Appleseed by Matt Bell

Author:Matt Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Custom House
Published: 2021-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

The brothers move their few possessions into the Worth household, the Worths grateful to have Nathaniel’s help earlier than usual, to have Chapman there too throughout the busy weeks of the harvest and of preparing for the winter to come. Nathaniel and Chapman labor dawn to dusk beside Jasper, bringing in the crops, patching leaky joins between the house’s boards, pulling stubborn stumps from ground Jasper wants to plow the next year. The work isn’t harder than anything Nathaniel and Chapman did in the Territory, only more determined by the rhythms of the household, by the morning and evening meals, by Jasper’s insistence on reading scriptures aloud after the night’s meal and after Eliza has been put to bed, while the four adults sip last year’s cider from Grace’s delicate ceramic cups.

Jasper reads, Jasper interprets, Jasper shows Chapman the words of the man whose ideas rule Jasper’s own. “According to Swedenborg,” he says, “the soul is the gift of life from God and the human body its natural clothing. You are shaped as God made you, there can be nothing wrong with the flesh you are given.”

He slides his book across the table at Chapman, who takes it but doesn’t open it. He can’t read, has never learned. He considers Jasper’s words, weighs them against the faunish body he’s hiding. As a child unlike any other, Chapman had wondered what it was he was called, but when years later he learned the word faun from a book of tales Nathaniel bought and read to him, he found it answered few of his questions, for the place the book claimed fauns were from wasn’t like the place Chapman had been born, the wild country in which he’d lived his life. Was that all books contained? Knowledge but not answers? Then perhaps Chapman didn’t need books.

Watching Nathaniel refill his cup with cloudy cider—refilling his cup too often, Chapman thinks, watching his brother’s slackening face, his drooping eyelids—he asks, “But can the soul come back? Can the body die and the soul go on?”

Jasper frowns, retrieves the unopened book from Chapman’s hands. “The Church teaches us there is Heaven, where the sunlight of God’s love shines upon you, and there is Hell, the absence of such light. In between the recently dead travel a realm of spirits, where a man grapples with the events of his life until he dares admit his true nature. Only after his every deed has been confessed and heard and judged does he pass into Heaven or else descend into Hell.”

Chapman cares not for this talk of Heaven and Hell: What does it have to do with one such as he, so bound to the earth? He tells Jasper good night, then drains his cup; he takes sleepy Nathaniel’s and drains that too. His tongue thick with cider, Chapman says, “Come, brother. Let us lay out our bedrolls, let us get you to your rest.”

Nathaniel’s voice slurs, his movements unsteady. Chapman cares for his brother now as his

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