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 welcomed the cold. Every morning Levi checked the three barrels of pressings from the Bleeding Hearts and removed the ice from the surface. This went on for a week. When the cider had a kick strong enough to get a man’s unwavering attention, Levi pulled a ladleful and handed it to Callie.

She had been drinking applejack for as long as she could remember. From a single mouthful she could tell what kind of apples had gone into the press, how many nights of freezing temperatures it had been set out for, and if there would be a market for it.

This jack was very strong and fragrant. It burned a path down her throat into her belly, where its heat spread out a warmth that burrowed deep.

Levi said, “Well? What’s it taste like?”

Callie took a deep breath and then a smile broke out across her face. “Money,” she said. “It tastes like lots of money.”

They fit as many quart jugs of applejack as they could in the bed of the wagon secured under a tarp covered over with straw. Levi set out again and was gone the entire month of March; in that time Callie harvested the first of the scion wood from the mother tree and grafted it onto her best rootstock. The Bleeding Heart grafts had gone into the ground in the rich soil at the bottom of the hillside, where they had some protection from the wind and even shallow roots could profit from the fast-running Sacandaga.

Now those saplings were in second leaf. The right thing to do, the way she had been trained, was to wait another two or three years until they were sure of the fruit before they began to graft the Bleeding Heart in earnest. This time they harvested the scion wood at the first opportunity. With the cuttings from the wild tree and this year’s grafting, they should have more than fifty trees this year, and a half-dozen of them would bear first fruit.

The rain was coming down so hard that Callie finally took note. She pulled her hood more tightly around her face and shoulders, and cleaned her knife on her apron.

The ringing of the meetinghouse bell came to her on a gusting wind, as frantic as the beating wings of a caged bird. On a clear day the meetinghouse bell seemed loud enough to wake the dead, though it was almost a mile away. She turned to listen, and as she did, the ringing stopped. Most likely one of the Ratz boys getting up to mischief, but then the ringing started again and a knot pulled tight in her belly.

A fire or somebody underneath a fallen tree. Somebody in trouble. She folded her knife, put it in her pocket, and set out for the path along the river, the quickest route into the village proper. And then stopped at the sight of the Sacandaga, already breeching its banks.