The Invention of Flight by Susan Neville

Author:Susan Neville [Neville, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780820307060
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 1984-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Johnny Appleseed

He told me that his ancestor had left his hard black seeds in neat rows where scrub pine or thistle, cockle or thorns would have grown and that when people stopped just long enough to eat the apples he had planted they felt their feet become like iron and their heads become drugged and when they tried to move, found that they, like the trees, couldn’t. And in turn, he said, the people planted squash and corn and ate the apples freely, spreading more black seeds whose roots joined under the earth in dark rivers which spread under the houses which also grew from the seeds, wrapping around children’s knees, strangling pipes until they had to dig more and more wells.

And he told me I was still under the spell of those trees of his ancestor and I said I didn’t believe that until he said would I leave in the morning with him for Zanzibar and I said no. And he pointed to the trees behind my house, black as obsidian against the darkening sky, and he said the black branches were the rivers from the apple trees, spreading out like sap at this time of night, and that to him they were a cutout in the sky. If I looked closely I could see stars where the bark should be. I looked closely and didn’t see stars, but there were stars outlined with gunmetal on the hat he wore and I liked it when he stroked his beard a certain way and I didn’t care about the trees or the bark or his illusions. He said he was a direct descendant of Johnny Appleseed, that he had the same name, and that once he had even seen him in a bar in Kansas City, the original Johnny, toting glossy catalogs, posing as an undergarment salesman so he could say “negligee” and “brassiere” to the women who came in. He said that he himself was an itinerant magician, specializing in appearing and disappearing, that I’d already seen one-half of his act. He put his arms on my shoulders and asked was I anxious to see the other half and I said no, I wasn’t. Then he asked again if I would leave with him for Zanzibar and I said no, but I’d put him up in the garage for the night. He said that was a trick question; since I’d said no I was in need of help and he would stay around until I said yes. I told him he sounded crazy, I thought he was just a tramp, but he pulled his beard and bent his knee slowly so that rings of cloth crawled up his leg and I thought, what could be the harm? Stay, but only for one night. By that time the cut-out trees had bled into the rest of the sky; there were stars around his head as well as on it.

I pulled a mattress into the garage while he sat crouched on a high shelf watching, hanging by rakes, shovels, hoes.

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