Apples. First crop we had a record of. And that pioneer farm family lost heavily on it. They too were forced from their orchard. In apple farming you won a round now and then but you lost as many or more. Why do it then? Why play the game with the deck stacked against you? For the satisfaction of taking on a sure-fire winner, nothing less than nature herself, the elements. Brought out the grit in you. A contest worthy of a man. Coming off second best was not bad when your opponent was the unbeatable all-time champ. If they’d had it to do over again Adam and Eve would have done it. Apple farmers were like that. Born, not made. You inherited it. Maybe through a strain from that original couple. And because your forebears had endured its hardships for your sake you owed it to them to endure what they had endured. They expected that of you, no less. What was it that kept us from flying off into outer space? And how was that discovered? Ah, if only an apple would fall on Janet’s head, teach her the law of gravity, and tie her down to her native soil!
It mystified him how, his blood fueling her, she could tramp over the property with the real estate dealer and every prospective buyer he brought out and not comprehend what a prize she was letting go. By now the agent could have shown the place himself, so many times had they gone together over it, but she insisted on accompanying every party. Offers were made but on the agent’s advice, or so he pretended, he was accepting none because they kept going up all the time. Yet even this did not increase the worth of her property to Janet. It did to him. It made it all the harder to sell.
“You realize, Pete,” he said across the breakfast table one morning during this period, “that with the disappearance of orchards hereabouts, combined with the increase in population, which is to say the market, the price of locally grown apples is sure to soar. Instead of succumbing to offers to sell, now is the time for farmers to hold on. I know it’s what I would do if only I were younger, or had somebody to carry on after me. This place is going to be a gold mine, with somebody in charge who knows the business. The day will come when apples are individually wrapped in foil like chocolates. I may not live to see it, but it can’t be far off.
“So now, what are we going to be doing today? You’re the manager.”
“More of the same. Planting trees.”
“Planting trees!” said Molly to Janet. “If those two don’t take the cake. The place is up for sale, and they’re still planting trees.”
“This building boom we’re in is a bubble that could go bust overnight. Overnight. Then what’s left? Farmland. Got you a place with no mortgage to foreclose—and this has never had one since the dawn of Creation—you won’t be selling apples on streetcorners. You’ll be supplying them.”
“Planting trees. At your age.”
“We orchardmen take the long view. Eh, Pete? Father to son. Or son-in-law, as the case may be. As long as this remains an orchard it’s going to be treated as one. That means replacing trees. Maybe one of my grandchildren will want to farm it.”
“You haven’t got any grandchildren. And if you were to have one tomorrow it would come of working age about the time these trees you’re planting bear their first fruit. You expect to live to see that?”
“I expect to be feeding people long after I’m dead. When you think, Pete, of the work that goes into an orchard! The work and the faith. Your grandfather planted that tree, your father that one. They did it for their children, we do it for ours. Can you just imagine the heartbreak of seeing them all torn up by the roots?”
“I don’t have to imagine it. I have seen it done.”
“I’m sorry I mentioned it, son. That was thoughtless of me.”
An offer was made by a developer which the agent advised him to accept. He did. He accepted it with no intention of living up to the agreement but in order to impress Janet with his determination, with the worth of her patrimony and her duty to preserve it. For the announcement of his acceptance the agent was invited to supper. He felt not one twinge of conscience over using and misleading the fellow. He did not like him, nor any of his breed. Merchants of misery, of broken homes, deaths, ruination, old age, spoliation. Besides, he had practically boarded him.
“Looks like I’ve got no choice but to take it,” he sighed.
Never was so much money accepted so ungratefully. It was an awesome sum. It made him realize as never before what he would be sacrificing. The amount shocked him, shamed him, made him feel a bigger culprit, contemptible in the eyes of all the living and of all his ancestors now turning over in their graves out behind the house. He listened with one ear to the offer while listening with the other one for Janet’s voice relenting at the eleventh hour.
She was calling his bluff, forcing him to show every card in his hand. He had now played all but the last one: the closing. Meanwhile, nothing had been signed, all was still pending. Backing out of the deal even after a binder had been put down was a common occurrence. He would gladly refund a buyer’s binder.
He could no longer rely upon that telepathy he had believed to exist between him and her. She was younger than he realized, childish, less sensitive, less dutiful. Truth was, her mother and her sisters had spoiled her. People used to do the things expected of them out of a sense of obligation, but today’s youth—irresponsible, selfish. It was time for a showdown. He would be tactful, fatherly—all that; but he would be firm, and he would have his way.
“Listen here, Janet,” he said. “It’s time you and I had a talk.”
She agreed, for she had something to say to him.
“You’ve got something to say to me? What is it?”
“I’m engaged. Engaged to be married. You’ve got all your daughters off your hands now. Well, aren’t you going to congratulate me?”
“Who is he?” he demanded.
“Rod.”
“Rod? Rod who?”
“Why, Rodney Evans, of course. What other Rod do we know?”
He did not know any Rodney Evans. Who the hell was Rodney Evans? There could be no Rodney Evans, for none figured in his plans. Then he knew who Rodney Evans was. He had been a part of his plans but this was not the part he was cast for. Rodney Evans was not a person, he was the real estate agent—him with hair like a meringue—meant to scare her with. Rodney Evans was the serpent he himself had invited into his garden. Pete Jeffers had lived under the same roof with her for nine months and never gotten to first base; this Rodney Evans had begun his successful suit on their initial walk together over the property.
“It was love at first sight,” she said.
“Shame on you, Father! Trying to make your daughter marry a man she does not love.”
“But you will love him. You will. In time. Pete will make you the best of husbands. You’ve seen him up close. You know how he lives. Hard-working. Easygoing. Good-natured. Home-loving. Thrifty. Dependable. Has no bad habits. Doesn’t drink—or only a drop now and then. Doesn’t go out to bars. Doesn’t go out anywhere. Doesn’t gamble. Doesn’t chase after women. Why, I’ve never even heard him curse! And there’s another thing. (This is just between you and me.) There’s a lot to be said for being brighter than your husband. You’re not just better educated but a lot brighter than Pete, and he knows it. He would look up to you. You can twist him around your little finger. And I know you. You’re like me. You like having your own way in everything. Eh? And why not! Well, with him you would.”
“Father, you are becoming more shameful by the moment. You’re proposing a husband for your daughter on the grounds that he’s not too bright. And he’s supposed to be a friend of yours!”
“Listen. Marry Pete and I’ll leave everything to you. Everything. Your sisters don’t need it. Their husbands have got the most secure jobs in the world. People are going to go on dying and trying to get to heaven for the foreseeable future.”
“Father! I will not be a party to robbing my sisters of their inheritance.”
“You always were my favorite. You know that.”
A silence fell. Between father and daughter passed
a perception. It was as though he were wooing her for himself.
“I know nothing of the sort. And I don’t want to hear it. How can I face my sisters? If I’m your favorite now it’s because I’m the one still unmarried. Do you realize what you are doing and what it makes you? You are tempting me with the apple.”
“Millions of them! Millions! Tell me, what have you got against Pete?”
“Nothing. I’ve got nothing against Pete. I like him. But I don’t love him. He’s supposed to be a friend of yours. Would you want your friend to marry a woman who didn’t love him? I like Pete too much to wish that on him. What is more, I have no reason to think he loves me. Or anybody else, for that matter. Pete doesn’t know what love is.”
“He respects you.”
“Once and for all, Father, I will never marry a man I do not love. Did you have me only so I could carry on this farm?”
“It’s been in our family, yours and mine, for four generations.”
“That’s long enough. Time for a change.”
“That does it! Now you listen to your father, young lady.”
“Listen to your daughter, old man. You are forgetting that you are my father.”
“Marry Pete, and everything will be yours. Marry this what’s-his-name—”
“Rodney. Rodney Evans. And I will soon be Mrs. Rodney Evans.”
“—and I will leave everything to be divided between your sisters.”
“You’re no father, you’re … you’re a breeder. A stockbreeder.”
He fell silent, struck by a truth in what she had said. A twist to it of which she herself was unaware, and the difference in their outlooks made him feel the difference in their ages, the gap between the generations, made him feel that indeed he was not the father of his children—or rather, that they were not the children of their father. Yes, he had “bred” them with a career for them in mind, as he had been bred. He had given them life, that was to say, he had passed on to them the life passed on to him. He had housed them, fed them, clothed them, educated them, nursed them. Yet it was not he alone who had done that. He had been a link in the chain. Fruit from trees set out by their grandparents had paid their bills. Did they owe nothing to those who had worked and worried and denied themselves and put aside for their unborn offspring? Were they now free to do just as they pleased, mate to their fancy, outside the strain, without consideration for their forebears? He had expected that their long-lineaged genes would shape and guide them. They thought the world began with themselves. For him the world was ending with himself.
“Father,” she said, in a different, a reflective tone, “you ought to have traveled. Seen something of the world. Then you wouldn’t think that the sun rises and sets over this farm of yours.”
How he hated it when people, especially young whipper-snappers, told him what he should do or should have done!
“To have one spot of earth that is all the world to him—that is what I call a fortunate man. That it costs him work and worry now and then makes it all the dearer.”
“What reward has it brought you?”
“Independence! I have been my own man.”
“Independence! You’ve been a slave. Ten thousand masters you’ve got. You belong to those trees. They don’t even let you sleep.”
It was always hard work; chainsaws and tractors made it dangerous work. Throughout the growing season you were often out on the sprayer all night long, and the chemicals were hazardous to your health: to your lungs, your eyes, your skin. When it came to spraying you were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t. The insects and the fungi could blight and canker your fruit, but the chemicals that poisoned them also poisoned the birds that ate them. Worse by far, the chemicals killed the bees upon which your whole operation depended, without which your blossoms went unpollinated. It was not like that in the original Garden of Eden. Those gates at which the flaming sword would be set kept out the bugs. The Hudson Valley lay east of Eden—though in the spring you would have thought it was Paradise regained.
There was no season of rest. Harvest-time did not bring months by the fireside in your carpet slippers. Pruning—a never-ending job—was done in the depth of winter, mowing at the height of summer; you shivered and you sweltered. The trees of each variety ripened separately; you were at it sixteen hours a day. The apples must be sorted, graded, packed, shipped. The “drops” must be gathered from the ground and sent to the cider mill. You might find that before you had time to wrap the trunks to protect them, the deer had eaten the bark of your saplings and killed them. Five minutes of hail or six months of drought—hard to say which was the longer to live through—and your crop was gone.
But with the pickers in the trees singing like birds—if birds could warble words—and shouting jokes to one another, and with that red river of ripe fruit flowing along the conveyor belt—was it you who grew all that? Construction workers on skyscraper girders, tugboat crews, road-menders, assembly-line workers, schoolchildren from here to California would polish off lunch with one of your apples.
Meanwhile, sure, like farmers everywhere, he pore-mouthed. Once when he was inveighing against his hardships one of those sons-in-law of his commiserated with him by saying he couldn’t understand why anybody in his right mind would go in for it.
“You’re not in your right mind!” he said proudly. “You don’t ‘go in for’ it. You’re born to it. It’s in your blood.”
His worst year was to have been his best. The weather was balmy. With the warming of the days, like popcorn in a pan, first a few blossoms, then more, then in a burst the trees whitened. The air was drowsy with the buzz of bees. Though the days were warm, the nights were cool: the prescription for growing. The rain was regulated as though by the Department of Agriculture. He was encouraged by these conditions to work harder than he had ever worked before. The trees sagged with fruit. Incandescent as Christmas trees they were in the glow of the setting sun when he went out to inspect his ripening crop. Money didn’t grow on trees? Who said? When they were apple trees it did! It almost restored his long-lost faith, at least for a season. God was in His heaven and all was right with the world, quoted Ellen, the Vassar College English major who would in time marry the mealy-mouthed minister. He suspected that God was out of His heaven, leaving some sleepy subordinate to mind the store. Only then would orchardmen have such luck.
The days when school was let out and whole families came to pick apples, bringing a picnic lunch with them (he supplied the iced tubs of beer and soda) were a thing of the past. Now labor contractors went to Florida, Jamaica, the Bahamas and signed up migrant gangs. The farmer housed them in trailer camps or in area motels. They chattered incessantly as they worked. Listening to them was like getting hard of hearing: it was English they were speaking, you knew it was, yet you could not make out the words. But it was musical. They were as noisy in the trees as nesting wrens and just as merry. Last year his pickers had been Jamaicans and so they would be again this year.
The fruit was almost ripe for picking when the state legislature, under pressure from labor unions, passed a measure requiring aliens to obtain work permits, and making it impossible for them to do so.
He watched his finest crop go unpicked, fall to the ground and rot.
“What do you think—life is a picnic?” he said. “Think I would sooner have had it soft? Sit in a bank making loans to people? Sell their houses out from under them? Brokers in heartbreak! I’ve fed people. And more than that. Not just staple food. Joyful food. What children love to steal. There’s satisfaction in that. No, it hasn’t always been easy. But man must eat his bread in the sweat of his face.”
“Father, remember how that curse came upon us?”
Going once.
Going twice.
He was like an auctioneer egging on two competing bidders.
Except that one, Janet, was not competing.
Going…
Going…
Gone!
It was the commission
he would earn on the sale of the Bennett farm that put Rodney Evans in a position to propose marriage. So, with a sense of the fitness of it which he expected him to share, he informed his future father-in-law. This commission was staying in the family.
The terms of the sale left them with a lifehold on the house and five acres right around it. At once, even before the clearing of it began, his former land, the land of his family, was like a lake surrounding his little island. Just so he felt himself cut off from his neighbors, his former friends. The very trees, now awaiting execution, the trees whose pruning he had overseen as watchfully as a mother the barbering of her brood, reproached him for his treachery—or would have if he had ventured among them.
On the morning a week after the closing they were awakened by noises as if war had broken out all around them: bursts of machine-gun fire, the rumble of tanks. Although expected, it still came as a shock, and they clung to each other, frightened by this upheaval in their lives. The temptation was to pull the covers over their heads and stay in bed, but drawn by a contrary curiosity he dressed and went outdoors.
Men with chainsaws were in the trees as pruners had once been, only these were not just trimming out the unwanted suckers, they were lopping off all the limbs. Above one pile hovered a pair of songbirds protesting the destruction of their nest with its eggs. Already half a dozen trees had been topped, leaving a row of stumps three feet tall.
Now the bulldozer was brought on. It lumbered up to a stump, lowering its blade like a buck his antlers to engage a rival. For a minute the contest was a stand-off. The tree resisted, clung to its hold. Then as though in mounting rage the engine growled deeper and deeper as the operator summoned up its lowermost gears. Its treads dug into the ground. The tree yielded, toppled, its roots tore loose and surfaced. One after another the stumps were attacked. Then they and their limbs were pushed into a pile. The holes left looked like bomb craters. The pile was doused with kerosene and set afire. Being green, the wood smoked thickly. Soon the scene was like one of those days when fog from off the River blanketed the Valley.
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