Madapple Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  GNAPHALIUM

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  ANGEL’S-TRUMPET

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  BITTERSWEET

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  DAYLILY

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  DOLL’S-EYES

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  ADDER’S EYES

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  WINDFLOWER

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  ELDER TREE

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  CARRION FLOWER

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  EVENING STAR

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  LOW SWEET BLUEBERRY

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  EVE’S CUPS

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  WITCH HAZEL

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  LILY

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  ZARA

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  GREAT ASH TREE

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  SANGUISORBA

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  DEVIL’S-BITE

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  KING’S CROWN

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  ICE PLANT

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  FALSE NETTLE

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  HERB OF GRACE

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  AMPHICARPAEA

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  ASK AND EMBLA

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  GOLDEN BOUGH

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  BEE BALM

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  GOLDEN BUTTONS

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  RAGGED ROBIN

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  SNAKEROOT

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  TWO-EYED BERRY

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  MILKWORT

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  WATER LILY

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  SWAMP LILY

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  GLASSWORT

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  FALSE SOLOMON’S SEAL

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  VIRGIN’S BOWER

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  MADAPPLE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  COPYRIGHT

  For Doug, who believed,

  and for our miracles, Jacob and Owen.

  And for my mother,

  who sees God in every mad apple.

  GNAPHALIUM

  Life Everlasting

  Bethan, Maine

  October 1987

  The women resemble schoolgirls with gangly limbs, ruddy cheeks, plaited flaxen hair; they walk holding hands. Yet the older of the two is pregnant; her unborn baby rides high and round. And the younger woman’s left foot scratches a path through the leaves. She seems comfortable with her limp, accustomed to it.

  A child darts before them, chasing leaves that swirl at her feet. Her dark hair, tied back in a scant tail, whips behind her. She stumbles, catches herself. “Mor!” she calls out. “Mommy!” Then she points at a bird perched high on a leafless branch, its plump breast berry-like against the low sky.

  The older woman hesitates before she recalls the bird’s name. “A robin. The bird is a robin. Soon it will fly south for the winter. It is too cold here in Maine.”

  “Men det er ikke koldt. But it is not cold.” The child’s words are malformed; she is not yet three.

  “Ikke for Danmark,” the woman says. “Not for Denmark. And certainly not for you, but you are not a robin.”

  The robin jerks its head to the side, then back, before it takes flight.

  “The robin was looking at you,” the child says to the woman with the limp, not her mother. “He wanted to know your name.”

  “I’m Moster Maren, little Sanne. Aunt Maren. Have you already forgotten?”

  “Yes!” The child laughs and sprints forward; her laugh is discordant, but the wind carries the sound away, and the woman, Maren, is grateful.

  “Sanne reminds me of you when you were small,” the child’s mother says to Maren. “Do you recall what Fader called you? Gnaphalium, remember? That plant known at home as ‘life everlasting.’ You were so full of life.”

  Maren stops walking.

  “What is it, Maren?”

  “Don’t go back to Denmark, Sara. Stay here with me. Please. Your marriage is ending—you know that. And with Moder’s death, there’s little keeping you. And I can help you. We’ll help each other.”

  Sara frees her hand from Maren’s grip. “Fader is still in Denmark. And I told you before, I don’t need your help.”

  “Yes, Fader,” Maren says. She reaches toward a plant and runs her index finger along a scar on the fleshy rhizome of the plant. “Solomon’s seal. This plant’s name is Solomon’s seal. See, the mark here. It resembles the seal of King Solomon, the Star of David—the symbol Solomon used to cast away demons, summon angels.”

  Sara lifts Maren’s hand from the stalk and turns Maren toward her. “Tell me what’s wrong,” Sara says. “This isn’t about me. Why did you ask us to come? You said you were leaving Denmark to start a new life, but now you want to bring your life in Denmark with you here?”

  “I want you here. And Sanne. And your new baby,” Maren says.

  “But why? What is wrong? Is it something about Fader?”

  “Don’t tell Fader.”

  “Don’t tell Fader what, Maren?”

  “I’m pregnant, too.”

  “Mor!” the little girl calls out. “Løb efter mig, Mor!” Sanne runs down the path; trampled leaves cling to her scarf and hair. “Chase after me, Mommy!”

  “You are pregnant?” Sara says, but she looks at her daughter and the gray sky and the leaves.

  “Don’t be angry with me—” Maren says.

  But Sara interrupts. “I didn’t even know you knew about such things.” She is fondling her own hands as her eyes search Sanne’s hands, but Sanne’s hands are a blur. “You’re so young, Maren. Maybe you’re mistaken.”

  “I’m a robin.” Sanne’s arms stretch wide. “I can fly!”

  “I’m almost sixteen,” Maren says. “I’m not that young.”

  “But you’ve been in the States for less than two months. How could this happen in such a short time?”

  “I’m four months pregnant,” Maren says. “Three months less than you. I was pregnant before I arrived.”

  “Mor,” Sanne says. “I’m flying away. I’m flying south.”

  Sara wraps her arms around herself and begins walking again, toward Sanne. She can see Sanne’s hands better now: her fingers splayed, and those two webbed fingers not splayed. And she wonders. And then she says, “Before you arrived? But how can that be? I didn’t even know you had a lover. I’ve been like a mother to you since Moder died. How could you have not told me?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know?”

  “I didn’t know I was pregnant. I found out the day I asked you to come.”

  “But you knew you’d been with someone. You had a lover, Maren. And you didn’t tell me.”

  “I’ve flown away, Mor.” Sanne has reached the end of the path. “I’m gone forever.”

  “But I didn’t have a lover,” Maren says. “I’ve never had a lover.”

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  2007

  —Please state your name for the record.

  —Aslaug.

  —And your last name?

  —I don’t know.

  —You don’t know your last name?

  —No.

  —Your mother’s name was Maren Hellig, was it not?

  —Yes.

  —You are Aslaug
Hellig?

  —Mother called me Aslaug Datter.

  —So your last name is Datter?

  —No. I mean, I don’t know. Datter means “daughter” in Danish. I’m not sure it’s my name.

  —What was your father’s name?

  —I don’t have a father.

  —You don’t know who your father is?

  —I don’t have a father, other than the one we share.

  —You mean God in heaven?

  —I never said God is in heaven.

  —But you mean God, am I right?

  —Yes.

  —Well, I’m referring to your biological father. You don’t know who he is?

  —I don’t have a biological father.

  —Your Honor, the witness is being nonresponsive. She’s being tried here for one count of attempted murder and two counts of murder in the first degree, and she’s playing games—

  —Do you have a birth certificate for the witness, Counsel? It seems that document may clarify this matter.

  —She has no birth certificate, Your Honor. At least none we’ve found.

  ANGEL’S-TRUMPET

  2003

  Hartswell, Maine

  Mother crouches in the field, her body folded into itself as she uproots the salsify plants and lops off their purple heads. Our gathering baskets circle her like iced-over petals, their inert white handles conspicuous above the quiver of herbs and wildflowers. Her hands are gloved, should she encounter stinging nettle, she claims; its young shoots and upper leaves are worth collecting, she reminds me; we have eaten them as greens and in stew. Yet I know it is the jimsonweed, not the nettle, she is prepared to find: rank-smelling, rash-causing, poisonous jimsonweed. When I was growing up, Mother called the weed a variety of names. Madapple at times. Devil’s apple at times. And green dragon and stinkwort and angel’s-trumpet. No matter, her warning was always the same: deadly. Still, I know it is the jimsonweed she wants today. Her eyes pick through the flora, searching in vain for the tall green plant with the prickly fruit and funnel flowers that look deceivingly benign.

  For nearly two months now, I’ve found the weed’s leaves and kidney-shaped seeds drying in the back porch sun, mingling as if innocent with the other berries, seeds and leaves. Perhaps Mother assumed I wouldn’t notice the jimsonweed, subsumed in this mosaic of plant parts. Perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed if it weren’t for the weed’s smell: like rot. But for much of this past week, I’ve smelled only its absence, and, as of today, absent it remains.

  Despite the dearth of jimsonweed—perhaps because of it—our baskets are mostly brimming. I carry handfuls of yellow goatsbeard leaves to cook as greens for dinner, and I toss them into the basket on top of a mound of sweet clover. The vanilla scent of the clover hovers about the basket, obfuscating the stench of waste that lingers on my shoes and skirt. We spent our morning at the town dump, collecting the wild madder we use to curdle milk when making cheese. Had we found the jimsonweed then, we might have headed home. Instead, we’ve worked most of the afternoon in this field collecting far more of the other flowers than we need.

  The basket containing the medicinal plants is overflowing, as if the whites and yellows of the blossoms were oozing free. And the mullein is so abundant; we’ll have candles for a month at least. Only the basket for the plants Mother calls her sapientia, her wisdom, is not yet full, the Indian tobacco there making only a thin purple-green bed along the basket’s base.

  “Aslaug,” Mother says. I watch her untangling as her back straightens and her clenched fingers ease just enough to release the salsify. “Those cinnamon ferns,” she says, and she motions toward a gaggle of green bordering the woods we will pass through on our way home. “They have hundreds more chromosomes than you.” I look to the ferns; even assuming her statement was meant as a slight, I can’t quell my interest.

  “I’m hurting,” Mother says then, as if the ferns’ genetic abundance has some bearing on her pain. I turn back to her, and I see it, the pain; it seems different suddenly; she wears it differently. Her lips are powder-dry and pursed. Her left eyelid is twitching, twitching, twitching, like an insect’s pumping wings. I have the urge to press my fingers against it, hold it still.

  “We’ve been out too long,” I say, walking toward her. “We should go home.” I say this, but I don’t mean it: I don’t want to go home. Our house sits outside the village of Hartswell, at the end of a dirt road, at what I imagine is the end of the earth. We have only one neighbor; the next closest house sits miles and miles away. Even so, Mother and I leave our house only to forage, less often to drive into Hartswell to collect the mail or to the college town, Bethan, to buy supplies. The outside world is my featherfoil plant, magnificent in its season, when it appears in abundance, but then it disappears, completely, for what seems years. Our drapes are thick as quilts, and tacked shut floor to ceiling, side to side, inch by inch by inch. We live in a cocoon, Mother and I, whether to keep the inside in or the outside out, I do not know.

  “We can’t go, Aslaug,” Mother says. “I need help.”

  “I can help you walk.”

  “No. No. For the pain.”

  Mother is sick. She’s been sick almost as far back as I can remember. Not terribly sick, but sick. I don’t know the name of her illness; Mother’s never mentioned its name, and I know not to ask. She’s said only that her body is attacking itself like a tomcat that devours its progeny, the progeny being her cartilage and bone, and her muscles and ligaments and tendons. Her joints are red and swollen, and, day by day, little by little, she is becoming deformed.

  I rip off a leaf of the Indian tobacco and lift it to her mouth. She chews it but shakes her head. “We have shinleaf at home,” I say. “I’ll make the leaf plaster for you, rub it on your knees and back. It will help.”

  “No,” Mother says. “No shinleaf.”

  There’s a feeling that wells in me I can’t name. An instinct, it seems—an instinct that something is very wrong. “I found some scarlet pimpernel at the dump,” I say. “Not a lot, but enough to make a poultice.” Mother refers to pimpernel as adder’s eyes—snake eyes. But she’s taken it before; it’s made her happier, nicer. I want to believe it will help her, but I know it won’t, even before she answers.

  “Adder’s eyes?” Mother says. “Adder’s eyes won’t help.”

  “You want jimsonweed,” I say, not meaning to, but the words come.

  Mother looks at me like she doesn’t know me; she doesn’t ask how I know about the jimsonweed. “I make an ointment with it, Aslaug,” she says, “for the pain. Like the shinleaf. I mix it with nightshade, and it helps. More than shinleaf.”

  “I’ll find some,” I say.

  What I don’t say is she is allergic to the touch of jimsonweed, as am I. This is something she knows, we both know; each of us has been careless at times, brushed against the weed and endured its wrath. Mother has no intention of rubbing her skin with jimsonweed.

  Nor do I say I’ve seen her make cigarettes from the weed’s dried leaves and seeds. Her hands protected by gloves, she rolls the weed with hemp or Indian tobacco and smokes at night when she believes I am asleep. Sometimes she mixes the leaves with something flammable—potassium nitrate, maybe—and she burns them in a saucer and inhales their smoke deeply, and holds it. I watch from the top of the stairs, the jimsonweed burning in the distance like a neutron star, and the Kabbalah or Torah or Upanishads glowing faintly in its light. Although I don’t know what the weed does for Mother, she seems transported in those moments, and sometimes for days, like she’s entered another time and space. A time before me. A space without me—a space where the windows were open to the world. There is a softness about the way her mouth falls loose after she inhales, and in her eyes: their twitching and relentless blinking give way. She releases her hair at some point while she sits there, and it plunges to her waist like a flash of light.

  I submit to sleep before she does, always, and I wake before she does, always. And I often find the remain
s of Mother’s foray in the morning: her cigarette butts like magnified mouse droppings or the saucer like a diminutive swamp. Sometimes I pick up a butt with tweezers, lift it to my mouth, or I breathe hard from the saucer, trying to find that space Mother finds. But the power of the jimsonweed is dead for me; it takes me nowhere.

  I run through the field now, moving far faster without Mother. How easy it would be to run away from her. How easy; how impossible.

  I find the jimsonweed at the far edge of the field, and I rip it down bare-handed, knowing even as I do I will suffer for this. I carry the weed back and throw it on top of the Indian tobacco. I expect Mother to seem relieved, even pleased with me, but she doesn’t look up. She is watching a butterfly as it flutters across a bed of sweet clover. The butterfly is pale brown, almost gray, and from a distance it looks drab, but as I walk nearer, its delicate markings become apparent: the wings are speckled with darker spots ringed in white; a single blue splotch near the tail is flanked by patches of orange.

  “An Edward’s hairstreak,” Mother says.

  “It’s beautiful—” I begin.

  But Mother stops me. “It shouldn’t be here. We’re too far north.” She jerks her hands into her pockets, and I wonder whether they are shaking, whether she is hiding them from me. She has the same look on her face as earlier this month when she saw the purple passionflower she says resembles a crown of thorns. Mother claims the flower doesn’t grow in Maine, but there it was. When Mother saw the passionflower, its showy blossom almost gaudy in the otherwise plain thicket, she crushed its fringed corona in one swoop like a bird of prey, and she tore it from the ground.

  “We need to find some sneezeweed,” Mother says now. The butterfly moves behind her, across the clover, and she turns away from me to follow it.

  “You want sneezeweed?” We’ve never gathered sneezeweed before; I assumed we never would. Mother told me herself its only use is to purge the body of evil spirits, and Mother claims she doesn’t believe in spirits, evil or otherwise. On any other day, I would assume Mother is mocking me about the sneezeweed; today I’m not sure. I want to look at Mother’s face again: at her eyes, to determine whether she is there with me or has escaped inside her mind; at the tilt of her mouth, to see whether her lips are tight in irony, or open in wonder. But Mother has her back to me now.