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not staying here. He’s not the man for you.”
    Minette laughed and hugged her father. He couldn’t begin to know what had been revealed to her. He had no idea that the universe could be found in a single instant, a drop of water, a blade of grass, a leaf of an apple tree.
    That night Minette slept in John’s arms, warmed by his strange heat. There were burrs on her skirt and in her hair. The scent of the river clung to her skin. She thought about her father sitting at home, worrying about her, and of her own little house, empty. In the morning, the Chapmans got ready to go. There was a light rain falling that John said would be good for the seeds they planted. In a hundred years there would be a hundred trees and each one would bear fruit. Minette waited, but he didn’t ask her to go. She was not especially surprised. Nathanielshook her hand and wished her well and said if he ever came back this way he would surely stop and visit. John Chapman was singing to himself the way he sometimes did. The rain didn’t bother him. He was already moving forward, thinking about stories he’d heard about the West, how the land was so endless and untouched it was indeed like heaven.
    The larks were swooping through the rain. The river was running so fast they could hear it in this meadow. Minette kissed him good-bye in a way she had never kissed her husband, and John kissed her back as if she was perfect and wondrous and alive.
    I N THE MIDDLE of the next winter one of the Starr boys came running into town. The tree John Chapman had planted in Husband’s Meadow had bloomed. Everyone went to see, tromping through the snow. It was twilight and the snow was still falling. Indeed, one bough of the young tree was covered with apple blossoms. This was an impossibility, a miracle, not unlike Minette Jacob’s baby being born ten months after her husband’s death. It was the reason the apples from this wonderful tree were called Look-No-Furthers. It was why Minette’s father, Harry Partridge—who was so close to his grandson that the boy took his last name when he came of age—vowed he would never eat apples again.

THE YEAR THERE WAS NO SUMMER
    1816
    T HERE WAS FROST IN THE GARDEN IN J UNE . Clothes set out on the line froze, their wrinkles set in place. Bedsheets turned hard as stone. The wind from Hightop Mountain gusted across the meadows, sifting through cracks below windows and doors, chilling residents to the bone. Horses in their barns grew skittish when the sky pooled into black puddles in the middle of the day. The spring had been unnaturally cold and dry, and now the weather took a turn for the worse. Throughout the Commonwealth, cornfields were ruined and vegetables were covered with slick coatings of ice. There was talk of a famine to come. People were preoccupied, panicked. Perhaps that was why no one noticed when Rebecca and Ernest Starr’s daughter Amy disappeared.
    The Starrs lived in the house local people called the Museum. Ernest Starr was a collector. He searched out rocks, seeds, minerals, animal skeletons. On his mantel there was a moose jaw and a rust-colored fox’s pelt. In his cabinet he kept a strange piece of rock that was always hot to the touch and another in which there was a hole caused by a four-inch piece of hail that Ernest himself had witnessed before the ice melted into a wash of greenish water there in his hands. He had specimens preserved in jars of salt and liked nothing more than to study the desiccated bodies of bats and birds. He was enthralled by the wonders of nature and took special delight in amassing information no one else had. Over the years he’d gathered a library of atlases, maps, and scientific books that were so rare, professors from Harvard College had come to view them.
    The Starrs were an old family in town, with ancestors who were part of the founding expedition. Ernest had inherited the wheat fields beyond Band’s Meadow, as well as the leatherworks. He was a man in his