The Endless Forest by Sara Donati Read Free Book Online Page A

home at a steady pace. Levi was in the barn shoveling hay, his thoughts so distant that she had to call his name twice before he heard her. Levi was a hired hand, a freed slave who had been on this farm since Callie could remember, and who was as dear to her as a brother. Without his help she would have had to give up the orchard long ago. He had been trained by her father but he also had a feel for the work. Sometimes Callie caught Levi standing motionless in the orchard, his head cocked to one side and his eyes closed. She had the idea, silly but still somehow right, that he could hear the trees talking to him.
    Callie handed him an apple from the wild tree. Something came over Levi’s face when he bit into it. Maybe hope. Callie was pretty sure that’s what he was seeing on her own face.
    —
    Here was the eternal problem: Even if she planted every seed from every apple on that miraculous wild tree, Callie would not get one like it. An apple tree could not be reproduced from seed, because apples never bred true.
    Callie was barely six when her father began to teach her how to fool nature into making a tree that could not be grown from seed. How to identify scion wood, how to cut it, score the root end, and keep it damp until it could be grafted onto rootstock.
    In the years since, she had grafted hundreds of trees and cared for them until their first bearing. The maybe trees, as she thought of them. They might produce a new fruit, perfect in every way, but more likely they would give her apples too sour or woody to eat, without any flavor at all, too acid to press, prone to aphids or maggots or fire blight. In all the years there had been two grafts that grew into trees worth keeping, and neither of them had been hardy enough to withstand insects or mold or rot.
    Every year Levi pulled down the failed maybe trees, cut and stacked the apple wood for seasoning, and every year two dozen new grafts were set in those newly empty places.
    The plan was to harvest scion wood from the wild tree, but that had to wait until winter was just about to give way to spring. In the meantime, there were other questions to ask.
    Levi picked every apple on the tree and then Callie sat down with paper and ink and a new quill, and she wrote twenty-five letters.
    Dear Sir. With this letter I send to you the first fruit of a tree I have named Wilde’s Bleeding Heart. If you would be so kind, I would be exceedingly thankful for any thoughts or comments you might have on the quality of this apple. Please share these by letter, or directly with Levi Fiddler, a trusted employee, who brings you this message. If you are interested in tasting the cider, I will gladly arrange for it to be delivered at the end of the winter.
    Most sincerely yours, C. D. Wilde, New-York State.
    Levi went off with the apples to call on growers from Schenectady to Albany, from Albany to Boston. When he came back three weeks later his portmanteau was bristling with letters. Every apple grower wanted to taste the cider of this new apple, as soon as it was available.
    They had all questioned Levi closely, but he had not given them any satisfaction or even the vaguest hint of where C. D. Wilde was to be found in the great expanse of New-York State. Better to stay out of the public eye; they did not want a stranger showing up at the door until they had a few dozen healthy, bearing trees, mature enough to give up scion wood of their own. Without any discussion at all they knew that they could speak to no one about the Bleeding Heart.
    Settlers might move ever westward and drag their laws with them, but Paradise sat on the very edge of the endless forests, a frontier that would never be tamed. There had been stories over the years of blood feuds over things as simple as a single tree.
    That winter they pressed the small amount of fruit they had as soon as the temperatures dropped below the point of freezing. Ice covered the lake and made the lanes treacherous, but Callie and Levi