Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  Chapman

  Nathaniel fires his musket in 1799, aiming uphill at what he thinks is a wild goat, his mistake unknown until halfway through the pull of the trigger. Afterward he spends ten confused, brotherless years grieving and planting alone, tending nurseries alone, traveling alone between the wild Territory and the settled east, then across the State the Territory becomes into lands beyond, lands Territory still. Ten years seeking new undrained swamps, new uncut stretches of virgin forest, new rivers undammed and undiverted and maybe still unnamed and unmapped; ten years of planting seed after seed as every spring the advancing civilization chases him farther west, as first the Territory and then the State fill with human towns, human cities, the human sign spreading until the wilder places are cut off, until they shrink and separate and disappear.

  Nathaniel spends these ten years always searching what wilderness remains, in case his brother lives, because it was only in the wild where Chapman was ever comfortable. Ten years of aging, ten years of drinking, ten years of thickening flesh, of graying hair, of exile and grief and returning every year to climb the Ohio hillock where, in the breaking light of dawn ten years ago, he swore he saw a wild goat—but in the second he took his shot didn’t he see his prey was no animal, rising as it did to stand on two hooves?

  Ten years of waking shaking and sweaty in his bedroll, dreaming of a terrible accident he’d caused but couldn’t understand.

  Ten years now past.

  Now Nathaniel is there on that hillock, now Chapman’s there too, returned as Nathaniel’s bullet finishes its transit, ten years after it first met Chapman’s skin, the until-now-paused lead ball burning through the skin to mushroom against the rib cage in an Ohio so changed it might as well be another world from the one in which Nathaniel’s bullet was fired.

  And where was Chapman in the years between? Where was he with Nathaniel’s bullet?

  Escaped into the flicker, riding the singer’s song between the stations of the seconds before and after the bullet’s impact, safe in an interstitial reprieve unable to keep the bullet and his blood apart forever, every hurt sooner or later returning to the earth from which it sprang.

  Grieving Nathaniel, older now, reunited with his lost brother, still young; skeptical Nathaniel, dropping disbelieving to his knees at the injured faun’s side; faithful Nathaniel, arriving as the final strobes of the flicker recede, as his bullet at last starts killing Chapman: steady Nathaniel wastes no more time. He hooks his arms under his horned brother’s armpits, then drags him from the exposed hill. Below the tree line, he shucks his possessions—his satchel, his bedroll, the same rifle he used ten years ago—then takes his knife from his belt. Kneeling beside Chapman, Nathaniel places his free palm on his brother’s bare chest, trying to soothe his rocking movements, his inhuman moaning.

  “Hush, brother,” Nathaniel says, peering into the bullet wound, its seeping entry a decade and a moment old.

  “Nathaniel,” Chapman says, wheezing past sharp teeth. “We have to go.”

  Nathaniel shakes his head. “Not until I get the bullet out of you.”

  “There’s no time,” Chapman says. He tries to sit, fails, wraps a furred hand around Nathaniel’s spotted forearm. “Can’t you hear them coming?”

  Chapman’s last word garbles into a cough, punctuated by a bubble of blood. Nathaniel tries to hear whatever it is Chapman hears, but there’s only a slight wind blowing, a few squawking birds scattering away from the commotion.

  “Lie quiet, brother,” he says. Knee on Chapman’s hipbone, knife in his hand, Nathaniel surveys his brother’s bloody wound: the bark of his brother’s skin is harder than hickory, Nathaniel’s knife only a farmer’s tool, not a doctor’s scalpel. With a whispered apology, he digs the knife’s tip into the entry wound, searching for the mushroomed musket ball. If he’s lucky, the lead might be near the surface, crashed against bone without breaking through. If not, the bullet might’ve shattered the rib cage or slipped between its slats to lodge in the lungs or the heart.

  But probably then Chapman would already be dead.

  The wound isn’t deep, but Nathaniel can’t find the bullet. He can’t even move the knife below the skin, because whatever a faun is, its flesh is made of sterner stuff.

  “If you were a man,” says Nathaniel, “I wouldn’t have shot you.”

  Chapman only moans, pain robbing him of language as Nathaniel tries again to move the blade inside the bullet wound, as he’s again stymied by his brother’s stubborn flesh.

  “If you were a man, I’d save you,” he says. “A man wouldn’t need to die.”

  Nathaniel is half right, but today half right is enough. When he tries for a third time to explore the entry wound, Chapman howls, the beastly sound shivering Nathaniel, setting his hands to shaking. He pauses, lets his brother’s bucking slow, then tries again—and this time as the knife reaches the wound, Chapman changes skins. Nathaniel sees the faun he has known his whole life, then the man he’s asked his brother to be instead, a man whose chest contains the same bullet hole as the faun’s. The vision is unstable, the body shifting moment to moment: Chapman’s a faun then a man, then a faun and a man; he has feet then hooves, then one foot and one hoof; his skin blooms fresh fur, the fur ripples away in shed sheets to reveal hairless flesh. The horns spiral up out of the man’s head, as the face widens and sharpens, grows faunish; they spiral back in as the face flattens out, leaving only two circles of shiny skin blazing the forehead.

  Nathaniel’s mind is quick, his spirit steady. He puts the blade against the bullet wound in the faun, then when the faun becomes a man, he moves the blade.

  The flesh of the man gives, the flesh of the faun resists; Chapman’s body bucks, his moans elongate pitifully, his voice sounds one way from the mouth of the faun and another from the man’s, both voices hurting, hurting.

  Now Nathaniel hears the slightest clink as the steel blade taps lead, the smashed mass turning the knife tip aside. He holds his breath, steadies his grip: if he pulls the knife loose before removing the bullet, he’ll have to start over. He studies the man turning faunish, studies the faun becoming a man; he adjusts the blade, moving from the top of the bullet to its side, then below. Now his knife cuts into Chapman the man, now Nathaniel worries his brother the faun will kick his hooves or lash out with his claw: if Chapman decides to buck him free, there’s nothing Nathaniel will be able to do, not with the arthritis in his joints, the chronic aching in his muscles. But as new blood wells around the blade’s entry into the wound, Chapman’s changing body stills, his shape flickering more slowly, sometimes pausing somewhere in between: not the perfectly proportioned half-man, half-beast the faun was, but something monstrous, something never meant to be, truly half a faun, half a man.

  As smoothly as possible, Nathaniel works the knife like a lever, slowly lifting the musket ball through the flickering layers of skin and muscle. He moves when he can move, he pauses when he has to pause, he waits for his chance.

  His whole life, Chapman has been the wild one, given to flights of fancy and boundless curiosity, while Nathaniel has been steady, unplayful, a stodgy plodder. This was the man Nathaniel believed he had to be, but who could love the role, choosing stoic readiness over excitable joy, quiet perseverance over quick-blooded passion? As the bullet rises, his pulse does not elevate, his breathing remains unhurried. At last the bullet comes free from this brother he shot ten years ago, whose life he’d already saved twice before, once when Nathaniel’s bullet sent Chapman into deepest flicker, a no-when where the musket ball could wait arrested while the witches who might’ve torn him limb from limb lost his scent, and once even earlier, forty years ago in a story never fully told, of the day teenage Nathaniel lifted the newborn faun in his arms, rescuing a child unloved and unnamed in still-wild woods, abandoned to death by exposure by Nathaniel’s grieving stepfather, who would not love the horned babe that was his own firstborn son, whose mother-killing shape the man couldn’t ever again stand to see.

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nbsp; By the time Nathaniel finishes constructing a lean-to in a nearby copse of cedars, Chapman’s bandaged shape is once again only a faun’s, injured but no longer dying. Despite his long absence, Chapman looks exactly as Nathaniel remembers, unchanged and unaged. Unlike Nathaniel, who after the surgery feels every one of the last ten years.

  He moves Chapman’s unconscious form inside the lean-to’s crooked structure as gently as possible. This isn’t an ideal camp—it’s too far from water, too exposed—but Nathaniel is thankful for the time each next task takes. He gathers up Chapman’s few possessions, the poverty of his well-worn leathern bag holding only a dusty last handful of dead seeds, plus the broken gimlet they’d fought over a decade earlier. He digs a depression for a firepit, gathers wood kept dry beneath the biggest trees. After walking a half mile to the last creek he crossed, he fills his newer waterskins and his brother’s aged pair, Chapman’s bladders seeping at their seams. Back in camp, Nathaniel builds a fire, sets a pot to boiling while he peels gathered roots and carrots, guiltily gnawing a knuckle of dried venison as he works. A man makes a mistake but still he needs to eat. The vegetables go in the pot, he lets them cook until they soften to a watery mash. He fills a cup, takes it to his brother in the lean-to. His brother needs rest, food to restore his strength, fluids to replace lost blood.

  Last night’s rain is ended, the grass is wet, but above the boughs the clouds part to let the sun pass. Chapman shivers and stirs, but is he awake? Kneeling beside the bedroll, Nathaniel tips the cup to his brother’s mouth, but the mash only dribbles into the scratch of his beard.

  Nathaniel drinks what Chapman refuses. He’s sitting closer to his brother than he has since they were children alone in the Appalachian woods, their first home after fleeing their father’s house. In those first years, Chapman’s body grew faster than a human child’s, but inside he was a toddler desperate for whatever poor parenting Nathaniel could provide. Chapman’s birth cost Nathaniel his family, his inheritance, whatever life he might’ve had back east in Massachusetts; his birth gave Nathaniel the many years they worked the wilds of the Territory, work Nathaniel has finally come to love for its own sake.

  The leftover mash goes cold. Nathaniel busies himself with darning a pair of socks, with sewing a button back onto his last decent shirt, then wrapping a cracked adze handle with leather stropping. He builds the fire past the point of comfort, not sure how much warmth Chapman might need, the faun shivering under the lean-to despite being wrapped in both their blankets. Nathaniel sweats as the afternoon gives way to evening, as the evening gives way to night. He gnaws a second strip of jerky and paces the camp to cool himself, then returns to his vigil.

  Sitting beside his resting brother in the dark, Nathaniel doesn’t think he’ll sleep—he’d have to lie blanketless on the ground, something his arthritic joints would likely protest—but then his eyes flutter closed and suddenly it’s hours later, Nathaniel startling himself back awake, still sitting in the dark of the lean-to, his aging legs jumping involuntarily.

  Looking down, Nathaniel finds he’s holding Chapman’s hand, something he hasn’t done since his brother was a child-faun, fresh on his hooves. But here they are, one brown-furred and clawed hand held in another, liver spotted and pale.

  Nathaniel and Chapman, man and faun, brothers forever, despite everything.

  At dawn, Chapman wakes to discover Nathaniel beside him, his brother barely awake, his body listing but his hand still holding Chapman’s. He tries to sit too quickly, winces and clutches his bandaged chest, then tries again, more slowly. “Brother,” he says, rising to his elbows. “You’re here, but—” He shuts his golden eyes against his confusion, then opens them to take in Nathaniel’s face again. “But you’re so old now.”

  Nathaniel drops Chapman’s hand, embarrassed. He strokes his gray beard, runs his fingers through his thinning hair. “It’s been ten years, Chapman.”

  The faun holds up one arm, studying the fur there, all of it as deep russet as ever, without the slightest sign of the gray shooting through his brother’s hair. “What happened?”

  “Ten years ago I shot you atop this hill, mistaking you for a wild goat. By the time I saw it was you, it was too late to stop my trigger, and after I climbed the slope . . .” Nathaniel shakes his head, curses. “A little blood, a clot of fur, and no brother to be found.” He tells Chapman the rest: how he’s worked their apple planter’s life alone, how for ten years he’s returned to this place, the pilgrimage here often his last task before looping back through their older nurseries on his way east. He explains that this year’s east is a destination farther west than before, as it’s possible now to comfortably winter near the new towns of eastern Ohio, in this State the Territory’s become, instead of crossing the mountains back into Pennsylvania.

  “You saved my life,” Chapman says. He opens the bedroll, then rises slowly, swaying unsteadily. He tentatively smiles his toothy grin, then stamps his hooves to move his blood. He taps an index finger at the makeshift bandage covering his bark-brown torso, then pushes in a claw. He winces, but no new blood spots the linen, the faun healing fast now that the bullet’s been removed. “You saved my life not once, brother, but twice,” he says, then pauses: How to explain the night of the rainstorm, the fleshy witches, the beheaded singer, the chase through the changing wilderness? “I was being chased,” he says at last, “by some who planned to punish me for a crime I didn’t commit.”

  Nathaniel imagines a mob, armed and dangerous, a throng of violent, suspicious men like the crude and uncouth ditchdiggers he’d left Chapman for, all those years ago. “For what crime? What did you do?”

  “I think it was an accident,” Chapman says, then falls silent. The forest floor here is springy with spongy soil, humus, and moss; the trees are old, scarred, ancient kings, their broad branches full of birdsong; everywhere there is the sign of deer and bear, wolf and fox, rabbit and squirrel, all Chapman’s old comforts, his oldest joys. But in the witches’ shapeshifting, in the beheaded singer’s song, in the flickering vision they gave him and the shifting landscape through which they gave chase, there was something else too, something new, something he both fears and craves: true magic and deepest mystery, the revealed existence of forces perhaps as inhuman as he is, possessed of some power by which much that seemed impossible was made to happen.

  Chapman had nearly been ready to forsake his self-imposed quest by the night the witches and the singer appeared; now his hopes are renewed, because any world in which creatures such as these existed might be made a world in which his Tree did too. He has seen the singer’s song move the landscape through time, changing it, shaping the ground to make it possible for the witches to more easily advance—what if the song could do the same for him, he tells Nathaniel, what if it could show him the future in which his Tree exists?

  “I don’t understand,” says Nathaniel, his normally placid face contorted by confusion. His brother has babbled for five incoherent minutes, the fantasies he relates surely divorced from reality and sense.

  “Neither do I,” says Chapman. The faun absently rubs his horns, the whole then the broken, then makes a decision: even if the witches could help him, his fear remains greater than his hope. He scans the way east, the direction Nathaniel would’ve been planning to travel anyway. It was in the wild places the witches had found Chapman; he fears it’s in the wilds they’ll hunt him again. “We have to go, brother. Back east, back anywhere it’s better settled. No time for stopping this year either. Our nurseries will have to wait.”

  Nathaniel nods, giving his assent even as his furrowed, sunburned face twists in confusion. “There’s something else I need to know,” he says. “When I found you last night, you weren’t only yourself. You were—”

  Chapman considers his steady, stoic brother, who once possessed no lick of superstition or belief in anything more supernatural than his Christian god, this brother whose lack of imagination had persisted despite his many years in the company of a creature who
se true name they’d had to learn from a book of stories. He asks, “What, Nathaniel? How have I wronged you?”

  Nathaniel grows visibly frustrated, his reddening face betraying the return of the intractable anger that broke their fellowship. “Have you always been able to do it?”

  “Have I always been able to do what?”

  “Have you always been able to make yourself a man? Could we have been two men this whole time, proper men together?”

  Chapman laughs. “Brother, no! This is me. I could no more change my shape than you can change yours.” But suddenly he isn’t so sure. He considers again the shapeshifting witches and the mutable landscape, driven before them by the singer’s song; he raises a hand, recalling how strange he’d felt after Nathaniel’s bullet struck, held softly aloft in the flicker, a sensation he can still feel tugging his seams.

  He tries, best as he can, to put just one part of himself back.

  What happens next is no meditation or prayer, no parlor trick or spell, but it’s hard to pretend it’s not magic: Chapman’s hand become a man’s, the hand of the man from whom Nathaniel dug a bullet.

  The brothers startle. The hand changes back in an instant, furred and clawed again, then with effort Chapman makes it pale and hairless once more. Surprised anew, his concentration quickly breaks, his hand this time rippling over slowly, until the skin is sheathed with its accustomed fur, fur this faun has somehow learned to wear on the inside.

  John

  It takes her another week to come for him. Returned to the cool dark square of his assigned house, its fresh-printed concrete still stinking and curing, John turns on the solar light to reveal Eury Mirov sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in the same black suit she’s worn for countless promotional videos and press briefings, the same white blouse donned for board meetings and Senate depositions, her tight black slacks cropped above low wedge boots. The outfit’s too fashionably cut for the spartan space of the concrete house, but Eury’s also not her television self, not so made-up and well lit: this is the real Eury, taller than John even without her heeled boots, her fingernails chipped, her face tanned and windburned. “I knew you’d come back,” she says, uncrossing her legs, then using a bootheel to push back the table’s other chair, gesturing for him to sit. As if he has a choice.