The Endless Forest (6 page)

T
hey had a plan, and so the men who had gathered in Curiosity Freeman’s barn set out into the rain. The river had been high many times, and it had even breached its banks once when Daniel was a boy. It was hard to imagine anything worse, and yet they must.

Ben Savard lent Daniel the use of a horse—his own horse, in fact, a big sorrel he called Florida. Daniel turned her toward the village and set off at a trot. He had to get the word out about school being closed, and it also fell to him to ask for volunteers to help with the sandbags. Too little and too late, but it was action. It was something.

And if his shoulder screamed to the heavens, he would get this done.

He headed straight for the trading post, the most logical place to find men who could be compelled into action. Daniel was wondering if there might be sacks somewhere in his mother’s cellar and if Hannah would be able to put her hands on them when he first heard it.

A far-off sound, but big. Some large animal crashing through the underbrush. The hair on the back of his head stood up. Daniel turned in
the saddle but found nothing that could account for such a noise, as big as the sky and swelling.

An odd memory came to him. One of the stories his grandfather Hawkeye had told about his years in the West. He had lived among the Crow for a few seasons, and hunted buffalo with them. The best stories were of the stampedes. A thousand buffalo pounding across the prairie so that dust rose like storm clouds. A hundred men in pursuit, because without the buffalo they would not survive the winter.

A hundred men. The hundred-year water.

The sound was louder now, and more distinct. The roar of an angry bear.

Daniel kicked Florida hard and galloped down through the village to pull up in front of the meetinghouse, where he leapt off and ran up a short flight of stairs. The alarm bell was housed under a small roof, open to everybody in case of emergency.

Now Daniel yanked the bell rope with all the power of his good right arm, and he kept yanking. The noise was tremendous, even through the rainfall, and the effect was immediate. Men came running into the lane from the trading post in their shirtsleeves. Joshua Hench appeared in the door of the smithy, a load of empty burlap bags over his arm. And from inside the meetinghouse came a half dozen men. The Quaker elders, who had been sitting in silence, as was their habit, while they prayed.

All across the village people were looking up at the sound of the bell. The first indication that they were in real danger, but from their windows they would see only more rain.

Daniel stopped the bell with his hand and then bellowed from the bottom of his lungs.

“Get to high ground! Get everybody to high ground! Flood!”

T
he storm bullied its way in and settled down on Paradise, merciless and unrelenting. Cold, but not cold enough to give way to snow. A miserable weather, in which nobody would want to be out. Nobody but Callie Wilde, who was exactly where she needed and wanted to be, in her apple orchard on the sloping hillside that ran down to the Sacandaga.

Callie worked steadily despite the weather and the low light, pausing now and then to wipe the streaming rain from her face and clear her eyes. She could not make room for the storm, not today. Not in the cusp between winter and spring after two years of crops lost to black rot.

Everything depended on the harvesting of this year’s scion wood and the grafting of the Bleeding Heart, her best hope. Her only chance to turn things around.

She had found the tree by accident; a gift of fate. It began as an aimless walk on a Sunday afternoon in September with no thought but solitude and, if she was lucky, a few hours not thinking about the loss of her crop. The Spitzenburg to fire blight; the Seek-No-Furthers and
Reinettes and Newtons to black rot. The end result was a few bushels of sorry fruit, hardly enough to make pressing worthwhile.

As she wound her way along the banks of the Sacandaga, moving in and out of the forest and bush, she had asked herself for the first time what she would do if the next crop failed. It was a question she had always refused to consider, but now it stood before her and would not be ignored.

As this thought came to her, she looked up and there it was: a wild apple tree in a sunny patch of bristlegrass gone to seed. Just six feet tall and just as wide, its branches garlanded with fruit: small lopsided apples of a size that fit exactly into her cupped palm. Streaked red yellow at the crown deepening to a deep, rich true red. Wasps buzzed as they fed on the fallen fruit.

She picked up an apple and studied it. No sign of blight or mildew or rot, but that meant very little. It could be mealy, woody, bitter, without any taste at all, or simply inedible, as wild apples almost always were. It was silly to hope, and so she hesitated, picking up an apron full of fruit and studying each of them.

In time hunger and curiosity got the upper hand and Callie bit into the nameless apple from a solitary tree.

A crisp bite through tough skin into fine-grained flesh that gave up a mouthful of juice, sweet and tangy, with a hint of … she took another bite, and held the fruit in her mouth. Pear. Hints of pear. Nothing like any of the apples she grew or had grown.

Callie walked home at a steady pace. Levi was in the barn shoveling hay, his thoughts so distant that she had to call his name twice before he heard her. Levi was a hired hand, a freed slave who had been on this farm since Callie could remember, and who was as dear to her as a brother. Without his help she would have had to give up the orchard long ago. He had been trained by her father but he also had a feel for the work. Sometimes Callie caught Levi standing motionless in the orchard, his head cocked to one side and his eyes closed. She had the idea, silly but still somehow right, that he could hear the trees talking to him.

Callie handed him an apple from the wild tree. Something came over Levi’s face when he bit into it. Maybe hope. Callie was pretty sure that’s what he was seeing on her own face.

—

Here was the eternal problem: Even if she planted every seed from every apple on that miraculous wild tree, Callie would not get one like it. An apple tree could not be reproduced from seed, because apples never bred true.

Callie was barely six when her father began to teach her how to fool nature into making a tree that could not be grown from seed. How to identify scion wood, how to cut it, score the root end, and keep it damp until it could be grafted onto rootstock.

In the years since, she had grafted hundreds of trees and cared for them until their first bearing. The maybe trees, as she thought of them. They might produce a new fruit, perfect in every way, but more likely they would give her apples too sour or woody to eat, without any flavor at all, too acid to press, prone to aphids or maggots or fire blight. In all the years there had been two grafts that grew into trees worth keeping, and neither of them had been hardy enough to withstand insects or mold or rot.

Every year Levi pulled down the failed maybe trees, cut and stacked the apple wood for seasoning, and every year two dozen new grafts were set in those newly empty places.

The plan was to harvest scion wood from the wild tree, but that had to wait until winter was just about to give way to spring. In the meantime, there were other questions to ask.

Levi picked every apple on the tree and then Callie sat down with paper and ink and a new quill, and she wrote twenty-five letters.

Levi went off with the apples to call on growers from Schenectady to Albany, from Albany to Boston. When he came back three weeks later his portmanteau was bristling with letters. Every apple grower wanted to taste the cider of this new apple, as soon as it was available.

They had all questioned Levi closely, but he had not given them any satisfaction or even the vaguest hint of where C. D. Wilde was to be found in the great expanse of New-York State. Better to stay out of the public eye; they did not want a stranger showing up at the door until they had a few dozen healthy, bearing trees, mature enough to give up scion wood of their own. Without any discussion at all they knew that they could speak to no one about the Bleeding Heart.

Settlers might move ever westward and drag their laws with them, but Paradise sat on the very edge of the endless forests, a frontier that would never be tamed. There had been stories over the years of blood feuds over things as simple as a single tree.

That winter they pressed the small amount of fruit they had as soon as the temperatures dropped below the point of freezing. Ice covered the lake and made the lanes treacherous, but Callie and Levi welcomed the cold. Every morning Levi checked the three barrels of pressings from the Bleeding Hearts and removed the ice from the surface. This went on for a week. When the cider had a kick strong enough to get a man’s unwavering attention, Levi pulled a ladleful and handed it to Callie.

She had been drinking applejack for as long as she could remember. From a single mouthful she could tell what kind of apples had gone into the press, how many nights of freezing temperatures it had been set out for, and if there would be a market for it.

This jack was very strong and fragrant. It burned a path down her throat into her belly, where its heat spread out a warmth that burrowed deep.

Levi said, “Well? What’s it taste like?”

Callie took a deep breath and then a smile broke out across her face. “Money,” she said. “It tastes like lots of money.”

They fit as many quart jugs of applejack as they could in the bed of the wagon secured under a tarp covered over with straw. Levi set out again and was gone the entire month of March; in that time Callie harvested the first of the scion wood from the mother tree and grafted it onto her best rootstock. The Bleeding Heart grafts had gone into the ground in the rich soil at the bottom of the hillside, where they had some protection from the wind and even shallow roots could profit from the fast-running Sacandaga.

Now those saplings were in second leaf. The right thing to do, the
way she had been trained, was to wait another two or three years until they were sure of the fruit before they began to graft the Bleeding Heart in earnest. This time they harvested the scion wood at the first opportunity. With the cuttings from the wild tree and this year’s grafting, they should have more than fifty trees this year, and a half-dozen of them would bear first fruit.

The rain was coming down so hard that Callie finally took note. She pulled her hood more tightly around her face and shoulders, and cleaned her knife on her apron.

The ringing of the meetinghouse bell came to her on a gusting wind, as frantic as the beating wings of a caged bird. On a clear day the meetinghouse bell seemed loud enough to wake the dead, though it was almost a mile away. She turned to listen, and as she did, the ringing stopped. Most likely one of the Ratz boys getting up to mischief, but then the ringing started again and a knot pulled tight in her belly.

A fire or somebody underneath a fallen tree. Somebody in trouble. She folded her knife, put it in her pocket, and set out for the path along the river, the quickest route into the village proper. And then stopped at the sight of the Sacandaga, already breeching its banks.

Callie looked back to her saplings, but somebody was screaming. One of her neighbors, screaming loud enough to be heard over the rushing river and the rain.

She ran.

With Florida turning and dancing beneath him, frantic to be away, Daniel pulled hard on the reins and brought the horse to a shuddering stand so he could get a proper look.

On the far west slope a gash had opened up in the tree line, a long rip down the mountainside. As he watched, trees fell like children’s blocks; the earth itself seemed to be moving, as a plank floor would give under the boots of a big man.

Even in the mildest winters it took weeks for the ice to break up, but today it shivered and shifted and then the ice began to crack. It sounded like a barrage of rifle shots.

The whole surface of the lake was pulsing and twisting, breaking apart into hundreds of pieces, some three feet thick and twice as long.
The force of water coming off the mountain was pushing the ice forward, and at that moment Daniel fully understood what this flood would do.

He turned Florida and galloped up the lane. All over the village people were running uphill. Some carried belongings—a candlestick, a small chest, a milk can—while others led cattle and goats. Many were without any kind of wrap or mantle and most were barefoot. Children were squalling in unison, confused and frightened. Michael Yarnell—the most fidgety student in Daniel’s classroom—was running with a hen under each arm.