enough that deer were unlikely to want their tougher leaves. Even as he built them he worried that the fences might send a signal to Sadie, tempting her to mischief she had not even thought of.
Luckily spring was such a busy time of year that she was unlikely to visit the orchard. There was too much to do: plowing and planting fields of oats and corn, digging and planting the kitchen garden, repairing roofs, cleaning out the barn and the house. While James worked with Nathan and Caleb in the fields, Sal and Martha dug the garden, and Robert swung between garden and field, helping whoever needed it most.
Because she did not like digging and did not mind making her daughters do it, Sadie mostly stayed out of the garden, and spring-cleaned the house after the long winter, throwing back the doors and windows, sweeping and scrubbing and beating and dusting. This was when she could be bothered. Sadie had never been very house-proud, not even back east. She was even less interested in it in Ohio, where it was harder to keep clean. She would get an idea into her head that something needed to be done—the quilts aired, for instance. Then she would make a great show of stringing a rope between two trees and bringing out the quilts to hang up and beat. Inevitably she would carry too much at once, and drag the ends through the mud so that they had to be scrubbed—not by Sadie, who never liked to fix what she had broken. Sal, or more likely Martha, would have to boil water and wash out the mud. By then Sadie would have moved on to another task, such as scrubbing every surface with so much vinegar that the sour acrid smell drove the family outside again. She moved between extremes: attractive when she was loving, which wasn’t often these days; or, more often, unpredictable, vicious or indifferent. James had to remind himself of the lively girl in the blue dress who had wrapped her legs around him and laughed. That Sadie was long gone, left somewhere in a field in Connecticut, the dress faded to the color of the sky.
At least she did not touch his grafts. After the declaration of war and the letting loose of the cow, she let it drop—typical of Sadie. James did not trust her, though. She might be addled with applejack most of the time, but she did not forget grudges. Indeed, she seemed to relish holding tight to them.
One April day after they had finished plowing and planting the fields, James was walking through the woods along one of the old Indian trails they didn’t use much, looking for muskrat push-ups he could set snares near, when he became aware of a green haze overhead. The leaves on the trees had come out, small and new and creased like a summer quilt that has been folded away during the winter months and needs a day or two of shaking out to become smooth. Although he knew that unless God had other, apocalyptic plans, it would happen every year, James was always caught off guard by the leaves’ appearance. He thought he had been keeping a close watch, yet they still managed to surprise him so that he never caught the midpoint between closed bud and open leaf.
With his eyes on the leaves, he stepped into a mudhole that slopped over the top of his boots and stank of rot. James cursed and stopped to shake them out. This was why his children often went through the swamp barefoot—it was easier washing your feet than getting boots clean of swamp mud. But James hated the squelching clay between his toes, and preferred the civility of shoes.
When he stood up again he noticed, just off the path, a gray-brown boll plastered around the sawn-off branch of a wild apple tree, a small wand sticking up out of it. It was the tree he’d once eaten sour fruit from when he was desperate for the taste of apples.
He stepped up to the graft, but didn’t even need to examine it to know it was Robert’s work, for it looked exactly like a graft James himself would have made. There was no one within a hundred miles who could copy him so well. Not only that: the graft had taken, with buds on the scions close to bursting into leaves. He couldn’t be sure until it flowered, but he suspected the blossoms would be tinged the pink of Golden Pippins. Robert was thinking ahead, cultivating an apple tree out of Sadie’s way. James smiled at his son’s foresight.
Though he should have gone on to look for signs of muskrats—the drag of their tails, the underwater entrance in the stream he was following—James instead did something a settler would never normally do during the busy springtime when food stores are still low and there is so much work to be done. He did nothing. Lowering himself onto a damp log, he sat and looked at the green fuzz taking over the trees, at the birds flitting through the branches as they built nests, at the trout lilies and trilliums and Dutchman’s breeches at his feet and at the graft his son had created at a safe remove from Sadie and her wrath.
Gradually he relaxed on the log in a way he never could around people. He liked to note the cycle of the trees through the seasons, with their leaves unfurling to an intense green, then flaring and browning and falling. Trees did not talk back, or willfully disobey, or laugh at him. They were not here to torment him; indeed, they were not here for him at all. James’ sitting under them did not matter one way or another, and for that he was profoundly grateful.
He contemplated the grafted Golden Pippin before him, and wondered how long it would manage to grow before the Black Swamp got to it with mildew or mold or rot. Humid swampland, full of grasses and reeds and trees run wild, was not ideal for an apple tree—though the wild one had managed somehow.
James sighed and looked down at his hands, roughened and scarred from years of the worst kind of hard work—the futile kind. After nine years he knew he should have gotten used to the life here. The Goodenoughs were old-timers compared to all the newcomers whose axes rang through the woods as they fought the trees. They were now the people new settlers came to for advice on how to drain a field to grow barley (Grow potatoes), on how to keep the skeeters at bay (Wear mittens in August), on whether the numerous bullfrogs were tasty enough to eat in a pinch (You’ll find out).
At last he got to his feet. He would not tell Robert he’d found the grafted tree. There were few secrets in a family who lived in such close quarters, but he would keep one now.
As he walked back towards the farm he was overwhelmed by the need to look at the grafts in his orchard. They had shown no sign of budding on the top scions as Robert’s already had, but it was hard to tell with the spiked deer fences keeping him away. Now with the leaves emerging all around in the woods, he had to know if the grafts had been a success.
He spotted it from the edge of the orchard: an applejack bottle tipped upside down and hung over one of the fence spikes. James’ stomach twisted. Drawing closer, though, he saw that the grafted trees were still intact, and in fact were all budding above the graft. Their leaves would open soon, to join the rest of the greening woods.
The upended bottle was a reminder that Sadie was watching them too.
James always said the best part about May was that the apple blossoms were out. He would say that. For me the best part was goin to Perrysburg for the first time since November. It was only twelve miles away but with the state of the roads it might as well be a hundred, we were that cut off. By May the snow was gone and the mud was bad but not as bad as April. And our stocks were real low then—wed been livin on bacon and squirrels and corn pone for months. It was always hard in the spring how everything was growin but we had so little food to eat. Id been dreamin of bread made with flour and of eggs—fox got most of the chickens—of coffee and tea and of a stir of sugar to go in it. Needed some lettuce seeds, some tomato seeds. Besides that, our boots all had holes and the plow blade needed mendin. Id run out of white thread and was havin to repair quilts and shirts the mice got to with brown. James wanted nails. We needed a couple of chickens.
And all of us wanted to see other people. The Goodenoughs were sick of the Goodenoughs. Who wouldnt be, trapped in that cabin all the long winter. Back in Connecticut the winters were hard but there was family all around and plenty of neighbors too. If I got sick of one of those Goodenough wives I could go into another room and sit with another one. If James drove me crazy I could talk
