Poison Apples Read online

  “What is it, Em? Talk to me, Em.”

  Already Emily was on the steps; upstairs, her bedroom door slammed. It meant: Mother stay out. Ruth sank into a kitchen chair. Its upright back dug into her spine, but she couldn’t afford new chairs, the farm was barely making it, milk prices dropping—when they usually went up in the fall. She could ride it out if her family would cooperate. If they’d stay healthy, cheerful, contained. But Emily was in crisis this year, or so it seemed. Her boyfriend Wilder Unsworth was away in private school for a postgraduate year; her parents were divorced in spite of Emily’s trying to patch the unpatchable. Her grades were dropping—and now she was spending every extra minute over at the Earthrowl orchard: to make money, she said, for a trip between graduation and college. She wasn’t ready, she claimed, for college, she needed her “journey.” A journey, Ruth thought, how lovely. But the only journey Ruth had made was up the aisle of the local church, to marry Pete at the end of her sophomore year at the university.

  The answering machine was blinking and she picked it up, pushed the play button. She was thinking of simplifying her life, giving the machine away; she didn’t need the world blinking at her, pulling her away from her work. There were two calls: Colm Hanna wanted to take her to the local diner for dinner; this was Colm’s idea of a grand evening; would she call him as soon as she got his message? Well, she might, she might not. Then there was Moira Earthrowl, asking her to call. Moira’s voice sounded breathy, hoarse. She’d respond to that one.

  But when she called, Moira said Stan was there, in the living room with Opal, their visiting niece, she couldn’t talk. Could she call Ruth back? Her voice dropped to a whisper: “It was a hate call,” she hissed, and hung up.

  Then Vic ran in, with two friends; they left triangular cleat marks of mud on her scrubbed linoleum floor. Before she could speak three words they were on their way upstairs, two steps at a time. After that the phone rang; it was her older daughter, Sharon, wanting to know, “Can you baby-sit, Mom? Seven-thirty Jack and I are going out to a movie. We haven’t seen a movie in months, Mom, it’s a Jack Nicholson film. Emily can take over for you. You don’t mind, do you?”

  She did mind, but she said yes. It would be an excuse, anyway, to give Colm when he called again to ask her to go to the diner. She was especially tired tonight, she didn’t know why.

  “But it wasn’t just the diner,” he said when she called back. “That was a lure to get you to go to the movies. There’s a new Nicholson film on, I thought you might—”

  “I’m baby-sitting,” she said. “At seven-thirty. So Sharon and Jack can go see it.”

  “Then I’ll be over at six,” he said. “With dinner. That new Chinese restaurant in town. They have a great takeout combo. You like asparagus and chicken?”

  “No,” she said, staring at the muddy tracks on the floor.

  “Something else, then. You’ll have a choice. Besides, I want to hear more about that orchard. I hear that guy Stan is going bonkers over there. Complains to everyone who’ll listen about the censorship case. Though he’s got a point, don’t you think? Tonight’s that meeting, with the teacher they’re trying to incriminate. But it’s a closed meeting. Too bad. It might be better than the movies.”

  “Moira’s had a hate call. That’s the latest. She couldn’t talk much, Stan was there. She didn’t want to upset him.”

  “Shrimp and noodles,” he said, “with broccoli.”

  “I don’t eat shrimp,” she said, “you know that. I break out.” But he’d hung up, he was coming over anyway, he’d bring pork and beef. Now Emily was stomping downstairs, her face a red fury. “Those boys,” she said, “they’ve made a mess out of the bathroom. They let the tub run over. You better go up, Mom.”

  Ruth couldn’t face it. She drew a bottle of Otter Creek Ale out of the fridge. She needed it. She wasn’t about to clean the floor, either; Colm would have to see it the way it was.

  “I need one, too.” Emily held out a glass.

  “You do not.”

  “I do. If you could see that girl, that niece or whatever she is, you’d need one, too. She’s a vamp. It’s obvious. She practically layed Adam Golding, right in front of me.”

  “Oh stop.”

  “She did.” Emily poured herself a small glass of beer. She swallowed it in a gulp, sat at the table, dropped her head on her elbows. “Everything’s wrong in my life. Everything! This girl vamping Adam just when he and I... well. Then my favorite teacher—they’re trying to throw him out. I don’t believe one word about him coming on to Harry Rowen. Or if he did, it was to comfort him, Harry’s been failing, you know. There’s all that bad stuff going on at home.”

  “You like him, Mr. Samuels.”

  “I do. I like him a lot, everybody does. Well, almost everybody. There’s a small group in class—well, hardly a group, only three of them. Their mothers go to some weird church. They report everything, every word he says. Harry’s own mother is one of them. Now they want to crucify Mr. Samuels!”

  “I can’t believe they have that kind of power. There are only two right-wingers on the school board, according to Scuttlebutt. The others are perfectly sane, open-minded people. They won’t let anything bad happen.”

  “Says you. Mr. Samuels says people are too relaxed, they don’t interfere, they don’t care. They don’t vote. Did you vote in the last school board election, Mom?”

  “Well I...” She thought a minute; it was the time Jane Eyre was giving birth, she’d meant to go, she couldn’t. She couldn’t afford the vet, she needed to be here herself.

  “Then don’t be surprised if there’s a takeover,” Emily warned. “We’ve been talking about that in my American history class. People are passive and the next you know it’s a fascist state.” She banged down her glass and threw on a jacket. It read BRANBURY HORNETS on the back in large orange letters.

  “Where are you going now? You just got home. Colm is coming over with Chinese.”

  “Count me out. I’m going to Amigo’s with Adam Golding. Though I may be back. If he has that vampire with him.”

  Ruth had to laugh. She wouldn’t be too upset herself if that happened, would she? She’d heard too much about this Adam Golding. He was twenty-three years old, according to Moira. Too old for a going-on-eighteen-year-old. Definitely too old—at this stage, anyway. Ruth was secretly glad the niece was there. It might create an even balance.

  The front door slammed. The three boys dashed down. Before she could open her mouth to protest, Vic hollered back, “The cows are humping, Mom, we’re going out to watch.”

  She felt suddenly left behind. Her children growing up, Emily graduating in June, Vic starting middle school. Two grandchildren to watch while her daughter and her husband went out and had fun. Ruth was a leftover, a has-been. Only forty-eight and she was a has-been. She sat down, dropped her chin into her elbows. The front door slammed again, and again. The slamming entered her temples.

  Chapter Nine

  It was like a witch-hunt, something out of long-ago New England. Stan had to keep breathing hard, pulling the breath up out of the lungs, letting it go with a sibilant hiss. He popped an aspirin. Without the deep breathing, the aspirin, there’d be a heart attack, he was certain of it. There’d been pains lately, in his chest; sometimes they traveled down the left arm. He knew what it meant, he wasn’t one to lie to himself. Breathe in, out, in ... keep on breathing.

  Still she talked on, in her high wispy voice: a plump blond woman in a pink pantsuit; she piled up the accusations like dirty underwear in the laundry basket. Aaron Samuels listened, or appeared to listen, his eyes cast down, his slender hands gripped in his lap. It was the inquisition, the pogrom, the holocaust. An aunt on Stan’s mother’s side had died, a girl of fourteen, in Buchenwald. He had her smiling picture at age ten, tucked away in a drawer.

  “This boy,” she said, “this Harry Rowen, you had your. ..” She paused, the matter was delicate, she wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something bad. “Y
our arms around him, you were embracing him. Someone saw, a classmate, oh yes, you were seen. Touch-ing this boy.” She gave the word “touching” two syllables, as though it were a dirty word, the sexual act itself.

  Let him speak! Let the man defend himself! Stan wanted to shout, but the man beside him, another moderate, he knew, put a restraining hand on Stan’s arm. Was it that obvious? Could they hear what he was thinking?

  Already she was on to the next count, the book Deliverance. “On page one-fourteen,” she was saying, “there is a scene where one man makes another man kneel over a log. . . .” She read the passage aloud, breathing between words, as though she were smelling each one, collecting them to stir into her cauldron. Bubble bubble, toil and trouble ... He almost smiled; would have smiled if he hadn’t been so upset, so deep-down angry in his bones.

  “It’s disgusting,” she said in her wispy voice, her pink arms flailing the air like pinwheels, “it’s abnormal, it’s immoral. And our children reading this filth! And their teacher .. . well, you can draw your own conclusions.”

  Stan couldn’t take it. He leaped up, shouted, “Let the man speak for himself! Let him tell you about that book. It’s not filth. It isn’t fair to take a passage out of context. Dickey’s a poet. It’s literature! My own daughter read it, she liked it, she . ..” His breath gave out.

  The woman stared at him, waved a finger as if he were a mosquito whining in her ear. The man in the next chair pulled Stan back into his seat. “Samuels will have a chance. When she’s done,” he said. “This is a hearing.” The young woman on Stan’s other side said, “Ssssh,” and Cassandra combed her fingers through her dyed pinkish hair and went on.

  “Touching a student, teaching a prurient book—and it’s not the first, oh no, not the first. Last year—”

  “Ma’am,” warned the board chair, and she sighed, and added quickly, “Inciting a rebellion, over to New Hampshire, defending that elementary teacher who—”

  “Ma’am.” The board chair spoke again and Cassandra sat down, curled up, it seemed, in her chair, like a cat full of forbidden cream.

  But the damage was done. Even Stan saw visions of teachers seducing their students, maybe falling in love, like that Oregon teacher. He’d wondered himself: How could a grown woman fall in love with a thirteen-year-old? But now he was being seduced himself, he was being brainwashed. If so, then what of the others? He glanced at his neighbor. Ralph Lotti was staring down at his hands, wiggling the fingers slightly. Thinking what? Ralph had a boy of his own in the school. Thinking this man, Samuels, might be guilty? Of seducing a sophomore boy? It was crazy, crazy. “Let him speak,” Stan shouted again. “Let the man speak for himself.”

  Samuels looked up for the first time, and there was a moment of knowing, of sympathy between them. Here is a man, Stan imagined Samuels thinking, who understands, who has been through the mill himself, been broken on the rack. Did he know that Stan was half Jewish?

  Finally Samuels spoke—not about the novel, but about the boy. “He’d failed a test,” he said. “He’s a farm boy. He had chores, he didn’t have time to study. The father didn’t understand, he’s illiterate, Harry says. The mother belongs to some Bible church, she doesn’t want her son reading any book, much less Deliverance. Hey, she wanted to pull the boy out of school altogether! Harry’s a bright boy, he needed someone to turn to, someone to talk to. . . .”

  Cassandra made a squealing noise and was shushed by the board chair.

  “He was crying,” Samuels said, his slight body visibly trembling. “I embraced him, that was all. I couldn’t let him just, well, go on crying.” He sighed. “That was all,” he repeated.

  Samuels stood there, as though if he moved, he’d lose his balance and fall. He was a small-boned, dark-haired man of forty or so, with large brown penetrating eyes. He was wearing jeans and an open blue denim shirt; there was a hole in the toe of one sneaker. He might have dressed up a little, Stan thought, for this interrogation; the man

  seemed determined not to help himself. Stan wished suddenly that Carol were there to hear this, to talk to, to add her perceptions. She’d be old enough now to be on the school board. She’d be twenty-one. She would understand this man. She wouldn’t tolerate that two-faced, biased prude of a witch-hunter.

  “I believe him,” Stan shouted. “He was comforting, not seducing a kid, for God’s sake! My own daughter, my—my daughter had a friend who ...” The board chair was staring at him and he slumped back in his chair. Ralph patted him on the arm and Stan pulled away. He didn’t need sympathy.

  Finally it was over, the hearing. Samuels hadn’t defended himself well at all. As for the novel, he’d simply said, “It’s well written, it’s literature. This is 1999” and sat down. He had a point there, Stan thought. It was 1999. Not 1699. Or hadn’t things changed that much in New England?

  Samuels had been dismissed—why the devil had he walked out head down like a kicked dog? Stan wanted him to stand up and fight. He grimaced. Was he doing that himself? Was he fighting the mischief that was going on in his own orchard? His anger was a snake, gripping his throat, tightening around his chest, weakening it. Was this the way Samuels felt?

  He couldn’t stay for the rest of the meeting. He couldn’t listen to the small talk, the petty disagreements. He had to find Samuels. He had to warn him before it was too late. Stay and fight, he’d say. Fight, man! You’re not alone. You have an ally.

  But when he got outside the meeting room, the corridor was empty. “Samuels!” he shouted. The classrooms were locked, a janitor leaned on a mop in one corner of the hall. “Down the stairs,” the man said, lifting the mop to indicate where.

  Stan ran down. In the main hall the double doors were shut. Through the glass he saw Samuels climb into an ancient hatchback. The man sat there for a moment, humped over the wheel, as if he’d just had a heart attack. Stan felt his own chest burning. But when he got outside he saw the car moving slowly through the school parking lot, down the drive, toward Main Street. Stan couldn’t go back to the meeting. He was done in, he wasn’t even angry anymore, just numb. Walking out to the Blazer, he had the illusion that the night was closing in on him, the Norway pines that surrounded the parking lot were moving toward him, like Birnam wood to Dunsinane—something out of Macbeth, Carol had had to memorize it. Inside, he locked the car doors against the encroaching pines. He sat a moment, trying to calm his breath. Finally he turned the key and the car sprang to life. He took another deep breath, didn’t let it out until he reached Main Street.

  Chapter Ten

  When Aaron Samuels stumbled out of his car and up onto his front porch, he found it full of women. They were kneeling, mewling like cats, the high-pitched sounds crossing and recrossing, rising and falling. He caught words: “Show him the light.. . Save him from Satan . . .” Who were they talking about? For a moment he thought he had the wrong house; it was dark, he was depressed—that meeting, those accusations, like something out of Brave New World. Big Brother is watching you .. . He’d taught that book, the kids liked it, they’d had great discussions. Deliverance too, it was a good book, James Dickey was a poet. He got the kids to read the poems along with the book—what was so bad about that? That boy, the one they accused him of harassing, seducing—he didn’t know what the right word was—Jesus! Was this the inquisition? Couldn’t you comfort a student anymore? Touch him—her? Couldn’t you give a kid a book and let him draw his own conclusions? What did these people want from him? His soul?

  He thrust past them, through them, there must have been a dozen, all women. No, one man, maybe, he heard the voice, as if the man were regurgitating gravel. A woman caught at Samuels as he fumbled for his keys; then they were on him, clutching his sleeve, pulling at his shirt till it ripped up out of his pants. Still praying. No, preying, he thought, the irony of it almost making him laugh.

  At last he was through the door, shutting it on their fingertips; he drew the bolt. But they wouldn’t go away. It was a keening sound, as if he wer
e dead already. And he was, he felt the numbness in his feet, creep up to his waist. His wife lost to him, their young son—now maybe his work. . . . He was a dead man from the waist down.

  “Shut up!” he screamed at the closed door. “Shut up! You have no business here! Leave me in peace!”

  Still the voices rose, circled his head; it was as if they were inside: disembodied voices, swirling in a vortex about his brain. He was hot, he was angry, they were driving him crazy. He ran to his study, yanked open the desk drawer, snatched up the pistol he’d kept there since his early teaching days in Brooklyn—why had he brought it up here to rural Vermont? Vermont, which had once been a republic? He’d loved that idea, a republic where all men were equal, Jew and Gentile, black and yellow and white, straight and gay.

  One shot and he’d frighten them off—he didn’t care about the consequences—let them call the police. What did it matter anyway? He’d as good as lost his job. He wasn’t cut out for teaching:

  He was too emotional, he took things too much to heart. Rachel always said that.

  They were banging on the door, calling to him. “Repent, repent!” Repent of what? Repent that he was a Jew? That he’d come to believe in nothing now, no God except in his heart— though even that One seemed to have deserted him? The pounding grew louder, the voices crowding his ears, persecuting:

  “Satan! Deliver him. . . .”

  “Out of here! Get out of here!” he screamed, and when they didn’t, desperate, at his wits’ end, he picked up the gun.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was three o’clock Sunday morning, an hour when most working people were still asleep. The geese were quiet; he’d slipped a powder into their feed. He moved down into the south quad of the orchard, far from the bunkhouses. A sliver of moon wove in and out of the clouds to guide his path. He would concentrate only on the outer block of trees, six or seven of them this time. He was carrying a cardboard box and a large glass jar, which he placed carefully on the grass. He removed the cover of the first and peered in at the wriggling mass of small greenish brown worms. He had bred them himself at home, off season, so they would be ready to feed in early fall. He took out handfuls of the squirming things and laid them on the branches of three trees, just above where the apples were clustered. The worms would spin a light web, rolling several leaves together, enclosing the clusters of fruit.