The Open Window: Tales of the Months

by Mabel Osgood Wright

“Did you ever hear of the man? Few of your generation have, yet I remember him as I saw him when I was a lad, sixty years ago, and my mother, who was Massachusetts born, numbered him among her distant kin. She said, and she had it from her mother, that he was born in Boston in the year of Paul Revere’s ride; and that his real name was Chapman (the same as my mother’s), John Chapman. He was a studious boy, and wished to be a preacher, having a zealous streak to go overseas and teach the heathen, but what with the war and troubled times, the way was not made straight. Yet the times were fair enough for falling in love, and this he did with one Anice Chase, but while he bestirred himself for the wherewithal to marry, the white plague laid its hands on her. In those days, at the first sign, the victim was set apart as doomed, and so it was with Anice. Only a year from their betrothal, and John journeyed on foot three days out from Boston town to her father’s farm to bid her good-by.

“It was a May afternoon, and the lilacs and apples in the yard were all abloom; Anice on a couch lay under one of those trees, for she would not rest content indoors; the sight and smell of the flowers were all she thought or spoke of. Long they talked together, and then she said so feebly that he could scarcely hear, ‘Go and preach, but not to the far-off heathen. Stay in your own land, but go westward, preach Christ and the Garden of Eden, which is Home, and wherever you go plant the apple, the Tree of Life that stood in the midst of the garden, as its symbol and mine. For I shall reach the garden first and wait for you close to the door.’

“That night Anice died. John Chapman soon after fell ill of a fever, they said from exposure on his homeward journey, and when he recovered, he had strange fancies, and then totally disappeared.

“Soon after the year eighteen hundred, early in spring, and for nearly half a century following, a traveller made his way from western Pennsylvania into Ohio, journeying straight across country to the Indiana border, whether there were houses in his route or not. He was a strange-looking figure, tall, gaunt, and clad in curiously assorted garments, sometimes hatless and barefoot, sometimes wearing mismated shoes and a peaked cap of his own manufacture. Either on his back, or else in a small cart that he dragged after him, he carried a bag filled with apple seeds. Whenever he came to a likely spot, he would loosen the ground with a rude, strong hoe, plant some seeds, weave saplings into a strong enclosure to keep the cattle out, and then pass on. Wild beasts never molested him, the rattlesnakes turned from his path, and the Indians, brutal as they were at that time in their treatment of the settlers, not only never harmed him, but treated him with reverence as a messenger of the Great Spirit.

“Then, when the day was done, he would knock at the door of a cabin, and after partaking of simple food, for which he would always offer to pay, either in coin of which he managed to earn enough to supply his few needs, or else in young apple trees, he would draw close to the lamp or throw himself on the floor by the fire, and pulling a tattered Bible from his shirt, open it and proclaim as one reading a letter, ‘Behold I have planted the Tree of Life at your doors, now hearken to the news fresh from Heaven.’

“To a few of the women, from time to time, he told detached fragments of his history, and my mother being one of these, recognized him almost by intuition as her kinsman John Chapman; and either feeling the distant tie of blood, or because we children gathered about him and hung on his words, he came to our cabin more frequently than to others, for next to his beloved trees, he loved little children and all animals. For women who tried to better his attire or sympathize with him, he had no eyes. ‘I have a wife waiting for me beside the gates of Paradise,’ he would say, ‘and what has she to do but busy her fingers in making me wedding garments, and none but of her making will I wear.’ As to his name, Johnny Appleseed was the only title he was known by in that country.

“Every spring he returned to Pennsylvania for more seed, for which he bartered at the cider mills, and wherever he went his path was strewn with his kind deeds. Did he come across a sick horse left to die by pioneers, it was housed and fed at his expense. Did he meet a traveller more ragged than himself, he always found that he had a garment he could spare, until finally, a feed bag with opening for head and arms was his most common coat.

“One autumn, being lame, he tarried a long while at our cabin; it was the year that I was ten, and word came that the Connecticut home in which my father was born had fallen to him, who, being the youngest, had been obliged to strike out for himself. At first my mother cried, for she had learned to love the free life, hard as it was, and she could not bear the thought of leaving what was now home to her; but in Connecticut there were better schools, and mother came of gentle stock, and had planned to make a preacher of me.

“When the day for leaving came, Johnny Appleseed, who had not left the vicinity of our cabin for weeks, appeared beside my mother in the kitchen; in one hand he held a straight young apple tree, securely packed in moss and sacking for the journey, and in the other a leaf from his Bible, the page of Genesis that tells of the Tree of Life.

“ ‘Take them with you, Hannah, and you will not be lonely,’ he said; ‘where the Tree of Life is there is home, and I give you fresh news of it; soon I shall enter forever into the garden where it grows;’ and before she could answer, he had disappeared among the trees.