Golden Delicious (29 page)

I didn’t answer.

“Sorry our prayer got disconnected the other day,” she prayed.

I didn’t answer.

The next day she tried again. “
?” she prayed. “Are you there?”

“Fuck you,” I prayed back.

“Excuse me?” she prayed.

“Fuck,” I prayed, “you.”

Eventually, people began to doubt there ever
were
such things as apples. Our neighbor, Bob Lonely? He started saying that those early chapters of Appleseed were imagined—that they were fictions. “Apples were just an idea,” he told me once, “Nice to think about, but not real.” After a while I had my doubts, too. I couldn’t remember what apples smelled like, what they tasted like. Were they heavy or light? Green or red? Bitter or sweet? Then I heard a rumor in school one day about a group of aardvark importers selling apples for high meaning off the back of a truck in the west margin. Some Cones must have heard the same rumor, though, because those aardvarks were apprehended later the same day. As it turned out they were just selling counterfeits—pears painted red.

The only one who didn’t lose faith in the promise of apples and trees was the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. He tilled every deadgrove in town. When he showed up in the groves across the street with his hoe and satchel of seeds, I walked over to see what he was planting. He opened the bag and I saw seeds of all different shapes and colors; some of them were as big as hearts. “What are they for?”

He shrugged. “I can’t keep track. I’ve been trading for as many different types and versions as I can.”

For two months or so, I worked in the fields across the street from my house as the Memory of Johnny Appleseed’s assistant. We pulled up old crops, turned the soil, and planted the seeds. I’d also accompany him on his trades. He met with some real characters! Once, we took the Bicycle Built for Two to Small Pear to meet a marginalia-man called Eyes. Eyes had a line of eyes that ran all around his head, and he had his seeds collected in tiny plastic bags. “These,” said Eyes, “are pumpkin seeds.” He handed them to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Thunderseeds,” he said. Then he found another bag. “These are motherseeds,” said the Memory.

“
Mother
seeds?” I said.

I looked at Johnny. Motherseeds! “How much for those?” I asked the seer.

“What about apple seeds?” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“Here,” said the marginalia, and he held up another bag. “Finest apples this side of East Appleseed.”

“How much?” said the Memory.

“Five truths,” he said.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed’s eyes narrowed. “Give you four,” he said.

“Fuck you,” said the marginal. He closed his knapsack and turned to walk away.

“OK,” the Memory said, grabbing the sleeve of Eyes’ coat. “Four truths, one theory.”

“What about for the motherseeds?” I said.

“Two ideas,” he said.

I handed him the ideas and he gave me the packet of seeds.

When we got back to the deadgroves we went right to work. We were running out of space in the deadgroves, so Johnny directed me to a patch of nothings and told me to pull them out.

“Really?” I said. “They’re almost ripe.” They looked like this:

“We can either grow nothings here,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed, “or we can pull the nothings and plant mothers and apples.”

I stepped into the field and began pulling up the nothings by the roots. Then I turned the soil and planted the seeds we’d traded for. After half an hour or so, Bob Lonely came walking across the street. “Afternoon,” he said.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed nodded to him.

Mr. Lonely looked at the pile of nothings. “Those nothings ripe?”

“Ripe as they’re going to get,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

The pulled nothings were screaming, and dying, in the sun.

“Are they—screaming?” Bob said.

“They’re singing,” said Appleseed.

Bob nodded and turned back toward his house.

The sun roiled overhead. The next morning, the deadgrove struck up a conversation with the sun, and the soil asked the sun out for chai, and then, out for a formal dinner date. Soon the sun and soil were spending a lot of time together. And then, lo and tone, I walked out into the fields with the Memory of Johnny Appleseed one morning and we saw stalks starting to sprout.

“Isn’t it amazing?” said the proud page.

Appleseed put his hands on his hips. “It’s a fucking miracle,” he said.

I started planning for a new life: life with a Mom. Two Moms, even! On my clipboard, I made a list of places we could go: to the Big Why, the Library, on a hike up Appleseed Mountain, to see a matinee at the Bing. Would this Mom like music? Would she appreciate the Ulcerative Colitises?

The rows of apple seeds didn’t sprout; neither did the pumpkin seeds. But two days after we planted the motherseeds the stalks were eye-high. I stepped up to the first row of plants and I could see, between the sheaths, human faces. When I looked closer, though, I saw a beard and an Adam’s apple. My thoughts swore in disappointment. These weren’t the faces of mothers after all; they were the faces of
fathers
, their eyes closed and their lips pursed.

When I showed the Memory of Johnny Appleseed the father faces he put his hands on his hips and spit into the
soil. “Shit,” he said. “That damn omniscient—he sold us Dads instead of Moms.” I could tell he was embarrassed.

“What are we supposed to do with these?” I asked.

“We could just turn them over, bury them,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed suggested.

I thought about that. “And grow what?” I said.

“Corn?” he suggested.

In the end, though, we decided to reap the crop—to let the fathers grow, pull them when they were ready, and then bring them down to the flea bee and see what we could get for them. This
was
during the blight, after all; everyone was down on meaning and we thought there still might be a good local market for Dads. Everyone needed a father—villains needed them, nomads needed them, even those
with
fathers needed fathers.

Another few days passed by—I spent them by myself, alone in the house. That weekend, though, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed prayed to me from across the street and told me that the sheaths were uncurling, that I needed to get over to the deadgroves right away. When I got there I saw: some of the fathers were waking up, rubbing their eyes and stretching their arms and stepping out of their stalks. Most of them were dressed in work suits and carrying briefcases. Each ripe father dutifully placed one foot on the field and then the other. Then they all checked their watches and straightened their ties.

One father approached me. “Dad?” I said, but he walked right past me and bolted across the grove.

Then another father stepped out of its stalk. “Dad,” I said, but that one walked right by, too.

Soon, a steady stream of fathers was storming across the street. In the groves, meanwhile, more fathers were waking up. One of them stepped out into the deadsoil and smiled at me. “Name’s Jim,” he said.

“
,” I said.

We shook hands. “Very good to be here,” he said, looking around at the fields. “You’ve done a great job here. I’m really proud of you, Son.”

I hadn’t heard words like those in I don’t know how long—maybe never. “It was nothings,” I said.

“But now it’s somethings, and that’s because of
you
, because of what you did. Show me around?”

Jim and I walked past the rows of dead trees. I introduced him to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed, who was helping other fathers out of their stalks. “I’m Jim,” he said to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “And you are?”

“The Memory of Johnny Appleseed,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“Great to meet you,” said Jim.

Just then, I saw my father’s truck pull into our driveway. He got out of the cab and watched a school of fathers pass him. I saw him look across the street. Then he began marching mechanically toward us. “What—” he said, his silver skin shining in the sun. “Who are these people?”

Jim extended his hand. “Name’s Jim,” he said.

“They’re fathers,” I said.

My Dad tried to compute this. “What are they doing
here
?”

“Dads are really popular right now,” I said quietly.

“But you
have
a Dad,” said my father. “Me.”

“I know,” I said. “I thought—if we brought them to the flea bee—”

“OK, but you should have asked me about this first,” he said, rubbing the soot of toil off his forehead. “This is a really meaningful risk.”

“The seeds were only—”

“Fathers have huge appetites,” my Dad said. I could smell the work on his breath. “What do you plan to
feed
them?”

Across the street, fathers were looking for tasks. Two had opened the hood of my father’s truck and one was fixing the steel banister on the front step.

Jim looked at his watch. “Gosh darnit, I’m late,” he said.

“Late for what?” said my father.

“I’ve got a meeting at the office,” he said, straightening his tie.

“Will you be coming back?” I said.

Jim winced. “Probably not,” he said.

“Not ever?” I said.

“I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on,” Jim said. “
, you take care of yourself, all right, Son? You have a good life now, you hear?” Then he chucked me on the shoulder and charged toward the street.

“Jim,” I said, weakly.

“Forget that one,” said my father. There was sudden meaning in his eyes. “Go back out to the fields. Keep them in their stalks until we figure out how to store them.”

I was dizzy. “How do I keep them there?”

My father ran his hands through his tired hair. “Do
whatever it takes,” he said. “Try to reason with them. Tell them a story.”

My Dad ran toward the house and I went back into the groves. By then it was almost dusk, and more difficult to see—the running fathers made shadows on the white page.

When I reached the fatherfields, though, all was quiet. The only fathers left in those fields were not yet ripe, still sleeping in their stalks. I went from stalk to stalk, looking at their sleeping faces. Some fathers were mumbling to themselves; others were wheezing and snoring.