The Bark That Knew Before Anyone Did

The storm had knocked a long ribbon of bark off the old willow, and it lay in the mud like a shed skin.

Maya picked it up before Soren could tell her not to. She turned it over. The inside was pale and damp and it smelled faintly bitter, like the underside of a leaf you were not supposed to chew.

"My grandmother chews this stuff," she said. "Willow. When her knees hurt."

"Does it work?"

"She says it does." Maya scraped a fingernail along the wet layer. "She says her grandmother told her. And her grandmother's grandmother."

Soren crouched next to the trunk. There was a raw stripe where the ribbon had torn away, wet and green underneath.

"So somebody figured out that a tree helps your knees," he said. "How do you even figure that out? You'd have to try chewing a tree."

"Somebody did."

"Somebody chewed bark and dirt and beetles and roots and one of them was the tree that fixed their knees, and they remembered which one." He said it slowly, like he was checking each piece as it left his mouth. "That's a lot of chewing."

Maya laughed, then stopped laughing.

"No," she said. "Not one person. That's the thing."

"What thing?"

"My grandmother didn't figure it out. Her grandmother didn't either." Maya held the bark up so the pale side faced him. "Somebody figured it out so long ago that nobody remembers figuring it out. It just got handed down. Like a spoon."

Soren went quiet. He was looking at the torn stripe on the trunk and doing arithmetic he did not like the size of.

"How long," he said.

"How long what."

"How long have people been chewing this. If your grandmother got it from her grandmother, and she got it from hers."

Maya shrugged. "Forever."

"Forever isn't a number."

He pulled out his notebook and wrote willow. Under it he wrote knees. He tapped the pen against the paper.

"There were people writing about this on clay," Maya said suddenly. She was frowning at the bark like it had said something to her. "I read it. Really old. Older than paper. They wrote it on clay tablets and they said willow for pain and they didn't know why either."

"They didn't know why?"

"How would they know why? You can't see why. You can only see that it works."

Soren sat back on his heels in the wet grass.

"Wait," he said. "So for all that time, people had the answer. They were holding the answer. My knees hurt, I chew the tree, my knees stop hurting. And nobody knew what was in it."

"Nobody knew there was an in it," Maya said. "It was just the tree. The tree that helps. Like the tree wanted to."

"The tree doesn't want to."

"I know the tree doesn't want to." She pressed the bitter side of the bark with her thumb. "But that's what it feels like, right? It feels like the tree is doing you a favor."

Soren thought about that. He thought about somebody on a cold morning three thousand years ago, older than the pyramids finishing, chewing a strip exactly like this one, feeling the ache in their hands go soft, and having absolutely no idea that inside the bark was a real thing, an actual substance, small and specific, doing the work.

"There's a chemical," he said. "There has to be. An actual chemical, in there, a molecule, and it's the thing that works. It was always in there. The whole time."

"For thousands of years."

"For thousands of years the molecule was just sitting inside the bark being the answer, and nobody could see it." Soren's voice had gone strange. "It didn't wait to be discovered to start working. It worked on the clay-tablet people. It worked exactly the same on them as it works on your grandmother. The bark didn't change. We changed."

Maya sat down in the mud next to him. She did not usually sit down in the mud.

"Somebody finally caught it," she said. "Right? Somebody finally figured out the actual thing inside."

"Somebody must have." Soren wrote pulled it out of the bark. "Somebody took the tree apart until they found the one piece that was doing everything. And then"

He stopped.

"And then they could make it," Maya finished. "Without the tree."

They looked at each other.

"Every white pill," Maya said slowly. "Every headache pill in every drawer in every house."

"Started as a tree," said Soren. "Started as somebody chewing bark in the mud and having no idea why it helped."

"And the little tablet in the medicine cabinet is the same thing the clay people had. It's just, somebody caught it." Maya turned the bark over one more time. "It's the same favor. It's just, now we know what the favor is made of."

Soren wrote the whole industry started here and then crossed out here and wrote started three and a half thousand years before anyone knew it started.

"That's the part," Maya said, watching him write. "That's the part that gets me. All those people. They were right. For thousands of years they were completely right and they couldn't prove a single bit of it. They just knew."

"They knew the that," Soren said. "They didn't know the why."

"The why was in there the whole time."

"The why was always in there."

Maya stood up. Mud slid off her knees. She walked to the trunk and pressed the torn ribbon of bark back against the raw stripe where it had come off, lining it up carefully, the way you'd fit a puzzle piece, and she held it there while the wind moved the long branches over both of them.