North Woods

Osgood departs for war and dies in the battle of Lexington in 1775 when his daughters are 19 years old. Alice and Mary ably carry on the orchard business after his death. In addition, they also amuse themselves by creating musical compositions. Alice plays the fife, while Mary plays the piano and sings. They write ballads that they perform together. Although they’re identical twins, they have very different temperaments. Mary is practical and oversees the orchard business. Alice is more inclined to dream of romance. She exudes an indefinable charm that makes her more beautiful than Mary.

During their childhood, Osgood told the girls the story of the golden apple of discord that the goddess Eris tossed into a feast on Mount Olympus. It was inscribed “to the fairest” and became the spark that ignited the Trojan War. Each year, he replayed the scene and offered the apple to the fairest of his daughters. He showed no overt partiality, but Mary was sure that his gaze always lingered longer on Alice. The girls attended a school taught by Minister Carter. He was a bad teacher, but the girls befriended his amusing son, George. He showed them parts of the woods they’d never seen before and introduced them to an Indigenous healer man named Joe Walker. While Joe knew the story of the Osgood property’s original inhabitants, he chose not to tell the girls.

As the girls grow to marriageable age, Mary worries that Alice will wed and leave her. Alice dreams of falling in love, getting married, and raising children. However, her dreams never materialize. Mary breaks up Alice’s budding romance with a wounded soldier. Other suitors follow, but Alice knows she can’t leave Mary. As the decades pass, resentment grows between them. During an economic downturn, Mary proposes buying Merino sheep, but there isn’t enough open pasture, so she wants to cut down a glade of trees that Alice regards as her refuge. She calls it Brocéliande after the forest of Arthurian legend. Mary gets her way, and Alice is heartbroken: “The […] trees falling sounded to her like screaming” (81).

When the sisters are in their fifties, their old friend George Carter returns to his family’s farm to spend his remaining time there after years of roaming the globe. However, he’s a hapless agriculturalist. During harvest season, he asks for a large quantity of Osgood apples and presses them into cider. When he offers some to the sisters, Mary is deeply offended. Her father forbade pressing the Osgood apples, insisting that they were meant to be eaten. However, George says that he was the boy who led Charles Osgood to the apple tree in the first place. Alice brushes aside Mary’s objections and enjoys some cider with George. He then invites her to his house for dinner, while Mary remains at home, furious.

Tipsy from the cider, Alice and George make love, and she stays the night. The following morning, she dreads the confrontation that awaits her when she tells Mary about her romance: “No matter how well she knew her sister, no matter how many times they had fought, there had never been such a rupture” (89). When she returns to the pasture, she’s horrified to find that Mary has chopped down several apple trees. As Alice walks up, Mary kills her with a blow from her axe: “‘They are not for cider,’ said Mary, standing alone in the orchard, the savaged trees around her” (90). Leaving Alice’s body in the orchard, she returns to the house, where she receives a letter by messenger from George intended for Alice, explaining that George isn’t cut out to be a farmer. After professing his love for Alice, he avows that he’s a confirmed bachelor. He’s leaving for Boston and won’t be back for another season. Upon reading the letter, Mary concludes that she saved Alice from heartbreak. Feeling lonely without her twin, she takes Alice’s body back into the house, she cleans and dresses the corpse, and props it in a rocking chair. Since no one comes to the Osgood home, Mary spreads the word that her sister died of “apoplexy.”

Five years later, Mary grows ill. She discovers a tumor growing inside her and feels the end approaching. Knowing that she can’t take care of them, she unpens all the Merino sheep to wander at will. Then, Mary deposits Alice’s body in a cellar storage area beneath the floor of the pantry: “She paused, looking down, then went and got her sister’s fife, and the thick book of ballads they had written together over the years” (93). After she lies down beside her sister, Mary closes the hatch door on both of them to spend eternity by Alice’s side.