Golden Delicious (16 page)

The Mother’s eyes narrowed. “Do you have any words on you,
?”

“Just these,” I said. I held out the broken question.

The Mother took the question, read it, and handed it back to me. “
Living
language, I mean,” she said. “Did you see any sentences moving through here?”

I shook my head. “Am I in trouble?”

“You’re sure?” said the Mother. “We’ve seen worries crossing through here. Threats. Doubts trying to sneak into Appleseed.”

I was scared. “I swear to the Core,” I said, “I didn’t see any.”

“Stand there and don’t move,” the Mother said. Then she prayed to my Mom, who confirmed that I was who I said I was. The Mother prayed that she’d get me home safe. Then she closed the prayer, turned to me, and said, “Need a lift home?”

“That would be awesome,” I said.

The Mother took me in her arms and rose up into the sky. We ascended high over the margin, and soon I saw the edge of town: the shrug of Appleseed Mountain and the distant lights of the Big Why and Cordial Carl’s. Something was happening in the Amphitheatre. Then I could see Van Tassel’s Groves, and rows and rows of spidery tree-shadows. Somewhere over town I dropped my question, but I didn’t even care.

“Is it difficult to learn how to fly?” I shouted.

The Mother smiled but didn’t answer. When we got to my house, she landed in the driveway and knelt down until my feet were touching the ground. But I didn’t let go—I held on to her shoulders. “Let go,” said the Mother finally.

I hugged her tightly.

“Let go of me,” she said again, and pulled me off of her. Then she stood up. “No more wandering in the margins,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

“I mean it,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”

“I promise,” I said.

She lifted up into the sky and was gone.

The story of the founding of Appleseed—the one that the Reader and I pulled from the page—was about how Johnny Appleseed, moving to a barren town of stone in the mid-1700s, heard a strange prayer and followed it, as if driven by something beyond himself, high up Appleseed Mountain (which was known as Geryk Mountain then). It was there, in a clearing in the clouds, that he found a lone crooked tree holding a single alien fruit. At that point, no one in America had ever seen an apple—they wouldn’t have even known about them unless they’d read about them in ancient European planting brochures. Pioneers and pilgrims had tried to grow apples on American soil, but to no avail; it was believed that something in American soil kept apple trees from taking root.

The old prayers say that when Johnny Appleseed approached the tree, a bookworm—a slithery sentence—rilled forth from a hole in the page and warned him not to pick the fruit, that it was meaningless and would only make him ill. When Johnny tried to push past him, the worm stood at full height to frighten him away. But Johnny had heard the fruit praying to him and believed it to be meaningful, so he drew the word “sword” from his satchel and
told the worm to stand down. When the worm didn’t, Johnny slew him with the word. Then he picked the fruit, ate it, and planted the seeds. The seeds grew more trees. The trees grew more seeds. Appleseed collected those seeds in his holy satchel and started planting groves all over Appleseed.

A few weeks after the Memory of Johnny Appleseed told me and the Reader that story, though, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed and I were arranging those paragraphs on the pagefield when two Mothers landed in the fresh soil. One of the Mothers held a giant pencil; another was wearing headphones on her ears and a giant tape machine strapped to her chest. The first Mother told the Memory of Johnny Appleseed to put down his hoe, and he complied. “What’s this all about?” he said.

“Are these your words?” said the taller Mother.

“Yes,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“You grew them?”

“With
,” he said.

“Who?” said the taller Mother.

“Me,” I said, raising my hand.

“We’re picking up some anomalies here,” said the headphoned Mother.

Then the other Mother picked up the word “sword” and studied it. As she held it, the “s” in “sword” shivered. “Shit,” said the Mother, and she dropped the word. The “s” detached from the “word” and slithered into the grass.

“What was that?” asked the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“Bookworm,” said the first Mother.

“A what?” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“We’re going to need to confiscate these,” said the headphoned Mother.

“Confiscate—the words? Which ones?”

“These,” said the first Mother, pointing to the paragraph. “All of them.” They prayed for backup, and soon other Mothers arrived and began lifting words—“bookworm,” “sword,” “American”—right off the page, leaving a blank space where they’d been.

The Memory watched from the margin, repeatedly taking off his hat, rubbing his hands through his hair, and pulling his hat back on tighter. “Oh,” he whined at one point. “Do you really have to take ‘American’?”

No one answered him—“American” was already gone. Now they were pulling up “soil” and “the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.”

“My
name
?” shouted the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Not my name!”

“Settle down,” a Mother told him. “We’ll just run some tests on it and then we’ll bring it back to you.”

“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

“Make up another name,” suggested the headphoned Mother.

So he did—for a week his name was Martha D. Anger. During that time, it was
Martha Anger
who found the apple tree—Anger who plucked the apple, planted the seeds, grew more apples, planted more groves.

At the end of that week, Martha received a prayer from the Mothers saying that his name had been tested and cleared and was ready for pickup. I went with Martha to
pick up the name—we rode the two-person bicycle over to the Word Pen, a temporary testing site in South Appleseed. We gave our names to the attendant and then waited in the mud for Martha’s name to be released. Behind high fences covered in barbed wire, two wildwords—“humble” and “negotiate”—fought with each other. Other words howled or paced in place.

Finally the gate creaked open. Martha Anger turned and said, “Heeeere’s Johnny!” Then his name bolted around the corner and jumped into his arms.

That winter, some pipes froze at Woodside and two sinks cracked and died, so my Uncle Joump and I went out to Wolf Swamp to catch some new ones.

Joump worked with my Dad at the buildings. He was as tough as they come, and I’d never seen him scared of anything. When my Dad walked into the boiler room one day and saw some meaninglessers squatting behind the oil tank? Dad sent Joump in to marcia them out. When we needed to get rid of the “snowmen”—the ancient, obsolete asbestos-covered burners? The hazardous-waste companies would have charged us hundreds of theories, but Joump went in there one afternoon with a sledgehammer and a red bandanna over his mouth and he carried out those burners in pieces.

Joump was always nice to me—he gave me my Walkman and headphones on Core Day a few years earlier, for example, and if he found a book in his travels he’d always save it for me. With most people, though, Joump had a quick temper—I’d seen him get in fights with ricks and edgers way bigger than he was. Joump himself wasn’t big, but he had a bulb-round belly from years of gorging on Kaddish Fruits. Kaddish, which gave you mights and false memories, was abundant in Appleseed; there was a grove
in Wolf Swamp, for example, and a cluster of trees out by the Appleseed Prison. Joump grew his fruits himself, from trees that he’d transplanted onto his property and covered with a fake page. He’d show up at the buildings with his eyes smudged and his teeth stained blue, and sometimes he was so blurry that my Dad would have to send him home. The problem got so bad that my Dad and Joump stopped speaking for a while—one day Joump showed up at Woodside too kaddished to work, my Dad told him to leave, and Joump didn’t talk to him for two years.

Then Joump’s wife, Rachel, died. She was a really nice person,
too
nice, and finally she died of niceness. When my aunt called from Canada to tell us the news, my Dad put me in the truck and we drove over to Joump’s house, a small duplex out near the Mental Hospital. We parked in the street and my Dad and I got out of the truck and walked toward the house. At the edge of the driveway, though, my Dad stopped and looked at the house in the distance. “Go see if he’s OK,” my Dad said.

“Me?” I said.

My Dad stared at the house. The grass was high and the house was dark.

“You do it,” I said.

“He’s your uncle,” said my Dad. “Just go knock on the door.”

I walked up to the door. “Uncle Joump?” I said.

There was no answer.

“Uncle Joump!” I said.

The door opened a little—I smelled the sour burn of rotten Kaddish Fruits. “
?” Joump said.

“My Dad wants to know if you’re OK,” I said.

The door closed.

“Are you OK?” I said.

There was a shuffling inside the house.

“Uncle Joump?” I said.

“Tell him I’m hanging in,” Joump said. “That I’ll see him at Belmont next week.”

This was later, after Joump sold his house and moved into Appleseed Heights. He’d bought a new car, a Cadillac, and he was dating a woman who lived in the complex. Her name was Dot. I didn’t like her—she wore too much makeup. When she smiled, cracks appeared all over her face.

Joump drove out toward the swamp, the sinknets and the dead sink corpses and Joump’s own sad story sliding around on the plastic lining of the truckbed. When we reached the wetlands, Joump parked and we hoisted the heavy nets on our shoulders. Then we walked down toward the still waters.

That swamp. I love thinking back on it—the way the trees folded their hands together to make shadows over the damp pathways; the sound of porcelain running through the trees; the mildewy smell of the water praying in the sun.

We walked for about half a mile. Then Joump stopped and pointed. There, about fifty yards away, was a standalone old sink grazing in the shallow muck. The sink looked old, but strong—you could see muscles by the drain. Joump flashed me the “OK” sign, and I moved as
quietly as I could through the grass, flanking the sink and stepping up behind it.

When I was about twenty feet from it, though, the sink looked up and sniffed the air.

“Crap,” said one of my thoughts.

“Get it!” Joump said.

I ran toward the sink and threw the net at it. The sink flinched, recoiled, and ran.

“Somana
bitch
,” I heard Joump say.

The sink turned and fled into the high grass. It was
fast
—I ran my fatbody after it, my thoughts’ glasses fogging and my lungs a burning house, but after ten seconds the sink just disappeared.

I didn’t slow up; I thought that maybe the sink had fallen, or that it was hiding in the tall grass. I sprinted toward where I last saw it. Then my foot caught on something, and my ankle cried out, and I landed face first in the grass.

“Somanobee!” shouted my uncle. “
! You OK?”