Poison Apples

by Nancy Means Wright

  He chose his trees, pumped the handle at his side to build pressure, then squeezed the trigger on the spray wand. It was a quiet method, of spraying, he couldn’t have used a ground rig—the motor would have awakened someone. Anyone hearing this might think it an airplane on its way to the Burlington airport, or a squealing rabbit, caught up by an owl. He’d be quick. He would do only this section for now, six or seven trees: to frighten, to turn the wits. So that be wouldn’t have to destroy the orchard completely: He’d accomplish his purpose before then. Though if he had to—if they hung on—he would complete the destruction, oh yes. He had access to an airplane. He’d do it without remorse—he had good cause.

  He could smell the stuff even as he sprayed. It stank, it made him want to throw up, he didn’t like that. He didn’t want the smell on him, though it would probably fade out with the wind. When he was done, when he’d defoliated seven trees, he returned the spray rig to the storage shed where he’d found it, looking about carefully to be sure he wasn’t seen. Next time, maybe, they’d initiate a night watch, he’d have to use a friend’s Cessna to do the job.

  It would be several days before they would discover what he’d done. Maybe weeks before they caught the full effect. One apple alone wouldn’t harm, would it? He didn’t think so. But make cider out of several, drink a gallon of it—it would do the job. Make life difficult for one certain person.

  Off in the woods beyond the orchard there was a squealing sound;then a humming noise, like something chuckling, triumphant. Even though he identified with that, the sound made him shudder. It was like a nail scraping a blackboard, a machine gone askew. He hurried off.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  It was nine A.M., the milking done and the cows out in the pasture. That was one of the pluses for this time of year, Ruth thought, as she walked slowly back to the house: With days growing shorter, one could milk later in the morning. The second hay cutting was in, and Ruth and Tim had stacked most of the split wood in the basement. It was a glorious fall day: goldenrod and blue vetch springing up along the roadside and in the uncultivated fields. The mountains were soft gradations of purple: One could see the Adirondacks to the west, the Green Mountains to the east. Who could ask for more?

  But then there were the minuses. In the kitchen she found Vic’s dirty boots where he’d dropped them in his race for the schoolbus, Emily’s breakfast dishes in the sink because she’d been late for school, and a note from Tim, in the capital letters he always used for writing: “CORN CHOPPER BROKE, BLEW UP AFTER THE FIRST WAGON LOAD, NEEDS A U JOINT. CAN’T GET IT IN TOWN.” So she would have to order one through a dealer—which might take a week or more and slow up the whole proceedings. Then there was Tim’s P.S.:

  “COONS IN THE CORN AGAIN.”

  She poured a cup of strong coffee. One day, her older daughter Sharon said, the coffee would do her in, but Ruth lived day by day, milking by milking, calf by calf. This was another concern:

  Bathsheba was nearing the end of her pregnancy and that would make three dry cows this fall—definitely a financial burden. The Holstein had to store up her milk for a good two months and be treated with antibiotics in the bargain to prevent mastitis. Ruth hadn’t figured right this fall about the inseminating. Less milk, but at least higher prices in the fall—a plus, after all. She guessed she’d come out even in the plus-minus category. But lately Emily had been talking about going out of state to college—how on earth could Ruth afford that? She’d have to have a serious talk with Pete—if he was still in town.

  She finished the breakfast dishes and swept the kitchen floor. She didn’t mind, she had energy to burn. Afterward she pulled her boots back on to check the corn that the pesky raccoons had knocked down—and heard a car careen into the drive. She knew who it was even before the woman got out—she could sense her sister-in-law by the way the hairs bristled on her own neck.

  “Oh, Ruth, I just saw Pete. He’s staying with me a few days, did you know? Just until Violet gets here. Isn’t it wonderful he’s doing business up north again?”

  Ruth had no answer for that. Pete’s sister, Bertha Willmarth, came tripping up the steps in her shiny heels and polyester pants and bobbing bonnet. One would think she was off for a cruise instead of a trip to a hardscrabble farm.

  “I know, Bertha. He called. Look, I was just heading out in the fields. We can talk on the way if you want to.” Of course Bertha wouldn’t want to—the holes and rocks would make short work of those pinky-red shoes.

  But this time Ruth was foxed. Bertha said, “I’ve got some galoshes in the car, just wait a minute now. I need to talk to you.” Back at the car, she stuck out a stockinged leg to pull on a pair of rubber galoshes that might have been a legacy of her deceased mother.

  “I hear you’ve been on your knees a lot lately,” Ruth said as Bertha followed her into the field. Moira and Emily had told her about the praying women of the Messengers. And Bertha belonged to that group. Aaron Samuels was improving; she supposed Bertha would want to take credit. She could hear Bertha panting, though—her activity on her knees evidently didn’t keep her in shape.

  “What? Please, Ruth, slow up, I don’t want to fall, I’ve got a weak left hip, you know.”

  Ruth slowed; she needed information from Bertha about the Messengers, but it was hard. Hard to deal with this woman, to forget Bertha’s past, her transgressions on the family. Well, she’d let the woman talk. She might learn something.

  “It’s that apple orchard up the road, Ruth. I hear Emily works there. Does Pete know that?”

  “He will when you tell him, Bertha.”

  “He’ll want to discourage that, I’m telling you. It’s a godless place now. It used to be so beautiful. It was my Uncle Howard on my father’s side owned it, you know, Pete and I played there as children before Howard sold it. But now that man Earthgrowl—”

  “Earthrowl.”

  “He’s a murderer, oh yes. He ran poor Cassandra down. On purpose, Ruth. On purpose! Oh, he knew what he was doing. And now he’s taken the body. Cassandra’s body. Ruth—slow up, will you?”

  “What do you mean, he’s taken her body?” Ruth turned to face the woman. “It’s the police—forensics, not Stan Earthrowl—who have the body. They’re trying to find out what—well, what really happened.” Now she was confused. She didn’t know herself what had happened. They were checking tire prints, Colm had told her; there was something about a witness. They were walking past the hemp patch now, she saw Bertha peer closely at it—there were still handwritten HEMP tags Tim had tied on some of the plants. Ruth walked faster. Then she stopped again. “Where were you when Cassandra was struck, Bertha?”

  “I saw. Oh yes, that’s what I was coming to tell you. I’ve been to the police. I saw that man start up his car, and Cassandra close by. She ran toward him. He’d broken up our vigil at the liquor store, you know, he’d assaulted our minister! That godless man.”

  “Stick to the point, Bertha. What exactly did you see? After she supposedly ran toward him?” Ruth started walking again, she didn’t want to seem too eager.

  “Not ‘supposedly,’ Ruth. She did run toward him. Ruth, can’t we go in the kitchen? This ground is all uneven. I don’t remember it this way when I was a girl.”

  “It was worse, Bertha. We’ve filled in a ton of woodchuck holes since then. What did you see?” Ruth did want to hear what Bertha saw. Or thought she saw. Bertha was impressionable: You could plant an image in her head and it became “reality.” “Answer me, please, Bertha.”

  “If you’ll stop walking—”

  “All right, I’ll stop. Now speak. Please.”

  “Well, Cassandra ran toward him and—oh, it was terrible, she was lying there on the ground, all bloody, she was hit in the back—”

  “But you said she ran ‘toward’ Stan. He wouldn’t have hit her in the back, then.”

  “Stop being so technical, Ruth! Maybe she turned her back at the last minute, I don’t know. Anyway, I got out of the car after I he
ard the scream, I felt her pulse. Our minister went to call an ambulance. But when it got there it was too late. She was, she was . . .” She drew a large flowered hankie from her purse, blew her nose loudly into it.

  “Wait a minute, Bertha, back up. You were in a car? What car?”

  “We were going back to the church. I mean, we hadn’t left yet. I was sitting in the back between Gertrude and Alma. We had cushions, you see, it was quite comfortable, though I kept telling our minister we needed a larger vehicle. . . .”

  “If you were in the back between two women, you couldn’t see, then, could you? You didn’t see the actual moment of impact? You can’t say it was definitely Stan Earthrowl’s car that struck her? You can’t prove she wasn’t, well, pushed in front of his car?”

  “Of course she wasn’t pushed. Who on earth would push her?”

  “But you didn’t actually see the moment of impact. Answer me that, Bertha.”

  Bertha looked about her wildly, her orangy hair was flying on end in the wind, her hat had blown off; she went back to retrieve it.

  “Answer me, please, Bertha.”

  “No,” Bertha shouted back. “No, I didn’t see that very moment! I was looking at something else, I don’t recall exactly. We were all, well, talking. But it had to have been Stan Earthrowl. That’s what Reverend, um, Turnbull said.”

  “Then tell the police that, Bertha. If you don’t, I will. You tell them you didn’t actually see her hit by Stan Earthrowl’s car. This is a human being you’re accusing, Bertha. A man who has lost his own child to an automobile accident. Maybe he was wrong to break up your damn vigil. I can’t figure that one out in my mind. But maybe you and those other women were wrong to go on Aaron Samuels’s property and pray! I mean, right on his porch? Oh, I heard that, yes I did. A neighbor saw it, she told the police. You weren’t praying for him, but against him. He’s out of the coma, I hear—lucky it was a low-velocity bullet—but it will be a slow recovery. He’ll give up teaching, he says. Is that what you wanted, Bertha?”

  She turned on her boot heel and stalked on ahead through the pasture; put distance between herself and this officious woman.

  “That’s enough, Ruth,” Bertha shouted after her. “I won’t listen to that talk. I only came here to warn you about Emily working in that place. I thought you cared about...” Her voice grew thinner, the wind blew the words back in her face.

  Ruth walked on into the cornfield. Several rows had been knocked down, chewed, the corn stripped and bare. It was annoying, yes, but they were only raccoons. They were hungry, Ruth was willing to share. She’d take a raccoon any day over Bertha and her group of exterminators.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Bertha trudged slowly back across the pasture. She was upset, oh she was. Ruth had no right to speak to her that way, no, to put down her friends, her fellow parishioners. They were her life now, since she’d found Christ. All those years growing up on this farm, the blur of days that followed—mundane jobs, charities, endless trips to the grocery store, the beauty parlor—were nothing compared to now. She was doing important things: keeping babies from being murdered, men from taking to drink—at least she was trying. Sometimes it was discouraging, oh my, so discouraging. Why, they shoved right past her and into the liquor store!

  Ruth didn’t understand. Ruth would never understand, she was too hotheaded, too . . . too—Bertha searched for the word. “Godless,” was the word she came up with, “godless.” Yes, openly godless. What was this she was planting now? Bertha leaned down, broke off a stem, sniffed it. It didn’t smell like corn. The tag said HEMP. Wasn’t hemp illegal? Yes, she’d read about it in the paper. She’d take it to Pete, that’s what she’d do. Let Pete decide. Or her pastor. Should they go to the police? Should she warn Colm Hanna? But Colm was in league with Ruth. That was what hurt the most. Her wonderful Colm, who’d danced with her, kissed her once by her locker. Back in high school it was, she’d never forgotten it, never. It was near Christmas, someone had hung mistletoe in a doorway. She’d stood under it and suddenly there was Colm, his dark fuzzy head bending over her. Was it a long kiss? She couldn’t remember. She’d gone over and over it a thousand times through the years. Had he spoken? Had he said he’d . .. loved her? How, why had he changed? Why did he ignore her now? Oh, Colm, Colm .. .

  Pete wasn’t there when she got home. She kicked off her heels, they pinched, her feet had expanded over the summer. She fixed herself a cup of herb tea—they weren’t allowed caffeine, Christ called it a stimulant, like wine, like whiskey, like cigarettes. That had been the hardest, giving up her cigarettes! They were to be pure, like their Christian saint, Dorothea.

  She gazed at the print of Dorothea she’d hung on the living room wall. The reverend had given them each one, he’d had it copied from a portrait by Francisco de Zurbaran; she rolled the name over on her tongue. Fran-cees-co de Zur-bar-r-ran. How beautiful Dorothea was, in her rich red gown with the pale yellow sleeves, her dark hair flowing like water over her shoulders, and in her hands, the tray of apples. Golden Delicious, they looked like, yellowy, with a cheek of red. Uncle Howard used to grow them in the family orchard: She remembered her own dear mother slicing them up into salads. The orchard that was being contaminated now by that murderer, that Jewish Antichrist!

  How innocent Dorothea looked. How sweet, how courageous, as she walked to her execution, her martyrdom. Her path to paradise. For it wasn’t this life that counted, no, but the next. Christ had taught them that. Good deeds in this life—joy everlasting in the next. As though Heaven were an orchard full of sweet-tasting apples, like nectar.

  She imagined meeting Colm Hanna there, sharing an apple with him. If she could only loosen Ruth’s hold on him, show him the true light! She sipped her raspberry zinger tea and closed her eyes. And there was Colm ...

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Now Emily knew who had let the goat go that first time. Because it was happening again. It was seven o’clock Thursday evening and she was on her way to the tool hut in the east quad of the orchard where she and Adam had a trysting place (she loved that word, “trysting,” she’d come upon it in a nineteenth-century poem they were reading in English class). And just as she was coming through the trees she saw Opal—well, not exactly cutting the rope, but, knife in hand, shooing off the goat. Only the goat didn’t want to leave; it kept coming back to the grassy spot where it had been feeding. So Opal grabbed it by the rope fragment and pulled it down the path. “Nasty thing,” she hissed, and gave a little shriek when it suddenly backed up and banged into her thigh. Emily stifled a laugh.

  Opal was wearing a red T-shirt and cutoff jeans, in spite of the evening chill. Her black pigtail bobbed like a feather where it was pinned up. Several times Emily had caught Adam looking at the girl, and Emily didn’t like that. Adam was hers. Weren’t they planning a trip to Essex, and then Montreal, the very next weekend?

  Emily coughed. And Opal shrieked again. “You’re following me!” she shouted. “You’ve no business. I was just—”

  “You were just letting that goat go. For the second time, right? And I know why. It’s because of the Jamaicans. What do you have against them, huh? What?”

  Opal didn’t answer; she just stood there, her dark eyes blazing, her pigtail quivering with her indignation. Suddenly the goat lunged and broke free; this time it loped ahead through the trees.

  “Look what you made me do!” Opal cried.

  Emily was floored. It was Opal’s fault that the goat was loose. “Help me catch it,” she told the girl. “We’ll bring it back to the bunkhouse. I think you’d better do that,” she said when Opal stood motionless, her mouth open, a bit of spittle on her sallow chin. “Where’d you get that lethal-looking knife, anyway?”

  “From the Earthrowls’ kitchen, of course,” Opal said, as though it were the dumbest question she’d ever heard, and dropped the knife in the grass. It gleamed there like a streak of moonlight.

  “Well, you better put it back,” Emily snapped, a
nd started after the goat. She heard Opal tramping slowly behind her. Hearing voices, she turned, and there were Derek and Bartholomew, Derek’s gold earring glinting in the waning light. She saw that Don Yates was nearby as well, picking up drops.

  “It broke its rope,” Opal told the men. “I saw, I came after it.” Emily was stunned at the lie, but said nothing.

  “It a feisty one,” Derek said, “it know what’s comin’. Smart ole goat.”

  “It went that way,” Emily told the men, pointing into the darkening trees. “Opal and I were chasing it.” She glanced at Opal, but the girl was staring straight ahead.

  The chase went on for another fifteen minutes until they found the goat chewing on a clump of grass under a tree. Derek laughed and caught it up. “You don’t get away dis time, ole goat,” he said. “You mek my harvest soup, oh yea.” Bartholomew laughed, too, and snatched an apple off a tree and bit juicily into it. “Bossman won’t miss one,” he said. “Maybe two will make good luck,” and he put another apple in his pocket.

  “Good luck get dis here goat bek,” said Derek, picking one of the apples for himself, and he and Bartholomew trotted with the goat back up toward the bunkhouse. Night was coming on quickly now. Don Yates followed, carrying a bag of drops he’d picked farther down. “Good evening, ladies,” he said, doffing his tweed cap. “I’m sure the men appreciate your help.”

  Opal grabbed Emily’s elbow. “If you don’t tell on me, I won’t tell where you’re going—what you all are up to.” She pointed in the direction of the toolshed. Then her voice got all husky. “Someday I’ll tell you why. Why I really let that goat go.”