The Endless Forest

by Sara Donati

  She thanked foresight for her own sturdy boots as she followed the crowds, people on an outing as though they were going to a fair, and expected to be well amused.

  Where she could, Elizabeth ducked around larger groups—mothers and fathers and children, some still in arms. Then the field opened before them and she could see the gallows. The executioner stood, waiting patiently. So the prisoner hadn’t yet arrived; she had time to find her grandsons and get them away.

  There was little hope of meeting the rest of her party in such a throng, and so Elizabeth headed directly for the closest stand of trees. It was less crowded here, as this spot would give no view of the proceedings at all—unless you were sitting up high on a branch strong enough to hold two boys.

  Elizabeth put her head back to look into the tangle of evergreen branches, squinting to sharpen her gaze—her eyesight was getting worse; she really should have made the time in Manhattan to see about spectacles—when many hundreds of people began to shout and cheer with such enthusiasm that she couldn’t help but turn around.

  The crowd made way for a cart drawn by a mule. On the flat bed was a rough coffin of raw wood, and on the coffin stood a man, his hands tied before him. He wore only breeches and a linen shirt open at the throat, a carefully laundered shirt that set off tanned skin and dark hair that fell down around his shoulders and lifted in the breeze. If he was cold there was no sign of it.

  She could make out shouts from the crowd: Murray! Murray! Murray! We’ll miss you, Jim Boy. Jimmy Murray!

  The prisoner bowed gracefully from the shoulders, right and then left. He raised his bound hands in an awkward salute and the crowd responded with good cheer.

  Elizabeth shook herself out of her preoccupation and turned back to the trees. She put her hands around her mouth and shouted up into the branches.

  “Nathan Bonner! Adam Bonner!”

  But it was no use, she couldn’t be heard above the crowd. She couldn’t even be sure that the boys were anywhere near. She hurried on, calling as she went.

  On the gallows the mayor of Johnstown was reading from a piece of paper, his head thrown back and his arms extended to accommodate his shortsightedness.

  “James Murray of Schenectady. You were charged with the roadside robbery and murder of Mr. Horace Johnson, tax collector—”

  The crowd had a lot to say about Horace Johnson, and for a while their voices were louder than the mayor’s. It seemed that many were thankful to Jimmy Murray for relieving them of Mr. Johnson’s company.

  Elizabeth worked her way from tree to tree, shouting the boys’ names up into the dark and fragrant tangle of evergreen branches.

  “And so!” bellowed the mayor. “You have been indicted, tried, and found guilty. The court has sentenced you to death by hanging. Do you have anything to say?”

  Murray did indeed have something to say. Elizabeth hoped he would entertain the crowd for a good long while, as she hurried from tree to tree.

  “He was a right bastard,” Murray shouted, and the crowd agreed with him at length.

  Elizabeth slipped between trees too young to support the weight of two boys and almost ran into someone she never expected to see here.

  “Annie,” she said. “What—”

  But she could see what, and why, and understood that they had all been sent on a fool’s errand. Nathan and Adam wouldn’t be found anywhere nearby; most likely they were still someplace in Mrs. Kummer’s barn. It had all been Gabriel’s doing, and Annie’s.

  Her youngest son came out into the open without being called, his expression carefully neutral. Twenty years old, the tallest of all the Bonner men, taller even than his father by a few inches. The most stubborn of all the children, which was saying quite a lot. Nothing of embarrassment or regret nor even a trace of remorse.

  “What exactly is it that you were planning?” She heard the tremor in her voice but could do nothing to stop it.

  “We were married not an hour ago,” Gabriel said. “By the dominie at the Dutch Reformed church.”

  Elizabeth drew in a sharp breath. “Oh, Gabriel.”

  “You eloped,” Gabriel said.

  “The circumstances were very different,” Elizabeth said. A conversation they had had many times, and were about to have again while behind them a hanging ran its course.

  “You and Da wanted to get married and your father disapproved,” Gabriel said. “Seems pretty much the same to me.”

  “But I didn’t object to you getting married,” Elizabeth said, her voice rising and cracking. “All I was asking—”

  “You ask too much, Ma,” Gabriel said.

  Elizabeth tried to gather her thoughts. She turned to look at the girl. The youngest daughter of Many-Doves and Runs-from-Bears, a child she had helped deliver. On her deathbed Many-Doves had asked Elizabeth to look out for this daughter’s welfare, and Elizabeth had sworn to do her best. What she had never imagined was that her own son would get in the way.

  “Annie. This is what you wanted?”

  The girl raised her head. She was so much like Many-Doves that the sight of her always gave Elizabeth a jolt, joy and sorrow intertwined.

  “Hen’en.” Yes. “I left the school.”

  “Of your own free will?”

  Gabriel began to protest and Elizabeth shot him her sternest glance. He scowled, but stepped back.

  “Annie. Kenenstatsi.” Elizabeth switched to Kahnyen’kehàka, because it was the language the two used when they talked together. It was a language she spoke imperfectly, but she needed every advantage at her disposal.

  “You must say what it is you want. It is your choice. Not Gabriel’s, not mine. It is not too late.”

  A flash of anger lit up Annie’s face. She said, “Aunt, I know who I am. I am Kenenstatsi of the Kahnyen’kehàka Wolf clan. I am the daughter of Many-Doves and the granddaughter of Falling-Day. I am the great-granddaughter of Made-of-Bones who was clan mother of the Wolf for five hundred moons. I am the great-great-granddaughter of Hawk-Woman, who killed an O’seronni chief with her own hands and fed his heart to her sons in the Hunger Moon, in the time when we were still many, and strong.”

  Her voice never faltered, but she paused, as if to gather her thoughts. Gabriel stood behind Annie, his posture stiff and his jaw set hard.

  “Gabriel wrote to me and asked me to meet him here. I listened for my mother’s voice, and in my dreams I ask my grandmothers to guide me. I am a daughter of the Wolf Longhouse, and it is my right to choose a husband.”

  All the tension left Gabriel’s shoulders. The expression on his face was so full of emotion that Elizabeth felt it was an invasion of his privacy even to look at him.

  To Annie she said, “My son is very fortunate to have won your favor.”

  Annie closed her eyes very briefly and then she smiled. For the first time in this very difficult discussion, she smiled. There was nothing of nervousness or agitation in her smile, but a kind of quiet calm that soothed some of Elizabeth’s doubts.

  In the field beyond them the noise of the crowd rose and then fell off suddenly. In the still they could hear the creak of the swinging rope.

  Gabriel would follow in his father’s and his grandfather’s footsteps, and make his living hunting and trapping in the Kahnyen’kehàka tradition. He would never dream about leaving Hidden Wolf, as long as he had Annie with him. In his single-mindedness he was so much like his father at this age.

  “I am sorry about the school, and the money you paid to send me there,” Annie said. “But it wasn’t the right place for me.”

  “I wanted you to be sure,” Elizabeth said. “I thought you might like teaching.”

  “She’s not you, Ma.” Gabriel’s temper, so easily aroused, flared up.

  “And that is my misfortune.” Annie shot back at him. “Do you show your mother disrespect on the very day you take a wife?”

  The girl walked away and Gabriel watched her go, a stunned expression on his face. Then he ran to catch up to her. Elizabeth wat
ched them both, and wondered how much she was to blame for this turn of events, and if at forty or fifty her youngest son would look back on this day and still find fault with her.

  6

  On the mountain called Hidden Wolf the streams boil up, ready to breach their banks.

  The ground is still frozen solid; a shovel wouldn’t get far, and neither does the rain. The earth cannot soak up anything at all, and so the water begins to move, dragged down and down by its own weight, pulling debris from the forest floor along for the ride: branches, rocks, a whole hawthorn bush trailing its roots like a hundred knotty legs. The rain fills the burrows where small things tend their young. The water flushes out the deepest fox holes, and rouses a young bear from hibernation. From deep in the forest a moose bellows its irritation, but the sound disappears into the swelling water.

  The water moves, and everything must move with it.

  7

  They had a plan, and so the men who had gathered in Curiosity Freeman’s barn set out into the rain. The river had been high many times, and it had even breached its banks once when Daniel was a boy. It was hard to imagine anything worse, and yet they must.

  Ben Savard lent Daniel the use of a horse—his own horse, in fact, a big sorrel he called Florida. Daniel turned her toward the village and set off at a trot. He had to get the word out about school being closed, and it also fell to him to ask for volunteers to help with the sandbags. Too little and too late, but it was action. It was something.

  And if his shoulder screamed to the heavens, he would get this done.

  He headed straight for the trading post, the most logical place to find men who could be compelled into action. Daniel was wondering if there might be sacks somewhere in his mother’s cellar and if Hannah would be able to put her hands on them when he first heard it.

  A far-off sound, but big. Some large animal crashing through the underbrush. The hair on the back of his head stood up. Daniel turned in the saddle but found nothing that could account for such a noise, as big as the sky and swelling.

  An odd memory came to him. One of the stories his grandfather Hawkeye had told about his years in the West. He had lived among the Crow for a few seasons, and hunted buffalo with them. The best stories were of the stampedes. A thousand buffalo pounding across the prairie so that dust rose like storm clouds. A hundred men in pursuit, because without the buffalo they would not survive the winter.

  A hundred men. The hundred-year water.

  The sound was louder now, and more distinct. The roar of an angry bear.

  Daniel kicked Florida hard and galloped down through the village to pull up in front of the meetinghouse, where he leapt off and ran up a short flight of stairs. The alarm bell was housed under a small roof, open to everybody in case of emergency.

  Now Daniel yanked the bell rope with all the power of his good right arm, and he kept yanking. The noise was tremendous, even through the rainfall, and the effect was immediate. Men came running into the lane from the trading post in their shirtsleeves. Joshua Hench appeared in the door of the smithy, a load of empty burlap bags over his arm. And from inside the meetinghouse came a half dozen men. The Quaker elders, who had been sitting in silence, as was their habit, while they prayed.

  All across the village people were looking up at the sound of the bell. The first indication that they were in real danger, but from their windows they would see only more rain.

  Daniel stopped the bell with his hand and then bellowed from the bottom of his lungs.

  “Get to high ground! Get everybody to high ground! Flood!”

  8

  The storm bullied its way in and settled down on Paradise, merciless and unrelenting. Cold, but not cold enough to give way to snow. A miserable weather, in which nobody would want to be out. Nobody but Callie Wilde, who was exactly where she needed and wanted to be, in her apple orchard on the sloping hillside that ran down to the Sacandaga.

  Callie worked steadily despite the weather and the low light, pausing now and then to wipe the streaming rain from her face and clear her eyes. She could not make room for the storm, not today. Not in the cusp between winter and spring after two years of crops lost to black rot.

  Everything depended on the harvesting of this year’s scion wood and the grafting of the Bleeding Heart, her best hope. Her only chance to turn things around.

  She had found the tree by accident; a gift of fate. It began as an aimless walk on a Sunday afternoon in September with no thought but solitude and, if she was lucky, a few hours not thinking about the loss of her crop. The Spitzenburg to fire blight; the Seek-No-Furthers and Reinettes and Newtons to black rot. The end result was a few bushels of sorry fruit, hardly enough to make pressing worthwhile.

  As she wound her way along the banks of the Sacandaga, moving in and out of the forest and bush, she had asked herself for the first time what she would do if the next crop failed. It was a question she had always refused to consider, but now it stood before her and would not be ignored.

  As this thought came to her, she looked up and there it was: a wild apple tree in a sunny patch of bristlegrass gone to seed. Just six feet tall and just as wide, its branches garlanded with fruit: small lopsided apples of a size that fit exactly into her cupped palm. Streaked red yellow at the crown deepening to a deep, rich true red. Wasps buzzed as they fed on the fallen fruit.

  She picked up an apple and studied it. No sign of blight or mildew or rot, but that meant very little. It could be mealy, woody, bitter, without any taste at all, or simply inedible, as wild apples almost always were. It was silly to hope, and so she hesitated, picking up an apron full of fruit and studying each of them.

  In time hunger and curiosity got the upper hand and Callie bit into the nameless apple from a solitary tree.

  A crisp bite through tough skin into fine-grained flesh that gave up a mouthful of juice, sweet and tangy, with a hint of … she took another bite, and held the fruit in her mouth. Pear. Hints of pear. Nothing like any of the apples she grew or had grown.

  Callie walked home at a steady pace. Levi was in the barn shoveling hay, his thoughts so distant that she had to call his name twice before he heard her. Levi was a hired hand, a freed slave who had been on this farm since Callie could remember, and who was as dear to her as a brother. Without his help she would have had to give up the orchard long ago. He had been trained by her father but he also had a feel for the work. Sometimes Callie caught Levi standing motionless in the orchard, his head cocked to one side and his eyes closed. She had the idea, silly but still somehow right, that he could hear the trees talking to him.

  Callie handed him an apple from the wild tree. Something came over Levi’s face when he bit into it. Maybe hope. Callie was pretty sure that’s what he was seeing on her own face.

  —

  Here was the eternal problem: Even if she planted every seed from every apple on that miraculous wild tree, Callie would not get one like it. An apple tree could not be reproduced from seed, because apples never bred true.

  Callie was barely six when her father began to teach her how to fool nature into making a tree that could not be grown from seed. How to identify scion wood, how to cut it, score the root end, and keep it damp until it could be grafted onto rootstock.

  In the years since, she had grafted hundreds of trees and cared for them until their first bearing. The maybe trees, as she thought of them. They might produce a new fruit, perfect in every way, but more likely they would give her apples too sour or woody to eat, without any flavor at all, too acid to press, prone to aphids or maggots or fire blight. In all the years there had been two grafts that grew into trees worth keeping, and neither of them had been hardy enough to withstand insects or mold or rot.

  Every year Levi pulled down the failed maybe trees, cut and stacked the apple wood for seasoning, and every year two dozen new grafts were set in those newly empty places.

  The plan was to harvest scion wood from the wild tree, but that had to wait until winter was just a
bout to give way to spring. In the meantime, there were other questions to ask.

  Levi picked every apple on the tree and then Callie sat down with paper and ink and a new quill, and she wrote twenty-five letters.

  Dear Sir. With this letter I send to you the first fruit of a tree I have named Wilde’s Bleeding Heart. If you would be so kind, I would be exceedingly thankful for any thoughts or comments you might have on the quality of this apple. Please share these by letter, or directly with Levi Fiddler, a trusted employee, who brings you this message. If you are interested in tasting the cider, I will gladly arrange for it to be delivered at the end of the winter.

  Most sincerely yours, C. D. Wilde, New-York State.

  Levi went off with the apples to call on growers from Schenectady to Albany, from Albany to Boston. When he came back three weeks later his portmanteau was bristling with letters. Every apple grower wanted to taste the cider of this new apple, as soon as it was available.

  They had all questioned Levi closely, but he had not given them any satisfaction or even the vaguest hint of where C. D. Wilde was to be found in the great expanse of New-York State. Better to stay out of the public eye; they did not want a stranger showing up at the door until they had a few dozen healthy, bearing trees, mature enough to give up scion wood of their own. Without any discussion at all they knew that they could speak to no one about the Bleeding Heart.

  Settlers might move ever westward and drag their laws with them, but Paradise sat on the very edge of the endless forests, a frontier that would never be tamed. There had been stories over the years of blood feuds over things as simple as a single tree.

  That winter they pressed the small amount of fruit they had as soon as the temperatures dropped below the point of freezing. Ice covered the lake and made the lanes treacherous, but Callie and Levi welcomed the cold. Every morning Levi checked the three barrels of pressings from the Bleeding Hearts and removed the ice from the surface. This went on for a week. When the cider had a kick strong enough to get a man’s unwavering attention, Levi pulled a ladleful and handed it to Callie.