At the Edge of the Orchard

by Tracy Chevalier

  James Goodenough was a sensible man, but apples were his weakness. They had been since he was a child and his mother had given him sweet apples as a special treat. Sweetness was a rare taste, for sugar cost dear; but an apple’s tart sweetness was almost free since, once planted, apple trees took little work. He recalled with a shudder their first years in the Black Swamp without apples. He hadn’t realized till he had to go without for over three years how large a part apples had played in his life, how he craved them more than whiskey or tobacco or coffee or sex. That first autumn when, after a lifetime of taking them for granted, James finally understood that there would be no apples to pick and store and eat, he went into a kind of mourning that surprised him. His desperation even drove him to pick the tiny fruit from a wild apple tree he came across along one of the Indian trails; it must have grown from a settler’s discarded apple core. He could only manage three before the sourness forced him to stop, and his stomach ached afterwards. Later, over near Perrysburg, he shamed himself by stealing from a stranger’s orchard, though he took only one apple, and it turned out to be a spitter rather than an eater. He ate it anyway.

  In subsequent years he bought more trees from John Chapman—seedlings this time—and grew his own from seeds as well. Trees grown from seeds usually produced sour apples but, as James liked to point out to whoever would listen, one in ten tended to turn out sweet. Like growing anything in the Black Swamp, it took time for the apple trees to thrive, and even those that seemed healthy could easily die over the winter. While the Goodenoughs did have apples within three years of their arrival, they could not be relied on. Sometimes the crop was heavy; other times the apples were scarce and tiny. Sometimes disease killed the trees. For several years James struggled to get thirty trees to grow, much less fifty. More recently he’d had more success, and the previous fall had picked apples from forty-seven trees. Over the winter, however, it appeared nine had died, like a punishment for his hubris.

  Luckily no one ever came around to count how many trees they had, as it was too hard to get in and out of the Black Swamp for law officials to bother. None of his few neighbors seemed concerned about the fifty-trees rule. Sadie was amused by the number, and enjoyed taunting her husband with it. Sometimes she would whisper “fifty” to him as she passed. But James fretted over it, always expecting someone to show up on the river or along one of the Indian trails that crisscrossed the Black Swamp and inform him that his farm was no longer his.

  I never wanted to live in the Black Swamp. Who would? It aint a name that draws you in. You get stuck there, more like—stuck in the mud and cant go no farther, so you stay cause theres land and no people, which was what we were lookin for. James was second youngest of six healthy sons, so there werent but a little bit of Goodenough farm in Connecticut for us. We managed for a time but James kept reachin for me at night and the children kept comin. Then his father, an old killjoy who never liked me, started hintin about us moving west where we could settle more land. He got the wives of James brothers to talk to their husbands, which they were glad to do cause they didnt like me either. They didnt trust me round their men. I got something they didnt have. So the brothers started pushin James to be more adventurous than he was. Really they shouldve gotten James brother Charlie to go west. Charlie Goodenough was the youngest and by tradition he was the one shouldve gone. Plus he had the gumption in him. Charlie wouldnt of let mud trap him in the swamp. Hed have bust through it and got out into the open where theres good healthy land solid under your feet, with sun and grass and clean water. But everybody loved Charlie, his wife most of all. It was she took against me the worst. Maybe she had reason to. Damned if she werent the nicest of the wives too.

  Then all of a sudden Charlie also said James ought to go—though he looked real sorry when we did leave. Stood longer than the rest, watchin our wagon go down the long track away from the Goodenough farm. I bet he wished it was him beside me headin towards a new life.

  Turns out lots of Connecticut farmers had gone to Ohio before us. Too many. We went across New York then took a boat on the lake from Buffalo to Cleveland and started lookin, expectin our pick of land to be laid out before us like a nicely made bed, but all we found were other Yankees—most of them war veterans got their allotment from the government. We made a circle round Cleveland, then heard we was better off goin west to the Maumee River, and even into Indiana. After Lower Sandusky we was headed towards Perrysburg when the road—if you can call it that—got worse and worse. That road was where we met our first enemy. Mud. I never saw anything stick so much. It stuck to the wagon wheels and when they turned they collected more mud like a ball of snow gettin bigger and bigger. Got so we had to stop the wagon every fifty feet to scrape it off. Near broke the horses legs. Finally they wouldnt budge and we had to wait till they recovered. Next day we got half a mile before they stopped again. Along that stretch of road there were inns every quarter mile for all the travelers gettin stuck. The inns themselves were set up by settlers who couldnt get no further.

  At last we got to the Portage River and decided that was it, we couldnt go no farther so it looked like wed arrived at our Promised Land. By then everything was covered in mud. Wed been wadin through it and couldnt get it off our boots or off our dresses or out from under our toenails. Sometimes the boys would take off their trousers at night and in the morning theyd be standin up by themselves with the mud dried on em. Had to live with it, and wash in the river. John Chapman was a smart one with his canoe glidin up and down the rivers and creeks easy as you like, stayin out of the mud.

  After a time we got used to it. Maybe I jest stopped carin. Id hear new settlers complain bout the mud and think, Theres worse things than mud. Jest you wait.

  We arrived in the swamp in early April which is a good time to settle cept theres a rush to plant crops and a garden and build a house. And to do any of those things you first got to clear the trees. They was another enemy waitin for us in the Black Swamp. Oh, there were a lot of enemies there.

  Damn them trees. I hate em, God love me I do. Back east we didnt have the tree problem the way we did in Ohio. James and I both grew up on farms that had been made some time before, with houses and barns built and cleared fields and gardens. My mother even had flower beds. Thered been settlers in Connecticut for two hundred years, and theyd been the ones breakin their backs to dig up the trees. Every garden, every field, every churchyard and road had to be made by takin out the trees. Wasnt till we was faced with a slice of land full of Ohio trees that we realized how much work we had to do. Well, James had to do, and the older children. I was carryin Robert in my belly and was too big to use an axe or haul wood or pull at those goddamn stumps. There sure wasnt gonna be any flower beds in the Black Swamp. Any clearin had to be done for a better reason than flowers. It was for feedin you and keepin you warm and dry.

  Clearin took so much out of my children that sometimes I think thats what killed Jimmy and Patty, weakened em so the swamp fever got em that much easier. Patty died the first summer, Jimmy the next. I never forgave the trees for that, and never will. If I could Id gladly burn down these woods.

  Even when we thought wed cleared all the trees we needed to, they kept growin and growin, pressin in on us. We had to keep an eye out for the seedlings that sprung up everywhere. It reminded me of dirty pots or dirty clothes: you scrub and scrub and get em clean, then an hour later youve burnt oatmeal on the bottom of the pot or smeared mud on your apron, and you realize it never ends, theres always gonna be pots and laundry to do. Trees are the same, you clear a field and they start springin up again. At least theyre slower than laundry. But you think youre payin attention, then a year goes by and you find you overlooked a seedling and suddenly its a tree, with roots that dont want to come out.

  I heard theres land out west thats got no trees on it at all. Prairie. Lord send me there. I tried to talk to James bout goin there, but he wouldnt listen, said weve made a place for ourselves, hunkered down like toads in the stinkin rott
in swamp, and here well stay.

  A branch snapped behind him in the orchard. My shadow, James thought. He did not turn around but reached out to run his finger along the branch of the nearest tree—a spitter—and feel the satisfying bump of a nascent bud. “Robert, get me a Golden Pippin from the cold cellar.”

  A few minutes later his youngest child returned and handed him a yellow apple speckled with brown dots—the only yellow apple in the Black Swamp that James knew of. It had an unusual oblong shape, as if someone had stretched it, and it was small enough to be held comfortably in his hand. He squeezed it, relishing the anticipation of its taste. It might be wrinkled and soft and well past its prime, but Golden Pippins retained their taste for months, if not their crunch.

  James bit into it, and though he did not smile—smiles were rare in the Black Swamp—he shut his eyes for a moment better to appreciate the taste. Golden Pippins combined the flavors of nuts and honey, with a sharp finish he’d been told was like pineapple. It reminded him of his mother and sister laughing at the kitchen table in Connecticut as they sliced apples into rings to be dried. The three trees on the edge of the Black Swamp orchard that produced these sweet apples were all grafts from the Golden Pippin tree James had grown up with. He had grafted them when the Goodenoughs first arrived in the Black Swamp nine years before, from branches James insisted on bringing with them to Ohio. Though grafted at the same time, they had grown up to be different sizes; it always surprised James that the trees could turn out as varied as his children.

  Robert was watching him with brown eyes the color of pine resin, still and intent like one of the smarter breeds of dog—English sheep or German shepherd. He rarely needed looking after, and he seemed to understand trees in a way none of the other Goodenoughs did. By rights he should be James’ favorite: a son, slight but healthy, clever and alert, the Goodenough child most likely to survive swamp life. He had been born just after they moved to the Black Swamp, and maybe because he was a native to the swamp, the mosquitoes left him alone, looking for foreign blood. Even when he was very young, it was Robert who nursed the Goodenoughs through swamp fever, sometimes the only family member unaffected. He followed his father around, watching and learning from him as his older brothers Caleb and Nathan never bothered to. Yet James found his son’s attention disconcerting. At almost nine Robert was too young to judge others, but he often caused James to look at himself, and there he always found fault. However much he taught Robert—how to skin squirrels, how to build a wormwood fence, how to plug gaps between the logs of the cabin to make it warmer, how to store apples so they did not bruise—his son continued to stare at him expectantly. That was why he preferred fragile, floating Martha, who did not seem to want more than James could give.

  Now Robert’s direct gaze made James feel nailed like a hide to a wall, and he fumbled with the half-eaten Golden Pippin and dropped it. It rolled into dead leaves, catching them in its exposed flesh. Before James could move, Robert had picked it up, brushed it off and held it out to his father.

  “You finish it,” James said.

  “There’s not many left, Pa.”

  “That’s all right. You eat it.” James watched with satisfaction as his son finished the apple in two bites, his face revealing his shy pleasure in the taste.

  “Where do those Golden Pippins come from?” he quizzed his son.

  “Connecticut.”

  “And before that?”

  “England. Your grandparents brought over branches of their favorite apple tree.”

  “Where in England?”

  Robert stared at his father with his unsettling eyes and shook his head. He was not the kind of boy to bluff if he didn’t know. James was glad of his honesty. “Herefordshire. Now, tomorrow we’ll graft. Go and check the grafting clay, make sure it hasn’t dried out. If it needs it, add a little water and stir it in.”

  Robert nodded.

  “You know what you’re looking for? You don’t need me to check it with you?”

  “I’m all right, Pa.” Robert trudged off towards the river, picking up a wooden bucket as he went.

  Most springs James Goodenough grafted a few apple trees, turning spitters into eaters, or poor spitters into better spitters. In Connecticut he had learned from his father how to make a productive tree from an indifferent one, and though he had now performed successful grafts dozens of times, he still appreciated the surprise of this re-creation. Their fourth autumn in the Black Swamp, they picked their first crop of Golden Pippins, small and with a thicker skin than those in Connecticut, but edible. James could still recall the first bite he took of one, savoring the crunch and the honey taste with the pineapple finish. The fact that Golden Pippins could grow in the swamp—that a sliver of his ordered life in Connecticut was now tucked into Ohio mud—made him hopeful that one day he might finally feel at home there.

  Grafting had always seemed a miracle to James, that you could take the best part of one tree—its roots, say—bind to it the best part of another tree—one producing sweet apples—and create a third tree, strong and productive. It was a little like making a baby, he supposed, except that you had control over what characteristics you chose. If he could graft his children, what parts of himself and Sadie would he choose to put together? Perhaps his steadiness with her spirit—which, though mercurial, was infectious. In the right mood she could make a room full of people dance.

  But he could not choose the parts: they came potluck. The Goodenough children were not a combination of the best of their parents, but a sometimes painful mixture of the things that bothered James about himself and what he hated in Sadie, with an added pinch of their own particular characters. Caleb was dour and violent, Sal tetchy, Martha uncertain, Nathan sarcastic. Robert was a mystery—a changeling, James sometimes thought, a child he would not have thought could be Sadie’s if he’d not seen him slip out of her womb in a wave of water and blood, landing ashore without even a cry.

  Sadie viewed grafting with suspicion, an attitude she had picked up from John Chapman. “You ain’t God,” she liked to say. “Choppin’ and changin’ and makin’ monsters. It ain’t right.” He noticed, though, that she still ate the apples from the grafted trees. Once when he pointed this out she threw the apple she was eating at him and gave him a bloody nose. Afterwards he retrieved the apple and finished it himself. He did not like to see fruit wasted.

  The first time John Chapman came through we hadnt been in the Black Swamp but a few weeks and were livin half in the wagon half under canvas thrown over a frame James had knocked together. The girls and I were down at the river on the edge of our claim washin clothes when we heard a whistle sounded like that bird they call a bob white. Then along comes this grizzled man, paddlin in a canoe and hallooin us like we was old friends. He had long greasy hair and a beard stained yellow round his mouth from chewin baccy, and he wore a coffee sack belted round the middle with a piece of rope, and holes cut out for the neck and arms. He looked like a crazed swamp man, but we was glad to see him, as there werent a whole lotta folks around and it was a treat to get a visitor, even a crazy one.

  He had a second canoe lashed to the first and it was full of pails of little trees. Turned out John Chapman sold apple trees for a livin—little ones, bigger ones and sacks of seeds he gave away for free. Him and James got to talkin right away about apples, which pleased them both no end, and James even stopped work on the cabin and went walkin with John Chapman all over the woods where he was goin to plant an orchard, showin him the bits of tree hed brought from Connecticut and was goin to graft into new trees. John Chapman sold him twenty saplings, sayin it was best to start with them rather than graftin. Its up to God to improve the trees, he said, though gentle like, not forceful about it as hed later become. Would have sold him more saplings but James had so much land to clear he couldnt do it fast enough to get more than twenty trees into the ground.

  They was off so long it started to get dark, so I told John Chapman to stay for supper, though we couldnt
offer more than some pease and a couple of squirrels Jimmyd shot. Three squirrels dont go far tween nine mouths, and a tenth aint so welcome then. But John Chapman told us he didnt eat meat cause he couldnt stand for somethin livin to be killed jest to keep him alive. Well. None of us had heard such a thing before but it meant we all got more squirrel, so we werent complainin. Even the pease he didnt take much of and drunk water rather than cider.

  After supper he walked round as we sat by the fire. That man was a pacer and a talker. Now he werent talkin apples, though. Instead he said, Let me bring you some fresh news right from Heaven. I wouldnt of taken him for one of them types, who got to share their religion like theyre passin round a bottle for everyone to drink from. He started to talk and I confess that first time—in fact the first few times—I didnt understand a word. After a while the children rolled their eyes and wandered off, and James got intent on his whittlin. I didnt mind though cause I liked watchin John Chapman. He didnt want to sleep in the wagon or under the canvas that night but said he was fine in the woods. Wouldnt even borrow an old quilt. Nathan spied on him and came back sayin John Chapman was sleepin in a pile of leaves.

  Next day he was gone fore we was up, though he came back a week later with the saplings. We hardly had the money to buy em, havin spent it all to get to Ohio. But James said it was worth it as wed have apples two years sooner than if we planted seeds. Then he was goin to graft the branches hed brought from Connecticut onto some of the saplings, though he never told John Chapman that as hed learned pretty quick how John didnt like graftin cause it tampered with Gods creation.