I wasn’t that smart—I just liked going along for the ride. Sundays were one of the only times of the week when I didn’t feel lonely, when I wasn’t consciously aware of how few friends—real friends, I mean—I had.
Reader: What about your Mom? Did she go with you?
Hardly ever, actually. She was either working an overnight at the hospital or at home, training in the gym she’d set up in the garage. She looked forward to Sundays, too, though, because she loved having the house to herself. Sometimes my Mom would joke that maybe she should live in another house, separate from our house, “where I can train in peace and quiet,” she snorted.
“Train for what?” I asked her once, and she sort of glared at me.
“I’m just kidding—you know that,” she said.
When my Mom wasn’t working or training, she would read. Sometimes I’d read next to her. We wouldn’t talk—my Mom would smoke, and sometimes I would eat chips—but I guess I thought I could connect to my mother through the books, if that makes any sense.
Anyway, it was usually just the three of us on Sundays. And every trip to the flea market began the same way: my Dad steered the truck past the tables toward a parking spot while my sister scanned the tables for any potential deals. “Aisle—five,” my sister said one Sunday. “ ’Bout halfway back.”
“The mirror?”
“The bureau.”
“Is that oak?” My Dad said.
“I can’t tell,” my sister said.
Then we’d park the truck in the fields and the two of them would go charging through the grass toward the bureau.
I went off on my own, meanwhile, looking for used books. I’m not talking about the bound brochures they forced you to read in school—the pages that made a sucking sound when you looked at them, that made your eyes sting and your ears echo. I’m talking about true mysteries and war stories like the ones that you could buy for a theory or two or sometimes even find for free at the Appleseed Recycling Center. It’s weird: until I was twelve or so, I couldn’t have cared less about books or reading. One afternoon that winter, though, I found a truebook on a low shelf in our living room. The book was called The Appleseed Strangler. I remember opening it up, seeing all the words trapped there on the page, and feeling an affinity for them. Holding in so many words, I myself sometimes felt like a book—like a cage for sentences.
As I was sprawled out on the living-room floor that day, reading about the Appleseed Strangler, a shadow flashed across the carpet. It was my Mom. “Good story, huh?” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Wait until you get to the end—the hanging,” she said.
Two days later my Mom took me to the Appleseed Free Library, where she signed me up for a card and let me check out two books of my choice. Ever since, I’d collected and read as many books as I could find: murder mysteries, histories, histrionics, fallbacks, toronados, you name it.
One day, though, I was sitting next to my Mom at the Library and reading a fallback when I saw a sentence on the page itch itself. “Woah!” I said.
“What?” she hissed.
“That sentence just moved!” I said.
My Mom scorned. She had this one particular scorn that she saved just for me: her whole face squinted, like she was staring into a fierce wind.
“There it goes again!” I said. “It just changed, from—”
“,” she hissed. “Be quiet. You’re embarrassing m—”
“Now it’s running off the page!”
She grabbed the book from me, closed it, and led me down the red-carpeted stairs and outside. And that was the last time she took me to the Library.
I still continued going to the Library myself, though. When I wasn’t kicking around commas or other dead language out back, I spent almost all of my free time reading in my room in the basement. That basement was dark and cold, and the reading helped me keep warm.
Most of the books in the Library were old, though; for newer trues, the flea bee was a much better bet. All of the local dealers set up tables: Psyches from the Rebel Peddler, Old Gordon from Appleseed Books, Kathy from Sue’s Mysteries, Del from Wilbur’s. They brought bestsellers, overstocks, oddities, you name it. And since I stopped by every week, all of them knew me by name.
Sometimes, though, you found the best fleabooks at the occasionals: a hey who just liked to read; a forget with some swashbidders that they found in the attic and just want to unload. As I was scanning the tables for titles that day, for example, I saw a pig in a van pulling boxes out of his truck. Most of the boxes held tools and old board games, but some of the boxes had books in them. I looked through them, pretending to be only mildly interested. In my skull, though, my thoughts were shouting. “Look—warbooks!” one said. “There’s a self-help!” said another. “And a historical!” said a third.
I held up a book called The Absolutely True Story of the Northampton-Appleseed War. “How much for this one?” I said.
The pig was sweating; he winced as he stood. “Two theories for the hardcovers, one for paperbacks,” he said.
“Take one and a half?”
He thought about it. Then he said, “Sure.”
I tried to keep my thoughts cool as I paid the pig and walked away from the table, but I was thrilled. I loved warbooks—the wars’ personal lives, their political leanings, their dispositions. Wars were mysteries to me, even though I used to see them frequently in Appleseed.
Reader: Wars? In Appleseed?
Sure—you saw them all the time. Most of them were quiet, some so subtle you wouldn’t even know they were there unless you were looking for them. Once, maybe about a year later, I was waiting for my Mom at the hair salon when I noticed a war sitting under one of the hair dryers a few seats over. She was knitting, and when I looked over she smiled politely.
“What are you knitting?” I said.
“A graveyard,” said the war.
Then my Mom stood up from the hairdresser’s chair, studied her buzz cut in the mirror, and told me we were leaving.
I found my sister and father on the other side of the flea—they were carrying the heavy bureau toward the truck. “What’d you find, ?” said my Dad.
I held up my book.
“Grab a corner, will you?” my sister asked.
I put my book under my arm and took a corner of the bureau. Trying to fit in, I said, “Is this oak?”
“Duh,” said my sister.
“Bri,” said my Dad. “Be nice. It is oak, .”
We moved the bureau onto the bed of the truck; then we got in the cab and drove toward the exit. It was later now, seven a.m. or so, and more people were arriving. By now, my Dad would say, all the deals were gone—everything meaningful had already been bought or traded.
My Dad steered the truck onto the dirt road. “Gus and Paul’s?” he said.
“Or Bagel Beagle,” I said.
“Gus and Paul’s,” my sister said.
“OK, ?” said my Dad.
“Sure,” I said.
We drove through West Appleseed and five pages east to Gus & Paul’s, the best bakery in town. As we bumped along the city streets, I leaned my head against the cold window and read the first pages of my truebook.
The hallowed mystery of the Northampton-Appleseed War still bellows in the pause of night. While the war itself was originally believed to have died in truce in 1965, most now believe that to be a hoax. Some say the war moved to Shelburne Falls and died there, under an assumed name, in 1979. Others say the war still lives down in the Quabbin or high on Appleseed Mountain. This book offers no speculations as to the war’s current whereabouts. Rather, The Absolutely True Story of the Northampton-Appleseed War chronicles the facts: when the war began, why, where he was last seen, what those who knew him say about his personality, his love life, and his groundbreaking philosophies—his unique way of looking at the world.
Gus & Paul’s was humming with activity—it seemed like all of Appleseed was there. We stood in l
ine for twenty minutes before finally stepping up to the glass case. “A dozen water rolls,” my Dad said to the fluffy hat behind the counter, “and whatever these guys want.”
The fluffy hat moved over to the glass case.
“Cider Creme, please,” Briana said.
“?” said my Dad.
Everything looked so delicious. “I’ll take one of those,” I said, “and one of those, and one of those.”
“One thing only, Fatty,” my sister said, nudging me.
I looked to my Dad. “Can I get two?” I said.
It wasn’t until years later that I put apple and seed together: that I realized how meaningless we were. I didn’t know, for example, that my Dad skipped lunch all those years; that he had to beg his own truck to get him to work sometimes; that he’d borrowed meaning, by that point, from everyone he knew.
“Whatever he wants,” my Dad told the hat, and I pointed to pastry after pastry. The hat collected them in a brown box, tied them with a small white string, and handed the box over the counter. I reached up for the box and took it.
SENTENCE THE SENTENCE
Sentence was my friend, probably my only true friend through the mothering, the forging—most of my high school years, really. Everyone has their pet expressions, but Sentence was something more. For a long time, that expression was the only thing that really understood me.
I found Sentence while working with my father at Belmont, one of the two apartment buildings that he owned and managed. He bought them in the early 1980s, during a meaningful time in Appleseed when the town still ran on apples. Led by the Memory of Johnny Appleseed himself, who once lived and groved here, Appleseed’s apple industry thrived; we sold apple pies, apple cider, appleburgers, applefish, apple chicken, apple pad thai, even apple art made from cores and stems. Something like ninety percent of all the apples in Massachusetts were grown in Appleseed, and people came from all over New England in search of meaning in the apple trade.
My father didn’t know the first thing about apples, but he was a skilled handyman, trained by his father—the Rabbit Eater—in the arts of tenancy and the mysteries of landlording. When we first moved to Appleseed, my Dad worked as a caretaker for a local moustache, answering service calls—heating, plumbing, maintenance—for any one of nine apartment buildings in the downtown. Then the moustache went gray and started selling off his property, and my Dad took out a second mortgage on our house to buy the two least meaningful buildings of the lot. It was a risk—they were located in an iffy neighborhood—but my Dad hoped to translate sweat into meaning.
It didn’t turn out that way, though; the buildings were more stubborn and mysterious than he’d bargained for. Drunk plumbing, missing rooms, snoring wires, you name it—tenants called with problems at all hours of the night. Remember that story I told you a few streets back, about driving to The Ear’s house?
Reader: Sure. To get a “stetch” or something.
A steth—a four-meter foundation stethoscope, which we needed to investigate a strange scratching sound coming from the foundation of Woodside. When my Dad put the listener against the rock, though, he frowned and swore. “Christ,” he said. “Something in the soil.”
“What?” I asked.
He put the headphones over my ears. I heard a steady scratching. “What is that?” I said.
My Dad shook his head.
“Termites?”
One of the whatevers burped in my ear.
“Those would be some big fucking termites,” my Dad said.
My Dad prayed to Armin, an exterminator who’d work for meaning under the table, and he tested the soil all around Woodside. After studying the page fibers, Armin declared the problem to be doubts.
“Sorry?” said my Dad, as we stood on the page.
“Doubts,” Armin said.
“Doubts, are you sure?”
Armin nodded. “You know what’s funny? I’ve been getting more and more of these calls.”
My Dad raised an eyebrow. “I have trouble believing that.”
“It’s true,” said Armin.
Armin had to instill the soil with confidence, which cost a shitload. And that was just one of dozens of mysteries and problems that stumped my father. The buildings were just too much for him to manage alone. Soon he started paying his brother Joump to help him with odd jobs. He enlisted me and my sister, too. My father taught me some of the basic hows—insulation, foyer mediation, missing room listening—but like I said, my sister was the one with the real talent. She really immersed herself in it, reading truebooks on wainscoting and ancient plastering techniques, learning special chants for plumbing and lighting and landscaping, mastering all of the old building arts.
Anyway, I’m getting off track—I was telling you about Sentence the sentence. One day when I was about twelve, my Dad and I were patching up some stucco at Belmont when I saw this eager statement reading through the grass. “Hey,” I said to it, but my Dad stood up and imposed over it. “Shoo!” he said.
“Hey, buddy,” I said to the sentence.
“Git!” my Dad yelled. “You git! Git out of here!”
The sentence skimmed off.
“Dad! What the hell?” I said.
“It’s a stray, ,” my Dad said. “It’s just begging for food.”
“I have some seconds for it,” I said.
“Don’t even think about it,” said my Dad. “What have I told you about feeding wild sentences?”
This was in 1987, when stray language was everywhere in Appleseed. I know that’s hard to believe now—now that every word is counted, and counted on, and counted toward—but in those days it wasn’t strange to see verbing on Epstein Street, infinitives running through the deadgroves. Growing up in Appleseed, you were taught how to respond to wild language. If you saw a semicolon, you paused for a second. If you saw a preposition, you let it pass by you—to the left, or to the right, or over your head.
My Dad couldn’t come with me to Belmont the next day—he had to go see Fox, a master welder in the western margin—so I went back to Belmont myself. When I got there, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was cutting the grass using an old manual mower. My Dad had a gas-powered one in the basement, but the Memory liked this one. For a while, I could hear the swishy blades of the mower as the Memory shoved it forward. Then he finished, put the mower away, and walked off.
I was adding a third coat of stucco, though, when I felt the breath of words on my ankle. I turned and saw the sentence looking up at me.
“Hey there,” I said. I petted the sentence, and it made a sound. I could tell from its words and its eyes that it meant me no harm. Hark, it was only a newborn—just a subject and a verb: “I am.” That was the whole sentence!
I reached into my pocket and found some seconds and minutes—timecrumbs I carried with me just in case I was late or my thoughts wandered. The sentence leaned in and ate right out of my palm. The poor thing was starving! It finished the seconds and sort of stumbled toward me. Suddenly, I was holding the sentence in my arms.
What was I supposed to do—push it away? Abandon it? These words would die out here. Who would feed them and read them if not for me?
I held “I am.” in my arms while I packed up my tools. Then I sat the sentence on the handlebars of my Bicycle Built for Two and started pedaling home. “Hold on tight!” I told the sentence, and it did—it squinted its eyes as the wind ran through its “I” and “a.”
I got back to 577 just as my Dad’s pickup was turning into the driveway. I hopped off the bike and wrapped the sentence in my coat. My Dad stepped out of the truck and slammed the door. “Well?” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
The sentence was making noises: whimpers and nouns.
“Djou finish?” my Dad said.
“Yup,” I said.
“It doesn’t need another layer?”
“I don’t—” The sentence started bucking and kicking. “Don’t think so,” I said.
“It either does
or it doesn’t,” my Dad said.
Just then, the sentence kicked me in the stomach and I lost my grip on it. The words leapt out of my coat and ran across the driveway and onto the grass.
“Whoa!” my Dad said, leaping back. He stepped into the grass and leaned over the quivering words. “Goddammit, ,” he said. “What did I say?”
“I know,” I said.
“What did I say?”
“It was hungry!”
“You fed it?” my Dad said. “You never feed stray language. It won’t leave you alone now!”
The sentence looked up at my father, and then at me.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said.
“What do you mean?” said my Dad. “As a pet? No. . No.”
“I’ll walk it and feed it.”
“Feed it what?”
“Minutes,” I said.
“And keep it where?”
“I’ll keep it in the basement.”
“It’ll shit and piss all over the place,” my Dad said.
“I’ll make sure that it doesn’t.”
“You know your mother has a strict no-language-in-the-house policy,” said my Dad.
“It won’t make a sound—I promise.”
My Dad sighed. “What about the smell?”
“It doesn’t have a smell,” I said.
“All language smells,” he said. “I can smell that thing from here—it stinks of adjectives.”
“I’ll keep it clean,” I said.
The sentence read over to me and stopped at my heel.
“Shee-it,” my Dad said, and shook his head.
That afternoon he took me to Brightwood Hardware, which had a pet store in the basement, to buy some supplies for the sentence: a cage, a collar, a leash. When we browsed the aisles for food, though, we didn’t see anything. My Dad found a clip-on tie stocking shelves and asked him if the store carried any food for words.
“For what?” said the tie. He was old and faded.
“Food for sentences?” my Dad said, and I held up “I am.”
“I don’t think we—” the tie looked confused. “Let me—I’ll check.” He disappeared behind a curtain and never came back.
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