The Beet Queen

The branch to which Karl clings so intently symbolizes the broken family tree from which he hails. Abandoned by his mother after the loss of his father, Karl needs something sturdy to hold onto. His need is so great, however, that his hold becomes a death grip. At first, Mary is stunned by the depth of Karl’s need: “Turning to look for Karl, Mary was frightened by how far back he had fallen and how still he was, his face pressed in the flowers. She shouted, but he did not seem to hear her and only stood, strange and stock-still among the branches” (2). They are separated, and Mary remains in Argus. She notices that the tree from which Karl extracts his branch catches blight—the scar left by wrenching the substantial branch from the tree invites it—and it dies by the next spring.

Later, however, that same branch saves Karl. After he jumps from the moving train, he breaks his feet and ankles badly. Fleur Pillager happens along—“My salvation,” he thinks (48)—and salvages his broken feet: “Out of it she made my casts and shaped them with carved splinters from the only branch within a mile of the railroad track, the apple branch, torn from an Argus tree, that she found lying next to me” (49). This foreshadows the inexorable pull that Argus will have over Karl; he will eventually return, ultimately to stay. When Mary has her vision that Celestine will deliver a baby girl, she imagines Celestine as similar to the tree from which Karl harvested the branch: “And then she saw Celestine too, her mouth deep, her arms spread and grasping, her body more solid than the tree Karl had embraced before he vanished” (143). Celestine’s strength, like a sturdier tree, will create the branch that is Dot; thus, a family tree is engendered.

Mary also envisions Sita as a fragile branch on a tree, foreshadowing her later descent into mental illness and death by suicide: “Sita flowered into the same frail kind of beauty that could be broken off a tree by any passing boy and discarded, cast away when the fragrance died” (21). She will be cut off from the family tree by her resentments, her fragility, and her dependence on men. When Sita hallucinates the vision of Karl sinking into the ground, she approaches a tree on her property: “I described the tree in detail. It bore the leaves of my betrayal. The roots reached under everything” (153). Sita’s guilt over cheating Mary of her younger brother and over her garnet necklace underpins her branching off from the family, not to mention exacerbates her mental illness.

It reveals much about Sita that, instead of being horrified by the story of Adelaide’s flight away from her children, she admires Adelaide for her courage. Sita disagrees with how the rest of the family reads her escape: “They thought she was cracked by misery, but how I understood her! I saw her sucked up into a cloud. […] She didn’t have to flap, but effortlessly swerved into the streams and currents that flow, invisible, above us. So she flew off” (287). This is Sita’s dream of freedom, of what she herself never managed to make happen. She thinks, “That’s what I should have done instead of transplanting phlox. Their roots were tough, and I could never find the proper place to put them, the proper fence to set them off” (287). She is inadvertently describing herself, never quite comfortable putting down roots in Argus and always dreaming of flight. The roots that Mary craves after her abandonment are, to Sita, an entanglement in a family tree that she resents and rebels against.