The first mature American chestnut in a century is hailed as an ecological miracle — until one Appalachian woman realizes the tree's survival is being fed by the living things around it.

SYNOPSIS:

Hazel Surratt has spent her life keeping watch over a single line of barbed wire on her family’s land. Below it, at the bottom of the holler, stands an American chestnut that should not exist — a mature specimen of a species ecologically extinct since 1904, healing its own blight cankers and seeding progeny across the surrounding ridges in patterns no biologist can explain. Above the wire, Hazel maintains the rhythms of an ordinary mountain life: her dying brother Lee, her brilliant niece Willa, the chores, the church, the dog Lucky who will not cross a particular line in the grass. As Lee declines, Willa begins to bloom — strangely radiant despite eating less and losing adult teeth that come out clean and bloodless, walking to the wire in a way Hazel has seen once before, in 1985, in her older sister Della. A young Forest Service scientist documenting the tree’s miraculous recovery is welcomed onto the place; a senior forest pathologist sees what the younger man cannot and goes quiet. By the third act, Hazel must finally name what she has been guarding against — and discovers that the warden in the tree returns what it has taken, but not as you remember it, and never for free.

A PALE HOLLER