North Woods

Several decades later, in Massachusetts, another girl witnesses the massacre of her village by Indigenous warriors. They capture her and her infant son, carrying them off along with other hostages. The girl is terrified and grows feverish after a long trek. Eventually, the Indigenous warriors take her to a cabin in the woods where an elderly woman dwells. The woman is English but speaks the language of the Indigenous people too. She takes the girl in and nurses her back to health so that she can care for her son.

The girl learns that the elderly woman ran away from the colony with her husband many years earlier. After he died, she married an Indigenous man, who also died. The girl is wary of the woman because she befriended the Indigenous people: “Is he who slayd my father your friend, and is he who slayd my sister? And she said, Has he not a father and a sister who were also slayn?” (15). The woman teaches the girl much lore about nature. Initially, the girl fears that the woman is a witch until they read the Bible together.

As the girl learns to trust the woman, whom she now regards as her mistress, their cabin is visited by three English scouts in search of the captives that the Indigenous warriors abducted during the massacre: “Then we welcomd them and brought them food and one of them, he bid me sit near him and from his pockets took an apple and invited me to taste. And I laughd, and said, Who am I, Eve? for he frightend me so” (16-17). That night, the women barricade themselves to sleep in the loft so that the men don’t try to rape them.

The next day, the men go out to scout the area but return in the evening. The man who tried to give the girl the apple produces a severed child’s hand. He says they made an Indigenous boy tell them where the village is. They intend to return with soldiers to slaughter everyone there. The girl notices her mistress weeping alone in the garden when she learns this news. That night, the woman orders the girl to stay in the loft while her mistress prepares a meal for the men. Then, the woman comes to the girl and says, “You must understand what is about to happen must happen so that there is no more bloodshed. And I must have lookd afraid for she said, It is so the Evil stops” (17).

The woman has poisoned the men with a mushroom called “Nightmaid.” When they realize what has happened, they try to break into the loft. The woman kills one of the scouts with her axe. Another shoots her with his musket, and she dies. The girl takes the axe to defend herself and her son, and kills the other two men. Afterward, she drags all four bodies out to the meadow and digs their graves. She buries her mistress closer to the house but groups the scouts together. Afterward, the she writes down her story in the margins of the elderly woman’s Bible before fleeing the north woods with her son, never to return.

The meadow remains undisturbed after this tragedy. Months pass: “In the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman with the child, is a piece of apple core with three remaining seeds” (21). In time, one of the apple seeds germinates and grows into a sapling.

In the 1770s, an elderly man writes down his history for the benefit of his two daughters. His name is Charles Osgood, and he has harbored a lifetime obsession with apples. This began during the French and Indian War, when Osgood was a British soldier fighting the Battle of Quebec in 1759 and rose to the rank of major. One day, he surprised a French soldier who was in the process of coring an apple with his bayonet blade. Seeing the Englishman, he plunged the bayonet through his ribcage, but the apple on the end of the bayonet acted as a foil, preventing the blade from piercing Osgood’s heart: “An inch more, and I would have been lost forever. But God had noticed me” (27).

Osgood’s faithful companion, Rumbold, finds him in time and takes him to a surgeon. Falling in and out of consciousness, the major dreams of a meadow where children run about with apples in their hands: “Curious, they scampered down to me, and when I asked what they were eating, they told me that I had reached the tree that fed the souls. Would I like one? They asked. Yes!” (27).

Osgood awakens and continues to convalesce in Quebec. However, when he receives word that his wife has died, he returns home to Albany, where his sister’s family is taking care of his twin daughters, Mary and Alice. Osgood’s brother joins him in Albany and urges him to return to the army, where a promotion awaits, but his head is filled with dreams of apples. He talks so often to his sister and brother about his apple obsession that they call a doctor named Arbuthnot to cure him of his mental malady. The doctor’s quack remedy does nothing.

The former major begins searching for the perfect location to start an apple orchard; the tract of land that the government gave him won’t do: “And a natural tree it must be. Many were the grafted varietals available in the nurseries of Albany, but I wouldn’t have them [...] Mine would be wild, American! Around it I would build my new life” (33). His search takes him far afield until he arrives in the north woods in western Massachusetts, where a local boy tells him of a marvelous apple tree growing wild in the area. The boy leads him to the abandoned cabin and the pasture where the elderly woman and the three scouts are buried. Tasting the fruit of the tree that sprang from a scout’s body convinces Osgood that he has found the perfect apple.

He buys the parcel of land and then hires workers to build a larger structure that connects by a passageway to the original cabin. The two-story saltbox is painted yellow and has a black door. Once the house is complete, Osgood brings his daughters to live with him. He finds the Bible that belonged to the cabin’s inhabitant but disregards the girl’s message inside. Instead, he’s busy teaching his daughters the business of managing an orchard since Osgood’s fruit becomes known far and wide for its flavor. He and his daughters christen the varietal the “Osgood Wonder” apple. As the decades pass, neighbors try to steal cuttings and graft them but can’t duplicate the flavor of the Osgood Wonder. In his later years, Osgood is once again called to war as the US colonies wish to declare their independence. A loyalist, he joins the British Army, leaving his orchard in the care of his daughters.