Lemuel had become obsessed with the notion of starting his own “true” religion; it was all he ever talked about anymore. Micah remembered that the nonsense had first started after Lemuel had a chance encounter with a man named Hyrum Smith over a bottle of whiskey, in a Missouri saloon a few months before. Hyrum’s tales of how he and his brother Joseph had crafted a modern religious mythology, making them wealthy and respected men as a result, had entranced Lemuel and set the wheels of his mind in motion like nothing before.
Shaking a half-eaten drumstick in one hand and a mostly empty glass of whiskey in the other, Lemuel described in glorious detail his future vision for this fertile valley in the middle of nowhere. It would become the New Jerusalem for a new Christian religion. He would be the prophet and Sam his high priest. “Bigger than the Mormons, and richer than sin,” as he so eloquently put it. They would establish, right there, a new trading post for weary souls, “heavy with sin and cash, and in dire need of being unburdened of both”.
“The way I see it, and please do tell if I’m missing something,” Lemuel started, as the mouthful of boiled potatoes he had chewed but not swallowed bubbled out of the corners of his mouth and dripped into his ill-kept beard. “God done provided. Our bellies were empty and now our cup runneth over. Fourteen trees grow even now, laden with bushels and bushels of fruit, between the homes he has so graciously given. This place is the “locust amoeba” which we have sought after our entire lives,” he declared in a sing-song preacher voice.
“Locus amoenus,” Samuel gently corrected him.
“What?” Lemuel said. “Right, locust amoeba, that’s what I said, Sam, listen up! These are momentous days we are living in. Mankind has waited millennia to be allowed to return to the garden, and today… well, here we are.” He shoveled an oversized spoonful of pickled turnips into his mouth, as if to emphasize his point.
Sam finally felt himself being touched by the spirit as well, whether it was by the Holy Spirit or the liquid variety he wasn’t sure, and he decided that it was his moment to wax philosophical while his chatty friend was momentarily rendered speechless. Sam smiled kindly upon his wife and his children, seated around the table, each of them looking clean and refreshed and enjoying their first real meal in months. The whiskey was doing a nice job of clearing up any previous doubts he’d had about the whole endeavor.
“You’re right, Brother Lemuel, you speak the truth,” Sam said. “We have done the will of God, we have been fruitful and multiplied as the Lord hath commanded, and have even set our hand upon the unclean heathen so as to reclaim this land for the Lord and his righteous. He has seen fit to reward us, to provide us with plenty, so that we may do his will. I believe wholly, as do you, that our good fortune is a sign that God intends for us to do his work right here. Surely that is why he saw fit to lead us away from the others with whom we traveled, through trials and tribulations straight into this glorious bounty.”
Micah sighed to himself. This conversation was just gearing up, he knew, and would no doubt continue deep into the night. He had heard it all before, so after listening politely for a bit, he excused himself from the table and went outside to watch the smaller kids play.
In the yard, Nathan and Jacob were throwing rocks up into the trees trying to knock loose the scarlet fruit that tantalized them from the branches high overhead - most likely apples, but so far up it was impossible to be sure. Micah was certain, at any rate, that he had never seen apple trees so large.
He joined the other boys in their efforts to knock down some dessert, but despite several direct hits, the tree stubbornly refused to yield its fruit.
He grew frustrated with the futility of his effort. He gave up, turning to go back inside.
He bumped hard into Anna, who had snuck up quietly behind him.
“Where are you off to so fast?” she asked. Her voice sounded different to him - softer, silky even.
“Back inside, I guess,” he said. “Can’t even knock an apple down for the kids, anyhow. It’s stuck so fast to the branches that not even a strong blow with a rock may loosen it from the tree.”
“But why hurry?” she asked. “It’s so nice out here, and Father’s just getting started, you know. He said that he thinks that hill behind us might be the very place the Bible says Jesus will return. Are you sure you want to listen to that? You know how he is when he’s drinking. Please stay here with me a bit longer. Please?”
Micah had never seen her act this way. Throughout their childhood he had simply been a person for her to boss around, and more recently, someone she tried to avoid.
He stopped walking, though. Standing beside her, he turned back towards the trees, unsure what to say.
“I was watching you throwing,” Anna continued. “You’ve gotten a lot stronger this year, haven’t you? And taller,” she said, as though very impressed with him.
He was surprised at how her eyes glistened so brightly in the last dying rays of the sunset. He had always thought she was pretty, but now she was beyond pretty – she was beautiful, he realized for the first time.
She glanced nervously back at her new house, and he looked, too. Her father had his back to the window, and was raising his freshly refilled whiskey glass as he lectured the other adults.
Anna glanced at the other children to see if they were watching. They weren’t.
Satisfied no one would see, she grabbed Micah quickly by the hand.
“Follow me,” she whispered. Then she gathered her long skirt up in one hand and dragged him along behind her with the other as she ran across the yard, raven hair flowing behind her, stopping only when they were well hidden from sight behind a thick trunk of one of the gigantic trees.
She pushed him hard up against the tree. The soft bark was smooth against his back, almost like saddle leather. He felt warmth growing in his groin, and he gasped as Anna took his hands and pressed them against her breasts.
“What are you doing?” he stammered, flustered.
She didn’t answer; instead, she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him, drawing his lips into her mouth, biting gently for a moment before releasing him.
He stared at her in amazement. She was panting for breath, looking as though she was a bit drunk, even though he was quite sure her father hadn’t left the whiskey unattended for one moment the entire evening.
“You remember last summer, when you found me in the smokehouse?” she asked.
He blushed. It was the first time she had ever spoken of it aloud.
“Yes.”
“Do you know what I was doing that day?” she asked, voice quivering with excitement.
He wasn’t entirely certain how to answer the question, even though he felt he had a pretty good idea of what it was she had been doing.
“No,” he said in a dry whisper.
She put her lips to his ear, so close that they brushed lightly against his flesh as she spoke.
“I was thinking of you.”
He didn’t know how to respond, but Anna saw a bulge rising in the front of his trousers and smiled approvingly.
“Tonight,” she whispered. “Let’s make it real. Meet me in the smokehouse after father passes out and everyone else is asleep. Meet me there and I’ll show you where you should be - you know…instead of my fingers.”
Micah nodded meekly in agreement. He would be there.
She slipped a small rolled-up paper into his hand and kissed him again, lightly on the cheek this time, then ran back to her house before anyone could notice she was missing.
He unrolled the paper she had given him, to see what was written there. It wasn’t a note as he had suspected, but a picture. He had seen it before, a pencil sketch made by a friend of hers when she was a bit younger. It was a pretty drawing of her, he thought. The artist had done an exceptional job of capturing the fire that burned in the back of her eyes.
He rolled it back up and slipped it into his pocket, waiting behind the tree as he struggled to quash his arousal. After a wh
ile, he felt almost normal again, and went back to throwing rocks at the fruit with the children. He had noticed empty bushel baskets were stacked on the porch next to the kindling, so he assumed the fruit must ripen and fall eventually. Why else would there be baskets for collecting fruit?
But that whole evening, not a single red apple fell.
V. THE TREE OF LIFE
LATER THAT NIGHT - long after the feast had been cleared away, the fires put out, and the children tucked up in bed - Micah lay in his room, blinking up into the darkness. It had seemed like an eternity before everyone finally settled down and went to sleep. Being the only boy - and a near-grown one at that - in a family with four sisters meant he had his own room, and he was happy for it, too. But now all he wanted was to leave it, to wrap his arms around Anna, to feel her soft lips on his once more.
Earlier, before everyone went to sleep, he had quietly prepared for his escape by prying open his bedroom window. His room overlooked the front porch, so he was confident that he could easily slip out when the time came. Getting back into the house would be a whole different challenge, but he decided to deal with that when the time came.
After waiting what seemed like years, he climbed out of bed and tiptoed to the window, where he sat and stared out across the lawn. He watched as the lanterns in Anna’s house were extinguished one room after another. It had been the hardest week of his entire life. He was still exhausted, not only from the long journey and near starvation, but from the incessant gnawing of desperation, the grinding stress of not knowing if each new day on the prairie would be his last. Fatigued or not, the desire that burned inside him for Anna’s touch urged him forward, prodding him awake.
As the final light in her house grew dark, he hoped that she was still awake and eager for him too.
For a little longer, the muffled voices of his parents bled through the thin wall from the room beside his. Then, finally, the house fell silent.
Everyone was fast asleep, but not Micah. He carefully stuck his head out his bedroom window and inhaled the cool night air deeply, feeling more exquisitely alive than he ever had before. The air was sweet with the fragrance of fruit in the trees, and it charged his senses.
Looking at Anna’s house, he imagined that he saw her looking back at him from her own bedroom window across the clearing, her visage pale and beautiful in the bright moonlight. He wanted to run to her, to hold her, to take her for his own at that exact moment, but he resisted that reckless urge and waited silent and still by the window.
They would meet at the smokehouse as planned, in due time.
After a bit he heard the clock in the living room softly chiming downstairs. The moment had arrived. He quietly crawled out of the window and over the sill, planting his feet carefully on the roof of the porch so as to maintain absolute silence. The last thing he needed was for his father - or even worse, a drunken Lemuel - to mistake him for an Indian seeking revenge and pump him full of lead without a second thought. Though he was sure that Lemuel would be plenty happy to kill him intentionally, if he caught wind of the intentions Micah had for his eldest daughter tonight.
He successfully made his way to the edge of the roof, and was just about to drop down on the soft grass below when he heard something, a sound that made him stop: a soft thump that came from somewhere out in the yard - from where exactly, he couldn’t ascertain.
Was it Anna he had heard, perhaps, leaping onto the grass?
His eyes strained in the dim moonlight to see movement around her house, but he saw nothing. All appeared to be still.
Then he heard it again, a soft thump somewhere in the darkness. This time the sound had been preceded by a rustling of leaves.
Thump. He heard it again.
Thump. Thump.
Indians, seeking vengeance? He wondered.
The noise continued, slowly at first, from scattered locations around the yard. Then he spied the first sign of movement in the gloom. A solitary apple rolled out from under the trees, along the ground towards him, its shiny peel glimmering blood red in the moonlight. It came to a rest on the walkway to the house, not more than a few feet from the steps that led to the porch.
At that moment, it finally occurred to him what was making the noise. He laughed quietly to himself because suddenly it seemed so obvious: the fruit was falling.
What had started out as a gentle patter quickly erupted into a downpour of fresh produce. A hailstorm of fruit poured upon the ground, thousands of apples, he guessed, if not more. The sound was like the footsteps of a hundred horses in a faraway stampede, soft and hushed, like a gentle rain, as the apples fell upon the silken grass.
The treetops shook like a wet dog drying its fur, as falling fruit struck branches, loosening leaves that fluttered down like a million moonlit moths through the night.
It ended as suddenly as it had begun, and silence once again descended upon the valley.
Micah held his breath, listening to see if the disturbance, although gentle, had been loud enough to rouse the family and ruin his chances for a rendezvous with Anna.
He waited, full of nervous anticipation, crouched atop the front porch. But all remained dark and quiet, both at his house and Anna’s. After waiting what seemed like an eternity, he felt satisfied that no one had been disturbed, so he slid down to the edge of the roof and dropped down easily onto the grass below.
Micah walked to the edge of the orchard. The thin clouds had cleared and the moon shone brightly. The apple-covered ground created a bright red reflection that shone up into the foliage. For a moment, it appeared to him as though a river of fresh blood now flowed beneath the massive trees and through the valley, dividing the houses. The thought sent a chill down his spine.
He looked towards the smokehouse; it was just visible in the moonlight. He took a few steps in that direction before pausing. He found his desire for the forbidden fruit waiting for him in the smokehouse briefly overwhelmed by his desire for the real fruit, fallen at his feet. The air was fragrant with the sweetness of it. His mouth began to water.
He plucked an apple from the ground and inspected it. It was cool, smooth to the touch. Polishing it quickly on the leg of his trousers, he brought it to his mouth, lips quivering with anticipation.
Unable to resist the intense allure of the fruit for a single second longer, he bit down hungrily. A bolt of exquisite flavor exploded into his mouth as his teeth pierced the skin. A wave of lightheadedness washed over him as he chewed the delicate, creamy flesh, sticky juice dripping from his chin.
It was delicious.
For a moment, he completely forgot about Anna and his planned meeting with her, finding himself filled instead with a powerful urge to run amongst the trees and gather as many apples as he could, to devour the heavenly fruit until his belly filled to bursting. His tongue had never tasted anything in his life as transcendentally wonderful as the rapidly diminishing apple he held in his hand. In that moment, he wanted nothing other than to keep eating them until he could eat no more.
As he nibbled the last bit of fruit down to the core, even nearly devouring the seeds, Micah noticed a pale figure standing in the clearing on the other side of the trees, skirt billowing gently in the soft breeze, watching him intently.
It was Anna, looking decadently voluptuous in the moonlight.
She turned away from him, making rapid strides towards the smokehouse, silken hair flowing across her shoulders as she went.
He let the now-slender core on which he had been gnawing fall to the ground and began to run, his desire for her once again ignited inside him. He sprinted towards the anticipated intersection of their paths near the rear of the valley, running along the edge of the tree line to avoid twisting an ankle on the fruit as he ran.
Micah caught up with her near the rear of the smokehouse, nearly tackling her to the ground as he took her in his arms, pulling her to him, pressing his lips, still sticky-sweet from the fruit, hungrily against hers.
Anna pushed him away roughly,
tasting the sweetness he had left on her lips with her tongue as she did.
“What are you doing, kissing me in full view of God and man?” she protested. “I told you to meet me inside the smokehouse! What if Father catches us fornicating? He’ll shoot you and me dead, both here on this spot.”
She looked nervously towards her house to see if anyone had followed them.
Seeing her glancing back, pale skin and white dress illuminated in the dead light of the moon, caused him to think of the story of Lot’s wife in the Bible - how she must have appeared as she turned into a pillar of salt after looking back towards Sodom.
“I’m sorry,” he said meekly. “Let’s go inside.”
She ignored him.
“I think somebody saw us,” she fretted. “There’s somebody in the yard in front of the house. There, look - under the trees.”
“Nobody saw us,” he said gently, “you’re imagining things.” He took her hand. She pulled away from him, her agitation growing.
“We’ve been found out,” she sobbed as she stared in horror towards the trees. “He’s going to shoot our heads off our shoulders, just like he did to those Indians.”
“There’s nobody there,” Micah insisted, and turned to point at the empty yard spread out under the trees, eager to soothe her anxiety and get her into the smokehouse. But there was someone there, a few hundred yards or so away - someone moving rapidly across the yard from Anna’s house and heading towards his.
Alarmed by this discovery, he grabbed Anna and quickly forced her down onto her knees in the tall grass so they wouldn’t be spotted.
Crouched low, they watched as the silhouetted figure disappeared onto the porch of Micah’s house. Across the valley, the windows of Lemuel’s house remained dark, as did the windows in Micah’s house.
Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 46