Poison Apples Read online

  “What’s for supper?” Vic asked.

  “Misery pudding,” she said, and Vic said, “What?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Morning, and Stan was sleeping like a baby beside Moira. He was making sonorous sounds. One would think it was just an ordinary Sunday morning, church perhaps—though Stan was a nonpracticing Jew, and Moira didn’t attend St. Mary’s very often now. Though today she felt the need. She needed to sink to her knees and mumble the liturgy, feel the good numbness, chant along with a hundred others, the priest in his fatherly white robe. He would take care of her. He would keep the birds out of the house.

  They’d gotten in late last night from the police interview. It had all happened so fast: the phone call from that minister, the police wanting to take Stan into custody. They hadn’t been able to hold him, there was no proof—”Not yet,” Chief Fallon had said, quite ominously—that croaky voice! The minister had been a witness, but admitted he hadn’t seen Stan run the woman down. He’d described Stan breaking up the picketing at the liquor store, pushing Cassandra into the door front. Then when they went after him, a matter of defense, the man said—a handsome gray-haired fellow with blazing blue eyes, a deep melodious voice that would mesmerize his flock—Stan peeled off. Cassandra, foolish woman, the man said, had run at the car and Stan knocked her down.

  At least it had to have happened that way, the man—Turnbull—said. He’d gone back into the store to leave pamphlets. The next he knew, he heard a scream, he turned to look, and the woman was down on the pavement. He’d run to her, she was lying in a Z—

  “In a what?” the chief had asked. “Curled up,” Turnbull responded, “like a fetus, she was struck in the back. The back!” he’d hissed, the voice warmed up to a fine pitch. “The back!” as though she’d been exploited, martyred, in her innocence. He’d called an ambulance; then he’d left in Cassandra’s car. The rest of his group had already taken off, he explained, in the church vehicle. “I went to the hospital. To pray,” he added, with a hard look at Stan.

  And all Stan could do was shake his head. The woman was nowhere near his car when he left. Well, she must have been, he conceded. He did recall seeing her, at one point, run toward the road. “She was crazy!” he shouted. There was a slight slur in his voice. The chief was smiling a little, or so it seemed; it was hard to tell, there was a single dim light bulb hanging from the ceiling. “Was there anyone else in the parking lot?” he’d asked. “Any people getting in or out of their cars?” He was so relaxed, so laid back, that chief. The faster and louder the minister spoke, the softer Chief Fallon’s voice sounded.

  Once the chief turned to smile at Moira and somehow she was calmed. It was as though they were in the office of Stan’s old high school principal: Stan had inadvertently thrown a piece of chalk out the window of his classroom, hit a young girl in the neck. She was bruised, but everyone knew it wasn’t intentional. Of course not!

  And then, to Moira’s surprise, Turnbull had turned to the chief and said what a nice person the chief’s wife was, how spiritual. And the chief’s nose and cheeks got red, and he said it was late and everyone could go home now, at once; they’d all be in touch. How had that minister known the police chief’s wife?

  But the facts were damning. Stan had a grudge against Cassandra Wickham. That it was well deserved wasn’t the question here. A death was a death, a murder was a murder. Murder? Stan was no murderer! She looked down again at his sleeping form, at the way his nose squashed into the pillow where he lay on his side. At the soft dark hairs on his arms and chest. The slow, even breathing.

  But last night—he was still an angry man; late in the interview the anger had pushed through again. He admitted interrupting the vigil; he wanted the woman to realize the magnitude of what she’d done. She was a busybody, he’d said, “She’s a two-faced bigot”—as though she were still alive.

  And Turnbull, she recalled, just gazed at him with those fiery eyes. “You were angry enough to kill,” he said in his sonorous voice. “God will punish you.” A key ring, or maybe it was a pen, fell off the chief’s desk, as if dislodged by the minister’s words; it clattered to the floor and rang in Moira’s temples.

  Finally they left in a taxi. The police were keeping the Blazer: They’d examine the tires, look for blood, fibers, flakes of flesh, she supposed. She lay back on the pillow. “Please, God,” she prayed, “please don’t let them find any blood. Please. Please. ...”

  And Stan slept on. He’d gone to bed full of drink, it was his way of coping. She’d tried to jog his memory, but there was no memory. He’d drunk up his memory. And what do we have to go on, she thought, but our memories? Without them it’s like living with a stranger.

  He seemed a stranger today, this sleeping man who might have killed a woman—accidentally, perhaps, that’s what they would have to conclude, in spite of the minister’s testimony. But if Stan couldn’t remember—how could he help himself? How could she help him?

  The cardinal thudded against the bedroom window, like a rooster announcing dawn, and she staggered up and waved her arms at it. Below she saw Rufus walking, stony-faced, up the path with a jar in his hands. He was coming toward the house. Why was he coming here on a Sunday morning? The pickers had Sunday morning off. She threw on her bathrobe and went, barefoot, down the stairs. Already Rufus was knocking. It was her turn to be angry. She’d come up here for a quiet life among the apples and the mountains. Now that quiet life had gone awry.

  She opened the door and Rufus thrust a jar of insects at her. Dear God! What were they? “Maggots,” he said. “Apple maggots. Down where we planted the Cortlands. We sprayed ’em. Now they’re back. You tell Stan he better go have a look.”

  Before she could speak, he’d turned on his heel, was quickly swallowed up by the trees.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Stan woke to a web of sunlight in his face. It seemed to tie him to his bed; he couldn’t move his body. He was still in that half dream and he wanted it back, he didn’t want morning in his life. He squeezed his eyes shut, concentrated on the dream. He was in the Blazer, it had Connecticut plates, he was driving along a back road, there was no one in sight. He was on his way home. He was a schoolteacher, his life was simple, he had a lovely, creative wife, a beautiful daughter. He had Hester, the old yellow collie, beside him, her nose stuck out the crack in the car window. It was spring. The trees rushed by: the maples, the willows, the pear trees in pale delicate bloom. That was the dream: the driving home, the wonder of it, the almost thoughtless joy of it.

  The dream was slipping away, he tried to hold on, he couldn’t. The web of light was catching his neck, enveloping it, forcing his eyes open, wide. Bringing reality into the room. Making him see, making him remember. Was it only last night? That woman, Cassandra. Turnbull, the man who called himself a minister. He, Stan, had been angry. He couldn’t help it. They’d driven him to it. He hadn’t always been that way: As a child he’d been the one to settle his parents’ disputes, resolve the vendettas of his peers. But that woman! Her bigotry, her obtuseness, her interference. ...

  Something else about that woman. He couldn’t think. The sun was in his eyes now, like a pillow on his face, smothering. Suddenly he sat up. She was dead, that was it. The woman was dead. Someone had struck her with a car. They said it was him. But he ... had he? He’d wanted to kill her, it was true, but he wouldn’t have, not consciously, unless in a moment of madness...

  He sank back into the pillow. It felt hard, like a stone. The pair had come at him, the woman and the minister—or was it just the woman? He couldn’t think, he couldn’t remember. After that, after that... The sun was bright on his body, flattening him, holding him down on the bed. Numbing his brain. When his wife came up, a glass of orange juice in her hand, he waved her off with a limp wrist. He wanted to sleep. It was the way he’d felt after Carol’s death. That was all he wanted to do. To sleep ... to forget.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Moira went down herself to see the ap
ple maggots. Someone had to oversee the orchard; Stan was in no state. With the future in flux, she had to live and work inside the moment. Rufus was already there, among the Cortland plantings, with Bartholomew beside him. Cortlands had become one of her favorites: a sweet-flavored apple with a shiny red cheek. She loved them in salads, the flesh was slow to turn brown. She resisted the urge to pick one off a tree, bite into it. But not with Rufus looking! There was something stern and ministerial about the orchard manager, as though he were the owner and not herself and Stan. Don’t touch. Don’t touch my apples, she could imagine him muttering under his breath.

  But here he was, expressionless as usual, picking off the maggots one by one; dropping them, plunk, plunk, into a pail. A crow was perched on a top branch, eyeing them, as though waiting for something dead to pounce upon. She stood behind Rufus, but he seemed hardly to notice her.

  Bartholomew, at the next tree, gave her a shy smile. He was wearing a green UVM baseball cap with a panther on it, the usual red cotton bandanna around his neck, a lavender shirt with striped sleeves, ripped a little at the top. Cats, the university athletes were called up in Burlington. Catamounts, extinct now in the Green Mountains—or were they? People claimed to have seen droppings, tracks. Somehow she believed there were panthers, skulking around, reminding the world that there was danger out there, yellow eyes watching, observing, hiding. Unlike the cardinal that knocked boldly on the windows, trying to get in....

  “How many trees are infected?” she asked Rufus, and he held up two fingers. He wasn’t one to waste words. “But leaf rollers on that’un.” He pointed at a third tree. “Hard to see ’em, they get on the underleaves.” He glared at her a moment and went back to his task of pinching off maggots.

  “Two trees, I find the worms,” said Bartholomew. “Mum, look.” He held up a plump greenish brown worm. It appeared so innocuous. But she knew what it would do, she’d read Stan’s handbook. It would slowly munch away at the leaves, denude the trees, kill the fruit. “Bad, bad,” Bartholomew said, his leathery brown face, wrinkled like parchment, turned compassionately toward her. “Too many to be accident.” He dropped the worm, wriggling, into a galvanized pail.

  “Then who could have done this, Bartholomew?” she asked, and he cocked his head thoughtfully. “Obeah,” he said, “somebody practicing obeah. Someones don’t like us. Want to harm us, you, me, us all.” He looked gloomy, his grizzled head bobbing, the broad nose flaring at the nostrils as he spoke.

  She’d read about obeah: It was an African-rooted belief, similar to voodoo. “But I didn’t think people practiced it anymore. Do you really believe in it, Bartholomew?” As she spoke, she thought of the cardinal, her own family superstitions. It’s inside all of us, she realized, these fears.

  He gazed at her out of eyes like dark oceans. “It happens, oh yea, it happens. I don’t make it! No! But there’s ones that do. Oh yea. Happen anywhere. Right here in this orchard.”

  She shook her head. She didn’t want to hear any more about it. Obeah was just that, superstition. She’d had enough of superstition from her mother, her Irish aunts. The worms and maggots could have gotten here by accident. She wanted to believe that. The south quad bordered on an old orchard, unused now, the trees unsprayed.

  She turned back to Rufus; he was rational, knowledgeable. No obeah for him. “They might have come from over there?” she asked, her arm sweeping in the derelict orchard. “Maybe,” he said, shrugging. “Maybe they did. Maybe not.” And he went back to pinching off the maggots, as though they were bits of filth on his sleeve.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Emily Willmarth saw Moira coming up the path and ducked behind a tree. Not that she wanted to avoid her—she was a very nice lady, in fact. It was just that Emily had overheard her mother talking to Colm Hanna about Mr. Earthrowl and that woman who’d been killed, and she wouldn’t know what to say. Besides, it was Sunday morning, and she didn’t have any business here, really, they weren’t picking until afternoon. That is, she did have a reason for coming, but it wasn’t apples. It was Adam Golding. When he’d brought her home the night before, he’d kissed her.

  That is, she’d kissed him first. They were out by the barn, it was a beautiful starry night, he’d pointed out Venus to her, it was floating in the sky above the silo. He knew a lot about stars, Adam did, he knew a lot about a lot of things. He’d been to Branbury College for a year. But then he wanted to see the world, and he did—for a summer, anyway. He and another boy had hitchhiked through Greece and Afghanistan—though Afghanistan was full of pirates, he said, who would rush down on tourist buses and take all the money. They went to India together, and then to Katmandu.

  Emily wasn’t sure where Katmandu was, but it sounded terribly romantic. She’d look it up on a map when she had the time. Adam told about how his mother had practiced Zen Buddhism before she died and always wanted to go to Katmandu—as a child he remembered her sitting in meditation, and then Emily was so choked up she just flung herself at Adam and kissed him. She was amazed at herself! She’d never done that with Wilder Unsworth. Wilder seemed so prosaic, so ordinary for all his city background. Whereas Adam was a romantic hero by contrast. He reminded her of the Shakespeare play they were reading in English, that melancholy Hamlet. Would she be his Ophelia? She didn’t know. They were only now finishing Act One.

  Three of the Jamaicans were squatting on the steps of the bunkhouse when she passed by. One of them, Derek, waved at her. Derek was her favorite, he teased her about Adam, he seemed to have noticed that she was sweet on him. “I know where you go,” he said now, shaking a dark finger, and she blushed and waved him away. The others she felt awed by, a bit uncomfortable with; there were no black students in her high school, though there were several at Branbury College. She would like to get to know the Jamaicans, but they didn’t always return her interest, as though they, too, were uncomfortable in this milk-white state, as her mother called it. Zayon, who sat beside Derek, was polite when she passed by, and though she admired his dreadlocks and would like to know more about his Rastafarian religion, she felt gauche in his presence.

  She wondered if Zayon was unhappy with her being there, for receiving pay for picking apples when she couldn’t come close to his expertise. Surely, he knew she’d receive less pay, since they were paid by the bushel. But still, he seemed distant. The third man, Desmond, was more friendly. He was stroking the goat that was tied up nearby. Poor thing! It didn’t know what it was in for. Desmond glanced up at her and said, “Goat fritter, goat soup, ummm, la-dy,” and laughed. She smiled feebly; she didn’t want to offend him. But she didn’t like the idea of goat soup! A fourth Jamaican was coming out the door now, grinning at Desmond’s comment about goat soup, and she moved on past, taking a long way around so it wouldn’t be quite so obvious where she was going.

  She hadn’t gone fifty feet when she came upon that girl Opal, standing by a tree, with a sketching pad. She didn’t want the girl to see where she was going, so she slowed down, pretended she was just taking a walk.

  “Hi,” she said. “I love this orchard, don’t you? All those shiny apples. You should see it in the spring, though, the pink apple blossoms. It’s like a perfume bottle got spilled and spread the fragrance all over.” She paused. Opal didn’t seem impressed with apple blossoms. She just kept on sketching, her face tight with concentration. Emily stepped closer. The girl was drawing a Jamaican. He was holding on to a goat—the goat looked pretty realistic, but it had big curving horns, like a ram, and the Jamaican—Oh, no! The Jamaican had horns, too. Emily didn’t know what to say, so she just said, “You’re a good artist. But why those horns?”

  Opal kept her eyes on her sketchpad. “That’s the way I see things. With horns. With cloven feet.”

  Emily looked again at the sketch and saw that, yes, the Jamaican’s feet were cloven. It was as if he were some kind of devil. It was Derek! She recognized the single gold earring he always wore. Her favorite, Derek. There were no horns on Derek.


  She must have shown her consternation because Opal laughed and said, “Just a joke, that’s all.” She ripped up the sketch and sent the pieces flying, then ran back down the path without a good-bye.

  Emily thought of the night before when she’d seen Opal down by the storage shed. Emily was to meet Adam just beyond there, by the toolshed, and she wasn’t exactly happy to see Opal. Adam had his blue bandanna loose around his neck, and Opal was lifting her arms as if to tie it for him. Until she saw Emily, and then Adam stuffed it in his pocket and spoke briefly to Opal, and walked away from the two of them. Emily hadn’t known what to do: She waited by the toolshed anyway, and after a short while Adam came, and they sat and talked, and then he’d walked her home, and then... She stumbled on a tree root, remembering.

  Adam lived with the Butterfield twins in the smaller of the two bunkhouses. They all seemed to get along, and she liked that about Adam, he was friendly with everybody. She’d never heard him bad-mouth anyone or anything. He was polite even to Rufus, whom, personally, Emily didn’t care for—Rufus was too matter-of-fact, too distant somehow. He’d look right through Emily like she was invisible, or just a girl who couldn’t pick apples fast enough and he was only tolerating her because Ms. Earthrowl wanted her here.

  Adam had said to come by at nine-thirty and they’d take a hike on Snake Mountain. Emily had made up a picnic; she carried it now in her backpack: cheese, lettuce, and peanut butter sandwiches, corn chips and wine. She’d bummed a bottle of white Zinfindel from her sister Sharon. Sharon was nursing the new baby and bossing her husband around all at once; she’d said, “Go ahead, but don’t get loaded,” and went on telling her husband how to mop the kitchen floor—he never did it right, she said. In Emily’s opinion, Jack should tell Sharon to take it or leave it. But Jack just winked at Emily and started mopping. He was crazy about the new baby girl, of course, and even changed her poopy diapers.