Back outside, Chapman pauses at the meadow’s edge, sits back on his hooves, breathing hard, his limbs heavy and tired. He takes a deep breath, lets his body still. It takes a moment for his body to quiet but once it does he sees how this bit of forest is mostly unaffected by him, now that he’s ceased his scurrying. Bright birds flit from branch to branch of their own accord, a red fox wanders by without a glance at Chapman, stepping lightly on the soft pads of its nimble feet. Chapman stays put, he tries to be even more still, more silent. His breathing slows, he focuses on each breath filling his lungs, each breath emptying out his mouth and nose. Time passes, the sun moves above the trees, the shadows shift slightly. A black bear cub appears at the meadow’s edge, snuffling through the underbrush, hunting for nuts or berries. Chapman lets his attention fall on it lightly, so lightly that even with his gaze he does not risk disturbing the cub.
The longer Chapman sits the more he sees. The cub stays, rolls around in the fallen leaves, rests gently on its side. A dragonfly buzzes by Chapman’s head, bombing a gathering of gnats off his left ear. Horseflies land in Chapman’s fur and he does not brush them away; he lets them bite him if they will. It is harder to see how the trees accept his impartiality but he hopes they do; he hopes they are just as happy to be left alone as any creeping, crawling thing might be. He imagines the slow life of a tree, of anything rooted in one place, taking on whatever weather might come. What tree could want for anything more, anything else?
If an oak wanted something other than the life of an oak, it would have had to become something else first. And, perhaps, in another forest in another age, exactly this had happened—between the oak and the faun, there must be stretched such a spectacular splendor of wanting, creating newly varied life.
Whatever the forest is, it doesn’t require Chapman. He can participate, he can be a part of the life he sees, but it doesn’t need him, it doesn’t crave his thoughts or desires or impositions. The forest is made of many creatures, fur and bark, feather and leaf. The forest is something self-willed, something living for itself—it is not for him any more than it is from him. And this, he thinks, at last he thinks, is what makes the forest real: self-will.
The forest is an organism made of many organisms, and as long as every part of it is allowed to be what it is, for its own reasons, then it has self-will, and anything that has self-will is real. As real as any man, as real as any faun who lives among them.
But for a man that realness comes with a cost. But for Chapman, a faun who wants to be a man like his Nathaniel brother is a man, the cost is the same: to separate your own self-will from the self-will of the world around you is to set yourself apart, to see yourself opposed.
Chapman thinks of the orchards he and Nathaniel have planted. He thinks of all the work that must be done to prepare a nursery, to carve it from the world that was: the trees that must be removed, the rocks that must be rolled away, the earth that must be tilled before the planting can begin. He thinks of the work that must be done each and every year after, to keep the nurseries viable, to let the trees grow as he desires them: the building of fences, the pruning of suckers, the remove of other plants that try to claim the same cleared space for themselves. How the brothers have worked to prevent deer from eating their saplings bare, how they drive away all the small gnawing mammals, how they wish to protect their trees from worms and flies and other pests: all this effort, year after year, to make just one patch of earth into what they will it to be!
How real is an apple tree, grown in such a place? An almost identical tree, grown from a seed dropped in the scat of a bear or the dropping of a bird, it would have the same self-will as anything else, would live only for itself. But what of Chapman’s nurseries, Nathaniel’s trees, the saplings they wanted to sell to the west-bent settlers whose grateful dollars Nathaniel was sure would make the brothers rich?
The brothers’ apple trees most often flourish wherever they are planted; they are in many ways indistinguishable from a wild tree of the same type—but as long as a being exists only to fulfill human desire, as long as its life is dependent upon that desire—then Chapman begins to see that its life might not be a real life, if real means self-willed, if real means free.
Nathaniel speaks always in the righteous language of the eager settler, proud of stewarding the land, of improving the country: how the Territory was earth that could not be put to its right uses until its swamps were drained, its forests made passable to man and horse, ox and wagon. Until wide wooden roads were laid over every hill and through every dale. Until the mountains had all been mined for their deep treasures, stores of ore that were surely vast and inexhaustible and meant as gifts for the hardy men who could find them in the dark and bring them up into the light, where their glitter might enrich mankind.
Yes, a tree had to die so a man might build a house, Chapman had heard Nathaniel say so many nights, but surely there would never be any shortage of trees.
The given world was not perfect, Nathaniel had said, but it could be made so by the efforts of good men. God had made the world, God had given the world to men, and men would show God their thanks by perfecting what he had made. And if it was in good works that a man showed his own worth, could the world not be improved by the same, by being made into the shape in which it might best be used?
“Heaven on earth is our goal,” Nathaniel always said. “Nothing less than heaven on earth, with two kingdoms carved out of it, one for you and one for me.”
At dusk, exhausted Chapman heads back toward the riverside camp where Nathaniel waits, where tomorrow they will pack their camp, ready to move on, deeper into the great black swamp, searching for a promising place to plant their next nursery. As the light fails, Chapman descends a narrow ridgeline into a salt lick marred by poorly thin birch trees, the lick populated by a dozen elk does standing ankle-deep in the scummy water: the big brown bodies shine in the late light, sunbeams falling weakly through the canopy to further soften the sight of their fur. He comes upon the elk gently, passing between their number without any intent, wanting to be nothing more than a hooved beast among hooved beasts.
At his approach, the largest of the does lifts her swollen head, eyeing him suspiciously, then shaking her waddle of fur in unmistakable warning. The doe snorts and Chapman snorts back and the doe puts her head back to the ground, angrily licking loose minerals trapped in clay. The sun is still out but the shadows are chilly and Chapman shivers just once when he sees jutting from the ground an expanse of preserved white rib cage, stony bones far too large to belong to an elk or any other local ruminant, and beside it he spies the curve of a single tusk, its tip seemingly having pierced the earth from below. How uninterested the elk are in these half-buried fossils, because whatever great mammal the rib and tusk belonged to lives here no longer, is of no matter to those left. Gone, gone, gone, like so much else. A giant beast, bigger than anything else living in the Territory woods, a monster of another age lost to ice, lost to starvation, lost to spear or arrow.
Something once real, now reduced to story. Hunted to extinction long before any beast on this continent ever heard a rifle shot, the clattering sound of powder-hot musket balls rattling through the trees.
What Chapman knows, what he does not want to know but knows anyway, because where he goes in the flicker everyone knows some part of the story: five years after this century turns, the last buffalo in the Ohio Territory dies. And then sometime after goes the last timber wolf. The last black panther. The last lynx. Every wild turkey soon dead and served for dinner. Every duck and goose and prairie chicken. The Ohio black bear, gone. The Ohio white-tailed deer, gone. The Ohio elk at this Ohio salt lick, every one of them soon Ohio-dead.
By the time Nathaniel dies, not so many years from now, other men like him will already be restocking replanted woods, placing tame deer beneath planted trees. But not every animal will be replaced, not every plant: only the ones men desire, and only if they do as men wish. Deer in the woods but not in the fields
. Trees in the yard, but their roots hacked back from every foundation. The given earth reduced to what belongs to man, populated by what man allows.
This salt lick will vanish even sooner, washed away by rushing water moving along new paths, spring floods able to track everywhere the forest was cut, the drained swamps no longer there to absorb the surge. What comes next: vast, rolling hills of farmland, divided into neat squares of rowed crops, fenced-in acres for cattle, goats, sheep. And on some of those farms there will appear whatever remains of an orchard of trees planted by Chapman and Nathaniel—and will what remains be real, as Chapman now means the word, compared to what was gone?
If the world is everywhere only human desire, is that enough to make a world real?
What will happen next? Chapman doesn’t know, the flicker hasn’t taken him so far yet. But despite Nathaniel’s claims for the invincibility of the earth, Chapman has seen by the flicker that nothing is static, that change is constant and constantly accelerating, that the fulfillment of every human hunger always speeds it onward. The world Chapman sees in the flicker is different from the Territory but that future will not last either, not forever. He doesn’t know if the when he visits lasts a year or a decade or a century. He thinks it is very far away from his own time but he doesn’t know that either, not for sure. He believes only that like all worlds it has bounds, beginning and end and borders on all sides, and that whatever exists outside those bounds might be wholly unimaginable to that time’s inhabitants, as unknowable to the inhabitants of the flicker as the flicker would be to others alive in Chapman’s today, in this plank of time he has inhabited all this life.
The elk move freely about Chapman, no longer paying him any mind. Their wills are their own, their wants local, immediate, here and now. The elk have their own pasts and futures but Chapman does not think they live much in either. Their past is gone, their future not yet made. It is only the now that is present, only the present where they can act. Unlike Chapman and Nathaniel and the other settlers coming west, more and more each year, the elk would be content to live in this given world forever, a part of this forest swamp exactly as important as any other. It is already their real world, the only world they have known or imagined possible.
But men do not want to live in the world the elk live in. Chapman’s brother Nathaniel wants to live in a world he has imagined, a more productive world, a world where he will possess new riches and wider fame. For ten years now, Chapman has worked to make Nathaniel’s world appear, to make the things of Nathaniel’s imaginings solid, touchable, ownable. Nathaniel has told him that this dream world is the real world, the one that is meant to be, the one God tasked man with making. Nathaniel says these things but he has never lived there in such a world, not yet—but Chapman has, for in the flicker he has seen what this place will look like, when it is as Nathaniel says it will be.
It will be no place for elk, and no place for fauns either; it will be a place for only men, men and what men desire.
Perhaps Chapman no longer wants to help that world to come. But he does not know how to stop. Because it is not only Nathaniel’s wants that drive the brothers onward in their plantings, year after struggling year, but Chapman’s as well—and even though he is only half a man he has lived so much more among other men than among the beasts and the trees that he does not know how to want less than the rest of the settlers, to say for himself that this world is enough, that it is enough to be a mere part of it, wanting nothing more than the one real moment, constantly renewing, in which it is possible to stay rooted simply by ceasing to crave all the future wheres and whens you might hope to own.
Tattersall
Madeline Kearin
It happened while I was planting the pansies: a jolt that halted the motion of my trowel and sent a rickety aftershock up my arm. To find rocks was common here, in this landscape abraded by receding glaciers, which left trails of stony debris in their wake. But this wasn’t a rock. Its squared edges and planed surface betrayed it. I set it on the grass and rinsed it with the hose. The letters materialized slowly, catching needles of sunlight in their wet grooves.
Alexander
Son of Luke and Evelyn T. Rooney
Died May 7, 1853
Aged 3 months 2 days
Two months earlier, I stood at the window in the office of our apartment overlooking Riverside Park. A dull hum sounded in my ears, drawing menacing echoes out of the back of my skull. The desk was quilted so thickly with pages that piles had spilled onto the carpet, spreading all the way to the base molding.
I gathered up the chapters in order, one by one, and placed them in the big metal trash can that normally occupied the alcove between the kitchen sink and the refrigerator. Then I set them on fire. I watched the pages curl, contracting like rotten leaves, then break down into fine gray flakes that the smoke inhaled and blew away. The flames glowed a candied-orange color with a caramel-yellow core.
In a certain time and place, such an act might get you sent to Bedlam, where you’d spend three hundred years chained to the wall, awaiting the invention of Thorazine. In the here and now, it gets you sent to Westchester: to a white clapboard house with eyebrow windows, a lawn circuited by flagstone paths, and gravestones in the back garden.
The historical society occupies a squat one-story building in a treelined neighborhood at the base of Bicknell Mountain. A railroad runs parallel to the street, and the leaves of the maples beside the tracks marble the red bricks and moss-thickened roof with anxious shadows.
I stand in front of the door like some extraterrestrial, applying the full force of its alien intelligence to the question of how to get inside. The two miles I walked from the old white house on Paisley Road felt like light-years. Weeks of curtailed movement and the medication pumping through my veins have reduced me to this, a simulacrum of a person. But they have also blasted away the social scaffolding that forced me to care what other people think.
I open the door into a room with a ceiling that is tented into a high vault. A colorful mural of oversized faces—Nelson Mandela, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, each painted by a different hand—occupies one wall. A long table set with mismatched folding chairs aligns the center of the room, with rows of bookshelves on either side. A small, straight-backed old woman with a nimbus of cotton-candy hair is shelving books. A middle-aged man, his face etched with salt-and-pepper stubble, sits at the table, poring over crinkly yellow pages. He rises to greet me.
“I found a gravestone,” I blurt out, before he has a chance to introduce himself.
Unfazed by my awkward opening, he reels into conversation as if we were old friends. Neither he nor the woman, who ambles slowly over, seems to notice that they are talking to a half human. They ask if I have pictures.
I show them, my fingers trembling as I splay the Polaroids on the table. You would think they were looking at a piece of fine art, something rare and exquisite, not some morbid curiosity encrusted with dirt.
“What does that say?” the woman asks. “Evelyn T.—”
“Rooney,” I tell her. “It’s a little hard to read in the photo.”
The man wants to know where I live, and I tell him, along with my name, Ellen.
“Akinville!” he exclaims, launching into his next monologue. “That’s the old name for your neighborhood—after Caleb Akin, who built the first gristmill there in the eighteenth century. You know, in the nineteenth century Akinville became a real center of industry. There was a needle factory, a wool factory, and then the Collier Optical Company built their factory there, in the 1870s. They were the largest manufacturer of eyeglasses in the world, if you can believe it—two hundred and fifty employees, making a million pairs of glasses a year.”
While I listen politely, I do have a difficult time believing it. I have heard people—a neighbor, the realtor—refer to the area around the old white house as Akinville, but it’s difficult to picture it as a center of industry. Paisley Road curves between parcels of
woodland sparsely dotted with houses. The old white house is hooded by evergreens, which insulate it from the heat even on the hottest days, and—I imagine—submerge it in polar darkness in winter.
My thoughts are running ahead of themselves. I don’t want to think about winter.
“What about Luke and Evelyn Rooney?” I ask. “Do you know anything about them?”
He shakes his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell. You might try looking at the census or at the newspapers for obituaries. Louisa can help you with that. She’s good.”
Louisa is, in fact, very good. She tracks down the relevant documents in minutes, her kinked fingers working swiftly through sheaves of papers. While she does this we wade shallowly into conversation. Have I just moved to the area? Yes, I have, with my husband. How do we like Tattersall? It’s very nice. Far enough from the city to provide a respite, but close enough for Owen to commute to work. (I am parroting the precise argument with which I was sold this move in the first place, leaving out, of course, the underlying motivation.) And do we like the house? Yes (an answer that rolls out over a small bump of hesitation, then lingers as I refuse to qualify it, even when faced with Louisa’s kindly quizzical expression).
And I continue to refuse, to my friends and family, to Owen, to myself, until we’ve been living there for almost three months.
A Cabinet of Curiosity Page 33