Dead Man’s Hand (27 page)

For John Appleseed didn’t just blow the pollen into the blossoms. John Appleseed breathed
the pollen into his lungs and there he came to know the grains, the deep inner secrets
of them, in the few moments of a held breath. Then he puffed out onto the blossoms
only the pollen grains that he wanted them to know, and so the apples that came forth
were like the animals from Noah’s Ark, ready to go and propagate the world, each after
its own kind.

“You’re a man with a marvelous knack,” said Alvin, “for talking and for growing things.
But I don’t see a jug of cider in your kit.”

“A man who’s had the pure pollen in his nostrils has no need of the fermented cider,”
said John Chapman.

And because Alvin was an honest man, and didn’t expect to hear any more lies than
he would tell himself, he took him at his word. And, as far as it went, that word
was true. John Appleseed was no cider drinker. He ate the tart apples as they came,
sharp to the bite, and otherwise he ate cornbread like other folks.

The sun was at midafternoon when they parted, Appleseed for a place he’d camped before,
the time he came to plant his nursery here. “And you go on into Piperbury, my young
smith. It’s a godly town.”

“The whole town?” asked Alvin. “That
will
be a sight. Every other town I seen has its good and bad people all mixed up together.”

“In Piperbury, they have a keen awareness of the goodness of God and the low poor
condition of the human soul,” said John Appleseed. “Every living soul of them. It’s
why I love it more than any other place where I’ve set up a nursery of my trees. It’s
why I keep on coming back.”

From this, Alvin wasn’t quite sure what to expect as he crossed through the bridge
and walked on into Piperbury. Would they be a pious group, proud of their humility,
critical of any who weren’t as humble as they? Or would they be genuine Christians,
their hearts filled with compassion and generosity? From what he found, Alvin figured,
he’d know a good deal more about John Chapman.

What he found was a mournful procession in the hamlet. It’s hard to put on a good
funeral show when there’s no more than twenty families altogether, but this was the
most ragged bunch of grievers Alvin had ever seen. It’s not that they weren’t sad
enough—he couldn’t remember seeing a group more downcast. It’s that they also seemed
so very tired, plodding along as if at the end of a long day’s work.

Well, of course they were. It was late in the afternoon, and Alvin doubted that anyone
except the immediate family had taken the day off work.

Alvin doffed his cap, as he knew would show respect, and then fell in at the back
of the procession. Up ahead, the plain box rested on the shoulders of six men, and
Alvin wondered if they were the dead one’s family or if the hamlet was so small that
the same six men carried everyone who died.

But before he could ask anyone that question, he had to establish himself. So he spoke
quietly to the prentice-age boy nearly at the back. “You mind a stranger asking whose
burial we’re headed for?”

The boy didn’t even glance up. “Why? You didn’t know her.”

“Well right there that’s something I didn’t know. A woman. Or a girl?”

“A woman as should have knowed better,” said the boy, and then he sped up his walk
and left Alvin behind.

“Move on through this hamlet, mister,” said a middle-aged woman. “We got nothing for
you here.”

“Not even a bite of supper? I can work for it or pay, if need be.”

“You don’t want to spend even a night here,” said the woman. “It’s the wickedest place
in all the world.” Tears streamed down her face.

“This little place?” asked Alvin. “It’s too small to be wickedest. You don’t even
have all the equipment.”

“We are burdened with our sins,” said the woman, “and we don’t have time to take you
on.”

“Maybe I can help with your burden,” said Alvin. He was beginning to get an idea of
the kind of Christianity that John Chapman loved.

“There’s no helping us,” said the woman. “Jesus only hung for a day on the cross.
That wasn’t time enough to atone for me.” And then she burst into tears and, like
the teenage boy, she sped up her pace and left Alvin behind.

Well, Alvin knew that a funeral wasn’t a place to discuss theology. And for all he
knew they might be right. A town was bound to know itself better than any stranger
could, especially one who just walked in and meant to walk right out again next day.
What was he going to tell them, that they’d listen to?

And yet they did all seem burdened, and not just by bearing a box on their shoulders,
or grieving for the dead. It became clearer when he got to the hilltop cemetery. For
they took turns speaking over the grave before throwing a handful of dirt onto the
coffin, and they all said just about the same thing.

“Nedra died convinced of her damnation, but I’m more damned than she could ever be.
There was the day she had a new bonnet, and I said, ‘Would Jesus think that money
was well spent? Remember the widow’s mite.’”

The other mourners groaned, sharing her apparent agony.

“I judged her and I know it broke her heart. I pray God to forgive me, for I helped
put her down there.”

Others had different tales, some longer, few as short. How they’d done this or that
to offend Nedra. But the pattern was soon clear. First, the offenses were all of a
sort most people did without thinking. They could be bad, but they didn’t seem intentional.

Second, they mostly consisted of saying things that might cause Nedra to judge herself
harshly. Which seemed oddly circular. There they stood, each in turn at the head of
the grave, explaining how their terrible sin was to make Nedra feel more sinful. Seemed
to Alvin she would have fit right in.

By the end, Alvin was beginning to think that the woman at the back of the procession
had been half right. This town
believed
itself to be the sinfulest place, but the sins were all those of piety.

Usually when people were full of such condemnation, they spent it to condemn others;
but in Piperbury everyone condemned himself—and what they condemned themselves for
was harsh judgment of others. Yet Alvin wasn’t really sure he believed that people
so sensitive about judgment would all have committed the same sin… of judging.

So he finally spoke up, when the woman from the procession’s end was done with her
confession and self-condemnation.

“Forgive a stranger, ma’am, but the words you say you said to Nedra seem awfully condemning.
You don’t seem to be the sort of woman who would say such a harsh thing.”

The group was silent, and the woman he was talking to seemed abashed. “Well of course
I didn’t say it
out loud
,” she said.

“But if you didn’t say it aloud, then Nedra couldn’t have heard your words, and if
she didn’t hear them, how could your offense have put her in the ground?”

The woman burst into tears. “I should have said them aloud! Maybe we could have talked.
Maybe I could have been a true friend to her!”

Alvin turned to face the largest group of mourners. “She’s not the only one, is she?
Did
any
of you say your sinful thing
out loud
, where she could hear?”

“Goodness no!” said the preacher.

“We try so hard not to hurt anyone,” said the weeping woman. “Yet she felt our rejection
and our condemnation, and she could bear it no longer. She is on our conscience! We
slew her in our hearts, every one of us!”

And there arose then such a wailing that Alvin fled from before it, walking halfway
down the hill and trying to puzzle out just what was going on here, and what sort
of Christianity this was. He’d never heard of an all-damnation, no hope of atonement
version of the faith. Nor could he believe that the cheerful, witty fellow with the
knack for apples that he met outside of town would find this place anything but disheartening.
Yet he had loved it.

He sat unobtrusively a ways back from the lane when the mourners came down to return
to their lives in the hamlet. No one met his gaze, until at last the woman he had
spoken to brought up the rear. She stepped aside and went to him.

“I thought you’d still be here,” she said. “I think I’ve left you more confused than
helped, and that’s a sin.”

“No, it’s not,” said Alvin.

“Let’s not argue,” she said. “You’re a stranger and it’s too late for you to go on
to the next town, though that would have been a better plan. So you can come to my
place. I’m a widow now, alone in the house, but you look to be an honorable young
man.”

“I’ll do any jobs as need doing,” said Alvin. “I have a way with stuff needs fixing.”

“Lives?” she asked. “Souls? Do you have a knack with those?”

“Only one who ever had such a knack as that,” said Alvin, “and I’m not him.”

“Come with me. You’ll have food and a nice place to sleep. My son’s bed lies empty.
It’ll be good to have someone in it again.”

“Has he been away for long?” asked Alvin.

She shook her head. “Near two year ago. Half cut his own leg off with a scythe and
bled to death. The tourniquet was too late. Or maybe someone was deliberately slow,
to help him on his way.”

“Are you saying someone helped to kill him?”

“It’s the only mercy we have left—to get to hell sooner, before we rack up any more
sins.”

“What’s wrong with you people?” asked Alvin. And then, remembering himself, he said,
“Of course I mean that in the nicest possible way.”

“It’s our knack, I think,” she said. “We have a knack for recognizing our own sins
and confessing them. Other people in other places may commit worse or coarser sins,
but what is within our reach, we do, mostly by hurting each other.”

They were already in the town square now—not much of a square, but not much of a town,
either. There was a church there, and behind it a large and lovely garden of a graveyard.

“I wonder why you moved it,” said Alvin. “The cemetery. This one doesn’t look half
full yet.”

“Plenty of room there, in the churchyard, on hallowed ground, where a godly soul might
go to rest until the resurrection day,” she said.

“So why did you move the cemetery out to that hill?”

“Because you can’t bury a suicide in hallowed ground,” she said.

“She killed herself?” asked Alvin. “No one mentioned that.”

“No one had to. We knew where we were burying her, and we knew why.”

“There are so many others up there,” said Alvin. “More graves than here. They can’t
all be…”

But they could. She gave him a glance that said all.

“Every one of them by their own hand?” asked Alvin.

“Because we drive them to it,” said the woman.

“The things you all told about up there by the grave—none of you even
said
those things.”

“Some did.”

“Most didn’t,” said Alvin. “What she didn’t hear
couldn’t
drive her to commit such a terrible sin.”

“Sin it is,” said the woman. “The worst sin. But when you finally come to understand
that your soul is so filthy that even Christ can’t save you, then what does it matter
if you add one more sin to the burden, if by doing it, you can
stop
your miserable life of abomination?”

It was the ugliest sophistry Alvin ever heard. Peggy had taught him to recognize such
false reasoning. But his own experience had taught him not to bother arguing. Most
people’s logic was invented to explain why they could only do what they already meant
to do. Her logic for suicide was meant to explain why so many had taken their own
lives. But arguing wouldn’t save a one of them.

Oh, it got worse. Turns out the woman—Mrs. Turnbull—kept a table for seven different
men of the hamlet—which was a high percentage of the total. Every one of them had
lost his wife, and so she cooked for them, having lost her husband and her son and
her two daughters.

“Did they all…?” Alvin knew it was prying and rude, but he had to know.

“No,” she said bitterly. “My husband killed himself, but my two wicked daughters fled
the town like Jonah, thinking they could hide their sins from the Lord.”

Alvin couldn’t help but think they had the right idea. Especially when he found out
one more piece of information.

At supper—an adequate meal, but Mrs. Turnbull was no great shakes as a cook, except
the apple pie—Alvin could hardly believe it, but Mrs. Turnbull told them about Alvin’s
curiosity. He started to apologize, but they seemed intent on begging
his
forgiveness—for what, he didn’t know—and then each man in turn told about his wife’s
suicide, and they weren’t halfway around the table before Alvin realized the worst
thing of all. Most of the suicides sounded like accidents to him.

He said so.

They all nodded knowingly. “Yes, that’s what Satan would like us to believe.”

“They seized the opportunity of the moment,” another one explained. “I don’t want
to say they
planned
it. They were just ready to die, and took the first opportunity.”

“It’s still self-slaughter.”

That night Alvin lay down on Mrs. Turnbull’s dead son’s bed, covered with his clean
white sheet and a blanket lovingly laid down. “You look right in that place, young
man,” said Mrs. Turnbull, kissing his forehead like a mother. “How I wish I hadn’t
driven him to his death.” Then she left the room weeping.

This was definitely not the most sinful place he’d ever been, but he’d never known
people who felt guiltier. And it was also not the most perfectly Christian place he’d
been, either, unless your idea of Christ was about condemnation.

Yet this obsessive guilt did not seem like anything that John Appleseed would love.
He had spoken of the New Church, whose members should go about like Jesus, doing good,
and that it was your collective good works that earned you a place in Christ’s forgiveness.
Nobody here talked about good works, or expressed the slightest hope that the good
they did could ever balance out, let alone overcome, their terrible, nonexistent bad
deeds.