Golden Delicious (2 page)

There were also those times, though, when we didn’t find him at all—when my Dad drove around for an hour or two, pounded the dashboard with the heel of his hand, turned the truck around and went home.

The Reader and I pedaled past the Amphitheatre, the Arcade, the Library—there was no sign of Johnny anywhere. Soon, we’d crossed the off-white pages of Highway Five, bumping over prints and railroad tracks. In the distance you could see Appleseed Prison, the Mental Hospital, and back behind that, the beard of Appleseed Mountain. It was a tough ride, what with the extra weight of the Reader and all, and out past Jonquil I had to stop and catch my breath. At one point I turned around and looked back at you. “Are you pedaling?” I said.

“Of course I am,” said the Reader.

“It doesn’t seem like you are,” I said.

“I am,” you said.

I stood up from the seat and bore down on the pedals.

Finally I saw Old Colton Road, and, up ahead, the Colton deadgroves. When we reached the edge of the
groves we laid the bike down in the grass and walked through the fields. My thoughts were clamoring; I leaned over, opened the top of my head, and let the thoughts spill out and run free on the dead pages. “Woo!” shouted one of my thoughts, sprinting forward. Another thought began digging.

“Don’t get lost!” I shouted to them. “And think right back here if you find the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.”

A third thought ran up to me. “I have to pee,” it said.

“Go over there by that tree,” I told it.

The Reader looked out across the page. “Should we shout for him or something?” she said.

“Shouting won’t do much good,” I said. “These groves go on for years.”

We trudged across the marshy ground. We saw some memories and scenes; a few wild sentences crossed behind a treeline. Soon I spotted a figure in the foggy fields; he wore a satchel around his waist and he was kneeling in the soil. When he heard our footsteps approaching, he stood up and put his hand to his forehead. “
?” he said.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed didn’t look good. He was wearing jeans that were too big for him, a green corduroy hat, and someone’s old Converse hi-tops. His white beard was patchy and his eyes were tired. “Who’s this?” he said.

“Reader,” I said.

“I can see
that
,” he said. He smiled a near-toothless smile. His face was stained with ink and soil. “What’s she doing
here
?”

“School project,” I said.

“About the founding of Appleseed,” said the Reader quietly.

In the distance, two of my thoughts ran past, one chasing the other with a tree branch.

“We were hoping we could interview you for it,” I said.

“What do you want to know?” said the Memory.

“About the first pages,” I said. “The planting of the first apple trees.”

The Memory stood up. “Sure,” he said. “I can go through it for you. How ’bout you help me with what I was doing—pulling out these stalks?” he said, leaning over. “And then I’ll give you the history.”

I looked out at the field. Five or six rows of black, spiny clumps stuck out from the ground. I could see the Reader studying the stalks. “What are you growing here?” you asked.

“Only thing that
will
grow in the deadgroves,” said Johnny Appleseed. “Those are stories.”

“I didn’t think anything could grow in the deadgroves,” the Reader said.

“Stories will grow anywhere,” the Memory told the Reader. “You can grow stories on the bottom of the ocean floor! In a tree! On the back of a song! These rows,” said the Memory, “are overripe. They need to be told
today
. So how ’bout it?”

I looked to the Reader, who nodded.

The Memory positioned himself over a stalk. “This inky part here? You grab it and
pull
.” He pulled, and up came a story. We looked at it; it was the story of Cora Morris, one of the first Mothers.

“See? There’s some history right there,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Now you guys give it a try.”

I knew I didn’t have a choice about the stories we were harvesting: they were already fully formed. But if I’d had a choice? I would have grown more of the small, dumb stories that I’d lived and lost: family of four goes out to Appleseed Pizza for an extra-large pie. Family of four has enough meaning to pay the mortgage. Family of four never has to worry about bookworms, meaning-losses or blights. There were never any problems and nothing bad ever happened. Were those even
stories
? Anyway, that’s what I wanted.

The Reader and I leaned down and took hold of a storyroot. We pulled, but the root held firm.

“It’s stuck,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Pull! With your arms!”

We tried again—you put your back into it; I dug my feet into the fibers. The root finally budged, and loosened, and gave. Together, we pulled the story out of the page.

As far back as I remember—
this page
, even—I used to kneel on the margin with my Mom and send out prayers: thoughts, honed and directed. Prayers, if you don’t know, can be sent to other people—the dead, the memorized, the far-away—or, with the right words and codes, directly to the book’s Core.

Some prayers are public, like the prayers you get from Town Hall or announcements from the newspaper, but most of them are private—“holy,” my Mom would say—between you and another person or you and the Core. My Mom liked to pray out loud sometimes, though, so I’d hear snippets of her psalms to my grandfather, Old Speaker, or to her mother the GameMaster, or a quick hi-prayer to her brother in Baltimore. “I miss you
so
much,” she prayed to Old Speaker once.

“Are you exercising?” he prayed back.

“Yes,” she prayed.

“How’s your eating?” he prayed.

“Fine
,
”
she prayed through clenched teeth.

“You’re not throwing up?”

“No,” she said.

When I first started praying, I just prayed to people I knew. Like, I prayed to my friend Large Odor: “Hey.”

“What?” he prayed back.

“Nothing,” I prayed.

But my Mom taught me how to pray better: how to make a thought in your mind and send it
up
, off the page and into the night. “Prayers are just sentences,” she told me once as we knelt in the worryfields, the wet page cold on my knees. “Sometimes you can direct them, sort of shape them in your mind. But they can also get away from you—” Just then a small sentence scampered across the page. My Mom lunged at it, picked it up by the scruff of its verb and tossed it into the margin. “—wander off,” she continued, “like a thought. You understand?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t. I wouldn’t for a long time.

“If you want to control your prayers—really direct them—you’ve got to
practice
. Pray
a lot
. Pray even when you don’t have to.”

When I got better at praying, I’d send out prayers almost as far and heart as my Mom did. When my sister broke her leg in gymnastics? I prayed for it to heal. When my Dad went into debt? I prayed for more meaning for our family.

When we finished praying, my Mom and I would stand up and brush the page from our knees and walk back home. “You’re a good praying partner,” she told me one day. “Where’d you learn to pray like that?”

She was so nice then.

“I have a good teacher,” I said.

But then the language rose up and the rot set in—into my mind, the town, our hearts—and my Mom stopped bringing me out to the margin; it was just too dangerous.
Then my Mom left altogether. Months after she floated upward, though, I started going back out to the margin again to pray. I didn’t care if it was safe or not—I had a missing I couldn’t meet. I’d pray out as far as I could, and sometimes my Mom prayed back. But it was always a cursory response—“Tell your sister and Dad I said hello!” or “Hope you’re having a nice day!” or “Do your homework!” Once I didn’t hear from her for a whole month, so I submitted a Missing Persons Prayer to the Core. All it did, though, was generate an automatic response: “Thank you for praying to Appleseed—we appreciate your prayer, and regret that we cannot answer every prayer individually.”

When I couldn’t reach my Mom I’d pray to someone else: my Dad at work, my friends Chamblis or Berson, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. Sometimes I’d send out psalms to the dumbstars. Once, just to see what happened, I tried praying to myself. I thought the prayer would just boomerang back and feedback my thoughts, but it didn’t; it went—somewhere—and reached a me on a different page. “Hello?” said the other-page me.

I prayed to myself that I was here in Appleseed, basically all alone with no one to take care of me. That I needed help. “I just don’t know what anything means anymore,” I prayed.

“And you’re
where
?” the me prayed back.

“Appleseed,” I prayed back.

“I’ve never heard of that place,” I prayed to myself. “Is it near Norwich?”

Somewhere, in a stuck drawer in my mind, I think I always knew about the blight. I probably knew about
the bookworms, too—where they came from, what they wanted, who brought them. Some thoughts rise into the sky, but others are just too heavy—they sink into the pagesoil, where they fester and rot. One person’s imagination can cause a lot of damage—destroy a whole town, even!

Before you read any further, though, I want to apologize. I’m really sorry—I am. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. If we work together, though, there might still be blank pages—room to fix all this.

Reader: Work
together
?

Maybe I could carry these stories, and you could carry those.

Reader: That whole stack? What is all that, even?

“This is most of my childhood right here,” I said.

“I’m not sure I can even
lift
that many stories,” you said.

No, no—you can store them in your mind. Here: I’ll—open the top of your head, move some thoughts around—

Reader: Ow.

—and we’ll stuff as many stories as we can in there.

Reader: They smell like cigarettes.

Those are my Mom’s. Don’t smoke them! They’re special MotherSmokes, six feet long and strong as Baz. Once I tried one and my mind started coughing and hacking and it almost puked into my skull.

Reader: That all of them?

Just—one more. There. Now we’ll just close up your skull good and tight, and you’re good to go. Hey—what page are we on?

Reader: 17.

OK—let’s go. We’re late already.

Reader: Go where?

Forward. To try to fix this. We’ve got to try to save Appleseed.

Turn the page, step onto the margin, and you’re at the edge of Appleseed, Massachusetts, standing right on the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, next to the Connecticut River. See? You can see Appleseed City—the smokestacks of Bondy’s Island, the Meaning District—off behind you. To your right is the town: the Amphitheatre, the Town Hall, the Appleseed Free Library, the Shoppes. Back behind them, but before you reach Appleseed Mountain, are the Prison and the Mental Hospital.

I wasn’t born here in Appleseed. We lived off the northwest margin until I was three, and moseyed here the way most of my friends’ families did, as part of the Housing Boom of ’77. That year, droves of houses—two-stories, ranches, Victorian mansions, cottages—stumbled across New England, looking for a space to settle. The boom began as a murmur in Vermont and bombasted into New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Houses started crossing the Connecticut River in March of ’77, marching through Greenfield, Easthampton, and Agawam. Our house walked that entire summer, carrying my family inside it every step. My parents spent all day steering from
the porch while my sister Briana, who was four at the time, sat in front of the TV and I slept in my steel case.

By the time the houses reached Massachusetts, my Dad said, every major road was blocked. “The old highways were literally
clogged
with houses,” he told me once, on a drive out to visit The Ear. The Ear was a handyman, like my Dad, except he always had much better tools. “What’s sad is?” my Dad said. “Some of those houses—”

“Died right there on the road,” said a thought lying on the couch in my mind. I’d heard this story a hundred times before.

“Died!” my Dad said. “Right on the road! Their foundations cracked from all that idling!”

“Those are the suburbs now,” said the thought, shoving some crackers into its mouth.

“And they closed down the roads and made
those
the new suburbs!” my Dad said.

By the time my parents made it into the Pioneer Valley, most of the towns along Old Route Five had closed their exits. You’d see signs, my Dad said, reading
NO PLOTS AVAILABLE
.

“It was nervewracking,” said my Dad, driving us through the Meadows. “You know how your Mom gets. And the TV antenna broke somewhere around West Springfield, so your sister was so bored.”

“What about me?”

“You were,” he said, “you. Quiet. Thinking in the Vox.”

At three, I had not yet made a single sound—not a gurgle, not a bleep, not a screech. I used to just sit still and stare
like a reader, my Mom said, with a terrified look on my face. Sometimes tears would run down my cheeks, my Dad said, but no sound would accompany them. My parents thought that I might never speak, that I was mute, that I might not have been born with a voice. My thoughts kept repeating the same words, over and over: “You won’t,” they’d say.