the number, and enjoyed taunting her husband with it. Sometimes she would whisper “fifty” to him as she passed. But James fretted over it, always expecting someone to show up on the river or along one of the Indian trails that crisscrossed the Black Swamp and inform him that his farm was no longer his.
I never wanted to live in the Black Swamp. Who would? It aint a name that draws you in. You get stuck there, more like—stuck in the mud and cant go no farther, so you stay cause theres land and no people, which was what we were lookin for. James was second youngest of six healthy sons, so there werent but a little bit of Goodenough farm in Connecticut for us. We managed for a time but James kept reachin for me at night and the children kept comin. Then his father, an old killjoy who never liked me, started hintin about us moving west where we could settle more land. He got the wives of James brothers to talk to their husbands, which they were glad to do cause they didnt like me either. They didnt trust me round their men. I got something they didnt have. So the brothers started pushin James to be more adventurous than he was. Really they shouldve gotten James brother Charlie to go west. Charlie Goodenough was the youngest and by tradition he was the one shouldve gone. Plus he had the gumption in him. Charlie wouldnt of let mud trap him in the swamp. Hed have bust through it and got out into the open where theres good healthy land solid under your feet, with sun and grass and clean water. But everybody loved Charlie, his wife most of all. It was she took against me the worst. Maybe she had reason to. Damned if she werent the nicest of the wives too.
Then all of a sudden Charlie also said James ought to go—though he looked real sorry when we did leave. Stood longer than the rest, watchin our wagon go down the long track away from the Goodenough farm. I bet he wished it was him beside me headin towards a new life.
Turns out lots of Connecticut farmers had gone to Ohio before us. Too many. We went across New York then took a boat on the lake from Buffalo to Cleveland and started lookin, expectin our pick of land to be laid out before us like a nicely made bed, but all we found were other Yankees—most of them war veterans got their allotment from the government. We made a circle round Cleveland, then heard we was better off goin west to the Maumee River, and even into Indiana. After Lower Sandusky we was headed towards Perrysburg when the road—if you can call it that—got worse and worse. That road was where we met our first enemy. Mud. I never saw anything stick so much. It stuck to the wagon wheels and when they turned they collected more mud like a ball of snow gettin bigger and bigger. Got so we had to stop the wagon every fifty feet to scrape it off. Near broke the horses legs. Finally they wouldnt budge and we had to wait till they recovered. Next day we got half a mile before they stopped again. Along that stretch of road there were inns every quarter mile for all the travelers gettin stuck. The inns themselves were set up by settlers who couldnt get no further.
At last we got to the Portage River and decided that was it, we couldnt go no farther so it looked like wed arrived at our Promised Land. By then everything was covered in mud. Wed been wadin through it and couldnt get it off our boots or off our dresses or out from under our toenails. Sometimes the boys would take off their trousers at night and in the morning theyd be standin up by themselves with the mud dried on em. Had to live with it, and wash in the river. John Chapman was a smart one with his canoe glidin up and down the rivers and creeks easy as you like, stayin out of the mud.
After a time we got used to it. Maybe I jest stopped carin. Id hear new settlers complain bout the mud and think, Theres worse things than mud. Jest you wait.
We arrived in the swamp in early April which is a good time to settle cept theres a rush to plant crops and a garden and build a house. And to do any of those things you first got to clear the trees. They was another enemy waitin for us in the Black Swamp. Oh, there were a lot of enemies there.
Damn them trees. I hate em, God love me I do. Back east we didnt have the tree problem the way we did in Ohio. James and I both grew up on farms that had been made some time before, with houses and barns built and cleared fields and gardens. My mother even had flower beds. Thered been settlers in Connecticut for two hundred years, and theyd been the ones breakin their backs to dig up the trees. Every garden, every field, every churchyard and road had to be made by takin out the trees. Wasnt till we was faced with a slice of land full of Ohio trees that we realized how much work we had to do. Well, James had to do, and the older children. I was carryin Robert in my belly and was too big to use an axe or haul wood or pull at those goddamn stumps. There sure wasnt gonna be any flower beds in the Black Swamp. Any clearin had to be done for a better reason than flowers. It was for feedin you and keepin you warm and dry.
Clearin took so much out of my children that sometimes I think thats what killed Jimmy and Patty, weakened em so the swamp fever got em that much easier. Patty died the first summer, Jimmy the next. I never forgave the trees for that, and never will. If I could Id gladly burn down these woods.
Even when we thought wed cleared all the trees we needed to, they kept growin and growin, pressin in on us. We had to keep an eye out for the seedlings that sprung up everywhere. It reminded me of dirty pots or dirty clothes: you scrub and scrub and get em clean, then an hour later youve burnt oatmeal on the bottom of the pot or smeared mud on your apron, and you realize it never ends, theres always gonna be pots and laundry to do. Trees are the same, you clear a field and they start springin up again. At least theyre slower than laundry. But you think youre payin attention, then a year goes by and you find you overlooked a seedling and suddenly its a tree, with roots that dont want to come out.
I heard theres land out west thats got no trees on it at all. Prairie. Lord send me there. I tried to talk to James bout goin there, but he wouldnt listen, said weve made a place for ourselves, hunkered down like toads in the stinkin rottin swamp, and here well stay.
A branch snapped behind him in the orchard. My shadow, James thought. He did not turn around but reached out to run his finger along the branch of the nearest tree—a spitter—and feel the satisfying bump of a nascent bud. “Robert, get me a Golden Pippin from the cold cellar.”
A few minutes later his youngest child returned and handed him a yellow apple speckled with brown dots—the only yellow apple in the Black Swamp that James knew of. It had an unusual oblong shape, as if someone had stretched it, and it was small enough to be held comfortably in his hand. He squeezed it, relishing the anticipation of its taste. It might be wrinkled and soft and well past its prime, but Golden Pippins retained their taste for months, if not their crunch.
James bit into it, and though he did not smile—smiles were rare in the Black Swamp—he shut his eyes for a moment better to appreciate the taste. Golden Pippins combined the flavors of nuts and honey, with a sharp finish he’d been told was like pineapple. It reminded him of his mother and sister laughing at the kitchen table in Connecticut as they sliced apples into rings to be dried. The three trees on the edge of the Black Swamp orchard that produced these sweet apples were all grafts from the Golden Pippin tree James had grown up with. He had grafted them when the Goodenoughs first arrived in the Black Swamp nine years before, from branches James insisted on bringing with them to Ohio. Though grafted at the same time, they had grown up to be different sizes; it always surprised James that the trees could turn out as varied as his children.
Robert was watching him with brown eyes the color of pine resin, still and intent like one of the smarter breeds of dog—English sheep or German shepherd. He rarely needed looking after, and he seemed to understand trees in a way none of the other Goodenoughs did. By rights he should be James’ favorite: a son, slight but healthy, clever and alert, the Goodenough child most likely to survive swamp life. He had been born just after they moved to the Black Swamp, and maybe because he was a native to the swamp, the mosquitoes left him alone, looking for foreign blood. Even when he was very young, it was Robert who nursed the Goodenoughs through swamp fever, sometimes
