Dead Man’s Hand (28 page)

The most common sin was driving people to suicide by unspoken criticisms and unperformed
acts of spite. Everyone in fact treated each other well, if a bit dolefully. And all
the suicides Alvin heard of might well have been accidents or illnesses—and might
have been recovered from, except that nobody bothered to take care of the sick or
treat the injuries or even stop the bleeding from a seeping wound. Alvin wanted to
scream, He might have lived, if you had only kept feeding him! Broken arms heal, it
doesn’t mean she tried to kill herself and failed! The sin here is that you all want
to die, and you keep allowing each other to do it, needlessly!

With these thoughts in mind Alvin tried to go to sleep, but his mind kept spinning
around and around.

Who am I to judge these people? I saw none of these accidents, none of the illnesses.
How can I say that any action of theirs might have made the slightest difference?
It’s easy for
me
to talk of healing or curing or helping or saving, because I have the Maker’s knack,
I can reach inside folks with my doodlebug and fix whatever’s wrong with them. Who
else can do that? How dare I, with my great gifts, judge people who don’t have them?

And then worse thoughts, as the hours grew later. They’ll know that I judged them.
I already let them see that I thought they should have tried to save their loved ones’
lives, and now my condemnation rests on them like a burden. Of course it will be unbearable;
how could he put something like that upon them?

What if every man at that table kills himself tonight, what if Mrs. Turnbull herself
is dead by morning? Whose fault will it be but mine, for having judged them so harshly,
so unfairly?

And unlike them, I didn’t even have the decency to keep it to myself. I spoke right
up, I said my say. I’m the worst of all of them.

By morning, Alvin was so full of despair, of the dark weight of his own sins, that
he found himself thinking of ways to die.

Accidental ways. As if he could trick God into not recognizing his subterfuge and
thinking that he died naturally. In his mind Alvin played out many stories of his
unintentional death, and now he understood why everyone knew that the suicides were
really suicides, however they might look: everyone had these thoughts, these nightmares.

But why do
I
? he asked himself. I don’t believe the way they believe. I don’t live here. If there’s
some guilt disease they all caught, I don’t have it. I haven’t done anything wrong,
at least not lately, and yet I’m so ashamed of myself, so guilty before God that I
can hardly bear it and it makes no sense at all.

Does somebody have a knack for causing other folks to have bad dreams?

Is there something about the bed pillows or mattress ticking in Piperbury?

And he kept thinking about John Appleseed. Calling this the most righteous town—no,
no, what were his words? “A keen awareness of the goodness of God and the low poor
condition of the human soul,” that’s what he had said. “Every living soul of them,”
he had said.

John Chapman has seen what I see, and he approves. There’s an unsanctified cemetery
filling up with bodies of purported suicides, and everybody in this town thinks they’re
worthy of nothing better than death and hell. And John Chapman said, “It’s a godly
town.”

Alvin thought back to the only meal he had eaten in the place, and the only part of
the meal worth eating: Mrs. Turnbull’s apple pie. It wasn’t made with windfall cider
apples. These were delicious to the taste, even baked in what he had to admit was
a very mediocre crust. What was good and memorable about the pie was the apples.

He didn’t take any of the offered breakfast. He especially didn’t take any of the
apple scones. “Will you hold my place for me, Mrs. Turnbull?” he asked. “I hope to
be back before the day’s out, but I have an errand to run.”

“What business could you possibly have around here?”

“The business isn’t around here,” said Alvin, “but your house, and your son’s fine
bed, will be on my way back from it.”

“It’s not as if there’s anyone clamoring to stay here,” she said. “But if you don’t
mind paying me the bit that you promised afore you go.”

Alvin paid it, preferring money to chores when he had some traveling to do, and then
he set out briskly along the path back to the main road, which skirted Piperbury about
a mile and a half south.

He came to the place where he had chatted with John Appleseed, and then began to look
for the way the man had gone. He had stayed with the road, it seemed, for Alvin saw
no sign of disturbance on the left hand or the right, and invisible as Chapman might
be when sitting still, he was a White man and he wasn’t going to turn off the road
without leaving a mark.

Alvin would make better time getting off the road and running through the forest with
the greensong in his heart. But then he’d see no signs of Appleseed. So he loped along
on the road, getting a little benefit in speed and smoothness from trees leaning over
him most of the way.

After only a half-hour’s run, Alvin found a turning, and the place where Chapman had
spent the night. It would have been a two-hour walk for him, no doubt, being older
than Alvin by twenty-five years or so. And however early Chapman might have risen
that morning to resume his trek—he left no sign of having cooked anything for breakfast—he
could not be all that far ahead.

Chapman gave a yelp of fright when Alvin touched his shoulder and said, “Beg pardon,
Mr. Chapman.”

“How did you come up behind me without my hearing?”

“You must have been lost in thought, sir,” said Alvin. “I had a question to ask you,
and I ran from Piperbury this morning to see if you had an answer.”

Chapman looked very skeptical. “From Piperbury? This morning?”

“Spent the night in Widow Turnbull’s house. In the bed her dead son left behind.”

“Her son gone? And her husband, too?” Chapman looked sincerely grieved.

“All part of the godliness of the town, it seems to me,” said Alvin. “Does it seem
that way to you?”

Chapman stared hard at him, and then suddenly tears started dripping from his lower
eyelids and running down his cheeks. “I deserve to go to hell for this.”

“Quite possibly,” said Alvin, “but this morning, after last night’s dish of apple
pie, I felt that my life was so evil and dark that death and hell would come as a
relief. I think that feeling is familiar to you.”

“I walk through the world with such a dark awareness of my sins,” said Chapman. “I’ve
tried all the good works that Swedenborg called for New Christians to embrace. I live
simple, I dress simple, and go about planting trees. It’s more than the apples, you
know. When I leave a nursery behind me, the local farms can transplant those trees
to meet the legal requirement of planting fruit trees on their land to prove their
title. They can do that instead of clearing and planting five acres—six trees are
as good as five acres in the law, because they’re an orchard.”

“No one doubts that you do good work, John Chapman,” said Alvin.

“I doubt it!” he cried, with anguish so deep it made Alvin’s own heart hurt to hear
it. “I see the work but nothing feels good to me, or not for long, or not good
enough
.”

“What did you do to the apples in Piperbury?” asked Alvin, getting to the point. “Was
that supposed to be a good work?”

“It was supposed to serve God,” said Chapman miserably. “I saw all these… these
happy
people, paying no attention to the sinfulness of the world.”

“The apples,” Alvin prompted him.

“I thought about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When Adam and Eve partook
of it, they were expelled from Eden. But it says the
reason
for their expulsion was so that they wouldn’t eat of the Tree of Life and live forever.
Once they’d eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, that wasn’t forbidden any
more. God didn’t mind if they ate more of
that.
”

“Doesn’t exactly say so, but it might be true,” said Alvin.

“Yet here were all these people, utterly without knowledge of the evil that they do
in the world. But I have that knowledge. To my bones I know it. So I thought that
I should try to bring that great tree back into the world of men. Not the Tree of
Life! That would be blasphemous! But a fruit that, when men eat it, they can see and
understand evil—I could do that.”

“How odd, then, that you made it so delicious.”

“Well who would eat it, if it was nasty?” said Chapman. “I found that knowledge of
evil in my own soul, and I put it in the pollen, and I gave it to an apple tree with
a strong root. Then I took the pollen of the trees that grew from that, and gave it
to an apple with a perfect fruit, sweet and hearty. And the trees that grew from that
pollination, they grow now in every orchard in Piperbury.”

“Strong so they live long, sweet so they’re good to eat, and filled with damnation.”

“No!” cried Chapman. And then: “Yes. But that’s not how I meant it. It was supposed
to turn them toward righteousness. It was supposed to make them…”

“Like unto you,” said Alvin.

“As
aware
as me.”

“But you forgot to give them the knowledge of good. It’s supposed to balance, in that
tree.”

“They knew good!” cried Chapman. “They were so…”

“Happy.”

“I’ve never been happy,” he said. “Not for more than a few minutes at a time. I make
a wonderful blending of two apples and I feel good and then I think, this is the sin
of pride, I’m such a wicked man to be proud of the workmanship of mine own hands.
So I leave the nursery behind me and go on to another place and try again, but my
sins follow me everywhere.”

“You have those moments, though,” said Alvin. “These Piperbury folks, they’ve got
none. No taste of goodness any more. No speck of joy.”

“They die from
accidents
,” said Chapman. “I’ve asked. All those suicides, they’re just accidents or illnesses.”

“And yet there are so many dead,” said Alvin. “Because their hopeless friends and
family members don’t help them, don’t heal them, don’t even feed them in their extremity,
because they know that death will come to them as a relief.”

Chapman dropped to the ground, curled up, and wept.

“I don’t know about evil,” said Alvin, “but right now you’re pretty useless.”

“I can’t fix it,” said Chapman. “Even if I cut down every tree in Piperbury, the pollen
has already spread into the world. Bees have carried it to other towns. The crossbreeds
aren’t as powerful—not as delicious, not as sturdy, not as…”

“Pernicious.”

“Effective,” said Chapman. “But it’s loose in the world and there’s no calling it
back.”

“Well, we can stop sending out the pure pollen, can’t we?” asked Alvin.

Chapman groaned in agony at the very thought, and Alvin realized: even this Tree of
the Certainty of Evil, he can’t bear the thought of cutting it down.

“You love even the wicked trees,” said Alvin.

“They’re the only children I have in the world,” said Chapman.

“You could have married and had the flesh and blood kind,” Alvin said.

“The only woman I ever wanted to ask, I got there and she had agreed to marry someone
else the day before.”

“And all other women were monstrous?”

“They all become monstrous after you marry them. I’ve seen how married people are.
I don’t know why I ever thought even one would be different. They’re always… telling
you things. Demanding things from their husbands. Having opinions. Being disappointed
or angry or
crying
in order to make you do things.”

Alvin could see now why John Chapman wandered the world. Like everybody, he needed
the company of other people, but only for a short time. He had to leave before people
began expecting things from him.

“You can’t leave this one behind,” Alvin said to him. “We’ve got to kill those trees.”

“I come back here to try new pollens on them. Pollens to undo what I did. I look at
happy people out in the world and I try to find that place in them and make a pollen
that will grow an apple that will give them that—”

“No,” said Alvin. “That’s wrong. An apple that makes you
happy
? Then all that people would do all day is eat those apples.”

“So you agree that misery is a necessary—”

“I agree that happiness and misery ought to be earned. You’ve forced guilt on people
who don’t deserve it. How will it make it better to force an equal certainty of the
goodness of everything they do on people who also don’t deserve it? A body should
feel good because he
did
good, and feel bad because he
did
bad. Your tree isn’t giving anybody knowledge, it’s giving them
certainty
.”

“That’s the same thing,” said Chapman, surprised.

“Certainty is how you feel about your opinions. Knowledge implies that you’re pretty
sure, but that you’re also right. Certainty doesn’t require that you be right.”

“That’s more philosophy than I can handle,” said Chapman.

“It’s not philosophy, it’s common sense,” said Alvin. “The Tree of the
Knowledge
of Good and Evil isn’t about making people
sure
they’re wicked whether they are or not, nor about making them
feel
bad. It’s about letting them see
clear
. What’s really good. What’s really evil. To
know
what each of them
is
when they see it. To help them make choices, and understand the choices they made.”

“Well I don’t know how to make a fruit that can do
that
.”

“That’s because you don’t have to,” said Alvin. “Eve and Adam already ate that fruit,
and passed the knowledge on down to us. We’re born with it, all but a few sad and
broken people.”

“Like me,” said Chapman.

“That’s foxfeathers, my friend,” said Alvin. “You know what good and evil are. You
just got the mistaken notion that it’s evil to be proud of accomplishing something
good.”