Fever Tree

I met a woman at a cocktail party who, when I mentioned that I was taking an adult education course in painting, told me she’d taken an adult education course in writing many years earlier, and a short story she’d written there had actually won a big prize. I smiled and said “good going,” or words to that effect, thinking that we were both dilettantes, but when she told me the name of the prize I took a step back, because it was, indeed, a prestigious prize, and I had a hard time imagining anyone winning it with something written in an adult education class.

When she went on to say that the story had been “about” the life of a dirt-poor, sharecropper family in the deep south, I thought that might partly explain it. Guilty, northern editors would be hungry for material like that, particularly at that time, and they’d have no way of knowing that the author was as white as an Easter lily.

I asked her if she’d lived in the south at some point, or perhaps done some work down there, maybe with the Peace Corps. Looking embarrassed and pleased at the same time she shook her head. “No, never,” she said, then leaned a little too close and said that the really “strange” thing was that she’d never even been to the south, much less known a poor black family. In fact, the class assignment had been to write about something you knew nothing about – to challenge your imagination. But this story had come to her in vivid detail. As if she’d lived it personally, she said, looking into my eyes in a way that stirred a little fear in me.

In defense as much as anything else I said I’d like to read the story and she said she’d be happy to send me a copy. I gave her my business card, rather than my home address, and didn’t say anything about it to my wife, who was in another room.

The next day I got on the Internet and found a list of past winners of the prize the woman had mentioned. There was a Susan on the list, and at about the right time, but I didn’t know what her maiden name had been. Nor had she told me the title of the story. And, looking at the names of the previous winners, which included some famous authors, I had my doubts. My guess was that she’d had a story published somewhere, the editor of that magazine had nominated it for this prize, and perhaps she’d even received an honorable mention or something along those lines. But not the actual prize.

The story arrived about a week later in a manila envelope. It was her original, typed manuscript, including penciled notes about tense and point of view that looked like they were from her instructor. Her maiden name and an old address were in the upper right corner. I went back to the listing of prize winners, and there she was!

I read the story at lunch. It was written from the perspective of an elderly woman looking back at her childhood. It was sophisticated, and well written overall. I couldn’t tell if these felt like authentic black people from that social group, or that era, because what did I know about that. But they did feel like genuine, living people.

About two thirds of the way through the story the narrator’s younger sister falls ill with malaria and the mother goes off into the woods to look for a “fever tree,” taking the narrator with her. Eventually they come to a tree with beautiful pink blossoms, glowing in the twilight. As the mother peels off strips of bark, the daughter-narrator observes that it isn’t the flowers of the tree that are pink, it’s the sepals. The mother makes a tea from the bark and the little sister’s fever breaks.

When I got back from lunch I searched “fever tree” and the description fit Susan’s story perfectly. The flowers, the sepals, the fact that the bark contains cinchonin, which can be used against malaria, even that it blooms in the spring – it was all there. But now I was even more suspicious. You could invent characters and a drama, I thought, but how could you invent something as specific as a fever tree? And in such detail.

In her cover note Susan had asked me to please give her a call after I’d had a chance to read the story. I hesitated, because I was worried that she was “after me” in some strange way. But I had no other way of getting the story back to her, since she hadn’t put a current address on the envelope.

Finally I did call her, from the office, one evening when I was working late. I told her that I thought the story was very well written, that I liked the perspective, and so on, and then asked her about the fever tree, whether that was also something she had invented.

She hesitated, then said, “Yes and no.”

“Yes and no?”

“Yes,” she said, “I just made it up when I wrote the story. But even as I did, I knew that there really was a tree like that.”

“How did you know that?”

“I remembered it,” she said, in a soft voice.

I felt myself slip off my mooring. Because I’d known she was going to say that, and I believed her. And, more than that, I had the feeling – like looking into deep, dark water – that if I asked Susan if she also remembered me she would be silent for a long moment and then say, in the same soft voice, that yes, she did, and that was why she’d come up to me at the party. And if I saw her again she would tell me things about myself that she could not have known any other way. Things I didn’t want to know. But could not deny.

– end –