can make it yours. Dry a few of these carefully so they last you until the fifth year your trees grow up there, or else they won’t work like they’re supposed to. They’ll grow from this grove.
- You’ll see them grow up there, Rav.
The old man turned back toward the road. He and his friend breathed in the scrub and the smell of the fruit rising from the back of the cart. They sat and the donkeys pulled, on their way to the long waiting line at the combination cart stop and guardhouse outside Santa Clarita, where they’d sleep that night. Sukkot was still three weeks away, and he wondered idly whether they still had any palm fronds to thatch a hut roof.
