The Twins (Early Settlers)
The novel begins with twin brothers fleeing from the Puritan colony to live in the wilderness, one driven by love, the other by loyalty. Their story anchors the book’s theme of origin and rebellion — an act of defiance against rigid order that seeds the wild independence of the land itself. Their relationship, fraught with devotion and guilt, embodies the tension between human desire and divine judgment. Their presence lingers long after they vanish, becoming part of the mythic foundation of the woods and the house that will rise there.
The Apple Farmer and His Daughter (The Martins)
A family of apple growers, Charles and his daughter Mary, inhabit the property, representing a shift from exile to cultivation. Charles’s obsession with perfecting his orchard mirrors humankind’s desire to master nature, while Mary’s imaginative, melancholic temperament ties her more to the forest’s mystery than to its order. Their section reveals how even acts of creation carry loneliness and futility, as disease, isolation, and time erode their fragile control over the land.
The Painter (Henry David-style Recluse)
A romantic landscape painter arrives decades later, seeking solitude and inspiration. His idealization of the wilderness collapses as his mental state unravels, revealing the fine line between artistic vision and madness. The painter’s story critiques the myth of the lone genius and exposes how art, like nature, resists possession. His descent also marks the house as a repository of human longing — a place where imagination both thrives and destroys.
The Spinster Sisters (Ruth and Alice)
In the 19th century, the house becomes home to two unmarried sisters who embody repression and eccentric domesticity. Their lives are defined by superstition, secrecy, and quiet defiance of social norms. As their minds deteriorate and their isolation deepens, they turn the home into a shrine of memory and ritual. Through them, Mason examines female autonomy constrained by patriarchy and the haunting persistence of love and loss.
The Escaped Slave (Unnamed or Poorly Recorded)
One of the most haunting figures, the fugitive enslaved man who hides near the property introduces the novel’s moral and historical depth. His brief but vivid presence exposes the violence and injustice buried within the pastoral American myth. His voice, fragmented in historical documents, reflects how entire lives and sufferings vanish from the written record — yet the land remembers.
The Modern Couple (David and Kate)
In the contemporary sections, a couple from New York buys the old house seeking peace and reinvention. Their relationship, strained by infidelity and depression, echoes the same patterns of longing, decay, and renewal that have cycled through centuries. They represent modern disconnection — the illusion that one can escape history through lifestyle or landscape. Their unraveling confirms that the past is not gone; it merely shifts shape beneath the surface.
Esther (the escaped enslaved woman) & her Child
In a later era, a woman escaping slavery seeks refuge in the house’s property, bringing with her the weight of America’s dark history. Her presence overlays the tranquil façade of the woods with violence, flight, memory, and the quest for freedom. Her story sharpens the novel’s interrogation of land, ownership and dispossession—not just for settlers, but for those oppressed by the system. In that chapter, the house and land become a witness to moral legacies.
