North Woods

“And I askd, Is the heathen who took me truly your friend? and she said, The one who savd you is my friend. Then anger filled me, and I said, And is he who slayd my father your friend, and is he who slayd my sister? And she said, Has he not a father and a sister who were also slayn?”

The captive girl questions the elderly woman about her friendship with the local Indigenous people. The girl’s choice of the word “heathen” indicates her Puritan bias. She has been indoctrinated to think that nonbelievers are all barbarians. She has a similarly lopsided view of the conflict that precipitated the massacre of her family. The elderly woman rightly points out both sides have done harm.

“In the place that was once the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman, one of the apple seeds, sheltered in the shattered rib cage, breaks its coat, drops a root into the soil, and lifts a pair of pale-green cotyledons. A shoot rises, thickens, seeks the bars of light above it, and gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs that once guarded the dead man’s meager heart.”

This quote refers to the germinating apple seed that rested in the gut of one of the English scouts. The same man tried to tempt the captive girl with an apple. His heart is described as “meager” because he cut off a child’s hand and was willing to massacre an Indigenous community. The fruit that grows from this seed ultimately poisons all those who succumb to its temptation.

“For a Fruit is a Thing, while that which I was searching for was nothing less than that which could transcend the tangible, speak to astonishment, invoke not only pleasure, but the perception of something vast, supernal, nothing less than enchantment itself […] ‘You mean Wonder?’ they asked, at once.”

Osgood asks his daughters to help him name his new variety of apple. This quote implies that he seeks something far more than a good descriptor for his product: He seeks transcendence. This impossible desire is echoed by all who follow him to the north woods and taste the apples that grow there.

“I have come to the opinion, generally, that he who does good to the land shall be protected, while he who trespasses upon her will be met with most violent return.”

Osgood expresses this opinion in a letter to his daughters. At least two trespassers in the north woods later meet violent ends, just as his quote predicts. Phelan is an uninvited guest, and Mary’s ghost dispatches him. Similarly, Harlan Kane intends to harm Lillian when he approaches the yellow house but is killed by what might be a mountain lion. Since ghosts in the novel can take corporeal shape, the killer may have been the ghost of the catamount who lived in the house herself for a time.

“What she didn’t say was that church, like the dances, was fraught with danger, that each time the young men smiled at Alice, she saw her father handing her the apple. That she feared that they would go together and she would leave alone.”

Mary reflects on the indefinable charm that Alice exudes, a quality that Mary herself doesn’t. Although they’re twins, Alice is more beautiful to those who meet her. Above all else, Mary fears abandonment. She’s willing to destroy her twin’s chance for happiness to secure her own.

“She had come to see for herself, to weigh, in one hand and then the other, whether the life which one of them desired was a life the other could endure.”

Alice has just formed an emotional attachment to a man in the village who sells crockery. Mary goes to his pottery shop to confront him and decide whether she can tolerate losing her sister. Sadly, she can’t rise above her own petty fears and jealousy to allow the romance to flourish.

“And in the same place in her heart where Alice kept her list of children’s names, Mary kept a different list—far better referenced and annotated—of all the local husbands who got drunk and beat their wives.”

Alice is a romantic who dreams of falling in love, marrying, and raising a large family. Her twin takes a darker view of Alice’s marital prospects. Mary thinks of everything that can go wrong for a wife if a husband is unfit. In her mind, she’s protecting her gullible sister from making a bad choice.

“With Brocéliande she felt as if she had made a pact simply by her presence, but she knew that if she said this, she’d be met by mockery. A pact? she could hear her sister answer. And did you sign it? And did the forest sign it? And in what? In mud? In sap?”

Mary wants to expand the family business by raising Merino sheep. To do so, she must clear a pasture in Alice’s favorite woodland retreat. In her imagined interchange with her sister, Alice reveals her mystical attachment to the land and Mary’s contrasting practicality. Mary has no time for nonsense about pacts with trees. She wants to exploit the land for profit.

“And so, for the second time in seventy-five years, a child’s apple led a grown man to the north woods place.”

The cycle of history repeats with regard to the temptation offered by the north woods. Osgood is lured there when young George Carter shows him the apple tree that sprang from a dead scout. Nearly a century later, Phelan is taken to the same orchard by a girl who sells apples in town. Neither man recognizes the folly of finding permanent solutions to their problems in a changing world.

“Out here, no one tears down anyway—one just adds upon, agglutinates, house to house, shed to shed, like some monstrous German noun.”

Teale makes this observation as he begins to grapple with the detritus in the yellow house that he has just bought. While his comment is literally true with respect to his construction project, it also holds true for the sedimentary layers of history buried beneath the house. The land may be a witness to all that has come before, but it remains silent and allows layers of new detritus to accumulate.

“Can there be art without the human in it? Maybe that is what I wish to capture: beast as seen by beast, tree as seen by tree.”

Teale aspires to capture nature without the intrusive presence of humanity. His ambition is echoed in the novel’s narrative structure. Each segment is told by a different narrator, but only the land knows the whole story. Readers participate in this same exercise by acting as silent witnesses to all that transpires throughout the book.

“He spoke of the woods, the trees, the spring birds. It was like being with a child, all this naming, like being with Adam, and all she had to do was listen and he was glad to speak.”

Nurse Ana describes her many walks in the woods with Teale. She draws a parallel to Adam in the Garden of Eden as he names all the animals. While this analogy suits the occasion, it also echoes many other instances in which the novel draws parallels to Eden, apples, and Eve, thus reinforcing the theme of Paradise Lost.

“This is Eden, Madame Rossi. The Serengeti of Massachusetts. A sportsman’s paradise. Look at the walls around you. White-tailed deer. Black bear. Bobcat. Moose. Each one of these animals was taken within these very woods.”

Farnsworth boasts to Anastasia about his many kills in the north woods. Again, the text refers to “Eden” to convey the woods as a garden of unlimited growth and possibility. Like many of his contemporaries at the turn of the 20th century, Farnsworth is a proponent of exploitation. The land and all it contains have been created solely for his use (or misuse).

“The dead do not use the Registry of Deeds. This is an old house. Three years means nothing in the spirit world. There has been a long succession of owners, God knows how many competing claims.”

Anastasia explains the presence of ghosts in the Farnsworth home. A charlatan, she bluffs her way through the conversation with the new owner. However, she’s actually quite accurate. The agglutination that Teale spoke of earlier applies to the spirit world too. Each preceding owner staked a psychic claim to the yellow house, and they’re all competing for space in it.

“The world, civilization, etc., exists in a state of constant threat of a ‘Rupture,’ which he, and only he, can repair through a series of ritualized walks. Calls these pilgrimages his ‘Stitchings,’ as if his footsteps are literally the needle that repairs the earth.”

These are the words of the psychiatrist who wants to perform a lobotomy on Robert. As in the preceding quote, in which Anastasia speaks the truth without realizing it, Robert does the same. However, he actually grasps the ecological disaster that is about to afflict the north woods, while his psychiatrist discounts this theory as a symptom of “schizophrenia.”

“I am so shaken by his absence that I pray, I kneel down before his trees. I lift the earth up and I speak to it. I ask it to bring him home. And why not? she thought. Sometimes he’d heard the soil whispering. Maybe, if she spoke to it, it’d let him know.”

Lillian is thinking about her absent son, who has gone on an extended walkabout. Her religious prison pen pal advises her to pray to God for Robert’s return. Like so many previous inhabitants of the north woods, Lillian appeals to the divinity in the land itself. This appeal mirrors Nurse Ana’s confession to the earth in an earlier era.

“Know the land, and know the killer. Man’s a product of his environment, and that’s true for the upright and the sickos alike.”

Jack Dunne, the true crime writer, speculates about the best way to apprehend Harlan Kane’s murderer. Even though Dunne hails from the big city, his theory holds true for isolated rural areas as well. However, his comment fails to consider that ghosts inhabit the environment he describes. The perpetrator is likely a phantom catamount.

“She had no idea what kind of detritus had collected there across such time. Well, she had an idea: a vast and indiscriminate accretion, like the strata in a geological basin where sediment accumulated. Ingress without egress.”

Helen has just returned to the yellow house after an absence of 12 years. Robert is dead, and she must deal with his possessions. Her comment concerns far more than one man’s clutter. She recognizes that the house has a long history and that each succeeding generation accumulated clutter and left it behind. Her reference to “sediment” echoes Teale’s earlier comment about agglutination.

“She was struck by the discrepancy in meaning the belongings presented. That death meant not only the cessation of a life, but vast worlds of significance.”

Helen’s observation relates to the theme of The Land as Silent Witness. Layer upon layer of human history accumulates, but no one has succeeded in interpreting the artifacts left behind. Each person who comes close to connecting the dots dies before offering an explanation. Helen is about to do so when she collects Robert’s film reels and passes them on without understanding them.

“Deep down, he dreams—as all historians dream—of a text so pure that reading it would be a form of time travel. For he knows that most accounts are, on some level, propaganda, shaped to outrage the colonial imagination, and to sell.”

Professor Jorgenson has just acquired a copy of the “Nightmaids” Letter. This quote highlights the bias that affects most historical narratives. Stories are told from a particular ideological viewpoint. The letter in question seems to avoid that fallacy, which makes it a far more credible source to understand past events.

“The ‘Nightmaids’ Letter lacked a crime scene; the True Crime! story lacked a suspect. It was just a matter of putting two and two together.”

Lakeman is exultant because he has connected two of the dots that tell the story of the north woods. However, his statement is naive in its assumption that the only thing required is to put the puzzle pieces together. He fails to consider his weak heart or the intervention of an amorous ghost. Human intentions rarely dictate outcomes.

“Now the understanding ran like a reel through time […] In the brief, exalted moments when she could picture the grand cinema of the forest’s passage, she felt like nothing less than a clairvoyant with a crystal ball.”

Nora views the north woods flora with a detective’s eye. While others have relied on written records or conversation to understand the record of the past, she sees the evidence imprinted on the landscape. Her choice of the words “reel” and “grand cinema” evoke Robert’s earlier efforts to record his ghosts on film. Her use of the word “clairvoyant” echoes Anastasia’s genuine ghost communication.

“Witness trees, she’d tell them. An old term of trade for trees that marked invisible boundaries. Now also used for those that were present at important moments in our history. In other words: the ones that witnessed us.”

In this quote, as in the preceding one, Nora refers to how the land records history. Her comment relates to the theme of The Land as Silent Witness. All the facts are there to behold, but few humans have the insight to interpret the evidence presented to them. Nora speaks the language of plants and trees, so she can give meaning to the facts.