Poison Apples

by Nancy Means Wright

  Opal was already pounding up the stairs; Moira took deep breaths to calm herself, and said nothing. The rethreading was wholly absorbing. Slowly a sense of relief stole over her. She couldn’t worry about the figure in the orchard—it might have been one of the local pickers, after all. This was the night for Bartholomew; she didn’t want to disturb the Jamaicans. In the morning she’d find out if someone had come to play another cruel trick on the orchard.

  Red over gold, blue over mauve, warp over weft: This was her meditation, this was her way of coping. She’d finish the rethreading, and then she’d go to bed.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Adam was late for their meeting in the toolshed, but it was all right; he’d been playing the guitar, he said, at Bartholomew’s wake. Or Emily guessed it was a wake—already the body had been shipped back to Jamaica. She was sorry, he’d seemed a kind man, a gentle one; he didn’t deserve to die. She couldn’t really believe all that about obeah, she told Adam. “I mean, how can somebody back in Jamaica, some jealous wife or somebody, put a spell on him up here in a Vermont orchard?”

  “Unless it was somebody right here in this orchard.”

  “No! I can’t believe that, either. It was awful, awful of someone to spray that poison!”

  “Probably he—or she—didn’t know he had a weak heart,” Adam said thoughtfully. “Derek ate one, too, and he’s all right.”

  “Derek is young and healthy,” she said. “It was still a cruel, irresponsible thing to do.”

  Adam nodded, took a long drink out of the bottle of Chablis he’d brought along. “There are a lot of poison apples in the world,” he said, putting his arm around her. “But one day they’ll all be turned into vinegar.”

  She smiled. Adam was clever with words. With music. With apple picking—he could pick almost as fast as the Jamaicans. He always looked gorgeous up there in the trees, his ponytail hanging down like a branch in blossom. She sipped her wine. It felt good, warm in the belly. It was Wilder Unsworth who’d introduced her to wine, her mother never let her touch it—her mother was so old-fashioned. But Wilder was probably making out with some female classmate this very minute. She didn’t trust Wilder anymore since he’d fooled around with a city girl back in high school. But Adam: There was a certain intensity about him, a spirit of questing, as though there was something important he had to do for himself and the world. She liked that. She felt she could trust him. It might even be called . .. love. Or its beginnings.

  She leaned against his shoulder; she fit right into a hollow there between the bones. The stars popped out of a traveling cloud as she watched, as if they had her and Adam in mind.

  “Are we really going to the Valley Fair next weekend?” she asked, and Adam murmured, “Hmmm?” And then, “Sure. You bet.” He leaned over and kissed her, on the mouth, a long loving luxurious kiss, while his hands wandered down over her breasts, down deep into her beltless jeans, into the moist V between her legs, and she felt as though any minute her groin would spill out sweet apple cider.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Ruth had made an offer to help interrogate the pickers, so she felt she had to keep it—though she should be in three other places at once! There was Sharon’s baby girl, down with an ear infection that filled the house with screeches; there was Vic’s science fair—although it would go on through Saturday; there was a hearing in Montpelier of farmers wanting to ban the use of rBST, the synthetic hormone that would stimulate milk production in cows—unsafely, Ruth felt. It made her blood boil, in fact, to think of certain area farmers using the stuff and the FDA actually approving, in spite of health risks. And of course she should be in the barn—she couldn’t leave it all up to Tim. When she announced her departure for the orchard, he’d tipped his ranch hat and said, “Well, ma’am, you gotta make up your mind. Are you a farmer or a detective?”

  Startled, she’d said, “Does a woman have to be just one thing?” and he’d laughed.

  “No, ma’am. But far’s I can see, you’re ten women all at once,” and he began to tick off the jobs. She got out of there fast then, it was overwhelming to hear.

  Moira had already interrogated Millie and then four of the seven remaining Jamaicans by the time she arrived, “and got nowhere. Though I’m probably asking the wrong questions, Ruth. I’m not much good at this. I mean, I don’t want them to think I’m suspicious, or accusing them of sabotaging the orchard. Lord! What’s the right thing to do, anyway?”

  She was glad, glad, she said, that Ruth would take over. There were still three men to question, and then Rufus and the other local pickers to talk to. She’d leave out Emily, since the girl was wholly above suspicion. Ruth laughed and said, “I’m not so sure about that! But sabotage—no. Though she might have seen something. I’ll talk to her.”

  Ruth began with the Butterfield twins, but they had little to say. Like the three monkeys, they had seen nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. “Although,” one of them said as they were leaving the barn—he stood there with his pail like a red-haired stork carrying a baby—”I did see Zayon—I’m pretty sure it was Zayon—go out late at night the time they found the maggots. He was headed down the path, I wondered what he was doing. The Jamaicans usually sleep tight. They’re bushed, I mean, like us. But he went out of sight, you know?”

  “What were you doing out?” Ruth asked. “Why weren’t you asleep?”

  And he laughed and blushed and said, “I had to go, well, relieve myself, you see, and my brother’d been on the toilet. He’d been eating too many apples, he had the runs. It was pretty bad, so I went out.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Oh, I dunno. Late. Midnight. Adam was asleep, I think, but you can ask him. For me it was a case of too much cider, I got weak kidneys. My mother says—”

  “Thanks. Thanks, then, um, Rolly. I think it’s Rolly,” she said. The brothers grinned at each other, obviously delighted at being able to confuse people with their twinship, and trotted off.

  Zayon, though, was upset when she told him what Rolly had said. He ran a nervous hand over his dreadlocks—not through, she noticed, they were stiff as brooms, a contrast to the soft-looking pointed beard. She wondered how he slept with them. And got her answer.

  “I sleep lak bear,” he said. “I not to get up, I don’ know what he talk bout. Once though mebbe—”

  “Once?” She shifted balance on the upturned apple bin where she was seated as magistrate; a pain shot through her kidneys. She was getting these strange aches in odd places—surely not arthritis at her age? The shoulder pain, though, undoubtedly came from lifting bales of hay.

  A bone spur, said Sharon, who subscribed to health newsletters from Harvard, Tufts, and the Mayo Clinic. “You’ll need a shoulder replacement, Mother, if you keep doing that.”

  “And who else is to do it?” Ruth had asked, laughing anyway.

  “Once, twice, I get Bartholomew’s med’cine. He wake in de night, can’t fin’ it. I’m de nex’ bed.”

  “But it wouldn’t be outdoors?”

  “No, missus. No, no. In de bunkhouse, dat’s where. I neber go out. Neber!”

  “All right, then, Zayon. Thank you. He must have seen someone else, he wasn’t sure anyway. You’ll be glad, won’t you, to go home after harvest? You have a wife? Children?”

  He chuckled. “No wife no more. Got my religion now. Got a mama. But I don’t go home. Yet. Florida, dat where, for to pick de fruit. No bad ting goin’ on dere. Here—not so good. Some-ting bad at work.”

  “Yes. Well, you can send in Adam Golding, then.” She didn’t want to hear anything about devils or obeah. Thank God she hadn’t lived in the seventeenth century! All that witchcraft. Her own race was as bad as any Caribbean’s. Worse!

  The barn door swung open, and the niece Opal appeared— and, seeing Zayon, disappeared.

  “Bad news, dat one,” Zayon said, pointing a finger at the closing door. “Go ask dat one what, who.”

  Zayon was gone before Ruth could ask
him why the girl was “bad news,” but thought she might interview Opal herself.

  It was a ten-minute wait before Adam appeared. By then Ruth was almost intoxicated with the smell of ripe apples—bins and bins of them, ready to take to the co-op. The cider press was in a far corner of the barn, it resembled a guillotine. “Off with your heads!” she said aloud, amused at her own analogy, and a voice said, “Ooh! got me!”

  Embarrassed to be discovered talking to herself, she said, “I was just thinking that the cider press looked like a guillotine, skinning the apples, decapitating them,” and Adam—for it was his voice she’d heard—laughed.

  He had a nice laugh. He seemed less confident today, though, than when he was in her kitchen, waiting for Emily to come down. He’d come directly from picking; he had on the wide shoulder straps with the white bucket on his chest, and tall black boots like the ones the Jamaicans wore. Emily wouldn’t wear boots: She claimed she could climb a ladder more easily in sneakers, and Ruth would agree, though she’d never picked apples. Adam’s hair was half pulled out of the ponytail, but clean and shiny, unlike the Rastafarian dreadlocks that Zayon took such pride in. How did he wash his hair, anyway?

  “Adam, you understand that no one is accusing you of anything here. I’m just helping out Ms. Earthrowl, with her husband in the hospital. .. .”

  “I know that,” he said quickly. “Emily’s told me what you’ve resolved in the past. That body you all found in the horse hole....” A dimple came into his right cheek, and she had to smile with him. It was rather ridiculous, the idea of a body in a horse’s grave. Although at the time it had been quite sinister, too, and she’d made rather a fool of herself in some ways. ...

  “I just happened to be a neighbor. Neighbors help neighbors. It’s that simple. Anyway, I need to ask you if you’ve seen anything, heard anything—no matter how simple, how seemingly unimportant. For instance, Rolly said he saw someone outdoors the night the maggots appeared.”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been asking myself,” Adam said, seeming more relaxed now. “What have I seen that’s different? Nothing that night of the maggots—though it happened a long way from the bunkhouses, didn’t it? Rolly wouldn’t have gone down there—I wouldn’t think so, anyway. This is the third orchard I’ve worked in, you know, it’s all pretty straightforward.”

  “Oh? Where else have you worked?” She was glad for an opening into his past. Why not make this interrogation work twice? Last night Emily had come in late, beyond her curfew; the creaking boards gave her away. Then Vic got up to go to the bathroom, and there was a hotly whispered altercation. Could she ask Adam if he was the reason for the late homecoming? She decided it would be inappropriate.

  He listed off two orchards: one in Branbury, one in New York State. “I like being outdoors in the fall,” he said. “It’s not a lot of money, but it’s a challenge. To see how much I can make, how I can improve my skills. If I’m doing something, well, I want to do it all the way.”

  Ruth smiled at him. She approved of that. “How did you hear of this orchard?”

  He thought a minute, a tongue poking into one cheek. She saw the fine blond hairs on his chin. She supposed he didn’t have to shave as often as dark-haired men. Lucky. Pete used to hate shaving; he was a regular bear.

  “In the local newspaper, advertising for local workers. That is, a friend of mine from the college lives in the county, he sent me a clipping. So I applied, got the job. Now, though, with all this stuff going on. . .” He looked worried, unsettled, as though someone had handed him a bruised apple and he didn’t know what to do with it: eat it to be polite, or toss it away.

  “But I haven’t seen or heard anybody,” he went on, “though I do remember last week, Tuesday or Wednesday, I think it was, hearing something down in the orchard: a kind of humming, like a tractor moving along. The geese squawking. I just happened to be awake, thinking. Planning. What I’m going to do with my life, I mean, besides . .. pick apples.” He looked embarrassed, as though she must think him a ninny, a ne’er-do-well, with no serious purpose in mind. “I want to be a musician,” he said. “A good one.”

  “Classical?”

  The dimple reappeared. “Guitar. Writing music, too. The classical stuff isn’t the only serious music. Though everyone seems to think so.”

  But they were getting off base. He’d heard a tractor, or something like it. “But it was a sprayer,” she said, “a ground rig of some kind, or possibly an airplane, that did the damage.”

  “I think if it had been an airplane I’d have heard it. I’m a light sleeper. It could have been a ground rig, I suppose, pulled by a tractor. Sometimes the smaller rigs are pulled that way; I’ve seen them.”

  “Mmm. Have you ever done any spraying yourself?”

  He hadn’t. “Just apple picking, ma’am. That’s my talent. I don’t know anything about spraying. I mean, I’ve seen it done— who hasn’t, if you’ve worked on an orchard? I suspect it’s an art like any other work. You have to have all the stuff for it—mask, the right clothing. Breathe in that stuff, and, man, you’re dead. Well, eventually.”

  “Yes, well.” She got up, the questioning was over for now. What had she learned? Not much. Rolly had seen someone out late, but what did that mean? As Adam said, the trees they found maggots on were far away from the bunkhouse. She glanced at her watch—it was almost noon. She had to get home, clean the barn, the gutters. She couldn’t depend on Emily these days for all the small chores. After lunch, though, she’d come back, talk to two more Jamaicans, to Rufus. Rufus was the crux, she thought, he was the orchard sprayer. He was the one who’d bought the paraquat. He knew about inchworms and apple maggots. But why would he want to sabotage this orchard, his own job? Unless to buy it—cheap. Was that what he wanted?

  A schoolbus was pulling into the driveway as she left the apple barn. It was full of shouting children. Evidently this school hadn’t heard about the spraying incident, or else wasn’t worried—two other schools had called to cancel. Anyway, Don Yates wouldn’t take them into the damaged areas. Don was running up to greet them; they were here, Moira had said, to learn about making cider. She watched as he herded pupils and their pretty young teacher into the barn. Watching them skip along, full of excitement to be out of school, to be in an apple orchard on a sunny fall day, lifted her spirits.

  She stood in the barn doorway a moment, listening. “You can all make cider, did you know that?” Don told the assembled schoolchildren. “You don’t have to use that big machine,” and he pointed at the cider press.

  There were murmurings, shouts. “Oh, come on,” said one wise guy; and the teacher said, “Shush, now, I said, shush! Let the man talk.”

  But Don wasn’t talking—not yet. Instead, he tossed an apple at each child. There was more excitement, more chatter, more shushing from the teacher. When the group was quiet, finally, Don said, “Take a bite. That’s the way! Then chew. Go on, chew! Now see? You’re making ci-der!”

  And the children chewed, and giggled, and chattered some more. And Ruth went home, smiling.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Geridoee, orshar, bagto Conec, Con . . .”

  Moira was trying hard to understand what Stan was saying. The stroke had left him paralyzed on the left side, his speech so impaired he could only say: “Lishun tamee, shellee orshar ...”

  “Don’t try to talk, sweetheart, save your energy.” Moira knelt beside his wheelchair, held tight to his limp hands. The doctor had administered something called tPA; Stan would, with luck and the right therapy, recover most of his strength and speech. If, that is, he worked hard at it, did his exercises. But now he was just sitting there, propped up in the wheelchair, his head lolling forward, mumbling the same litany over and over: “Geridoee, orshar . . .” When the nurse came to announce, “Time for physical therapy, Mr. Earthrowl,” he waved the woman away with a tremulous finger. “Cann, cann,” he said, and shut his eyes. There was a nick in his chin where someone had shaved him and missed,
a tiny drop of dried blood.

  Moira was filled with a sudden panic. Was this Stan, the cheerful, industrious, good-humored man she’d married, with whom she’d had a bright, beautiful daughter? She gripped his fingers tightly, as if it would keep him from slipping away. He was deliberately, it seemed, moving away from her, spinning inward into an unknown center. His eyes were shutting, his head lolled on his chest; he was unaware she was even in the room.

  She sat with him for a while, feeling light-headed; finally, at a nod from one of the nurses, tiptoed out. She needed to go back to the orchard, back to the trees where the Jamaican hands were fluttering like wild live birds. With the police patrolling the road on and off and no new crises since Bartholomew’s death, the men had begun to recover their good spirits. It was true, of course, that “dead” to an American might not mean “dead” to a Jamaican—Derek had told her that. “Bartholomew keep me picking,” Derek said. “He watching ever’ minute. Won’ lemme win at dominoes, Bartholomew still de champ.”

  Ah, the power of the imagination, she thought. She could easily begin to believe in something like obeah herself. Put the curse on whoever was doing this to the orchard. Her Irish granny would have done that!

  Her heart quieted as she turned into the long orchard drive that culminated in apple-green trees and beyond, in deep lavender folds of mountains. Daisies and wild aster pushed up everywhere, as if unaware that it would soon be winter. Humming, she fed the mewling cat, poured a glass of cider, and drank it down; then bravely punched the button on the answering machine.