Apple Season
LISA WINGATE
It is, at least, apple season. That one thing might save them. Although whether it can is yet uncertain. The orchard Grandmother planted long ago on the mountain’s craggy slopes has gone wild and spindly, without enough hands to tend it for three seasons now.
Still, the hardy little trees have done their part. As September slipped into October and New York’s Berkshire foothills donned their scarves of fog, the ragged orchard came in heavy-laden. Branches bowed to the ground, sometimes split at the forks under the weight of the ripening fruit. The trees once again proved themselves to be the kind of scrappy, determined things able to survive on the rough-hewn hillsides high above the Hudson Valley, hidden away to themselves, never having much need of outsiders.
Except this season, there is need. Little else but need.
Outsiders won’t come to the apples. That was what Ashmea had told herself weeks ago when the apples began bursting with color. Something’s got to be done before the crop goes to waste.
She knew, without anyone telling her, that not one apple can be lost when apples are all you have to get by until …
Until …
Until always ended in a question she couldn’t answer, and so she had tried not to ask it, even to herself, as she’d taken out the tattered baskets and prepared for the harvest.
The question had nibbled at her even before that, as summer waned and inched toward autumn, and there’d been no sign of her pa’s usual homecoming. And so with no one else to take charge of the harvest, she’d done so herself. She’d prodded her stepma, Clarey, from the bed and dressed the seven-year-old twins who were neither Clarey’s blood nor, in general, Clarey’s concern. In Clarey’s defense, she hadn’t come to the mountain expecting or prepared to be a stepmother. She was only double the age of the seven-year-old twins, Dabine and Blue, and just three years past Ashmea’s eleven.
Only fourteen, and already Clarey had birthed a baby that now lay buried out past the orchard, where Ash’s mother rested under a marking stone that Ash and the twins had rolled there themselves. They’d selected a pretty one with flecks that glimmered russet in the sun like apple skins. Like Ma’s hair. Her real ma, who’d fed the children, and stitched together clothes from scraps gathered or traded for, and had taught Ash, Dab, and Blue about the orchard … and had sent them there to hide anytime hiding was needed.
It’d been hard to say, when Clarey’s baby was lost, whether Clarey would’ve done the same for her tiny daughter if it had survived. There’d been no way of knowing whether Clarey had mourned or thought ahead about how she’d slip the baby away to some safe place when Pa took to the bottle and the leaning board-and-batten house turned into a bad place.
Clarey spoke in some strange language none of them understood. What little English she did know was poor enough that she couldn’t have possibly explained where Pa had gotten her from or if there was a home or a family out there, or anybody she missed. Clarey had the raven hair and dark eyes and high bones of the Indians who’d claimed these mountains before getting chased off to Ohio or married in with white farmers and timbermen. Her strange looks had been Ash’s only clue to who, or what, she might be. Pa had just led her in the door one day last spring and said, “This is your new stepma. Name’s Clarey. You show her where things are.”
The girl had stood there stoop-shouldered and trembling a little, her gaze darting uncertainly toward the twins and Ash, as if she was more than surprised to end up in a two-room house with three half-grown kids in it.
And that was that. Pa had doted on Clarey like a new prize for a while. It’d given Ash the feeling that if things got too crowded and somebody had to go, it’d be Ash and Dab, and maybe Blue, too, though Pa would be more likely to hang on to Blue for work, since he was a boy. Ash might’ve gone to the woods and figured out how to get by on her own—she could hunt and she could fish and forage—but with Dab and Blue being just seven, and Blue having a foot that’d healed lame after getting caught in the wagon spokes, there wasn’t much way.
Things had gone better for a month or two, with a new stepma around. Clarey could cook and she hadn’t turned out to be lazy. But then Clarey’s thin body had started thickening and rounding. Pa had gone off timbering and left them all there to sort things out on their own. Then the baby had come early and died, and Clarey had taken to the bed.
The last of the buckwheat flour had played out first, and later the cellar goods. All there’d been for a while was whatever Ash and the twins could trap or gather or catch in the streams … and the apples working their way toward ripe, promising better times ahead.
They’d started picking as soon as they could, a harvest crew of four, fighting off the birds and squirrels and the other creatures that would steal the bounty. Black bears had come at night and roared and grunted, bouncing their weight against the cellar doors, while the twins cried and huddled in their bunk. Ash had sat up in the rocking chair, the old rifle propped in her lap, but the long days and fitful nights had proven worthwhile, as had the trouble of hitching the rawboned bay mule and driving him slow and easy down the mountain to find just the right places.
The sorts of places where there were people with money and a taste for apples.
Places where a wagon with three little hill kids and a strange, solemn, dark-eyed girl wouldn’t be chased off by people who throw rocks and wave their fists and stab their fingers through the air, pointing away from their houses and storefronts and shade trees.
“Hillbillies! White trash! Go on. Get away!”
It’s not that Ash hadn’t heard the words before. In the far back of her memories was the time she went off to school one fall, riding double on the mule with the brother who was just a year older. The children there called them names and pulled her hair, but the teacher was kindly.
She said Ash was a very pretty little girl, with her chestnut hair and green eyes. And she said that Ash was smart. The teacher sent home books and fat pencils and pads of paper with big lines to write on. Magazines for Ma, too. And even a sewing pattern one time, neatly traced onto butcher paper, ready for Ma to cut out.
But by early spring, Brother had caught a fever and died, and nothing was the same after. Not with Pa, or with Ma, or with school. The books stayed, though. The teacher never came up the mountain to get those. If Pa wasn’t around to yank the books away and tear them up, Ma and Ash leafed through the pages together. That was how Ash learned letters and words and saw pictures of places far away from the mountain, like the factory towns and mills along the Hudson, and the big city where Grandma and Grandpa got off the ship from the Old Country before they came north to the Berkshire foothills.
Those strange places, seen only in pictures, tease Ash’s mind now as she guides the mule past farmsteads with tall red barns and through villages where all sorts of treasures wink from store windows. The twins lean over the sides of the wagon, their hands clutching the worn siderails, their thin bottoms balanced on boards propped up over the apple bushels.
“My tummy wants somethin’,” Blue complains, and rubs his middle with a hand that’s cleaner than usual after being scrubbed with the horsehair brush. Before they left home in the barely dawn hours of morning, Ash had made sure they were all washed up and their hair was combed. Nobody wants to buy apples from dirty children, Ma used to say in the before-time, when they’d do this very thing—go down the mountain to find the sort of people who had money to trade for apples.
“Get some walnuts from the lunch bucket, Blue, but just six,” Ash tells him. “And six for Dab, and six for Clarey.” She’s been teaching the twins to count when she has the chance, and this’ll keep them busy awhile. Other than apples, the walnuts and a few persimmons are all they could find that’d carry well on today’s trip. “Once we sell all these apples, we’ll buy something better.”
Ash feels Clarey look over with her slow-moving, careful eyes, hears her say something in that odd, thick-sounding language. Puckering her lips, Clarey presses all five fingertips against them.
“She says you oughta get six walnuts, too,” Dabine pipes up. Since they started the apple harvest and Clarey found her voice again, Little Sister has taken to talking for their strange stepma.
“You don’t know what she said,” Ash snaps.
“I do so.” Dab rises up a little and locks her bony arms over her chest, then sits back down hard. It’s troublesome, the way Dab has clung close to Clarey lately, like Dab was just waiting for their stepmother to rise from the bed and take over being Ma.
Ash snorts. “Dabine Wolters, you better stop that lying or I’ll pop you across the mouth. That’s what dirty, rotten liars get.” It’s what Pa would say, if he were the one driving the wagon. Ash hears him in the words, and even though it’s her own voice saying it, she feels her chin tuck and her head cower between her shoulders, like a big hand is sure to come out of the air and smack her hard enough that her ears ring. “Besides, Clarey can’t tell me when to eat. She’s not our ma. Only your ma can tell you that.” Ash adds this, a little more quietly, as they pass by a farmhouse, where a woman hanging wash shades her eyes to watch.
“You want some apples to buy?” Ash calls out. “Golden Russets, Kingston Blacks, Ashmeads, Dabinettes, Blue Pearmains. Good for eating or baking!” Those were the words Ma would yell when they’d go down the mountain to sell apples, back in the times before Big Brother died and things went bad.
“Finest apples in three counties!” Dabine adds, and Ash’s throat prickles and tears well up in her eyes. She didn’t even know Dab had learned those words from Ma. Seems like Dab would’ve been too young to remember Ma used to say that of the apples. “’Specially the Dabinettes!” Dab tosses in.
Blue throws back his head, his red-brown hair catching the sun. “And the Blue Pearmains!” They’ve played this game a hundred times in the orchard. Each of them has a special love for the trees Ma picked to be their particular namesakes.
The farm wife waits until they’re almost past the yard fence before she cups a hand to her mouth and answers, “Well … maybe a few.”
Ash pulls the reins, but as usual, the mule responds in his own time. They’re halfway down the farm field before the wagon finally comes to a stop.
The woman buys apples, anyway. They each hand her some, except Clarey, who sits stiffly in the wagon seat and holds the reins, keeping her eyes forward, like she’s afraid she might spoil things by watching.
“Your sister all right?” the woman asks, and slides a glance Clarey’s way.
“She’s our stepma,” Dabine blurts.
Ash snaps, “Hush up, Dab.”
The woman widens her eyes and shakes her head, and Ash is quick to tell her, “Our pa, he’s busy in the orchard, of course. Once we get all these apples sold—which ought not to take us long—we’ll go back and help pick some more. Awful fine season for apples this year.”
“Oh, my. I hope—” Whatever else the woman says is lost in the noise as an automobile roars around the corner and startles the mule. It’s all Clarey and the wagon brake can do to hold him in place. A man in a leather bonnet and eye goggles sits at the wheel, and in the back ride three women young enough to wear their hair loose over their shoulders. White ribbons stream from their white hats, floating like tail feathers on the breeze.
The twins cover their ears and stand with their mouths open, their faces catching a fine spray of mud. They’ve hardly ever seen an automobile, except in magazine drawings, where fancy-looking men in tall hats and tailcoats hold the gloved hands of beautiful women in long, pretty gowns and lovely hats.
The women in the automobile are like the ones in those pictures, like butterflies and birds, something too fleeting and beautiful to be seen fully before it takes wing again and sweeps away.
Ash wheels about and sprints after them, dodging mudholes and ruts, keeping a view as long as she can. A yellow blanket, tied across the back of the auto, puffs in the breeze. Big, black words are painted on, but she can’t read them before the rumbling beast rounds a curve and is gone, its polished skin flicking back splinters of sunlight.
When she returns to the wagon, Blue’s mouth is still hanging open, and his eyes are as big as tin dinnerplates. “Woweee! A oh-doough-mobile.”
“Automobile,” Ash corrects. She reads to the twins, when they can find the time to play pretend. In their games, she’s the pretty teacher and they’re the little hill kids who’ve come down to her school to learn things that can’t be known up on the mountain.
“Ff f f,” the farm wife spits under her breath. “Suffragettes.” Brushing the mud-spatter from her dress as she clutches an apple-filled apron, she scowls at the now-quiet road, her face narrow and red. The angry sweat breaking out over her cheeks doesn’t match the coolness of the day.
Ash fidgets uncomfortably, wondering if the woman might change her mind about the apples. Having grown up always watching for the signs of Pa’s mood going sour, Ash knows how to read the clues. Fists clenching, hands slapping, tools banging, red skin, eyes that scrunch up and turn hard.
Time to run for the orchard, if you can get away with it.
“We best settle up and be on our way, I expect.” Ash holds her arms stiff at her sides, fingers clenched over wads of her threadbare dress.
“Votes for women,” the farm wife grumbles, staring off down the road yet. “A travesty, that’s what that is. What in heaven’s name would a woman want with a vote? She’ll only have to do what her husband pleases with it.”
Ash sends the twins to the wagon with only the slightest twitch of her head. They have their signs, the three of them. Things no one else can see. Ways of warning each other that there might be trouble.
“Well, won’t she?” the woman demands, crooking her head to regard Ash.
“I guess so,” Ash says, and hopes it’s the right answer. The one that won’t upend the apple sale.
“Shamefulness, I tell you. No decent woman would go about in such a way.” Cradling her apron load like a pregnant belly, the farm wife sweeps off toward the house. “Come along!” she snaps when Ash doesn’t follow.
Ash trots after her into the yard, then hurries ahead to hold open the door, hoping that might sweeten the farm wife’s bad mood. Ash’s stomach grumbles and knots up as she gently lets the door close, then waits on the porch, crossing her fingers behind her back, praying the woman’s apple money is enough to provide something better than walnuts and persimmons to eat tonight. Maybe they can buy some buckwheat flour, even. Fried buckwheat flour cakes would taste as good as cream straight off the milk right now. Better, even.
When the woman comes back, she offers Ash a small muslin bundle, tied up with a piece of string. “Here’s four slices of bread and a bit of cheese. You share it with the others,” the farm wife says. When Ash tucks the gift in one elbow and holds out her hands, the woman drops in three silver nickels, as well. “Now, you won’t get five cents a pound from most other people you meet, but don’t take less than four. Those are fine apples. You’d do well to go on south toward the crossroads to Patterson and Quaker Hill. It’s early in the day yet, and fools will be traipsing off to catch the train to New York City, I suppose … so as to see those suffragette women make a spectacle of themselves this afternoon in their silly parade.”
Fastening her gaze to the bundle and the coins, Ash nods, swallows the water in her mouth and the prickly swelling in her throat. The food smells good, and kindness is a thing so far back in her memory that its sudden presence makes her feel dizzy and uncertain.
“And take care you don’t end up like that girl in the wagon with you. There’s no good to come from marrying so young.” Propping her fists on her hips, the farm wife towers over Ash. “You hill girls. Honestly. You can’t help it, I suppose.”
The sweet taste in Ash’s mouth turns sour.
“Well, get on with your troubles, now,” the woman commands. “I have wash to hang. If you hurry down the road, you’ll likely catch some business yet.”
Ash does as she’s told, tucking the coins safely in her pocket and returning to the wagon. Giving the food bundle to the twins to divide, she prods the mule into a trot, hurrying on toward the crossroads, where, if the farm wife is right, they might find people who have money and need apples.
Real bread and bites of cheese improve everyone’s mood, except the mule’s, and help to make short work of the trip downcountry to the junction.
When they arrive, there’s a woman in the road. Tall, and thin, and straight, she seems at first like a strange, wandering spirit, standing there in her white dress and hat. Her arms stretch skyward, hands extended all the way through the fingertips, as if she means to grab on to a cloud and float away.
The mule slows, unsure, or perhaps Ash pulls him up as she tries to make sense of the woman. Maybe she bounced out of the automobile and it drove on without her? The white dress is smudged and mud-spattered, and her hat hangs off-center in a way that says something’s gone wrong with her day. Her long yellow silk scarf has fallen from one shoulder, its tip trailing in the mud.
The wagon is almost upon her before the rattle and squeal cause her to lower her arms and shuffle in a slow, unsteady turn that shows she can’t be one of the young women who raced by earlier. Even before strands of gray hair come into view beneath the crooked hat, this woman’s age is clear.
Not one of those from the automobile, Ash is relieved to realize. Not one of the terrible kind the farm wife didn’t like.
“Praise be! You’ve come!” The stranger staggers impatiently over the muddy ground to meet them as Ash pulls on the mule. “I am the Reverend Octavia Rose, and I must have your help.”
“We don’t know you,” Ash answers, but her throat is dry and the words come out weak and small. Pa never trusts strangers, and the few times one ever came up the mountain, he didn’t take it well. Twice after Brother died, somebody named “Reverend” rode up and Pa turned that man away with a gun. Said nobody calling themselves “Reverend” was welcome. Ever.
“We just came to sell our apples here. To folks passing by,” Ash lets her know. “You have need of some good apples? If not, we’d best get on with our work. Blue, Dab, hold some apples up so she can see.”
The old woman doesn’t even wait for the twins to scramble around and uncover the baskets. “I’ll buy all of them,” she says. “If you will kindly bring them to my automobile and assist me in righting it on the road. I’ve had an accident, but only a slight one. Even so, the poor thing can’t seem to make its way out of the ditch. It’s most important that I continue on my way as quickly as possible. I must be in the city by three o’clock for the parade.”
Ash’s heart upticks a bit. This is the sort of person the farm wife warned about.
But, if she might buy the whole load of apples …
“You one of them sufferin’ women?” Blue pipes up, leaning around the wagon seat.
“Hush, Blue,” Ash tells him, then turns back to business. “Now … we get four … I mean five cents a pound for our apples, and—”
“Yes, yes,” the woman answers impatiently. “You may estimate the total pounds and we will settle on a price once the work is done. Is that a good, strong mule? And have you a length of chain or rope we might use to pull my automobile free? I don’t believe much will be needed to set her right again. She’s a good, sturdy Model T. There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have dug her out myself.”
Copyright © 2020 by M. J. Rose and Fiona Davis
Copyright © 2020 by Kristin Hannah. Copyright © 2020 by Lisa Wingate. Copyright © 2020 by M. J. Rose. Copyright © 2020 by Steve Berry. Copyright © 2020 by Paula McLain. Copyright © 2020 by Katherine J. Chen. Copyright © 2020 by Christina Baker Kline. Copyright © 2020 by Jamie Ford. Copyright © 2020 by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Copyright © 2020 by Alyson Richman. Copyright © 2020 by Quaker Village Books LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Fiona Davis
