Dead Man’s Hand (29 page)

“Pride is a sin!”

“Pride in a good thing is a good thing,” said Alvin. “The sin is when you’re proud
of
stupid
things. Like being born to rich parents. Or figuring out how to cheat other people
of more than your right share of money. Making other people ashamed of themselves
so you can feel proud of being better. Those are sinful kinds of pride. Being proud
of worthlessness. But being proud of having
worth.
Of bringing apple trees to farmers who need them—for cider, for pies, or for proving
out their claim—that’s something to be righteously proud of.”

“And why should I believe you?” demanded John Chapman.

“Because you have the knowledge of good and evil inside you,” said Alvin, “and you
know I’m right. Even if the Unmaker whispers to you that it isn’t so, your first response
to what I said—your heartfire leapt up when I said it. You recognized Good when you
heard it.”

“I recognize it,” said Chapman. “But it’s still out of my reach. I put this tree into
the world and it’s killing people, and making them so unhappy that they’re grateful
to die.”

“Well, we can’t stop it,” said Alvin. “And we’re sure not going to make an opposite
tree, that forces people to be proud and happy for no reason. And there’s no way to
make a Tree of Good Sense.”

“Well now,” said John Chapman. “Maybe…”

“John Appleseed,” said Alvin, “if you had any sense inside you, you’d never have made
this tree in the first place.”

“No, no, there’s no way to put good sense into an apple,” said Chapman. “Or if there
is, only God can make that tree. But good sense isn’t what we need here.”

“It’s hard to think of a time when that statement is even slightly true,” said Alvin.

“I meant only that a
tree
of good sense isn’t—”

“I knew what you meant,” said Alvin. “I’m just a wicked man and I’m ashamed of myself
for making a joke.”

“What my tree makes them feel is despair,” said Chapman. “It’s the tree of despair.
The certainty that nothing is good and it will never be good. So the tree I need to
make is the Tree of Hope.”

“Well, now, that’s a thought. Can you do it?”

“I’m not a hopeful man.”

“When you set out to crossbreed two apples, don’t you
hope
you’ll come up with something useful?”

“Usually I don’t.”

“But sometimes you do. So you
hope
that at least now and then you’ll get a good result.”

“That’s not much.”

“You don’t
feel
much hope,” said Alvin, “but you
act
on your hope. You have enough hope to go on trying. To go on living. To leave this
town and go on to the next. To plant these seeds and
hope
they’ll grow, even though you leave them behind in another man’s care.”

John Chapman closed his eyes. After a while he shook his head. “I don’t feel it.”

“It’s not a feeling,” said Alvin. “It’s a decision. It’s the part of you that decides
to try again. Not the part that gave up on all women ever. The part that made you
once
go to ask a girl to marry you.”

“The foolish part.”

“The part that acted in spite of fear. The part that dared.”

* * *

They got back to town well before dark. I asked Alvin myself whether he took John
Chapman by the hand and ran with the greensong through the wood, but he just shook
his head and laughed and told me that he wouldn’t remember a thing like that. “You
don’t remember the greensong,” he said. “While you’re in it, you’re someone else,
and when you’re back from such a journey, it passes away like a dream.”

But he’s taken
me
into the greensong and I remember it. Each time I ran with him like that, I remember
it. I don’t think he’s lying. I think it’s that he’s always just on the edge of the
woodland, in his heart. So stepping over into the greensong isn’t such a wrenching
change for him as it is for other folks.

However they did it, by greensong or with a footsore wornout Appleseed, they were
back in Piperbury by dark, and Alvin watched as John Chapman called them out of their
homes and said, “Don’t you eat any more apples from these trees I gave you.”

Not understanding how the fruit of those trees was killing everyone they loved and
any chance of happiness, they refused. “It’s the one good thing left in our lives!”

“If you won’t stop eating them I’ll burn them all and chop them down,” cried Appleseed,
“or the other way around!”

“Then you’ll just have to do that,” said Mrs. Turnbull, “because them apples is the
only thing that makes my cooking any good at all.”

Chapman turned to Alvin, sitting on a bench at the edge of the public square. “What
can I do?” he asked.

“Eat from the Tree of Good Sense,” Alvin replied, which meant nothing at all to the
people gathered there, but it made John Chapman smile just a little.

“How about this,” said Chapman. “The apples you’ve got stored up from this fall, destroy
those the way you’d shoot diseased cattle, to save the rest of the herd. But the new
apples that come this year, they should be all right.”

“What’s wrong with them?” asked a man.

“They make you believe things that ain’t so,” said Chapman.

“Like what?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Chapman. “Because you’re a fallen, sinful
man.”

Since that was what everyone in town already believed about themselves, nobody gave
Chapman any more argument.

They brought out their apples and had a fire. Smelled like an apple roast. Smelled
like a party. But Alvin and Appleseed watched to make sure that nobody ate any of
the cooked apples. If mice got into the mess that night or next morning, and then
in despair went out for the hawks or the owls to get them, Alvin couldn’t begin to
guess. He warned the mice not to eat those apples, but if they couldn’t resist the
smell, he couldn’t very well change their nature, which was all appetites, even stronger
than their fears.

When the fire was down, Alvin and Appleseed went around from tree to tree. They weren’t
in blossom yet, but that’s where Alvin’s knack came in handy. Appleseed had made the
pollen for apples filled with hope—not a crazy hope when there was no reason for it,
but the hope that makes a man act to do something good even when he thinks it probably
won’t work. A measured hope. A teaspoon of hope to counteract a bucket of despair.

Alvin looked inside that pollen and saw the deepest seed at its heart, and then took
that pattern and reproduced it in the tree. Tree after tree, working as fast as he
could, it took him an hour with every tree, or maybe a little more or maybe a little
less. Alvin didn’t carry a watch and time passed differently for him when his doodlebug
was out working in the world.

In three days he was done. There weren’t
that
many trees. Or maybe it took less time than he thought, per tree.

I know what you’re thinking. If he could change the trees to add hope to the pollen
they’d produce in their blossoms in the spring, why not change them to take away what
Appleseed had done to fill them with despair?

“I once took away something from a boy with a powerful knack,” said Alvin. “I took
it away from the deepest seed inside him, because that was the part that the Finders
tracked. I did it to save his life. But it killed a part of him. It killed his knack,
or weakened it, or broke it. When you take something out of a man, you take something
out of his soul.”

“I can tell you that this boy you’re talking about, whatever you took, he doesn’t
miss it,” that’s what I told him.

And he said, “Just because he doesn’t miss it doesn’t mean it isn’t gone.”

“A tree’s not a man,” I said to him.

“Trees were John Chapman’s children. I wasn’t going to kill them. I just added something
to them. A gift. That pollen still spread out into the world. A lot of people feel
guilty for things that aren’t bad. But a lot of people feel guilty for things that
are
bad, and it helps them stop from doing such things. What matters though is that with
that pollen, with those apples, they also get them a dose of hope. So whatever they
might feel guilty of, it doesn’t take away their hope. It gives them more.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever eaten such an apple,” I said to him.

“That was years ago, and the bees’ve been busy,” said Alvin. “In the past five years
you’ve never eaten an apple that
didn’t
have that pollen in it, his first change and then the second one. Not a new tree
rises from the ground without those blessings in the fruit.”

“Blessings,” I said to him, thinking of the graves in the Piperbury cemetery.

“They started having babies in Piperbury again,” said Alvin. “They started bringing
children into the world.”

“Well I suppose that
is
hope,” I said. “What about John Chapman?”

“He kept on planting apple nurseries with seed of his own making,” said Alvin. “But
I don’t believe he ever again tried to make an apple that would change human nature.
I think he decided to leave that up to God.”

“So you’re saying he
despaired
of such a thing,” I said, trying to goad him a little.

“I’m saying he put his hopes in God, and set about making fruit that was delicious
to the taste, but left a man his freedom.”

So yes, I had it from the mouth of Alvin Maker himself, in the happy days in Crystal
City. He didn’t make a copy of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the way some
folks say, and he certainly never made a Tree of Life. But he made it so every apple
in America, by now maybe every apple in the world, comes from a Tree of Hope and Despair,
and so we all swing back and forth between the two.

You ain’t gonna like what I have to tell you, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. See,
my name is Karen Memery, like memory only spelt with an e, and I’m one of the girls
what works in the Hôtel Mon Cherie. Hôtel has a little hat over the o like that. It’s
French, so Beatrice tells me.

Some call it the Cherry Hotel. But most just say it’s Madam Damnable’s Sewing Circle
and have done. So I guess that makes me a seamstress, just like Beatrice and Miss
Francina and Pollywog and Effie and all the other girls. I pay my sewing machine tax
to the city, which is fifty dollar a week, and they don’t care if your sewing machine’s
got a foot treadle, if you take my meaning.

Sure, fifty dollar’d be a year’s wages back in Hay Camp for a real seamstress, and
here in Seattle it’ll barely buy you a dozen of eggs, a shot of whisky, and a couple
pair of those new blue jeans that Mister Strauss is sewing. But here in Seattle a
girl can pay fifty dollar a week and have enough to live on and put a little away
besides, even after the house’s cut.

You want to work for a house, if you’re working. I mean… “sewing.” Because Madam Damnable
is a battleship, and she runs the Hôtel Mon Cherie tight, but nobody hits her girls,
and we’ve got an Ancient and Honorable Guild of Seamstresses, and nobody’s going to
make us do anything we really don’t want to unless it’s by paying us so much we’ll
consider it in spite of ourselves. Not like in the cribs down in the mud beside the
pier with the locked doors and no fireplaces, where they keep the Chinese and the
Indian girls the sailors use.

I’ve never been down there, but I’ve been up along the pier, and you can’t hear the
girls except once in a while when one goes crazy, crying and screaming. All you can
hear up there is the sailors cursing and the dog teams barking in the kennels like
they know they’re going to be loaded on those deep-keel ships and sent up north to
Alaska to probably freeze in the snow and die along with some Eastern idiot who’s
heard there’s gold. Sometimes girls go north too—there’s supposed to be good money
from the men in the gold camps—but I ain’t known but one who came back ever.

That was Madam Damnable, and when she came back she had enough to set herself up in
business and keep her seamstresses dry and clean. She was also missing half her right
foot from gangrene, and five or six teeth from scurvy, so I guess it’s up to you to
decide if you think that was worth it to her.

She seems pretty happy, and she walks all right with a cane, but it ain’t half hard
for her to get up and down the ladders to street level.

So anyway, about them ladders. Madam Damnable’s is in the deep part of town where
they ain’t finished raising the streets yet. What I mean is when they started building
up the roads a while back so the sound wouldn’t flood up the downtown every spring
tide, they couldn’t very well close down all the shopping—and all the
sewing
—so they built these big old masonry walls and started filling in the streets between
them up to the top level with just any old thing they had to throw in there. There’s
dead horses down there, dead men for all I know. Street signs and old couches and
broken-up wagons and such.

They left the sidewalks down where they had been, and the front doors to the shops
and such, so on each block there’s this passage between the walls of the street and
the walls of the buildings. And since horses can’t climb ladders and wagons can’t
fly, they didn’t connect the blocks. Well, I guess they could have built tunnels,
but it’s bad enough down there on the walkways at night as it is now and worth your
life to go out without a couple of good big lantern bearers each with a cudgel.

At Madam Damnable’s, we’ve got Crispin, who’s our doorman and about as big as a house.
He’s the only man allowed to live in the hotel, as he doesn’t care for humping with
women. He hardly talks, and he’s real calm and quiet, but you never feel not safe
with him standing right behind you, even when you’re strong-arming out a drunk or
a deadbeat. Especially if Miss Francina is standing on the other side.

So all over downtown, from one block to the next you’ve got to climb a ladder—in your
hoop skirts and corset and bustle, that ain’t no small thing even if you’ve got two
good feet in your boots to stand on—and in our part of town that’s thirty-two feet
from down on the walk up to street level.