I was a tough man in my day. There were rough characters on the Ohio River back then, when flatboats and canoes were working their way West with trappers, traders and settlers. Though some came down in wagons, I was with the river crowd, and met up with some very bad men at an early age. I am thankful that I did not lose my righteousness, for I came from a God-fearing family, but I did lose my innocent ways and learned how to fight men even though I was still a boy: how to fight them hard and win. When that godless ruffian, Mike Vine, came down the river looking to become the law unto himself, picking fights with men he didn’t like just to keep his shooting from getting rusty, and scaring the living daylights out of all decent women by the way he looked at them, as if there were no such thing as husbands in the world, I was one of the about twenty men who armed themselves, and stood up to him and his gang of lowlifes. There was a big fight then, right on the river, about a mile from where I proposed to Sadie three years later, and I fired our neighbor’s second rifle two times, and either me or Bart hit the man standing next to Mike with a musket ball right through the heart, a shot to be proud of. We have argued about which rifle the ball came from ever since. But that’s beside the point. Bottom line is Mike and his troublemakers were history, and I had something to do with that.

Like I said, I was a tough man. A good man and a fair man, but tough as they come. In those days, Mike Vine wasn’t the only one, you had scoria passing through frequently. You had go-getters and brave families with the spirit that has made this country great, and then you had the utter dregs who decent society back East had kicked in the pants and this is where they landed. When they told someone back East, "If we ever see you again, we’ll kill you", this is where they came. You always had to keep your guard up, frontier life was free and it was loose. Law books took second place to guns. Besides all this uncertainty in a land of strangers and newcomers, which even the mapmakers hadn’t caught up with yet, there were the red people, the Indians of the forest. God alone knows what was going on in their heads, and whether they had the hearts of men or animals, but they seemed to hate us, just for exercising the dominion which God gave to Man over Nature, and making the wilderness bear farms, and they could be on you in a flash. Their way of walking was like whispering, their thoughts were as secret as the night, and suddenly, if you looked the other way, you’d have an arrow in your back. Forty miles further down the river, the Reverend Curtis and his family had their heads bashed in by tomahawks and war clubs, the volunteers found them dead in his cabin, which was looted; his Bible had been thrown into the fireplace and burned. This was the punishment we received for trying to make the wasteland into a Garden of Eden. For trying to bring religion to the heathen.

Same way we fought against Mike Vine, I fought against the Indians over there. We had to clear them out, so that the country could grow, and progress could keep on marching. The nation was too young to sit down yet. We had one tough battle coming up on a village with ripe corn which the red men didn’t want to give up without a fight. They took us on in the forest, before we got to the clearing, and made such a racket that it sounded like the trees, themselves, were screaming at us, and trying to kill us with their leaves. Arrows were flying everywhere, it was like a rainstorm when the wind is blowing so fierce that the rain comes at you almost sideways, and you could hear the bowstrings twanging and the air rushing all along the sides of the arrows as they flew by. There were a few thuds and cries of pain, which made every one of us feel like bolting like deer, but we were a tough crew and remembered what our leader, Captain Hadley, had told us before. So we crouched by trees, in a crude and loose square, and some of our men, who he called the fakers, fired off their muskets, while the rest of us held our fire, but took out our powder horns and ramrods as though we had fired, too, and were going to reload. That took a real act of will, to do all this with a level head, and not to blow it. Sure enough, for Hadley knew the savages as the back of his hand (after all, they’d killed his father), the Indians tried to rush us after they thought we’d emptied our muskets out with the volley, whereupon those of us who still had loaded muskets lowered our weapons, prayed to God, and let loose with a volley straight from Hell, which filled the forest with smoke and overwhelmed us with the smell of gunpowder. We then met the Indians in hand-to-hand, but thank God, Hadley’s tactics had worked so well, that only a handful managed to reach us with tomahawks and war clubs, as the rest lay dying on the ground, cut down by our point-blank musketry. These we beat off, wielding our rifles like clubs, and with the big, sharp knives you use for finishing off game. Whether we were braver than the Indians or merely better armed, it does not matter. I sincerely believe the preacher who said: "God armed better the side he wished to win." Two hours later, the cornfields were burning, and an hour after that, the abandoned stockade. We got the breathing room we needed.

Like I said, a tough man. Not to brag, but as the years grow on you, and those who know you well die off, and the rest of them can no longer see who you were, because to them you are only this white-haired old man who can barely walk, you have to begin to speak up for yourself. You can’t count on them to recognize the gold in your soul, they don’t have the eyes for it. And so, your mouth must take the place of their eyes. It isn’t easy for men of my generation who were taught to speak with actions, and to represent ourselves with deeds, but living in a corner isn’t the way to end a life, either.

Sadie and I had some great years, together, and we raised a wonderful God-loving family. Besides the events I’ve already told you about, there wasn’t much to my life but the everyday business of living, which was something you could be proud of in the West, as it was back then. I mainly farmed, did some hunting, helped my neighbors to build and repair their cabins and their fences, fished in the river with great success, and taught my sons how to do all the things I loved: well, most of them. Some they learned to do on their own. In all those years, besides the two bad winters that nearly did us in, and the sickness that passed through the valley which took a daughter of mine, may God grant her eternal bliss, I had only one time of trouble, and that was when that strange and peaceful character came through on his way out west, for west kept on going beyond us, and spent some months among us.

I don’t know what it was about him that bothered me so, but there was surely something. His name was John Chapman, but everybody called him "Johnny" or "Johnny Appleseed." He’s famous now, and that gets me, too. Maybe it’s the way Sadie took to him.

Anyway, Johnny came in one day, this small, skinny man practically dressed in rags climbing out of a canoe, wearing a pan placed upside down and backwards over his head as a hat, and dragging these big cloth bags filled with seeds behind him. He also had a Bible. And that was it. Not a gun, as you needed in these parts in those days, even after we sent Mike Vine off to Hell.

"Who are you? What do we want?" a few of us asked him, warily.

We had kids and wives, and that’s why we looked strangers over as though our lives depended on it. They did. You couldn’t risk any wolves in sheepskins here, where there was no one to help you but yourself.

"I’m Johnny," the guy said. "I’m traveling through the country to do what I can to help everyone I meet along the way. We’re all God’s children. I got the Bible for your soul. I know a lot about herbs, in case anyone is sick. I’ll fix them if God will let me. I’m not afraid to climb up in the trees to get you honey, the bees are kind to me and sting me no more than I can stand. I’ve also brought apple seeds. God has made nothing more helpful to man than the apple, and by means of these seeds, I can have this land filled with beautiful apple trees in just a matter of years. You can pick them off the tree, use them to bake, make cider, or just look at them. An orchard of apple trees in bloom: it’s enough to restore a man’s faith."

We looked at each other, wondering if this man was mad, but one of our neighbors had heard about him, he was already becoming well-known. "Are you Johnny Appleseed?" my neighbor asked him.

"That’s what they call me. My given name is John Chapman. I was born in Massachusetts and spent a number of years living near Fort Pitt."

"You don’t got shoes, Johnny?" somebody asked him.

"No," he said, "but I don’t need them. God gave me tough feet, because it was his plan that I should walk through the country spreading his love to all I meet, and planting apple trees. Side by side, his Word and the Trees shall grow. The soul of man and the body of man shall be satisfied."

"The apple is the fruit by which man was damned," I told him.

"It was the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge that damned Man," Johnny said, "and that was only because it was the wrong kind of knowledge, eaten at the wrong time. It was a sin because God said No, not because the fruit, itself, was evil. These apples come without serpents," Johnny said. "You may rest assured that God not only wants you to eat them, but that he will rejoice if you do. If you eat them the right way, it will bring you closer to Him – as close as you dare to come."

"You can stay with us tonight," Sadie told him, coming down from where the women had been holding back, behind the shelter of the men.

"Why did you invite him in?" I asked her later, irate. "We don’t know, yet, who he may be. He may be a con artist: a danger. Maybe he is running from the law. He is almost certainly a nut. How can we fall asleep with him in our midst? He might cut our throats in the night."

"Jacob, he is a very holy man," Sadie told me.

I looked at her, stunned. "Because he carries a Bible?"

"Because he travels alone through the woods, and does not carry a gun."

I thought it might be from that twinkle in his eye, that shining, fearless, spritely gleam that set all the women at ease, and aroused my jealousy. Maybe he was representing himself as a man of God because he wanted our wives.

That night, I slept with one eye open, but the stranger didn’t stir, he seemed overcome by weeks of walking and hunger and had all the life of a stone, until the songs of birds welcoming the dawn caressed his ears, and suddenly he was up and out, disappearing with the stealth of the Indians we had vanquished into the forest. He came back about an hour later, as Sadie was milking the cow, with some berries he had collected from the woods to add to our breakfast.

"Come gather around, children," he told the children of our settlement later that day, "I want to tell you the story of Noah and his Ark."

"We already know that story," one of the kids told him.

"Not the way I’ve told it," he said. And many of the mothers came up, as well, not just to keep an eye on him with their kids because he was so strange, but because they, too, were captured by his style, which was as irresistible as it was unpretentious; and as they all sat there around him his eyes lit up, and the story of Noah seemed to be being told for the first time.

"Johnny, how big must that boat have been to carry so many animals?" one of the kids asked him.

And Johnny made them all get up, and they began to pace out the size of the boat imagining all the different kinds of animals that must fit in it, until they had, with markers, established the dimensions of the Ark, and all the children were jumping up and down with joy. "Can we build an Ark, just like the one Noah built?"

"For today, let’s just build it with our imagination," Johnny told them. "Otherwise, we might have to cut down the whole forest over there to get all the wood we’d need for it, and that would leave lots of animals without a home."

"There ain’t nothing but bears and snakes out there," one of the older kids protested.

"And who says they’re so bad?" Johnny asked. "Don’t step on the snake, and you’ll find out that he’s as friendly as a dove. Don’t scare the bear, and you’ll discover he’s not much more to worry about than a baby chicken."

"Crazy," I thought, when I heard that one repeated to me.

"And will rains like that ever come again?" one of the children, who was frightened by the Bible story, asked Johnny.

Johnny picked the kid up and said: "No, Zeke, as long as we are all good and remember to say our prayers, God will spare the earth. He won’t destroy it with storms, though it is the nature of life to be tested; and he won’t let us destroy it with our foolishness, either. For if we say our prayers with sincerity, it will change us, and we will no longer be a danger to each other." And then, he took out his Bible to read out loud a passage from Isaiah, about the Mountain of Peace.

It didn’t take very long for the settlement to fall head over heels for Johnny Appleseed, who was given free rein to plant apple seeds all along the edges of our property, where he said beautiful orchards would grow. He helped us around the farm, he helped us repair the damage in Bill Hunter’s roof, which was never put on right to begin with, and to fix the crack in the wall in the Clemens home which was the cause of Mrs. Clemens’ son waking up with snow all over his blanket. He also helped to repair the fence that kept in Abraham Trellis’ cows, and to deter a quarrel between Trellis and James Bunker over those same cows. "God has not put the sky above our heads, and built up mountains over the earth so that men should quarrel over a broken fence and a few cows doing what comes naturally," he said. And somehow, those simple words, or maybe the way he said them, set everyone at ease. No one felt he was the loser, and no one’s pride was left with a scar. Peace, which you cannot live without on the frontier as you face what is not a part of you, was kept. Sadie said: "What a beautiful man!"

I must admit that her remarks angered me, though I could not show it without seeming to be a fool. Johnny was so small, so slight of build, so kind and humble, that you could not take him seriously as a rival, and yet, all the women here were crazy for him: not in a sinful way, mind you, but their hearts were open for him as they were not for us. When they were with us, you saw, underneath the happiness they wished for and had sometimes, traces of sadness and disappointment, a mixture of familiarity and betrayal, as though we had somehow not lived up to their expectations, in spite of our courage and our competence. Something was missing in us, in our hardness; in the very strength with which we sheltered them there was something disagreeable, that made them grimace as though it were a poison. It was subtle, the reaction to us of the women we lived with, you could almost think we were imagining it; but it cut into us deeply. But when they were with Johnny, you could see that excitement and delight they had had when they first met us, shining from their eyes and glowing on their cheeks, that naivety, that inexperience that paints the world in glorious colors. There was something pure in him that we lacked, something honest in him that had been found out to be a lie in us.

I cannot deny that I resented it. I had fought Mike Vine, I had saved our country from the Indians, I was as much a man as a man who honors the Bible can be. And yet, here was Sadie, and all the rest of them, falling in love with this crazy man who had no home, no wife, no family, only bags filled with apple seeds, endless stories, and an insatiable desire to be helpful to everyone.

One day, as Old James was out in the woods inspecting his traps, he came upon Johnny sitting on a log, and he swore that he saw Johnny playing, there, with two bear cubs while the mother bear just stood nearby, watching. "You’re as crazy as the apple man," I told Old James. "Your eyes are shot, next time you go out in the woods you better take one of your sons or you may end up stepping into one of your own traps."

But Old James merely took offense, and told me: "Jacob. My eyes see well enough for my age, let’s see how well yours do when you come to this point. More than that, I know my woods inside out; what I can’t see clearly my experience makes sense out of. I know how to interpret blurs. Damn you, boy, I bet you I’m still a better marksman than you are!"

I remember the day I met Johnny in the woods, as I was out hunting. "Want to come with me?" I asked him. "You seem to know your way around the woods, to have a talent for the wilderness. How about helping me to track down a deer?"

"Oh no," he said, "I’m tracking down some wonderful herbs, I learned about them from the Indians. They can cure all kinds of ailments, but especially fevers. The kind of terrible sicknesses that wipe out entire communities."

"You know the Indians?" I asked, in disbelief.

"Oh yes," he said, "they’re so wise in the ways of the wilderness. We are like mere babies, discovering this country for the first time. They’ve been here since God made it. We’re like children, just beginning to learn to read green things. They know the book inside out."

"They’re Heathens," I reminded him. "They’re killers. Did you ever hear about Reverend Curtis? Do you know what happened to him?"

Burning, now, with fury, because I’d risked my life to make the land safe, I demanded, once more: "Do you know who the Reverend Curtis was?"

"May he rest in peace," Johnny said. "When I was with my Indian friends, they told me about an Indian family that was killed by settlers when they came in to make a trade. The settlers just took the furs without paying anything. Something worse may also have happened." Johnny’s face grew uncharacteristically heavy as he said that; there was a child in his soul that was too young and innocent to know some things, and yet, truth battered its way into his mind like a predator, making chaos of his joy. It is not only difficult to remain innocent in a world that is so repeatedly cruel, it is also irresponsible, and he knew that, and it made his soul bleed. You could almost see the blood staining his shirt and pants.

"You are saying that what happened to Reverend Curtis was justified?" I exclaimed. "An eye for an eye? A tooth for a tooth?"

"No," Johnny said. "I am only saying that I love white man and red man both, because God told us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. And even if He hadn’t told us that, it’s what’s in my heart. Whether that feeling is a weed or a flower, I don’t know, but I couldn’t pull it out if I tried. I am very sorry for Reverend Curtis. I will pray for him, and his family. Yes, I heard."

"And you?" I asked him, at last, unable to drive out of my mind the way that Sadie smiled at him, with a radiance she had not bestowed upon me for years. "Have you ever fought? Have you ever faced death in battle?"

"No," he admitted, but without any sense of shame. That infuriated me beyond all measure.

"You walk, barefoot with seeds, talking to animals and reading out of the Bible, in a country that others have made safe for you. You can be a man of peace, because others have fought the wars that were necessary."

"God’s made the world safe for me," he replied. "I was over by Twelve Willows before there was any settlement, but the Indians never bothered me. We got along as brothers, because God was in me, and somehow, though they had their own ways, God was in them, too. I’ve got stung by bees, many at a time, bitten by snakes, and my canoe overturned in the rapids; once, also, I fell out of a tree. When I did, it was like the branches were a host of angels breaking my fall, and I woke up next day on the ground with sunlight stroking my eyelids. Another time, a hunter almost shot me. He saw me moving in the bushes where a moose had been. That’s when I actually came closest to death."

"No, thanks," Johnny said. "The season of sickness is coming. I must find those herbs, and grind them while there is time."

After that, Johnny didn’t come back for a few days, perhaps because he heard the shot that brought the deer down. Perhaps he had looked into that deer’s eyes once, or even fed it by hand as they said he fed the wild animals who gathered around him like the hosts of creatures that had once swarmed around St. Francis of Assisi. Perhaps Johnny could not bear the sight of a close friend on his dinner plate, nor the thought of disappointing Sadie by declining to eat dinner with us. So he stayed away from us, hiding in the woods which cherished his strangeness and understood his lonely life.

My jealousy did not subside, though Johnny was so well loved that I could not speak openly to anyone about it. Whenever I hinted at my resentment to one of my friends, they would fail to accept my invitation to condemn him, and to prove themselves worthy as a confidante.

At last, thank God, or so I thought back then, Johnny got himself into trouble with our little settlement. He was found out walking through the woods with a wild wolf which had taken a liking to him. From the way the wolf hobbled, and the marks left on his foot, it could be clearly seen that he had been snared by one of Old James’ traps, and that Johnny had set the wolf free and nursed it back to health. Old James was momentarily enraged, saying, "That’s a crime, Mr. Chapman, to be interfering with a man’s business, and stealing what he’s caught out of his trap."

"I’m sorry," Johnny told him, "but Wolfie was in so much pain. He was whimpering. He looked me right in the eye, and I swear, though I know a Christian is not meant to believe that an animal has a soul, I saw his soul as he looked at me, and it was deep and unjustly persecuted. And I knew that the love Jesus has given me to love my own kind was not meant to stop there, but that this wolf was deserving of it, too. I had to release him, James. I had to! I had to take him down from the cross of iron around his foot! But I understand your situation, James, your loss. I can find a way to make it up to you, I’m sure. Don’t you need help in mending that stone wall of yours? I’ll plant a field over there by the edge of the forest, and I’ll harvest it, and it will be all for you."

To my chagrin, James let it go at that, and gave the Apple Man a hug. "Oh, forget about it, Johnny," he said, "it’s all right. How can I be mad at you? You’re not like the rest of us, and that’s probably a good thing."

I’m the one who first put the idea into people’s heads that the wolf, which seemed to get along well with Johnny and to follow him everywhere like a dog, was still a wild thing, and might one day turn on our livestock or even go after one of our children. "He’s a nice man," I said of Johnny, "but far too trusting. How do we know if he turns his back, or falls asleep, this animal which he’s brought into our midst might not revert to its former savage ways, and inflict some god-awful disaster upon us? Something which not all the tears of the world could undo… something which would have no remedy, only a gravestone to be placed above it?" A few of the mothers agreed, and Johnny, hearing them out, understood their concerns.

"You can keep the wolf," they reassured him, "but it must be chained, and kept inside an enclosure."

"But then, it won’t be a wolf," he told them. And, after thinking things over for a moment, he added: "I didn’t free him from a trap just to put him in a cage."

Johnny consoled the grief of all his friends as he prepared to part, saying, "No, no, it’s all right, it’s fine. Please, don’t feel bad. I understand your worries. Sometimes, God uses fear and doubt to move us along. We human beings have a tendency to remain in places where things are going well; but we may be needed elsewhere. Only by making a problem, can God get us to pick up and go to that place where we are needed more. I am so grateful to you all for letting me stay with you for the time I have, and I hope I have made your lives better in some way."

Practically everybody was crying, now, who could – we men couldn’t – or else struggling with their emotions. I may have been the only one who wasn’t sad, though no one could tell, because they could see I was suffering and did not know that it was because of guilt instead of sorrow. One last time, I had to endure Sadie hugging Johnny, weeping as she did so, clinging to him as though he were her man. My blood boiled and at the same time a terrible pain came to me.

And then, Johnny was off, smiling and waving, the pan-hat once more upon his head, bags of seeds and a bag full of provisions we had given him slung over his back. He flung them into the canoe into which his new wolf friend jumped, then climbed in himself, and waving good-bye one last time, paddled out into the deep water, his eyes fixed on the horizon, an unvanquished and sincere smile on his face. He would give to others the love he had given to us.

And that is the story of Johnny Appleseed and me.

Now, I am an old man, Sadie, may she rest in peace, is gone, and my children have grown and have families of their own. Most of them moved further west, one returned to the East. Pete has stayed nearby and sustains me, whenever the memories of things that are no longer here become overwhelming.

I look at the young ones whose day has supplanted mine, and I do not fail to remind them of the prowess I used to have, of the battles I fought to turn this country into a livable home. I was a man in every sense of the word, a man in whose heart burned the spirit that built this land from nothing. I was more of a man than him. But now, I am old, and forgotten by the green hills where I courted Sadie, and by the river that flows past, going to cities that did not exist in my time.

I look over, beyond the edge of my property, to see the sprawling orchards of the apple trees, blossoming profusely with pink and white flowers, handing basketsful of apples to the generations that have inherited the earth with generous, dipping branches that are just like him. I see the children climbing in the trees and playing in them, I see mouths chewing on the apples, wet and happy, I smell apples being baked on the wind and hear jubilant voices celebrating what they will be eating for supper.

I was more of a man than him.

But everywhere, there are apple trees growing.

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