Two

  IT is late August when the woman bundles up her child, closes the door to the cabin, and follows the trail to the edge of the clearing, where she stops to look back before she vanishes into the woods. Deer, lifting their heads above the goldenrod, watch her depart, and then move cautiously toward the garden. Across the valley comes a thrumming, rumbling sound, as a flock of passenger pigeons draws its curtain over the sky.

  Days pass. Snakes settle into the warm coves between the stones. A wolf pack gathers briefly in the lee of the cabin; the pups chase white butterflies by the pond. In the garden, the squash grows plump on thundershower, the trailing beans swarm up the cornstalks, the corn ripens in its husk. Butterflies alight upon the swaying sprays of boneset, and milkweed pods split open and begin to spill their tuft.

  In the meadow, beneath soft mounds of earth, lie the bodies of the woman and three men, and in the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman with the child, is a piece of apple core with three remaining seeds.

  No one comes. No soldiers. Not the man who brought the woman to the place. In the garden, the beanstalks wither in the heat, the squash rots, and rust infests the ears of corn.

  Colors change. Yellow creeps down from the mountain and slips into the veins of the hornbeams, red limns the oaks and maples, and in the understory, violet consumes the lemon-yellow wings of the viburnum. Leaves fall upon the brook that splits the hillside like a tear in the fabric of the earth.

  In the soil, the mold and the worm find the bodies of the woman and the men.

  Rain comes, patters on the remaining canopy, runs down the upstretched branches of the oaks and elms, foams about the hemlock trunks and slides into the dirt. It soaks the soft earth about the bodies, the ground swells with the water, the hillside slumps, the body of the man who offered the apple to the woman is brought closer to the surface and then into the light. A new rain bares his head and shoulders, until it looks as if he is trying to crawl out.

  Rats, flies, and pecking birds now do their work.

  Then it is winter. Snow falls and covers the bones of the man who offered the apple to the woman, buries him up to his crown. Field mice run through the icy corridors beneath the snow, voles nose the frozen litter, and the snorting of the weasels echoes through the hollows.

  Months pass, and on a single warm and windswept night, the rains come again and wash away the snow.

  The wolves return, the pups now tall and winter-thin. In the mud, they find the carcass of the man who offered the apple to the woman, dance about it, barking, and drag it farther up the hill.

  It grows warmer, until the water that gathers in the hoofprints of the deer no longer freezes in the night. Now, in the place that was once the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman, one of the apple seeds, sheltered in the shattered rib cage, breaks its coat, drops a root into the soil, and lifts a pair of pale-green cotyledons. A shoot rises, thickens, seeks the bars of light above it, and gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs that once guarded the dead man’s meager heart.

  The sapling grows through summer. By the end of August, it has eighteen leaves and is the same height as the haunches of a lynx.

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  “Osgood’s Wonder,” Being the Reminiscences of an Apple-Man

  Dedication

  To my most beloved daughters, to whom I entrust this letter of VALEDICTION, by an Orchardist going to war.

  AUTUMN arrives again in all her glory, and yet the moment of crisis is upon us. From her heights, the hawk looks down and sees the tiny ranks of marching men. Tomorrow I must leave my farm, my orchards, your sweet company. Ten and four years have we made this our Arcadia. I have watched you grow alongside the apples. Once I had foresworn the battlefield and consecrated my affections to our fruit, but circumstance now demands I leave Pomona’s arms and go directly to the fields of Mars.

  It is my intent and expectation that, come winter, I will return to these hills to join you once again, and that this letter will prove unnecessary. But I have been to battle many times before, and cannot delude myself as to the danger. If at times my words seem hasty, it is because I must complete my valediction before I depart at daybreak. My hope is that, though it be written under distressed circumstances, it will be but the first chapter of a great book I will one day complete.

  On My Origins and Why I Became an Apple-Man

  Of our family and my early history, I need not waste these fleeting midnight hours. My uncle has written an account of the Osgoods of Northamptonshire; I refer all readers to it. Know that we are of the martial Osgoods. There is not a family in England who has served more nobly, and I, too, would have remained on the fields of our sweet Albion forever, had my first wife not died with child. Though already grey in hair, I had little left to retain me. I came to America for war, found love again, served proudly in the French and Indian conflicts. Through the 48th Foot, I rose to Major, and there was talk that I was destined for Colonel, General even, when the Spirit came upon me and produced my fateful decision, being to leave the drill, the march, the song of fife and drum, the smell of gunpowder, and devote myself entirely to apples.

  How did this come to pass? Might I locate, in my passage through the world, the spark that struck the kindling of the fancy of my soul? Was there, on those back rivers of the St. Lawrence, some watery Road to Damascus? It was a deathbed dream that moved me, but dreams too must have their causes. Was it, in my faraway childhood, a pretty farmer’s daughter, who handed me a sun-warmed fruit and placed the slumbering seed within my heart? The water-colored cards that taught me my alphabet? The pyramids of bounty that overflowed our village market stalls?

  A kiss somewhere, on someone’s lips still wet with cider?

  The serpent that tempts us all?

  Or was it simply this: that the French soldier I surprised behind his bulwark on that fatal day upon the Plains of Abraham was slicing a sweet pippin with his bayonet when he rose and thrust it up into my chest?

  Of My Wounding and the Dream That Followed

  They tell me that the blade passed between my ribs and gently kissed my heart. That were it not for all the cries, the shots, the screaming cannister, one might have heard its steely beat. An inch more, and I would have been lost forever. But God had noticed me. Or simply, pressing His brush to the unfolding scene of battle, He bent the fabric of His canvas, and saved my life.

  The last that I recall was the apple splitting with a crunch. It was Rumbold, my batman, who saw me fall and brought me to the surgeon’s tent. When I awoke, wind was whipping through the open flaps; nearby another man lay screaming. Rumbold sat at my cot-side, and by his expression, I knew what was expected. Giving myself over to death, I asked that I be commended to my wife and daughters, lay back, and slept.

  And dreamed: That I was back in England, walking through a vast green field, when I came over a hill and found myself before a tree. Children dressed in white were playing, running along the branches like little squirrels, each with an apple in a hand. Curious, they scampered down to me, and when I asked what they were eating, they told me that I had reached the tree that fed the souls. Would I like one? they asked. Yes! For I ached so with hunger. I stretched out my arms, but I was only in a field tent, dark, cold, the tent flap snapping in the wind that came across the plain.

  Rumbold was waiting, and handed me a letter, from my sister, Constance.

  Dear Charles, It is with a heavy heart that I inform you…

  I read it slowly, unbelieving that a God so merciful would protect his soldiers, and not his soldiers’ wives.

  On My Return to Albany and the Fateful Decision Made There, and the Arguments Levied Against It

  I spent the winter convalescing at the Quebec garrison. When I was at last well enough to endure the journey, I travelled back to Albany, where I found my own house empty and my daughters living with my sister.

  It had been two years since I had seen these dear children, and they approached me warily at first, and then, with a leap, they hurled themselves upon me. They now were four. Identical born, Nature had preserved them as mirror images, with golden curls and rosy lips. They had dolls and play toys, and a cat, and they asked if I had killed anyone, and might I show them my wound, and had I heard that mother had left us? Now she was watching over them from Heaven; and they pulled me by the hands to show me the small memorial in the yard.

  That night, when they were asleep, I sat in the parlour with my sister, her husband, and my brother, John, who had served beside me in Quebec.

  They asked me what I would do now that I was home.

  I told them of the dream. When I finished, my sister reached across the table and touched my hand. She was a great interpreter of dreams, knew all their meanings, and this one was obvious: I had been granted a vision of Eternity. The dream-child was my wife, the apple her devotion.

  “But I woke before I tasted,” I told her, and she nodded sagely and explained it meant that it was the will of God that I should live.

  My brother asked when I would return to the garrison. The rumour was that I was due a promotion before the year was up; he had heard this from no less than Amherst’s cousin, who had a lovely sister, a beauty, now of marrying age.

  And I had seen her, and knew this was so. But at that moment, I felt not joy, but a new pain in my chest, though it had healed so neatly during my weeks of recuperation. Distinctly I now recall the vision of my own reflection in the cupboard window. I wore, in those days, my sideburns long, and my wavy hair combed neat against my head. The white ruffle beneath my chin gave off the strange impression that I was somehow cloud-borne. And perhaps I was! For God had willed me to live, but it was more than that. Since the Plains of Abraham, my passion had only grown. I had tasted every apple that had crossed my path between Quebec and Albany. I turned to them. God had willed me to raise an orchard, I said.

  On My Purported “Madness,” and the Question of What Is a Lunatick?

  Take a man in perfect health, and let him assert against the general opinion, and you will find such man accused of deviancy, or error, or madness. Such was my fate: that my sister and brother, while pretending to listen patiently to my dreams, were in fact conspiring behind my back. At that time, I was wont to wander the city, meditating on my future course, and it was upon my return from one of these rambles, that I found my house mysteriously empty except for my siblings. My daughters, Constance had me understand, had been taken on an excursion, which was the better, for I was to be visited by one Dr. Arbuthnot, who had agreed to my examination at half past three. I had no time to object, for the hall clock chimed the half-hour and was answered by an arrogant little knock. Now, if only the man had been as wise as he was punctual. Indeed, I knew of his reputation, both that which he flaunted, as a great surgeon of the War, and that which was whispered among the soldiers, as “Dr. Wrong-o-Leg.” A reasonable man might, then and there, have refused him, and yet I was aware that it behooved me to pretend to cooperation. Therefore, I girded myself to suffer this idiot, and smiled warmly, and welcomed him into my sitting room, while Constance ordered up some biscuits. The doctor was in a buoyant mood, having just come from a bleeding, in which he had taken off three litres and seen the child return most miraculously to health. It was further proof, he said, that illness persisted because the physician did not confront it aggressively, and, perhaps because he knew I was a military man, he employed the most martial language: what was needed was to launch a full assault upon my fancy, hunt every last vestige of the offending humour as one would the most heinous traitor, and treat it without—and here he slammed the coffee table—mercy.