Robert Goodenough

Robert is the youngest son of the Goodenough family. He is a quiet youngster who loves nature and really just wants to get along in life. He is the only child of the family who is interested in learning about James's apple trees. When Robert is nine, he is skilled at grafting and creates a graft onto a wild apple tree near the family home.

Robert is one of the children present when Sadie strikes James with an axe, mortally wounding him before he knocks her down into a spike from a deer fence, causing her to die as well. Before she dies, Sadie informs Robert that James is probably not his biological father, which hurts Robert horribly. Then Sadie tells Robert to run away from the swamp, and urges him to go find a prairie somewhere. Sadie has believed that living somewhere else would make her...