Dead Man’s Hand

by John Joseph Adams

  “Quite possibly,” said Alvin, “but this morning, after last night’s dish of apple pie, I felt that my life was so evil and dark that death and hell would come as a relief. I think that feeling is familiar to you.”

  “I walk through the world with such a dark awareness of my sins,” said Chapman. “I’ve tried all the good works that Swedenborg called for New Christians to embrace. I live simple, I dress simple, and go about planting trees. It’s more than the apples, you know. When I leave a nursery behind me, the local farms can transplant those trees to meet the legal requirement of planting fruit trees on their land to prove their title. They can do that instead of clearing and planting five acres—six trees are as good as five acres in the law, because they’re an orchard.”

  “No one doubts that you do good work, John Chapman,” said Alvin.

  “I doubt it!” he cried, with anguish so deep it made Alvin’s own heart hurt to hear it. “I see the work but nothing feels good to me, or not for long, or not good enough.”

  “What did you do to the apples in Piperbury?” asked Alvin, getting to the point. “Was that supposed to be a good work?”

  “It was supposed to serve God,” said Chapman miserably. “I saw all these… these happy people, paying no attention to the sinfulness of the world.”

  “The apples,” Alvin prompted him.

  “I thought about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When Adam and Eve partook of it, they were expelled from Eden. But it says the reason for their expulsion was so that they wouldn’t eat of the Tree of Life and live forever. Once they’d eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, that wasn’t forbidden any more. God didn’t mind if they ate more of that.”

  “Doesn’t exactly say so, but it might be true,” said Alvin.

  “Yet here were all these people, utterly without knowledge of the evil that they do in the world. But I have that knowledge. To my bones I know it. So I thought that I should try to bring that great tree back into the world of men. Not the Tree of Life! That would be blasphemous! But a fruit that, when men eat it, they can see and understand evil—I could do that.”

  “How odd, then, that you made it so delicious.”

  “Well who would eat it, if it was nasty?” said Chapman. “I found that knowledge of evil in my own soul, and I put it in the pollen, and I gave it to an apple tree with a strong root. Then I took the pollen of the trees that grew from that, and gave it to an apple with a perfect fruit, sweet and hearty. And the trees that grew from that pollination, they grow now in every orchard in Piperbury.”

  “Strong so they live long, sweet so they’re good to eat, and filled with damnation.”

  “No!” cried Chapman. And then: “Yes. But that’s not how I meant it. It was supposed to turn them toward righteousness. It was supposed to make them…”

  “Like unto you,” said Alvin.

  “As aware as me.”

  “But you forgot to give them the knowledge of good. It’s supposed to balance, in that tree.”

  “They knew good!” cried Chapman. “They were so…”

  “Happy.”

  “I’ve never been happy,” he said. “Not for more than a few minutes at a time. I make a wonderful blending of two apples and I feel good and then I think, this is the sin of pride, I’m such a wicked man to be proud of the workmanship of mine own hands. So I leave the nursery behind me and go on to another place and try again, but my sins follow me everywhere.”

  “You have those moments, though,” said Alvin. “These Piperbury folks, they’ve got none. No taste of goodness any more. No speck of joy.”

  “They die from accidents,” said Chapman. “I’ve asked. All those suicides, they’re just accidents or illnesses.”

  “And yet there are so many dead,” said Alvin. “Because their hopeless friends and family members don’t help them, don’t heal them, don’t even feed them in their extremity, because they know that death will come to them as a relief.”

  Chapman dropped to the ground, curled up, and wept.

  “I don’t know about evil,” said Alvin, “but right now you’re pretty useless.”

  “I can’t fix it,” said Chapman. “Even if I cut down every tree in Piperbury, the pollen has already spread into the world. Bees have carried it to other towns. The crossbreeds aren’t as powerful—not as delicious, not as sturdy, not as…”

  “Pernicious.”

  “Effective,” said Chapman. “But it’s loose in the world and there’s no calling it back.”

  “Well, we can stop sending out the pure pollen, can’t we?” asked Alvin.

  Chapman groaned in agony at the very thought, and Alvin realized: even this Tree of the Certainty of Evil, he can’t bear the thought of cutting it down.

  “You love even the wicked trees,” said Alvin.

  “They’re the only children I have in the world,” said Chapman.

  “You could have married and had the flesh and blood kind,” Alvin said.

  “The only woman I ever wanted to ask, I got there and she had agreed to marry someone else the day before.”

  “And all other women were monstrous?”

  “They all become monstrous after you marry them. I’ve seen how married people are. I don’t know why I ever thought even one would be different. They’re always… telling you things. Demanding things from their husbands. Having opinions. Being disappointed or angry or crying in order to make you do things.”

  Alvin could see now why John Chapman wandered the world. Like everybody, he needed the company of other people, but only for a short time. He had to leave before people began expecting things from him.

  “You can’t leave this one behind,” Alvin said to him. “We’ve got to kill those trees.”

  “I come back here to try new pollens on them. Pollens to undo what I did. I look at happy people out in the world and I try to find that place in them and make a pollen that will grow an apple that will give them that—”

  “No,” said Alvin. “That’s wrong. An apple that makes you happy? Then all that people would do all day is eat those apples.”

  “So you agree that misery is a necessary—”

  “I agree that happiness and misery ought to be earned. You’ve forced guilt on people who don’t deserve it. How will it make it better to force an equal certainty of the goodness of everything they do on people who also don’t deserve it? A body should feel good because he did good, and feel bad because he did bad. Your tree isn’t giving anybody knowledge, it’s giving them certainty.”

  “That’s the same thing,” said Chapman, surprised.

  “Certainty is how you feel about your opinions. Knowledge implies that you’re pretty sure, but that you’re also right. Certainty doesn’t require that you be right.”

  “That’s more philosophy than I can handle,” said Chapman.

  “It’s not philosophy, it’s common sense,” said Alvin. “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil isn’t about making people sure they’re wicked whether they are or not, nor about making them feel bad. It’s about letting them see clear. What’s really good. What’s really evil. To know what each of them is when they see it. To help them make choices, and understand the choices they made.”

  “Well I don’t know how to make a fruit that can do that.”

  “That’s because you don’t have to,” said Alvin. “Eve and Adam already ate that fruit, and passed the knowledge on down to us. We’re born with it, all but a few sad and broken people.”

  “Like me,” said Chapman.

  “That’s foxfeathers, my friend,” said Alvin. “You know what good and evil are. You just got the mistaken notion that it’s evil to be proud of accomplishing something good.”

  “Pride is a sin!”

  “Pride in a good thing is a good thing,” said Alvin. “The sin is when you’re proud of stupid things. Like being born to rich parents. Or figuring out how to cheat other people of more than your right share of money. Making other people ashamed of th
emselves so you can feel proud of being better. Those are sinful kinds of pride. Being proud of worthlessness. But being proud of having worth. Of bringing apple trees to farmers who need them—for cider, for pies, or for proving out their claim—that’s something to be righteously proud of.”

  “And why should I believe you?” demanded John Chapman.

  “Because you have the knowledge of good and evil inside you,” said Alvin, “and you know I’m right. Even if the Unmaker whispers to you that it isn’t so, your first response to what I said—your heartfire leapt up when I said it. You recognized Good when you heard it.”

  “I recognize it,” said Chapman. “But it’s still out of my reach. I put this tree into the world and it’s killing people, and making them so unhappy that they’re grateful to die.”

  “Well, we can’t stop it,” said Alvin. “And we’re sure not going to make an opposite tree, that forces people to be proud and happy for no reason. And there’s no way to make a Tree of Good Sense.”

  “Well now,” said John Chapman. “Maybe…”

  “John Appleseed,” said Alvin, “if you had any sense inside you, you’d never have made this tree in the first place.”

  “No, no, there’s no way to put good sense into an apple,” said Chapman. “Or if there is, only God can make that tree. But good sense isn’t what we need here.”

  “It’s hard to think of a time when that statement is even slightly true,” said Alvin.

  “I meant only that a tree of good sense isn’t—”

  “I knew what you meant,” said Alvin. “I’m just a wicked man and I’m ashamed of myself for making a joke.”

  “What my tree makes them feel is despair,” said Chapman. “It’s the tree of despair. The certainty that nothing is good and it will never be good. So the tree I need to make is the Tree of Hope.”

  “Well, now, that’s a thought. Can you do it?”

  “I’m not a hopeful man.”

  “When you set out to crossbreed two apples, don’t you hope you’ll come up with something useful?”

  “Usually I don’t.”

  “But sometimes you do. So you hope that at least now and then you’ll get a good result.”

  “That’s not much.”

  “You don’t feel much hope,” said Alvin, “but you act on your hope. You have enough hope to go on trying. To go on living. To leave this town and go on to the next. To plant these seeds and hope they’ll grow, even though you leave them behind in another man’s care.”

  John Chapman closed his eyes. After a while he shook his head. “I don’t feel it.”

  “It’s not a feeling,” said Alvin. “It’s a decision. It’s the part of you that decides to try again. Not the part that gave up on all women ever. The part that made you once go to ask a girl to marry you.”

  “The foolish part.”

  “The part that acted in spite of fear. The part that dared.”

  * * *

  They got back to town well before dark. I asked Alvin myself whether he took John Chapman by the hand and ran with the greensong through the wood, but he just shook his head and laughed and told me that he wouldn’t remember a thing like that. “You don’t remember the greensong,” he said. “While you’re in it, you’re someone else, and when you’re back from such a journey, it passes away like a dream.”

  But he’s taken me into the greensong and I remember it. Each time I ran with him like that, I remember it. I don’t think he’s lying. I think it’s that he’s always just on the edge of the woodland, in his heart. So stepping over into the greensong isn’t such a wrenching change for him as it is for other folks.

  However they did it, by greensong or with a footsore wornout Appleseed, they were back in Piperbury by dark, and Alvin watched as John Chapman called them out of their homes and said, “Don’t you eat any more apples from these trees I gave you.”

  Not understanding how the fruit of those trees was killing everyone they loved and any chance of happiness, they refused. “It’s the one good thing left in our lives!”

  “If you won’t stop eating them I’ll burn them all and chop them down,” cried Appleseed, “or the other way around!”

  “Then you’ll just have to do that,” said Mrs. Turnbull, “because them apples is the only thing that makes my cooking any good at all.”

  Chapman turned to Alvin, sitting on a bench at the edge of the public square. “What can I do?” he asked.

  “Eat from the Tree of Good Sense,” Alvin replied, which meant nothing at all to the people gathered there, but it made John Chapman smile just a little.

  “How about this,” said Chapman. “The apples you’ve got stored up from this fall, destroy those the way you’d shoot diseased cattle, to save the rest of the herd. But the new apples that come this year, they should be all right.”

  “What’s wrong with them?” asked a man.

  “They make you believe things that ain’t so,” said Chapman.

  “Like what?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Chapman. “Because you’re a fallen, sinful man.”

  Since that was what everyone in town already believed about themselves, nobody gave Chapman any more argument.

  They brought out their apples and had a fire. Smelled like an apple roast. Smelled like a party. But Alvin and Appleseed watched to make sure that nobody ate any of the cooked apples. If mice got into the mess that night or next morning, and then in despair went out for the hawks or the owls to get them, Alvin couldn’t begin to guess. He warned the mice not to eat those apples, but if they couldn’t resist the smell, he couldn’t very well change their nature, which was all appetites, even stronger than their fears.

  When the fire was down, Alvin and Appleseed went around from tree to tree. They weren’t in blossom yet, but that’s where Alvin’s knack came in handy. Appleseed had made the pollen for apples filled with hope—not a crazy hope when there was no reason for it, but the hope that makes a man act to do something good even when he thinks it probably won’t work. A measured hope. A teaspoon of hope to counteract a bucket of despair.

  Alvin looked inside that pollen and saw the deepest seed at its heart, and then took that pattern and reproduced it in the tree. Tree after tree, working as fast as he could, it took him an hour with every tree, or maybe a little more or maybe a little less. Alvin didn’t carry a watch and time passed differently for him when his doodlebug was out working in the world.

  In three days he was done. There weren’t that many trees. Or maybe it took less time than he thought, per tree.

  I know what you’re thinking. If he could change the trees to add hope to the pollen they’d produce in their blossoms in the spring, why not change them to take away what Appleseed had done to fill them with despair?

  “I once took away something from a boy with a powerful knack,” said Alvin. “I took it away from the deepest seed inside him, because that was the part that the Finders tracked. I did it to save his life. But it killed a part of him. It killed his knack, or weakened it, or broke it. When you take something out of a man, you take something out of his soul.”

  “I can tell you that this boy you’re talking about, whatever you took, he doesn’t miss it,” that’s what I told him.

  And he said, “Just because he doesn’t miss it doesn’t mean it isn’t gone.”

  “A tree’s not a man,” I said to him.

  “Trees were John Chapman’s children. I wasn’t going to kill them. I just added something to them. A gift. That pollen still spread out into the world. A lot of people feel guilty for things that aren’t bad. But a lot of people feel guilty for things that are bad, and it helps them stop from doing such things. What matters though is that with that pollen, with those apples, they also get them a dose of hope. So whatever they might feel guilty of, it doesn’t take away their hope. It gives them more.”

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever eaten such an apple,” I said to him.

  “That was years a
go, and the bees’ve been busy,” said Alvin. “In the past five years you’ve never eaten an apple that didn’t have that pollen in it, his first change and then the second one. Not a new tree rises from the ground without those blessings in the fruit.”

  “Blessings,” I said to him, thinking of the graves in the Piperbury cemetery.

  “They started having babies in Piperbury again,” said Alvin. “They started bringing children into the world.”

  “Well I suppose that is hope,” I said. “What about John Chapman?”

  “He kept on planting apple nurseries with seed of his own making,” said Alvin. “But I don’t believe he ever again tried to make an apple that would change human nature. I think he decided to leave that up to God.”

  “So you’re saying he despaired of such a thing,” I said, trying to goad him a little.

  “I’m saying he put his hopes in God, and set about making fruit that was delicious to the taste, but left a man his freedom.”

  So yes, I had it from the mouth of Alvin Maker himself, in the happy days in Crystal City. He didn’t make a copy of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the way some folks say, and he certainly never made a Tree of Life. But he made it so every apple in America, by now maybe every apple in the world, comes from a Tree of Hope and Despair, and so we all swing back and forth between the two.

  MADAM DAMNABLE’S SEWING CIRCLE

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  Seattle, Washington, 1899

  You ain’t gonna like what I have to tell you, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. See, my name is Karen Memery, like memory only spelt with an e, and I’m one of the girls what works in the Hôtel Mon Cherie. Hôtel has a little hat over the o like that. It’s French, so Beatrice tells me.

  Some call it the Cherry Hotel. But most just say it’s Madam Damnable’s Sewing Circle and have done. So I guess that makes me a seamstress, just like Beatrice and Miss Francina and Pollywog and Effie and all the other girls. I pay my sewing machine tax to the city, which is fifty dollar a week, and they don’t care if your sewing machine’s got a foot treadle, if you take my meaning.