by Matt Bell
Engrossed in his work, Chapman doesn’t hear Nathaniel approach, doesn’t know he’s there until he wordlessly touches Chapman’s all-too-human shoulder.
“Brother,” Chapman says, reaching up to take his brother’s hand. “We don’t have to go.”
Chapman turns toward Nathaniel’s beloved face, finds it momentarily untwisted with anger or drink but sagged with age, freckled and mottled by sun and wind. Chapman has been learning to be a man for years now, while alongside him Nathaniel has become partly an animal: his skin like leather, his hair and beard bright white fur, his ears and nostrils spilling more hair; his fingers yellowed, rheumatoid and tobacco stained, his cloudy fingernails sharp as talons.
“If we go,” Nathaniel says, “I will give up the cider, I will get my health back, we will walk to the edge of the world if that’s what it takes for us both to be free.” An old gleam enters his eyes, as when he first talked about the manifest destiny of man, how this new continent would be made the kingdom of heaven on earth. “I don’t want to die here, brother, drunk beneath a blanket. I don’t want to die here wheezing, you beside me in a skin that isn’t yours.”
Chapman begins to object, but Nathaniel waves him off.
“I should never have brought you here. We could’ve kept going west. There will always be more frontier, more wilderness—that is the one thing I believe this country will never lack. Somewhere awaits us where you could’ve been what you are, where we could’ve hurt no one, not even each other.
“I stole your life,” Nathaniel says, quiet tears rolling down his wrinkled cheeks, carving his canyoned face into deeper relief. “I stole your life and I am sorry.”
Stoic Nathaniel, steady Chapman. Brothers still, brothers forever.
Chapman takes his brother in his arms. They have never embraced like this, or else it’s been so many decades neither can remember whatever childish hugs they might’ve shared. “I took everything from you,” Chapman says, “and never paid my debt.”
“West then,” Nathaniel says, his grip surer than it has been in years. “As far west as we can walk. To plant a place all our own, from which no man might make me leave.”
By June they’ve traveled farther southwest than they’ve ever been, finding the land in far Indiana not nearly as dense with forest or swamp as wild Ohio was. The brothers are quiet this season, both given to their own reveries; later Chapman will wish they had spoken more, but even at their most gregarious, he and Nathaniel were often silent for days. Despite their recent strife, they long ago said most of what they might say: they have praised and blamed, accused and coddled, played and rejoiced and celebrated. It’s rarely possible for one to have a thought the other doesn’t know, everything revealed except for those Chapman holds back: what he saw in the ten years he spent in the flicker, its other whens he still lacks the language to reveal; and the first encounter with the witches and the singer, a story Nathaniel never quite believed. Even the day the giant trapper was killed, even then Nathaniel couldn’t have seen the wild women or the beasts they became, not as far back from the fight as he was, uselessly loading his musket.
Only now does Chapman realize Nathaniel must have thought it was Chapman who killed the giant trapper. For all these years he’s believed his brother the faun was also his brother the murderer, capable of dismembering a man.
No wonder Nathaniel took to drinking.
Even without his faunish shape, Chapman remains a dowser for nurseries, able as ever to sense land primed to flourish. This year, he chooses a meadow enclosed in a curve of untouched forest, flat land dotted with only a few sturdy birches, bounded by a gentle stream burbling over smooth rocks. There’s no reason to hurry: they will have to plow and till the meadow, but they don’t have to cut many trees or remove many boulders. When the brothers finish one row of planting they pause at the nursery’s far edge, resting overlong in the threshold of grass between the orchard to come and the first brambles and briars of the existing forest, all the life that lived here first.
They finish in the late afternoon of the twelfth day: all the seeds they brought west with them are almost exactly enough, buried now beneath the black dirt wild Indiana prepared for them, a gift of loam and humus, of dense soil ready to sprout whatever it’s given.
Afterward, Nathaniel falls asleep in the grass with his felt hat over his sunburned face. Chapman waits until Nathaniel begins to snore, then undresses quietly, puddling his clothes in the shade before wandering away along the nearby stream, looking for a hidden place he might go alone to remake himself, as Nathaniel promised he could.
How many years has it been since Chapman last wore the faun? A decade has been spent safely in civilized land, playing simple apple planter, earnest homesteader, no longer any wild creature. It’s been years since he last dreamed of the witches, longer since he last heard the beheaded singer’s song in the wind, long enough he sometimes pretends they’re as much legend and myth as this Johnny Appleseed, who Chapman knows is no real person at all. It’s been enough years he could almost choose to believe he was never a faun, instead making his memories of running free on powerful hooves into some hallucination or injury, something he made up to pass the infernal hours spent walking the frontier of this country, hours wasted planting thousands of apple seeds that brought exactly nothing, neither money nor magic. Perhaps the faunish days he remembers were just a fancy of youth like the stories Eliza Worth loves to tell, fairy tales and myths full of trickster shapeshifters and lost princes, capricious gods and clever girls and evil stepmothers, all transplanted to wild America from more civilized Germany and France and Greece.
But it wouldn’t be true. He knows what he is, what he might be in any shape he appears.
His last transformation, on the day the witches murdered the wolf trapper, had been nearly effortless, masterfully controlled. Now he feels an uneasy sluggishness as he tries to reclaim his first shape from wherever or whenever it is he’s stored it.
At first nothing happens. At first nothing happens in waves. The nothing rushes over him until Chapman’s sure he’s stuck, this plan to come west pursued to no avail, if its purpose was to let him be himself. He’s dismayed but he can’t give up. He persists, he insists, he pulls his body in, he folds his graying fallible human body in on itself, bending his shape until he feels the man squeezing its way back inside the faun, turning his skin inside out as it goes.
Immediately he realizes he’s not the same faun he was, not exactly. Back in his fur, standing on his hooves, he feels the faun’s age arrive not with the gradualness of lived life but with a sudden violence, his every physical deprivation a blow against the image he’s held on to all these years: he lifts a hand and sees graying fur, sees how his claws are as yellowed by age as Nathaniel’s fingernails; when he reaches up to grip his horns, his joints pop and complain.
Chapman curses. All the last years of his youth, wasted hidden inside the body of a man. He takes a few experimental steps on his hooves, then bounds a bit faster, leaping onto a series of mossy boulders, losing his balance as he misses a jump. The unfamiliarity of this aged body, its locomotion different from that of the one he’s worn too many years. He crouches beside the stream’s pool, lowering his face toward the wavering reflection dappled across the water’s surface. He explores the crags of his cheeks, fingers probing ravines dug by time on the face he’d tucked away, wider and stranger than the face he wears as a man. The golden eyes are spaced farther apart, slanted in toward his broad nose, the nostrils flaring, his broad lips chapped and scowling. His whole horn at least remains the same shape as always, spiraled tight against the right side of his skull, gleaming white gold in the sunlight, but the broken one looks worse than ever, its keratin thinned, in danger of further cracking.
Stunned, Chapman strikes the surface of the stream’s pool, splashes himself apart. He sits his trousered rump on a moss-covered stone, then startles when the stone gives beneath him. Not a stone at all, but a stump: sixteen inches high, a rough ba
ll of old bark covered in another inch of moss. Chapman claws free a mossy strand, then digs into the softer wood below to find hidden veins flush with chlorophyll. He scans the surrounding trees, searching for an answer: How is this thwarted trunk alive? What is this unlikely persistence of life? Because it lives on by the gifts of its neighbors, their hidden roots tangled in its withering root ball, delivering doses of water and nutrients; the forest is a community of thriving life, and man will have to do worse than this to break its bonds. From this seat, Chapman hears deer walking the same paths he took to arrive in this place; he hears trout moving against the river’s current, scales shuffling over rocks; if he concentrates he detects the gentle splash of skittering water bugs.
He remembers, all at once, a day twenty years ago, when he wandered the deep, uncut wild forests of the Territory, when for one afternoon—maybe the only afternoon like it in his life—he wanted nothing. Now he knows everything he saw that season is gone. Every singing bird nesting in the tallest trees, every lizard skittering over the granite boulders. The bear cub snuffling in the underbrush, the elk does he encountered at the salt lick, that sacred ground stuck through with mammoth fossils. The river gone, diverted. The salt lick drained with the swamp. Every movable rock removed, made into houses and forts, walls and fences; every tree cut to make way for fields or pastures, taken downriver to build some other settlement. The grasses burned, the flowering bushes pulled. Everything turned over to what pleases men, to fulfill what men desire.
Arrived in the future he foresaw that day, Chapman mourns the self-willed world he’d known then, a world where, in return for his not wanting anything, it for a time gave him everything it had. Here he is in some place still equally self-willed, where everything he sees claims its own way. Small god souls in everything: he’d nearly forgotten. He doesn’t believe in the deity his brother worships, nor the one whose word Jasper Worth preaches, but he does believe in this: that every creature and every growing thing and every unique place might be its own small god.
He believes, but he hasn’t always acted like he believes. He spent his whole life wanting something from the trees he planted, something magic could not offer, instead of accepting everything they gave. A life with a brother; a life outdoors under sun and moon, in fair weather and foul; a life where they always had exactly as much as they needed and no more. It could have been enough, if only they’d ceased their wanting.
And isn’t it too late now for these thoughts?
Isn’t he only an old faun, an old and stupid faun still allowed to do too much harm?
If he stays in this shape, the witches will come. After the vision he saw in the flicker, the first night he met them, he’d thought they wanted to punish him for something done in a past life, something out of a story. But when he saw what they did to the trapper, he also understood what the witches would soon do to prevent the future men had chosen from manifesting: the settlements they would undo by violence and disease, the livestock slaughtered and the crops withered. A warning, and not only to him.
The witches are not winning, if winning means holding back the settlers’ march. But still he could have listened better, still he might’ve been turned from his path. Now that he’s returned to this shape inside which there can be no hiding, he thinks they will come to find him. And when they appear, surely it won’t be only to tell him one more time what they’ve already told him plenty of times before.
Back in the new nursery, Nathaniel sits atop the broadest of the nursery’s fresh stumps, surrounded by yesterday’s sawdust. Nathaniel worn down to bones, Nathaniel old and emptied out, Nathaniel smiling and joyous and more present, this last passage through the country his first sober journey in years, the first happy one in longer. Now all bitterness is absent, at least for the hour: for a decade Chapman and Nathaniel have worked man beside man, but as Chapman returns in the shape he was born in, Nathaniel beams at the sight.
“Brother,” Nathaniel says. “I missed you, brother.” His voice is gravelly, an old man’s voice; he is an old man speaking with the same affection as the fifteen-year-old boy who saved infant Chapman, who gifted that infant their father’s name, who designed this whole apple-planting folly so his uncivilized sibling could have some way to live.
“And I you, brother,” says Chapman, and as always the word brother—this word they have said to each other a thousand thousand times, a word as abundant as the many seeds they’ve planted—the word brother forces his heart into faster movement. There’s so much Chapman hasn’t had, but he has had a brother. A brother is enough. A brother is a magnificent thing, a gift given and a gift returned in kind, wherever one brother brothers the other.
Nathaniel keeps his seat on the sawn trunk, his elderly legs kicking childishly against the wood. Chapman sets about building their fire, bounding back to the stream for a potful of cool, clean water, a handful of wild carrots spied growing nearby. He makes a simple broth—vegetables and salt and river water—he silently brings it to a boil while the world speaks with a gentle breeze rustling the trees, with birds who cry out warnings about the faun and the man in their midst, their calls beautiful despite their alarm.
Chapman pours the broth into their battered and dented tin cups, then joins Nathaniel upon his stump. There isn’t enough room to be beside each other, so they sit back to back, each sipping from his cup, each smoking his pipe. Chapman hears Nathaniel’s booted heels tapping the trunk on one side; Nathaniel listens to the softer tap of Chapman’s hooves doing the same. Chapman’s taller than Nathaniel, at least as a faun; his older brother leans back his heavy head, resting it between Chapman’s bare shoulder blades.
The sun sets, darkness falls, the wind picks up, blowing newly, easily, across the cleared space of the nursery. The brothers shiver back to back, they shiver their flesh against each other’s skin. Chapman takes his pipe from his mouth, lets it go cool in his hand. He closes his eyes, listens. For this moment, he is just Chapman, just one faun alive in this one unique moment with his brother, both of them alive in this hour and alive in the next and alive in the one after—until, in some other after, it’s only Chapman who is alive, asleep and dreaming, so that it isn’t until he awakes in the predawn darkness with his brother’s cold weight against him that he realizes Nathaniel has passed in the night.
Chapman buries his brother beside the sawn trunk they shared, digging up rows to make Nathaniel a grave, then replanting the closed ground with the leathern bag’s last handful of seeds. The trees here will grow from Nathaniel’s body, each tree expressing whatever attributes it carries in its seed, the endless randomization of an ungrafted apple tree. In death, what was Nathaniel will continue the brothers’ work, not across the nation coming into being but here in this one unique place, a place exactly unlike every other.
By the time the task is done, the sun is rising. Threshold time, doorway time, the liminal space, the light of the rising sun limning living Chapman. He huffs, drops his head, waits for what tears will come. He’s been a man so long his restored faunness surprises him every time he sees it: the furred legs, the black hooves. Whatever sadness Chapman feels, the emotion lasts exactly until he hears the song, its sound robbing him of his grief: the beheaded singer, his blasted funeral dirge, his elegy made physical pain.
Chapman raises his horned head, snorts in anger.
They’re here.
John
Where is Eury Mirov while her empire burns? First Beijing, where, after nearly three days of silent captive acquiescence, she begins speaking again. In flawless Chinese, she convinces the military police standing guard to free her from the Zhongnanhai cell where she’s been held since the interruption of her speech. Upon her release, she’s taken to the office of the general secretary, where without preamble or apology she begins pressuring him to send his troops into the Sichuan VAC to stabilize the uprising there, and to do it fast, before the terrorists, as she calls them, breach the Tower. It’s the Tower Eury wants protected, more than the land, more
than the livestock or the crops or the infrastructure the Communist Party’s funded.
“Everything else can be rebuilt or replanted or regrown,” she tells the general secretary. “But the Towers have to last the day.”
The general secretary doesn’t share Eury’s motivations: he reminds her of his security council veto of Pinatubo. Any setback there is a positive. “You have your own soldiers,” he says, but Eury presses for assistance: the resistance is too sudden, too expertly dispersed. The general secretary waves a hand, gives in. China needs the VAC to feed its cities, will acquiesce to keep the population from starving, from revolting again. Better they fight Earthtrust than Beijing.
Reunited with her China-based security team, Eury flies for Brussels. Midflight, she appears in Syracuse, where she screams for the president to mobilize the National Guard, the army, whatever he can. But the Farm—and all the Sacrifice Zone, and all the Midwest between the Farm and St. Louis—is completely under Earthtrust’s administration: it’s her soldiers who will have to fight, he says, not his. They are, as always, speaking alone. Eury doesn’t negotiate in front of others, never subjects her demands to public scrutiny. This rung’s security detail waits outside, the president’s Secret Service escort standing guard beside them.
In the cheap replica of the Oval Office, Eury slaps the American president across the face. It doesn’t change his mind, but there’s nothing he can do to punish her. “Then your people will starve,” she says, all the while thinking, If John were here, he would object: Are the Americans not her people too?
Perhaps not, not anymore.
An hour later, in Moscow, the Russians give her everything she asks for, but only if she agrees to pull Earthtrust out of Ukraine. She picks up a phone, gives the order. By nightfall, the Ukraine VAC will be completely dark. Better one country starves than every country. Besides, she doesn’t need every VAC for Pinatubo to succeed. Only most of them.