At the Edge of the Orchard Read online

  John Chapman started to pay us visits two or three times a year. Always in the spring when he come up to see how we and our trees had fared over the winter and sell us more if we needed any, and then in the fall when he was checkin on his nursery of trees further up the river. Sometimes in the summer hed stop by too, on his way from one place to another. I liked to think he stopped to see us cause of me, and Id run out to the river whenever I heard him whistle Bob white, Bob white.

  John Chapman was a singular man, thats for sure. I never once saw him wear clothes like other men, breeches or trousers and shirt and suspenders. Nor shoes, nor jacket, even when there was frost at night. Dont know what he did for clothes in the winter since we never saw him then. Maybe he holed up like a bear. He was a shaggy man too—shaggy hair and beard, long fingernails, heels like cheese rinds. Bright eyes though that flashed and followed their own conversation.

  He always took the time to talk to me, once hed figured out no other Goodenough was gonna listen to his God talk. When he found out I could read a little he used to lend me bits of books hed cut up and given to settlers up and down the rivers. All fired up from his visit, I would take the pages gladly, but once hed gone I couldnt make head nor tail of what was written on them. I never told him but I preferred the revivalist camp meetings we went to now and then when the mud was dry enough and we could walk to Perrysburg. Got to meet a lot of people there and be entertained by a God I understood.

  What I liked best about John Chapman was that he didnt judge me like some I wont name did. He never said, Sadie youre drunk. Sadie youre a disgrace. Sadie youre draggin this family down in the swamp. He didnt take the bottle from me, or hide it, or empty it so I had to drink vinegar instead. John Chapman understood the power of apples and the things that come from em. It was he who showed me how apples could be the cure for another of our enemies. That was the swamp fever.

  Swamp fever came alongside skeeters. They started bitin in June, but in August they swarmed so bad we had to wrap sheets round our heads and wear gloves, even in the heat, and burn smudge pots day and night so the smoke drove em away. Even then they still got us, bitin so much that our faces and hands and ankles—anything not covered by our clothes—swelled up, hurtin and itchin at the same time. I never seen anything like it. It was enough to drive a person wild as a cat. Patty and Sal had it the worst. Poor Pattys face was so swollen she didnt look like a Goodenough no more, but like a swamp creature.

  She was the first to get the fever. Begun to shake so hard her teeth cracked. I held her down in bed and doused her in water, tried mayweed and catnip and rattle root, but nothin worked. Jimmy was taken the next year, and baby Lizzie after that, then baby Tom, then Mary Ann. Did I get that order right? Hard to keep track. Some years we were spared. Sometimes I wished it would take me. I birthed ten children and got five left.

  Only Robert werent never touched by swamp fever. But then he never was like the rest of us. I birthed him two months after we settled in the swamp. I was wonderin if Patty or Mary Ann was up to helpin me through the birth, as in those days there werent no neighbors close by. James would have to do, though I never liked men to be at a birth, it was bad luck. As it was I didnt need James or the gals or nobody—I was only jest settlin down with the pain when Robert slipped out so he almost dropped in the dirt. We had walls by then and canvas on the roof, but no floor yet. Robert didnt cry at all and he looked at me right away like he could see me, not all dazed or squinty or squally like the others. He grew up like that too—would give me a straight look that made me a little scared of him and ashamed of myself. I loved him best cause he seemed to come from a different place from the rest of us. Maybe he did. I could never be sure, though I had my suspicions. But I could never show it, couldnt hug him or kiss him cause hed give me that look like he was holdin up a mirror to me to show me jest how bad I was.

  Robert had to look after the sick ones during the swamp fever. One October John Chapman come through when all but Robert and Sal was laid up, shiverin and shakin and rattlin the beds till I was sure our neighbors could hear us even though they were a couple miles away. John Chapman had planted stinkin fennel for us near the house to use when we was poorly, but neither that nor nothin else seemed to stop us from rattlin and shakin—nothin cept time or death. This time he helped Robert and Sal with the animals and the cookin, and he picked all our apples for us.

  Sadie, this is what you need, he said when he come in with a sack of spitters.

  I didnt know what he meant and didnt care at the time cause I was so cold and shaky I jest wanted to die right there.

  John Chapman took some of our spitters away in his canoes and paddled all the way down to Port Clinton and come back with five barrels of cider. It wasnt hard yet, that would take some weeks, but John Chapman said to drink it and it would drive the fever out. So I drunk it and you know, I felt better. James said I was improvin by then anyway without the help of the cider. That smart remark of his was the beginnin of our apple fights that last to this day. He didnt like John Chapman payin me attention, was what it was, so he cut under whatever the man said. But John was a man of the woods, hed lived with swamp fever for many years, so why wouldnt he know what he was talkin bout? I ignored James and listened to John Chapman. He told me soft cider was fine against skeeters but hard cider was better and applejack best of all.

  Id never made applejack, and he told me how. You put a barrel of cider outside in the winter, and the top where the water is freezes, and you throw away that ice, then do it again and again till youre left with just a little in the barrel, but its strong like its got fire in it with jest a little taste of apple behind it. James wouldnt drink it, said it was a waste of good cider. I didnt care—that was more jack for me. And John Chapman was right—when it was in my blood the skeeters didnt like it and left me alone, and the swamp fever didnt come. The problem was keepin enough jack around to last till August when it was really needed. We needed to make more jack, meanin we needed more trees—spitters, not the eaters from Connecticut James loved more than his own wife. Golden Pippins. I didnt understand why he thought they taste so good. Went on bout honey and pineapple when all them apples tasted like was apples.

  The next morning was a gray, rainy day, and James was teaching Robert how to graft. He had shown his son the process before, but now that he was almost nine, he was old enough to take in and retain information and make it his own.

  Other years Sadie came out to watch James graft and make harsh remarks about ruining perfectly good trees. Today, though, she was still asleep, stinking of the applejack she had drunk the night before. Since John Chapman’s departure she had been drinking steadily. She was an unpredictable drunk—angry and violent one minute, crying and petting the children the next. Sometimes she would sit in a corner and talk to one of her dead children—usually Patty—as if they were there with her. The living Goodenoughs had learned to ignore Sadie, though Nathan and Sal enjoyed the petting.

  “We ready?” James said to his son. “You got the scions?”

  Robert held up the bundle of branches James had cut from the centers of the Golden Pippins when pruning them in November; he’d carefully stored them in the cellar behind wooden boxes of apples and carrots and potatoes, sticking the ends in a pile of soil for the winter. He’d hidden another bundle in the woods in case Sadie discovered and burned the cellar scions as she had one year, claiming she’d run out of kindling.

  Lined up neatly on the ground were the tools and materials they needed for grafting: a saw, a hammer and chisel, a knife James had sharpened the previous night, a pile of strips torn from one of Sadie’s old aprons and a bucket of grafting clay made from a mixture of river clay and horse dung, plus the contents of Sadie’s hairbrush over a few weeks, which he’d had Martha gather without her mother’s knowledge. He had also brought one of the sacks of sand he’d dug up a few years before from the Lake Erie shore, making a special trip to get it. Golden Pippins particularly favored sandy soil, and James would nee
d to fork in sand around the grafts now and then.

  Though they were ready—tools and scions and clay and sand and son—James did not move yet, but stood in the light rain with his trees. He could almost see the branches unclenching after the frozen winter, the sap starting to circulate, buds emerging in tiny dots like foxes poking their noses from their dens, testing the air. Colorless now, in a few weeks those dots would show green, signaling the leaves to come. Growth seemed to happen so slowly and yet each year leaves and blossoms and fruit came and went in their cyclical miracle.

  The process of grafting did not take long, but like everything he did with apple trees—planting, winter and summer pruning, picking—James was methodical. Now, however, he must be bold. “All right,” he said. Picking up the saw, he stepped up to one of the spitters—a mediocre producer, planted from a John Chapman seedling four years back—grasped the trunk at waist height and sawed rapidly through it, trying not to look at the nascent buds dotted along all of the branches he was cutting off, for those buds would have produced leaves and flowers and fruit. He always did this fast, as it was the destructive part, and he did not like to dwell on it. He must also move quickly before Sadie came out and witnessed the sacrifice of the source of her applejack. When she saw only the results—two sticks bound to a trunk with a ball of clay surrounding the join—rather than the act, she was not so likely to lose her temper. Confronted with something new, it could be surprisingly easy to forget what had been there before, like a man’s freshly shaved beard drawing attention instead to his long hair.

  The cross-section of the sacrificial tree was about three inches across—enough for two scions. “This needs to be good and flat,” he said to Robert, scraping the surface with his knife. Then he took up the hammer and chisel. “Now we make a cut about two inches deep, straight across.” As James hammered carefully, the feel of the handle, the tinking of metal against metal, the presence of his son at his elbow, the dripping trees, all made him think of being with his father in Connecticut, learning so that he too could create good trees and pass on the skill, over and over along the chain of Goodenoughs stretching into the future. It was not always easy to feel a part of that chain while living in the Black Swamp, especially when a child every other year was being sacrificed to it, but when he was working on apple trees, he could feel its unique tug.

  James cut the ends of two Golden Pippin scions into wedge shapes. “Look here,” he said to Robert, showing him the ends. “A graft’ll be more likely to take if there’s a bud eye at the base of the wedge—see there?—where the bark begins again. Buds attract sap. You get that sap circulating through the two bits of wood, that knits them together into one tree.”

  Robert nodded.

  They were inserting two scions into the cross-section cleft when Sal appeared. James wished she hadn’t arrived at this delicate moment in the process, with him holding open the cleft with the chisel and directing Robert to fit the scions so the bark matched that of the root stock and a bud eye was just above the surface. Only when both scions were in the right place could he withdraw the chisel so that the cleft closed around them. They had already tried it once and pulled the scions back out to cut new ends that would fit better. James did not need the daughter who reminded him the most of Sadie to come and sit nearby on a stump, and then not even watch what they were doing, but pick at the dry mud on the hem of her skirt. If she was going to be there, he wanted her to care about grafting.

  “Your Ma up?” he asked, with the vague hope that a question might lure her over. Who could not be interested in the surprise and magic of grafting?

  But Sal did not look up from her futile picking—any mud she removed would soon be replaced by more. “Just for some water. Said her head hurt.”

  “You getting dinner on?”

  Sal shrugged, a gesture she used often. Even aged twelve she had learned that it was no good caring about things too much, and she held the world at an arm’s length. “Martha’s doin’ it.”

  “The boys still working in the barn?”

  When she did not answer, James said, “You go and dig up the garden, then.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “That’ll make the ground easier to dig.” James renewed his grip on the chisel. Robert was fumbling with the scions, turning them to find just the right position. “Go on, now.” When Sal did not move, James pulled the chisel from the cleft and stepped towards her. “Git!”

  Sal got up, but slowly, making it clear she was not moving because of her father’s command. The memory of her mother’s split lip the night before and the violence her father was capable of appeared to have no effect on her. Smirking, she sauntered back to the house rather than towards the garden. Noting the insolent set of her shoulders, James wondered when exactly he had lost authority over his family. There was no one moment, he decided, but an accumulation of Sadie’s drinking and their fighting and his fixation on his trees. And John Chapman: his canny eyes on James, a judgment about his stewardship that the Goodenough children sensed. Only Robert seemed still to respect his father, and Martha was young enough to do what her father ordered.

  We’re sinking into this swamp, James thought. Eventually the mud is going to cover us and the Goodenoughs will all disappear.

  “Pa,” Robert said, “you think that will take?”

  James looked down at the graft. The cleft had closed so snug around the scions that they appeared to have grown out of it naturally, with tiny buds set just above. He knew. Sometimes with just a glance you could tell. “Yes, that’s a good one,” he said, surprised that his one moment of disregard, when his attention had turned to his daughter, seemed not to have mattered. The graft would take without his total devotion.

  He and Robert bound the graft with strips of cloth, then packed the clay around it in a clumsy, protective sphere that resembled an oversized wasps’ nest. It would remain in place until summer. In just a few weeks they would be able to tell if the graft had taken: if the buds on the scion began to grow, that meant the sap was flowing from the tree on the bottom to the branch on the top. Then it would produce leaves, flowers and, in a few years, fruit.

  When they were done, James showed Robert the last step of grafting, opening his fly and peeing near the new trees. They would do so for a few days until the area around the grafts was marked, to keep the deer away so they would not graze on them while the leaves were young and tender.

  They grafted fifteen trees that morning, five more than James meant to. He kept finding promising-looking scions in the bundle, and feeling the press of the spitters dominating the orchard, and wanting to redress the imbalance, and so they kept going, Robert silent over the fact that they were taking five extra trees out of production for two or three years. Something had taken James over—that compulsive desire for creation overriding everything else. He would, he must, make the very best apple trees he could.

  You should see em, Ma, Sal said. Theyre out there butcherin your trees like hogs.

  Sal had always been a tattler. I knew she was lookin out for me more than any other Goodenough did, but that didnt make me like her more. Shed come to me and say, Ma, Marthas wet the bed, Ma, Nathan ate all the bacon, Ma, Robert let the fire go out. She wanted everything to be fair, when the best lesson she could learn was that life aint fair and theres no point expectin it to be.

  My head still hurt from the applejack but I got up and looked out the window to see what this tree massacre was all about. Id forgotten James was graftin. The days smudged together so it was hard to keep track. Couldnt see nothin—they must have been in a far corner of the orchard. It was rainin and I didnt want to go out in it and have the drops hammer on my head when there was already a fearsome hammerin goin on inside. But I was curious too. So I said Ill look but you go on and dig up the garden, Sal, you know it needs it and you dont need me to tell you what to do, big gal that you are. Sal made a face but she took up the hoe and went out.

  I put a shawl over my head and followed her out
into the rain to see what James and Robert was doin. I stayed off to the side so they couldnt see me. They wouldnt have noticed anyhow, they was that intent on their trees. Seein them bent over a little stump, their heads almost touchin, made me want to throw rocks. It was like when the Goodenough wives back in Connecticut had their heads together by the fire, talkin and laughin and leavin me out.

  Sal was right: they were butcherin the trees. Whatever numbers James had told me over and over, he couldnt have meant this many of my trees were gettin the chop. This meant war. I wanted to rage and shout and hit and kick. But I didnt. Stead I would wait for John Chapman to come back. Hed know what to do with those balls of shit James was hanging on the apple trees.

  And a few days later he did come back in his canoe, glidin up the river and whistlin Bob white, Bob white. Thank God for my John Appleseed—and the bottles of jack he brought with him, cause he knew I needed them, for the skeeters. They wouldnt start bitin for a few months but I could look after the bottles till then.

  He brought the trees him and James had talked about but didnt unload em right away from the second canoe. Instead James wanted to show him his devil work on the trees and took him down to the orchard. So he saw what unnatural business my husband had been up to. I wanted to hear what John Chapman would say about it, but I had to hide cause James didnt like me listenin to his apple talk. So I snuck down along the edge of the orchard behind the old dead brambles that barely hid me.

  John Chapman was canny and didnt say nothing at first bout them shit balls hangin on the trees and all the butcherin and ruinin that had gone on. He was a businessman after all and he had trees to sell.