Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  “It’s by our ingenuity that our civilization is produced,” Nathaniel says. “Other men have lived here for a thousand years, but wasn’t the country we found nearly as wild as the day they first strode it? Where was their imagination for right uses? Where are their fences, their domesticated herds, their smart households making useful goods, ready for market? Why did they lack brick and mortar, steel saw and iron axe, the long reach of the musket? Could these first men not hear the voice of God here, as we do? We followed them to this Territory less than two hundred years ago, and already we have named it better, this America; already we’ve set out to properly parcel and sell its splendor, to make ready the state to be.”

  Chapman doesn’t drop his end of the saw, he needs neither his brother’s break nor his brother’s nation-building tall tale, this aspirational mythologizing, its many erasures of war and disease. “You wish to be like a god,” he says quietly, letting slip only this bland objection. He knows better than to argue his brother’s points more voraciously, when the only reward for doing so will be a day of Nathaniel’s stubborn anger in the fields or else his sullenness around the night’s cookfire.

  “If we are all made in God’s image, why not act like Him as well?” Nathaniel asks, and Chapman lifts his horned head to object, Not all, not me—but before he can speak his brother says, “Now pull, and let us put this ground to right.”

  Their clear-cutting is slow, the centuries-old trees terribly dense from bark to bark: it takes an hour to cut an oak, another to limb it, a third to saw the trunk into logs ready to be rolled and stacked at the river’s edge. Finally the oak crashes, half its branches breaking beneath its bouncing weight; afterward each brother works his tomahawk methodically up the tree’s length, hacking the rest of the branches free. Soon their hands and forearms are slick with fresh sap, soon the sap is riddled with flies and bees and other hungry insects; their labors litter the ground with bright tan sawdust, with cut wood ready to be dried for kindling. Chapman aims to hurt no other creature, but every fallen tree spills birds’ nests, squirrel hovels, spiderwebs, and wasps’ nests. Everywhere the brothers make a home for an apple tree is somewhere something else no longer lives, and surely it’s not only the saw that diminishes the world. What about every booted or hooved footprint stomping a stand of moss? Or the sparkling trout taken out of the river rapids by Nathaniel’s fishhook, its belly filled with roe? Or every honeycomb broken and licked clean, every handful of berries Chapman snacks on whose absence deprives a bright bird, a nosing doe, a lost cub—

  “Yes, brother, yes, a tree must die so a man might heat his house,” Nathaniel says, “but surely there will never be any shortage of trees.”

  It’s impossible to do no harm, but how much harm is permitted? Chapman has asked this question since he was old enough to wonder after his mother, to hear how in the birthing of his hooved body she met her end. Nathaniel tells him it wasn’t his fault, but if not his, then whose?

  Chapman works through the afternoon rain, he does a settler’s work while settling nothing. He cuts and clears and hoes, he takes his turn dragging their makeshift plow through the rock-pitted ground until the brothers have turned this narrow plot of earth alongside the bright-sparkling river into quick-carved furrows of blackest dirt, their rows as straight as the stump-ridden earth will allow. After the rain trickles off, Chapman begins moving down each row, leaving behind cloven footprints in the soft turn of the soil. Unlike his faunish feet, his hands are human enough: fingers clawed, yes, backs furred, but all the rest commonly dull. He takes a handful of seeds from his leathern bag, he presses the seeds one by one into the black soil. Each seed is a bitter pill of wax and wood and cyanide-laced prophecy, leafed future: a tree in embryo, its nature impossible to know before it grows. It’ll be ten years before these trees bear fruit, but as he plants Chapman imagines them already past their flowering, each tree’s apples offering fresh wonders of touch and scent, texture and flavor: the skins might be red or yellow or green, dark-mottled matte or shined clear as glaze; the flesh moon pale, jaundiced, browned as if rotten. Only a few seed-grown apples are ever sweet; the others are destined to be peppery spicy or puckeringly sour, some repulsively bitter spitters.

  Chapman plants another apple seed. By day’s end, he will have planted two hundred seeds in neat rows, each stringy with pulp and pomace, each given its own hole, each hole mounded over by a scooped handful of black dirt. It’s such a simple act, producing such a complex being, sprout and root, trunk and branch, leaf and flower and fruit unfolding. An apple seed becoming an apple tree is as much a function of time as of space, the years to come as necessary as rich soil and plentiful rainfall across the thousands of days it takes to make a tree fruit, for a tree to make fruit containing seeds of its own.

  For the next stretch of nursery, Nathaniel hacks down more pines and maples while Chapman lifts moss-covered rocks from where glaciers let them lie, carrying them into the remaining forest or casting them into the sparkling river, where their accumulation forces free water into swirling rapids. From many a fallen tree there spills a nest of eggs or hatchlings, beneath every rock there is a wealth of worms. Chapman studies the riverbed hemming his nursery, how its new rapids also form a nearby pool of calm water that trout might find fit for spawning. When a bird’s nest falls to the ground he stops his work to carry it intact to a stretch of trees past the bounds of his planned nursery, despite Nathaniel’s scoffing, his entreaties for efficiency and haste, productivity above all else.

  Wherever Chapman does not plant or plow, native abundance persists. Hundreds of miles of virgin forest lie in every direction—surely enough free woods will always exist for every displaced creature to find a new home. Surely the world Nathaniel aims to build can coexist alongside the world given and grown. Or so Chapman hopes. From these seeds will grow enough seedlings for Nathaniel to supply six families, six ruddy husbands and their brave wives and whatever squalling children are already born, the first of the many each man and woman might wish to have, the multitudes necessary to settle the continent. Thirty trees for each family, bought from enterprising Nathaniel and used to better secure their legal claim to whatever plot of cleared land each family has chosen to build a cabin, over whose door they might hang an oil lamp to light the unbearable dark of the Ohioan woods.

  To plant an orchard takes a certain amount of time; hours pass, the sun flings itself high in the sky before falling fast. The temperature drops, the humidity becomes more bearable, a different hum of insects asserts itself. Chapman plants a seed, and whatever tree grows from it will create no exact copies, not without the art of grafting, unpracticed by the brothers. No matter how many trees they plant, they might produce any particular tree only once, and its uniqueness might easily be lost to weather or predation, to human whim. As the day at last dims, Chapman dreams again of re-creating one such unique specimen, the one he believes is the oldest fruit of the species, lost long ago but still hidden in the potential within each new apple tree, possible to grow from any particular payload of seeds.

  This is the story he tells himself, his way of making sense of his years of labor.

  But still, sometimes Chapman reflects on the backbreak of a day’s work and thinks, All this for an apple. All this for the only apple I want to eat. And what else might his apple cost?

  The sun sets and though the work isn’t done it is done for today. The brothers make camp at one end of the nursery, Nathaniel shaking out his bedroll on a stretch of trampled grass, Chapman using a hoof to dredge a shallow depression to house tonight’s fire. Nathaniel stacks chopped wood over gathered kindling while Chapman bounds off to find dinner, gathering fistfuls of acorns, filling one pocket with wild blackberries and another with narrow tubers clawed from the dirt. He moves fast, reaching a gait he indulges only when assured he’s alone: preternatural, beastly, unnerving even to familiar Nathaniel. Running wildly through wild lands, reveling in sore joints loosened by his quickness, with every step he shakes off more
of the afternoon’s efforts, his aches worked pleasurably free, thorny brambles scratching soothingly at his furred flanks. Birds squawk and flee the low branches at his approach; he frightens a doe and her young from a blackberry thicket, watching the white flags of their tails retreat into deeper woods—everywhere there is motion, every inch of the forest is alive at every scale.

  Chapman’s half a man and half a beast, but with Nathaniel he lives only a man’s life, does a man’s work for a man’s reason: possession and enrichment, dominion and control. For Nathaniel, there’s no other life worth living. But lately Chapman has wondered if without Nathaniel he might have become something else: a wilder creature, unbound from human wants. How much ego would have to be given up? How much belief in singular destiny, individual experience?

  Chapman isn’t gone long, but he returns to a slim cookfire already stoked, the brothers’ one pot hung over the flames and the pleasurable sound of water rapidly boiling. Sitting on a mossy boulder beside the fire, happy and slow in his evening reveries, Nathaniel smokes his pipe, a plume of fragrant tobacco smoke rising from his beard as Chapman spreads his gathered foodstuffs on the grass. He cracks the acorns and peels the tubers, then flourishes a hand over the slender bounty until Nathaniel laughs. Together the brothers share the cooking, together they dine: Nathaniel sits cross-legged on his bedroll while Chapman crouches near the fire, eating a steaming potato out of his bare hands, sucking bitter acorn broth from his battered tin cup, picking blackberry seeds from between his sharp teeth. Gnats and flies and mosquitoes fall from the sky, their mass a swarming anger until Nathaniel throws greener wood on the fire, letting the smoke drive them off. There are gray wolves and black bears and blacker panthers in the woods, but there’s little danger in the camp, at least while the fire blazes high, with Chapman’s odd shadow looming and his faunish smell upon the air: garlic and clove, musk and sweat and man, the sweet rot of damp moss, a forest growing beneath the fur.

  After dinner, Nathaniel takes their tin cups down to the water’s edge to rinse away the last of the broth. The river isn’t far, but Chapman can barely see Nathaniel past the firelight’s glow, his brother’s image reduced in the far darkness to the winking cherry of his pipe. Dishes done, Nathaniel returns to his bedroll, then casts his eyes to the shell of stars above. Lying back, he recites for Chapman stories remembered from a Bible whose weight he no longer carries: the warrior whose strength lives in the tangles of his hair, the fierce queen who beheads her enemies to set free her people, the Christ multiplying the fishes and the loaves, offering his followers food made as endlessly plentiful as his platitudes. A beggar is healed, then a blind man or a lame man; a dead man is raised living from a tomb of quarried stone, a story Chapman has never believed, not even as a child.

  “No,” Chapman says, turning restlessly. “The dead stay dead. And there’s nothing any god will do about it.”

  Nathaniel knows who prompts this objection: their mother, whom Chapman never knew, whom Nathaniel speaks of only rarely. Instead he tells more stories, though there’s only one Chapman truly loves: the Garden of Eden and its endless bounty, every animal and every plant waiting to be named and put to their right uses by the first humans, the Tree of Knowledge from which they were forbidden to eat, an apple tree like the ones the brothers have come to the Territory to plant.

  Chapman loves this story, but he quibbles at its telling, nitpicks the story’s shape to better fit his desires. “What good could a Tree of Knowledge do for immortals not yet cursed to die? Maybe they needed something else. Not a Tree of Knowledge but a Tree of Forgetting.” He gestures grandly, his clawed movement lost to black air. He says, “A way to become new. Apple as untrod dream, from whose taste you could awake fresh as a babe, freed from all your years, all your decisions, all your compromises.”

  “All your triumphs,” says Nathaniel. “All your loves.”

  “How few those are,” says Chapman. “Too few. A slight sacrifice.”

  You wouldn’t have to know your crimes either, he doesn’t say. The dead stay dead, but at least you wouldn’t know what you did to make them so, wouldn’t know how it was what you were that had doomed them; such a fruit might even allow his body to forget itself, might let him become someone else, as ordinary as his brother. As a teenager, Chapman had once tried to cut his horns free of his forehead; after Nathaniel found him howling in bloody pain, their handsaw in one hand and half a broken horn in the other, Chapman explained what he’d hoped: that without his horns, he might have ceased being a faun.

  Magical thinking, Nathaniel had scoffed then—Would you have kept going, he’d mocked, cutting off hooves and tail, filing your teeth and claws, shaving your fur?—but failure hadn’t stopped Chapman’s wanting. Fifteen years later, he again relates the tale he’s been telling himself, a dream of his own making, born of his brother’s retold scriptures: if a Tree of Forgetting has grown even once, then Chapman might plant it anew, might find in its fruit a magic by which a faun could forget he was ever anything but a man, surely a fate better than being both man and animal, torn between two worlds and forever home in none—

  “Go to sleep, brother,” Nathaniel interrupts, then rolls over, putting his back to Chapman.

  The faun falls quiet, restlessly awake as his brother begins to snore. Despite their differences, here in the Territory at the turn of the century they form a partnership of two, their goals parallel enough: for Chapman, his Tree; for Nathaniel, a fortune made speculating, by taming the land. But even tame is too strong a word: the brothers plant their seeds in fields plowed from wild riverbanks, but they build no proper fences, carve no passable roads, erect no sturdy houses. All they grow are barely domesticated trees, arboreal squatters planted on unclaimed land, destined to be sold to better settlers at passable profit. Even what grows in their nurseries will forever be unruly and ungrafted, each tree as twisted as the hairs atop Chapman’s horned head, each utterly as unique.

  John

  Inside the barn, Cal shows John the rare refuge she’s found, hidden by a steel hatch concealed under a dusty layer of hay and chaff. At the bottom of a narrow ladder waits a spare concrete room, an emergency shelter with a bunkbed, a store of nonperishable food and medical supplies, a tank of potable water. John’s immediately claustrophobic, but Cal shushes him, pushes him toward the corner shower. The water is rusty, stale, magnificent, stinging John’s sunburned skin, streaming over Cal’s stout musculature. The concrete muddies, the mud clogs the drain, they kick to clear the flow with their toes, playfully at ease as if they’d never parted, as if they’d parted on better terms. Afterward, John goes naked to his truck, enjoying the hot wind wicking away the shower’s moisture, his body dry by the time he returns to the barn in clothes at least marginally less dirty than the ones discarded below.

  Instead of returning to the bunker, they sit at a plastic folding table Cal’s dragged into the moonlight near the barn’s entrance. Famished, John devours the simple meal Cal offers him, the first hot food he’s had in weeks. He sighs at the honest pleasure of rehydrated beans and rice heavy with preservatives and salt, a tumbler of cool clear water tasting of the tank, all of it a joy after the austerity of protein bars and boiled water. “How did you find this place?” he asks, sporking a second bite into his already-full mouth.

  “I was working my way down the Dakota fracking fields, disrupting pipelines and breaking whatever I could,” says Cal, stirring her own food but not yet taking a bite. “You can probably guess what there was to see. Fleets of oil company trucks left behind when the wells went dry, office buildings filled with recent enough computers, already junk. Kilometers of server cables, electrical wires, leaking pipes. I found a bulldozer and used it to topple telephone poles, push over fence lines, break up the roads.”

  “More terrorism,” interrupts John, making air quotes with his hands. That’s what the federal government in Syracuse calls it, unwilling to recognize rewilders as separate from the rebel groups roaming Wyoming and Montana, loca
ls or new arrivals kicked out of the free Northwest: Bundyists with automatic weapons claiming swaths of land as patriot preserves, driving smokestacked pickups across the broken clay; bands of polygamists unwilling to be taken east, clinging to the strip of wasteland between what was once Arizona and Utah; the Navajo Nation and the other rightful owners of the Southwest, sovereign peoples refusing to be moved from their lands, to ever be relocated again. If Cal and John are terrorists, they aren’t the kind of terrorists who’d burned Reno to char, they weren’t the sort who’d detonated the crude oil tanks outside Houston, who’d set fire to the reserves stored below, setting off an inextinguishable underground blaze that had hastened the city’s evacuation.