“Just means you’ll have that much further to trot to answer her beck and call. You’re setting up a sweet life for yourself in your golden years.”
At twelve dollars a foot, the well-digger he hired went down two hundred and fifty feet before striking water, for this was a country of floods followed by long dry spells—Dust Bowl country once upon a time. A crew was brought in with a back-hoe to sink a septic tank and dig trenches for the leaching field. Then the form was built, the cement mixer summoned and the foundation poured. Junior and he could then set to work. They worked after Junior got off work, into the night, and all day Sundays, holidays.
He wavered between working fast and working slowly. For while he was building a house for his sister he was all the while building a coffin for her husband. He fully expected that upon his announcement of its completion Berenice would say, “Well, Wendell.” And Wendell would say, “Yes, Berenice.”
What would she do without him? To her he was what a clawing post was to a cat. Henry knew very well what Berenice would do without Wendell. She would turn all her attention upon him.
Now that his stem was wound and he ticking again, he rediscovered all his old skills that he had laid aside. He would need them all. For although he had always been a conscientious craftsman, never before had he worked for a more demanding customer, one harder to satisfy. Like his tools, those skills were a bit dull now and hard to hone, but they were still serviceable. The years of nailing down underlayment, floor boards, shingles, laying tiles had stiffened his knees so that in getting up off them now he almost required a crane, and it was not as easy as it had once been to lift his end of a rafter. His hands that in retirement had shed their lifelong calluses first blistered then regained them. Still, there was pleasure in the curl of a shaving from the plane, pride in the tightness of a joint. To cut a board to measure, fit it in place and drive the nail home was as satisfying as putting a period at the end of a sentence that said just what you wanted said—which, come to think of it, was something he had never done with Berenice.
They worked without plans, which allowed modifications to be made as they went along. Modifications were dictated by one thought: how would this suit Berenice, keep her from complaining—or at least from complaining about everything? He felt her looking over his shoulder every minute. Knowing that it would go unappreciated made it truly a labor of love.
“Right nice little bungalow,” he declared when, three months later, it was finished. “If I do say so myself.” He spoke without much conviction.
“You’ll have to say so yourself,” said Junior. “She won’t.”
The truth of the matter was, it was not finished, for he kept finding fault with it, anticipating Berenice’s objections. While waiting for Wendell to pass on to his reward he twice replaced the kitchen cabinet door knobs and drawer pulls. He changed light fixtures. He fussed with this, that and everything. Nice little bungalow, he had called it; in fact, this roomy house, on which he had worked more painstakingly than on any other of his long career, gave him no satisfaction whatever. Viewing it through Berenice’s eyes, all he could see in it was all that was wrong with it.
He found difficulty in phrasing his news that the house was ready and waiting for occupancy. It seemed to him that with it he was cutting off his sister’s husband’s life-support system and hastening her into widowhood. What he did was send her a snapshot of the house. On the back of the snapshot he wrote modestly, “Be it ever so humble.”
They came bringing with them all their worldly goods—far too many to fit into the house, spacious as that had grown, for Berenice was one of those people who never threw anything away—in the biggest model of what Susan called a Yawl-Hawl. Berenice was at the wheel of it. Not because Wendell looked weakly but because she never let him drive.
“What did I tell you?” said Susan to Henry. “Never sick a day. Dance on our graves.”
“He got better,” was Berenice’s explanation for Wendell. “Doctor called it a miracle.” But her smile was not for Wendell’s recovery. It was self-satisfaction in her trickery. Still playing like a cat with her prey, she would later confide, “He can’t last long.”
At the rate Wendell used up life there was no reason for him not to last forever. He had Berenice to run interference for him. Now he would have his failing health as an excuse to exert himself even less than before. Both would have Henry, and Henry, Jr., to wait on them hand and foot.
“Wendell,” said Berenice.
“Yes, Berenice,” said Wendell.
“Yonder’s your new home. You can see it from here. If you look hard enough. Never mind. It can always be added on to.”
The Apple of Discord
I
AN OLD APPLE, a rotten apple, the last one from the bottom of the barrel, shriveled, mottled: that was what his face had come to look like. It was moldy with whiskers now that shaving had become awkward for him, and he sullen and resentful and careless of his appearance. To do it at all after his accident he had had to buy this electric razor. With that clumsy right hand of his he would have peeled himself using a blade. But today was the Big Day, weeks in preparation. Today he was to give away the last of his daughters, and he must put on the best face he could for the occasion, and show that he could be gracious in defeat.
Today’s would be the third wedding in the house in as many years. Generations of Bennetts had been married under this roof in apple blossom time, the family tradition. Now after this one there would be no more—never.
Of his three girls the first to leave home was Ellen, the oldest. He had opposed her marriage. He opposed it not only because her intended was not what he wasn’t, an orchardman, but also because he was what he was, a preacher. He let his prospective son-in-law know just where he and his boss stood with him. Who was it who sent His sun and His rain to swell and sweeten and color the fruit on the Bennett trees? He who sent His frost and His hail and His drought and His mold and His bugs to blight and destroy it. As surely as God made little green apples? But God didn’t make them—he did, and God put all His obstacles in his way. He thought of himself with his trees as like one of those welfare mothers abandoned by the father of her children and struggling to raise them on her own. His charges numbered somewhere around ten thousand.
He told the preacher the old story of Farmer Brown. How, after being wiped out repeatedly by all the afflictions of Job, Farmer Brown raised his eyes to heaven and asked, “Dear God, what have I done to deserve this?” “Farmer Brown,” said God, “you don’t have to ‘do’ anything. There’s just something about you that pisses me off.” He himself was surely one of God’s chosen, for those whom He loved He scourged and chastened. He was a Bennett, one of the spawn of the original apple vendor. God had borne a grudge against that forbidden fruit ever since Eve.
He paused in his shaving for a moment to think about that ancestress of his. The first woman! The original! What a woman that one must have been! What a prize! In the fall of the mother of them all all would fall. A temptation … Furs? Jewels? The lure of a tropical cruise? There where the timeless fashions were the design of the Master and any ornament a detraction from the female form divine? A vacation from Paradise? Another, more attractive man? There was no other man, nor could one ever again be so attractive. Hers was the mold, and castings from it could only approximate the original. Something to tempt her to transgress against her Maker’s one prohibition …
Something good to eat. Something never before eaten. And so she could not know whether it was good to eat or not. But she could tell just by looking. A thing mouth-watering enough to entice her to disobey the command of the Almighty and risk bringing down upon herself His wrath. There in that Garden of Earthly Delights were all the sweets: pomegranates and peaches and plums, figs, grapes, mangoes—everything to be found in your local supermarket flown in from all over the world, only tree-ripened: cactus pears, pineapples, bananas. But to tempt the original sinner to commit the original sin Satan picked from among t
he produce the one irresistible one. None of your kiwis nor your passion fruit. And Adam, well aware of what he was up to, and what he was incurring, not even chewing but trying to swallow it down whole. It was for having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that the first couple were expelled from their garden, before they could find their way to the tree of life everlasting. Well, life everlasting they may have lost by eating that apple, but what fruit, one a day, kept the doctor away? Not prunes, friend.
And now God’s latest prank upon His servant Seth: a preacher for a son-in-law.
Ellen revealed a willfulness that he would sooner have expected of either of her sisters. That lifelong docility and dutifulness of hers seemed to have been building up like water behind a dam. It now burst. It almost made him change his mind about her and press his opposition to the marriage harder. Perhaps she had in her more of the grit of which farmwives were made than he had given her credit for. But orchardmen were getting scarce hereabouts. It was unrealistic of him to hope any longer to find one for all three girls. Let Ellen have her preacher. The blessing he gave her was grudging, but he gave it. Write her off as the wild card in the deck; he had two more to deal.
He lowered the razor and peered at his face in the mirror searching in vain for a likeness between himself and his off-spring. Those stepdaughters of Eve, his daughters, they none of them cared for apples. Bennetts—and they didn’t care for apples! Doris, the “in-between one,” as she called herself, wouldn’t touch one. Said she knew too well what work and worry had gone into it. Said that for her the sight of her poor mother, her old knees ruined long ago from kneeling to sort them, put a worm in each and every one. As for him, well, never mind how old he was but he was old—people told him so to his face: “I can’t blame you for selling out. You’ve got nobody to leave the place to and you’ll soon be too old to work it yourself anymore.” He had attained his age by eating apples enough each day to keep three doctors away.
Who were those girls of his to say they didn’t want to be apple farmers? Neither had he “wanted” to be one. He was born one. He did not choose, he was chosen. He had not asked to be left-handed, green-eyed, red-headed either, but so he was. He had cut his teeth on apples. That was what it was to be a Bennett!
He had put all three through college. He was not one of those who thought that higher education was not for women; on the contrary, he thought it was for women only—men were meant for practical affairs. How had he paid for their tuition? With McIntoshes, Cortlands, Macouns, Red Delicious, Greenings: so many crates per credit-hour. The fruit of knowledge. Apples for the teacher. The best schooling. Vassar College! The mistake of his life. How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Poughkeepsie?
Why had the farmboys he exposed them to all been so backward? No boldness, no spunk in any of them. To get that dowry of ten thousand trees, bridal-like with blossoms in the spring, aglow with fruit in the fall, he would have seduced one of the farmer’s daughters, any one, hoping that she got caught and he be marched to the altar by her old man with a shotgun at his back, chortling to himself all the way up the aisle.
Certainly none of those boys could have held back out of fear that the girl’s father found him unacceptable on closer inspection. He was prepared to overlook shortcomings. He encouraged them. He bucked them up when their hopes flagged. He kept them going by misleading them about their prospects. In fact, certain shortcomings he was looking for in his sons-in-law. It was doubly frustrating because the very backwardness—sometimes the none-too-brightness—that kept them from putting themselves forward was the attribute he sought. Broad backs and brawny arms were what they were to furnish—his girls would supply the brains. He wanted his daughters to wear the pants in their families. He wanted them to twist their husbands around their little fingers.
His stock of daughters dwindling, he opposed Doris’s marriage more vigorously by far than he had opposed Ellen’s. Another non-farmer. An undertaker—“mortician” he preferred to be called. Somebody had to do it, of course. Nothing more essential. But what more thankless a job was there? How could she sleep at night knowing what thing lay on that marble slab in the basement workshop? How could she tolerate the touch of those hands of his knowing what they had been busy at earlier in the day? How could you raise your children in a charnel house, and how did other children look on yours? How could you bear to be always in the hush of mourning among grieving survivors dressed in black? Why not a doctor instead, somebody whose business it was to keep people alive? Or better still, an apple farmer, one whose job it was to keep the doctor away.
So with two down and only one to go, he now had for sons-in-law one to put him under and another to get him a pass to that nursing home in the sky where you play bingo in eternity. The pair of them often teamed up on the same case. This thought would in time put into his mind a scheme. A way of ensuring that his third and last son-in-law be the orchardman he wanted. More specifically, Pete Jeffers, a man like himself, with cider, hard cider, in his veins.
One man’s misfortune is another man’s fortune. He had sometimes been the beneficiary of that one-sided exchange, though always mindful that it might just as easily have been the other way round. Apple farming had its rewards but it was a risky business. It could drive you to desperation. It could drive you crazy.
Some years ago a neighbor of his caught a woman in his orchard threshing one of the trees. He was a worried man. Crops had been poor for years and this one promised to be no better. He was deeply in debt. The chronic shortage of pickers had forced him into the pick-your-own business, something no farmer liked because in picking the apples inexperienced pickers broke off the buds of many of next year’s apples. Now the man went berserk. He grabbed the woman’s stick from her and threshed her with it. She died from a blow to her head. He spent the rest of his life in the state asylum for the criminally insane. The farm his family was forced to sell became part of Seth Bennett’s.
Of all the natural enemies of orchardmen the two most dreaded were a late spring frost when the trees were in blossom and a summer hailstorm when the fruit was on them. You could spray against insects and fungus, you could poison the mice that girdled the trees and the woodchucks that burrowed beneath their roots, shoot the deer, but against frost and hail you were helpless. If the fruit was not destroyed by the hail it was pocked, unappetizing-looking, unmarketable except to the baby-food processors, for a portion of the price it would have fetched. That insurance against it was available was a bad joke; nobody could afford the premium.
After losing his wife to cancer, then being wiped out by hail two years in a row, Seth Bennett’s neighbor Tom Jeffers went out in his ruined orchard and put a bullet in his heart. He left his only child Pete to sell out to developers and pay off his debts. Pete had lived at home, his father’s partner.
Seth Bennett felt beholden to Pete Jeffers as a combat veteran might have felt toward the orphan of a buddy who had taken the bullets meant for them both. For although their two farms were little more than a mile apart, such was the capriciousness of hail that his had been spared both times by the storms that struck Tom Jeffers’ twice.
Of late, on nights when the trees had to be sprayed, it was Janet, home from school now, who drove the tractor that pulled him on the sprayer. She would not allow her mother, with those knees of hers, to spend the night out in the chill and the damp.
Now that the two older girls were gone from home their rooms were unused. Pete Jeffers was homeless. Pete knew apples. Molly was old. So, for that matter, was he. He could use a helper, an experienced hand. Pete was a fine fellow. Quiet, serious-minded, with a farmer’s patience and tenacity. Pete was unmarried. He was just three years older than Janet.
To the sign on the road that read, “Garden of Eden Orchards. Pick Your Own. Seth Bennett, Prop.” was now added, “Peter Jeffers, Manager.”
“I want you to think of us as your family, Pete,” he said.
Including Janet, he
added to himself. But not as your sister.
What a workhorse the man turned out to be! Never still. Busy every minute of the day. Handy at everything, not just at the daily farm duties. Fixed, patched, mended, repaired, painted, cleaned, straightened—things needing doing for years. Even on Sundays. So eager to be doing he had no time for talk at table, was up and out while still chewing. This during the off-season. The time came to gear up for the year’s crop. What that young fellow didn’t know about apple farming wasn’t worth knowing. Born to it, in it all his life, had it in his blood. What a treasure he would be when he took over the place!
Trouble was, you couldn’t get him to slow down long enough to spend any time together with Janet. Was there another woman in his life? That would be a sorry repayment for the hospitality he had been shown as a homeless orphan! But no, there could be no other woman: he never left the place, never took a minute off much less a night out. His would-be father-in-law began to wonder whether Pete was not one of those born bachelors, living only to work. He seemed to have no pleasures, no personal life. Busying himself to keep his mind off his parents, said Seth to himself, and waited for Pete to come out of his mourning and take note of the world around him.
Meanwhile, to hasten that process he threw the two of them together whenever possible—and groaned inwardly at Pete’s backwardness as he spied on them. “Molly’s knees are bad this evening,” he would say, giving her a look, after dinner. “Pete, be a good boy and dry the dishes for Janet.” Pete did, and that was all he did: dry dishes. The evening still young, he would excuse himself, and Molly, for bed, and he was scarcely out of his recliner before Pete was out of his armchair, saying goodnight to all. Her father bought Janet a car, her first, and Pete taught her to drive. Seated that close, on back country roads, lovers’ lanes … Janet passed her license test on her first try.
“Pete,” he said, “let’s you and me have a talk. Father to son. I think of you as my adopted son. Who knows?—maybe one day soon we will be closer than that. My hope is that we will.
September Song Page 3