LITMIR.BIZ

      He was whipping his daughter but he was thinking of his wife. With each red strap mark that appeared across Martha’s narrow buttocks and twig-like calves, James grew angrier at himself for punishing her when he should be aiming his blows at Sadie. He knew she was behind Martha’s using Golden Pippins for the pies. But Martha would never admit it. In all her short life she had never tattled on anyone, preferring to take the blame. Her brothers and sisters always took advantage of her silence—all except Robert. He and Martha were both quiet, though it was not the same kind of quiet. Robert was stronger, and would stand up to someone he felt was wrong. He looked straight at people with his bright brown eyes, and his level gaze unsettled them so that they didn’t dare blame him for something he did not do. Martha had watery gray eyes and never held a gaze; she tended to hunch over and keep her eyes on the ground, reminding James of a willow tree with its spindly dangling branches. This morning Sal had braided Martha’s hair in a fishtail plait that did not suit her thin locks. The braid hung down her back like a frayed piece of twine with a kink in its tail, and every time James looked at it as she leaned against the wall, awaiting the strap, its wispiness made him strike her harder than he had intended. She didn’t even cry properly, but was silent while tears dripped down her cheeks. Her siblings were silent too, watching the whipping, mostly indifferent. Only when James saw Robert grimace did he cease.

      Sadie was smirking into her pie. “War,” she said, and got up to go to the bottle of applejack.

      Is this a war? James thought as he escaped the airless cabin. Because if it was, he would surely lose, as his wife was more experienced than he was at cruelty and ruthlessness. It was also easier to go on the offensive, as she did, than to defend, as he must his trees.

      Nonetheless, he took precautions. If he was to protect them, he would do so thoroughly. Taking precious time out from plowing—turning it over to Nathan and Caleb, who as predicted did not plow straight furrows and chipped the blade—James built around each graft a shoulder-high fence made of hickory branches sharpened to points at both ends and driven into the ground. He told the family that peeing around the trees wasn’t enough and they needed the fences to keep the deer away; but they were equally effective at stopping Sadie, or at least slowing her down. To get to a graft she would have to pull out some of the sticks. Unfortunately it meant that James could not get close to the grafts either, depriving him of the pleasure of inspecting them closely for progress. He could only peer at them from several feet away, when what he wanted to do was squeeze the buds and scrape his nail along the scion’s bark to see if it was greening. He still did not feel secure enough, and so he ringed the older Golden Pippins with deer fences as well, though they were mature 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

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