by Matt Bell
If the cavalry couldn’t negotiate with the squatters, they meant to burn them out instead. But everywhere last season the brothers found a cabin burned, this year two more are built nearby. Every dam torn down is already replaced, every irrigation ditch unblocked, every windmill repaired, every single yard of broken fence rebuilt and reinforced. When the cavalry came, the squatters hid in the woods, emerging afterward to repair whatever damage was done. The squatters—who do not think themselves squatters but settlers, landowners by right of inhabitation and improvement—refuse to be dislodged. Never mind that the land they inhabit was stolen from another; they swear they will not let it be stolen from them next. Now the destruction done by the cavalry binds them together, makes their isolated holdings into a community.
Is there any such community for itinerant Nathaniel and Chapman, any place where they might be celebrated for their contributions? They’ve so rarely been paid for their apple trees or the decades of labor those trees represent; now Nathaniel’s bartering for a fair share reduces him to prideful begging, the farmers who owe him often refusing to pay in anything but cider. In Hebron and Granville and Millersport, Nathaniel comes away with nothing but his skins refilled, day and night drinking his spoils to ease his aches, until the sweet smell of fermentation leaks from his pores and his teeth darken with rot. “If this is all anyone will give me,” he tells Chapman, hiccuping as he drains another fireside cup, “then I will take all I can get.”
“This is new, brother,” Chapman says. Never has he seen his brother so drunk, day after day delaying their travel until he sobers enough to walk.
“What do you know?” Nathaniel slurs. “What do you know about what is new?”
Chapman knows this isn’t the body into which he was born. He knows every day he spends as a man diminishes him. He knows the future they spent their lives trying to make arrived and then overtook them. They are living in the past, but the past is gone. Every moment a world ends, every moment a new world begins.
“Brother,” Chapman says. “Brother, it’s time to go home.” A word they’d never used before the Worth homestead, which nonetheless could be home enough for Nathaniel. It had been once already, in the decade Chapman spent lost in the everywhere everywhen of the flicker.
“Home,” Nathaniel sneers. “Home is nowhere. Because you—” He stops, slurs, stupefied or else pretending to lose his place. Loving the faun-child Chapman once was cost Nathaniel everything, left him reduced: all he is now is half a brother for half a man. But what Chapman has never said, what he has never pursued, is what Nathaniel cost him. The story of Nathaniel and Chapman is that Nathaniel saved Chapman’s life, gave up his own future for the vulnerable faun. But what if Chapman didn’t need Nathaniel, even then? He could’ve lived in the forests, would’ve forever fled the progress of man. He might not now be opposed by the witches, the wild women who want to punish what man has done, what Chapman, a once wild faun, did in man’s name. If only he had learned to speak their language instead of Nathaniel’s, he could have been their ally against the progress of a civilization of which he might then be no part.
Without Nathaniel, Chapman would never even have needed the tale of the Tree, a story he thinks of less every day he spends as a man. Instead of that story’s promise, Chapman has only his brother’s love, as Nathaniel has his, instead of the riches he sought—but look what brotherly love has cost them both.
It’s October the first time Chapman and Nathaniel return together to the Worth homestead. When they arrive, Eliza Worth is three years old, but she doesn’t stay three for long. Years pass; the brothers arrive, they winter, they depart; and whenever they return Jasper and Nathaniel work the land while Grace lets gentle Chapman help inside the house, fixing furniture, mending clothes, churning butter, and jarring preserves. Every year Nathaniel comes back weaker and angrier, his body reduced to loud popping bones and jaundiced skin and a flabby potbelly hanging over scrawny legs; he drinks more than his share of the Worths’ homemade cider and store-bought whiskey, the blood vessels of his face bursting with drink until each night Jasper begs Nathaniel to stop, until every spring he begs Chapman to take his brother away.
Yearly the brothers return from longer journeys to more distant frontiers in what is becoming Indiana, and when they return Eliza is six, then eight, then ten, then twelve. Eliza grows tall and straight, lean and strong, the only person Chapman’s ever observed growing up, so that at each winter’s joyful reunion he’s eager to see her new inches, the new evidence of her intelligence and quick wit. A town rises around the Worth homestead, but Eliza is no city girl. She memorizes Bible tracts and her father’s Swedenborgian apocrypha, she holds forth on Heaven and Hell, but despite her theologies it’s the living world of her father’s farm she loves best.
Chapman watches her at eight, moving through rows of cornstalks taller than she is, her hands brushing the stiff leaves, the stalks bending toward her touch.
He watches her at ten, nursing a sick sow back to health, its piglets anxiously squealing whenever Eliza is not there to comfort their mother.
He watches her at twelve, a farmgirl striding to the edge of her disapproving town with her father’s rifle in hand, her black hair braided down her back, off to hunt the last few deer living in the slim forest from which her town was carved.
Chapman watches Eliza but they rarely speak. Chapman knows he loves her as he loves Nathaniel, with as much affection as he feels for Jasper and Grace. But Eliza knows only the human half of him, not him entire. How would Eliza—the kindest soul Chapman knows, lover of animals, the best steward of the land she and her father and mother have shaped—how would she react to him, a monster stuck in the skin of man?
“Our mother’s name was Elizabeth,” Nathaniel tells twelve-year-old Eliza one night, his voice tired, his eyes fluttering shut. “Just like yours.”
He wants to say more but instead coughs into his fist, hacking until his voice sputters out. Sitting nearby, staring into the fire, Chapman starts. Nathaniel has never told Chapman this, has never in all their years spoken so directly of their mother, the woman Nathaniel loved, who died giving birth to Chapman’s kicking hooves, his clawing fingers, his head already studded with budding horns.
Later, Chapman spreads a blanket over his brother’s dozing body. Eliza wipes sweet cidery drool from Nathaniel’s lips with her handkerchief, then takes Chapman’s hand in hers as together they watch his brother shake and buck against his dreams. Elizabeth. It’s enough. A name to attach to all the longed-for memories Chapman will never possess. A container into which might be poured their imagined relationship, once desperately craved, a want never faded.
The year before Nathaniel dies, the year before Eliza Worth turns thirteen, Chapman is suddenly famous—but where do the tales begin, who is their first teller? The frontier has moved on, this Territory settled, and now the new people of Ohio and Indiana make their own myths, raising up the pioneers who came before, erasing crude violence and genocide in favor of edifying local legends and entertaining folk tales. There are ten thousand apple trees in the State that was once the Territory, trees planted by someone, and why not John Chapman, why not Johnny Appleseed, this wild-eyed man who never needs shoes no matter where he goes and no matter the weather, who always has his tune floating from his lips—The Lord’s been good to me, he sings, and so I thank the Lord, over and over—Chapman begging door-to-door while Nathaniel coughs behind him, Chapman saying, Let me tell you where some good apple trees are, saying, Let me sell you ten good apple trees for that sack of cloth, a sack grudgingly given, then gifted to Nathaniel, who refuses to replace his thread-worn shirt with this object that is not clothing, and all Chapman wants is whatever is best for his aged and embittered brother, even as Chapman effortlessly attracts the legends born of their shared life, these tall tales told among people only recently arrived in the State or the Territory beyond, about the Johnny Appleseed who once charmed and tamed a wolf with cider, made the animal his constant compan
ion, a dog that followed him everywhere, and then drunken Nathaniel says, Am I the drunken dog they see? but no, it’s only a story, Chapman says, dragging his brother through the muddy streets of some stinking hovel, away from some village green where they tell a tale of how Johnny Appleseed once hid from a band of marauders by lying at the bottom of a creek, sucking air through a straw of reed, and Nathaniel says, What creek was this then? and Chapman names a dozen creeks it could’ve been but wasn’t, because the story isn’t any more true than the fable of his tin-pot hat, and every time Chapman says, They’re talking about anyone other than me, you’ve been with me every minute of this curious life, and if anyone was to be a hero to men it is you, Nathaniel, the best of our settling kind, who invented every scheme we ever hatched.
Cider-drunk Nathaniel seethes. All the labors of his spent life and he remains poor and unknown, and now it’s his brother who is famous while unknown Nathaniel remains as penniless as the day he began. Childbirth to gravedeath, this poverty is to be his life, Chapman’s fault every inch. If only the faun had been suffocated by his caul, the membrane wrapped around his head at his birth, just like a goat’s; if only their father hadn’t been such a coward when the time came to crush his foul windpipe. If only the witches they’d spent years fleeing had caught him, witches Nathaniel still claims he’s never seen, a rumor he now accuses Chapman of using to keep them from ever staying in one place enough to truly live.
If only Nathaniel hadn’t saved his brother’s life, ten years after he almost murdered him.
If only, if only, if only.
What Chapman doesn’t know, what he’ll never know: the slug of lead Nathaniel dug from his brother’s chest waits in Nathaniel’s pocket, a charm he fingers whenever he worries he’ll say the words to break their long fellowship, their often tenuous brotherhood. Despite everything, Nathaniel loves his brother, his Chapman, the one thing in the world unlike any other, the one thing that was his alone to know. Or so it was before the faun became a man, a man almost like every other Nathaniel has known, a man who Nathaniel sees in the year of Chapman’s fame is better loved everywhere they go than he will ever be.
John
John waits calmly for the concealed entrance to slide shut behind him, the air pressure changing as the Loom chamber’s hermetic seal closes. There are only a few locations in the Farm without surveillance, without connectivity, but he believes this room is one such place: he squeezes his fist and sees the colored lights on the back of his hand blink red as they fail to find a signal. All is silent except for the hum of electronics on standby: the extruder arms surrounding the platform with its hidden bath of milky fluid, the stainless steel tanks with their refrigerant, the laptop on its rolling cart, and the other jury-rigged electronics waiting for his touch. In the dark, everything is still possible, but once John turns on the lights, he’ll know for sure: either the Loom will be able to do what he promised Cal it would, or else he’ll have to come up with another plan, somehow, hours before Pinatubo is supposed to launch.
There’s no point in further delay. John squeezes his fist again, switches profiles: with Eury’s spoofed authorizations loaded, the lights come on, the machinery whirrs to life. The Loom’s interface is provisional, unfriendly, meant only for Eury, who likely wrote the code—but if John doesn’t know exactly how the console works, he at least knows how Eury thinks. Her program has a search function, but before he tries it he manually scrolls through the currently loaded database, checking Earthtrust’s progress:
AMERICAN BADGER AMERICAN MINK BLACK BEAR BOBCAT COYOTE ERMINE GRAY FOX LEAST WEASEL LONG-TAILED WEASEL RACCOON RED FOX RIVER OTTER STRIPED SKUNK WHITE-TAILED DEER EASTERN COYOTE GRAY WOLF PIPING PLOVER KIRTLAND’S WARBLER GREAT HORNED OWL EASTERN CHIPMUNK BLACK RATTLER MOUNTAIN LION VIRGINIA OPOSSUM ALLEGHENY WOODRAT AMERICAN BEAVER BROWN RAT COMMON MUSKRAT EASTERN CHIPMUNK EASTERN FOX SQUIRREL EASTERN GRAY SQUIRREL EASTERN HARVEST MOUSE HOUSE MOUSE MEADOW JUMPING MOUSE MEADOW VOLE . . .
The list goes on, but already John understands that this section of the Loom’s database is intensely local: this is all the fauna of Ohio, all the vanished species of the last century, endangered when he and Eury were children, lost in their lifetimes. Her plan to restock the world is, by necessity and by choice, also a plan to rebuild the world of their childhood. The Loom’s database is an expression of hope, fueled by ambition; the fact of its existence, like her zoo of lasts, is despair embodied.
John grips the laptop’s glass bezels, breathes deep, then begins to type: first he tries Eury’s name, then human female.
No. Too much hubris, even for Eury.
He searches everything he remembers about Eury, every story she’s told about herself. It won’t be randomized or scrambled. The entry will be a single word or a phrase, possibly a joke. It might, if he keeps scrolling, eventually jump out at him. But there are thousands of other entries in the database, so many animals and plants already missing, waiting to be restored.
All her life, Eury has loved her name, loved the myth it referenced. He thinks of the story she told him the day they visited the Loom for the first time. Eurydice, the girl trapped in the underworld, doomed by the weakness of men. Me and not me, she’d said once, correcting the story even as she told it. I’m not her, I’m who she would have been, in a better story. The one who escapes, the one who saves herself, the one who is enough to save everyone else.
Eury always tells the part of the story she likes best, but that’s not the whole myth. Before Eurydice went down to the underworld, before she was married off to mortal man, she was a creature of the forest, a spirit of natural places, an integral part of the wonder and the splendor and the abundance.
John types nymph into the console, hits a few other keys.
A moment later, the Loom awakens.
At first, the printing of a woman isn’t so different from the printing of a wolf.
It begins with the opening of the radial trapdoor, the blue-white base liquid filling the hollow, sloshing like a bathtub of buttermilk; the extruders beginning to move, their whirring confident, precise. John watches in mixed horror and fascination, an unimagined voyeurism: this is Eury Mirov, his childhood friend, his once-upon-a-time love. This is the making of her organs—her heart, her lungs—all their bloody mess slowly caged in by a rack of bones; this is the bones threaded with blood vessels and marrow. Her brain, printed in layers; her teeth, built up exactly opposite of how John imagines they might be ground down; her tongue, a slab of muscle slid into the mouth and fastened into place. This is the breathing tube snaking into her throat, ready to inflate her lungs. This is her stomach tucked into its right place, her intestines coiled to fill her abdomen. This is the manufacture of the scar tissue around her missing uterus, evidence of the partial hysterectomy she had a decade ago, her recovery the only time John can remember Eury even slightly out of control, pain medication making her tell him stories he’d never heard, dreams of a surreal imagined world, an emotional landscape he hadn’t known she’d tended. Eury floating through green forests, Eury living alone in a glade—
No, not a glade. What was it she had called it? A similar but different word.
A dale. In Eury’s dreams, she had lived in a dale.
“You were there too,” she’d said, her pupils wide, irises obliterated by painkillers.
“You were there, but you weren’t you,” she’d said, and then she’d held her hands to the sides of her head, splayed her fingers, wiggled them. Hands made horns, maybe antlers.
“Spooky,” she’d said, then laughed. A laugh he hadn’t liked, that she hadn’t liked either.
This is Eury’s body, exactly as John remembers it. This is that body being zippered shut, skin stitched to skin. This is the chest heaving shallowly, mechanical breath being forced into the lungs. This is the moment when padded grips descend to hold the body in place, to immobilize the chest and the legs and the head.
This is electroshock, jolts applied to start the heart. This is the same drone-song
that played when the wolf came to life: John’s skin crawling, his teeth aching at the digitized scream screeched out, looped, repeated at various speeds. This is the final touch: one more extruder reaches down, its arm swiveling on articulated joints, holding a circular port in its steel grip.
The printed Eury thrashes her head, causing the paddles astride her skull to tighten as the arm aligns the port with the base of the neck, then punches it in. The clone tries to scream, the sound swallowed by her breathing tube; her wet flailing kicks pound the hollow tub, their clangs reverberating about the soundproof room; she slackens as the tentacle-arm retracts, momentarily silent as the paddles release her, as the milky liquid drains from the Loom’s chamber.
John watches the clone breathing, this new Eury alive in the same lived-in body John has known: an old scar blazes behind her right shoulder, reprinted exactly as it was, and there’s a raised bit of burn tissue on her forearm, where she injured herself on a college lab Bunsen burner; he recognizes a once familiar constellation of tiny moles reprinted on Eury’s neck, descending the left side of her chest. The skin around the implanted port in her neck is puckered and raised, future scar tissue forming around the steel. It’s an ugly wound, holding some kind of networkable module, perhaps with a faster processor and higher capacity than a pebble, but cruder, crueler.
John clenches his fist, directs his pebble to send out a series of exploratory pings.
The module responds quickly, at first sending back only an identifier: E-5. Whatever else the module is capable of remains a mystery, but he won’t figure it out by standing here staring. He covers the clone with a printed blanket, slides it under her body, lifts her to his chest. Her hair’s wet, her skin soft; she smells, he realizes, exactly the way new babies smell.
A moment later, she blinks open her eyes, her vision momentarily blurred; when John’s face comes into focus, she starts with surprise; then, in a voice John has known nearly his entire life, this new Eury begins to speak.