Beneath a Thousand Apple Trees (26 page)

Author's Note

Wart Buyers really do exist, and the use of a copper penny in the ancient art of ridding a person of warts is factual, although how and why it works is a well-guarded mystery. I have taken an author's liberty in embellishing the depth of the Wart Buyer's practices to include being the recipient and keeper of people's secrets. However, for the steadfast, often-isolated people of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where storytelling was the means by which traditions and memories were kept alive, I can't help but think that many confidences have, indeed, been whispered to Wart Buyers as they faithfully tended those who turned to them. May they always hold their secrets close to the heart.

Read on for an excerpt from Janie DeVos's next novel about the Harris family,
The Art of Breathing,
coming in February, 2017.

M
y parents, Jack and Rachel Harris, built the white two-story house I grew up in on the edge of their enormous apple orchard. My home wasn't far from my great-grandmother's place, which she'd bought as a young woman in the 1880s, and where my grandmother and mother had been born. The town was so small that most everyone was related in some way, even if they were “distant, distant somethings,” and if they weren't related then you could bet your last dollar they knew each other well—well enough to know things they probably shouldn't.

I was the first of Jack and Rachel's three children, and I looked like a perfect combination of the two. My hair was dark brown, like Daddy's, and my nose was the female version of his straight and strong one, but the rest of my facial structure was much like Mama's. We both had light eyes, as well, but hers were a true “Carolina blue,” just like the sky on an October day, whereas mine were as green as the grass in June.

My brother, Andrew, was sixteen months younger than I, and nearly a carbon copy of me. Though he'd grown into a ruggedly handsome young man, he'd been a beautiful, almost delicate-looking baby. I thought he was pretty and called him such, although my toddler's attempt to say the word “pretty” came out sounding like “Ditty,” and the name stuck.

Our sister, Emily Nell, came into the world two years after Ditty, and she was fierce and fearless from the start. I heard Mama once say that she was startled when she first laid eyes on Emily Nell because she reminded her so much of her own sister, my wayward aunt, Merry Beth, whom I'd never met. According to Mama, both had raven black hair, and it grew as fast and wild as a wisteria vine. And, apparently, both of their spirits were just as wild. I'd questioned Mama about my aunt a few times but it wasn't a conversation she wanted to get into, and she always said that Merry Beth had ended up going down the wrong road with the wrong ride; then Mama would conveniently find something else to distract us both.

When Emily Nell was two years old, she caught a cold that just wouldn't go away. It was early January, and we were experiencing record cold that winter. The house was warm enough, but even so, the north winds crept through every tiny space it could find in the walls, relentlessly working to bring the below zero temperatures into our home. Daddy kept the kerosene heaters full, and the fireplaces blazed, but even so, Emily Nell developed pneumonia. For nearly a week, the roads were impassible because of the thick layer of ice that covered them like glaze on a coffeecake.

Finally, my parents knew they had no choice if there was any chance of saving her. They wrapped my raggedly breathing baby sister as warmly as they could, and took her to the hospital in Marion, slip-sliding down the mountain roads as they did so, all the while praying to God that they would not all die before they could attempt to save my sister. They arrived at the hospital in one piece, and the doctors used every medication and technique available to them at the time, but Emily Nell was just too far gone. She died there in Mama's arms three days later. It was the darkest period that I've ever seen my family go through. Even though I was only six years old at the time, I'll always remember the black grief that gripped our family as deeply and as painfully as the north wind did that winter.

But spring unfailingly returned, as did all of the seasons over and over again, and through those years, my parents expanded their apple orchard as often as they could. They had a standing contract with Gerber Baby Food products, not to mention with several restaurants in Cabot and nearby Asheville, and every year, it seemed, more of my parents' apples were in demand. But the spring freeze of '44 had damaged many of the trees, and that year my parents were forced to purchase apples from orchards further south in order to fulfill their contracts. Over the following two years, they'd had to purchase more trees, as well as more land, leaving less money to help with my college expenses. So I worked long hours as a short order cook at Woolworth's Five and Dime, in Durham, to help make ends meet.

I'd decided to study nursing at Watts Hospital School of Nursing, just as my father's sister, my Aunt Harriet, had done, and I met Geoffrey Cavanaugh during his final year of law school at Duke. One late frigid January evening in 1948, I had just begun to degrease the grill after a twelve-hour shift when a highly intoxicated Geoffrey, along with several of his fellow law school friends, staggered in. Silently scolding myself for not having locked the door before starting on the grill, I grabbed an order pad and walked to the middle of the counter where the four inebriated men had made themselves at home on the red leather stools.

“What can I get y'all?” I asked, with pencil and pad at the ready. But the men were in their own world, laughing at things only they found humorous, and slurring any word that had more than one syllable. I waited another minute for the men to pull themselves together, but when they still couldn't, I firmly told them that I had work to do and asked them to leave. However, one of the men, Marshall Tanner, who was shorter and stockier than the other three, did not take too kindly to being told what to do, especially by one he considered as insignificant as a short order cook. Making matters worse, he noticed through his bourbon-soaked brain that I had a deep southern drawl, which had been especially apparent when I referred to them as “y'all.” I learned later that Marshall was from Washington, DC, and the son of a Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist for
The Post
; and his air of superiority came to the surface full force when he declared that I had all the telltale signs of being the daughter of an ignorant cabbage farmer.

“Easy there, Tanner,” Geoffrey immediately interceded, rising from his stool and moving to stand behind him, then slapping him on the back much too forcefully to have been a friendly gesture. “The poor girl is just trying to get out of here, that's all. No need to insult her. As a matter of fact, you really owe her an apology.”

Wanting nothing more than to finish up and get out of there, I quickly denied any need for an apology, but Geoffrey clamped his hand down on that tender area between the shoulder and neck, and applied just enough pressure that Marshall croaked out a very disingenuous and humiliated, “I'm sorry!”

“There now, don't you feel better?” Geoffrey asked the red-faced young man, patting the place he'd squeezed. Then, “Let's go. Let the young lady close up. We'll get a bite over at Dusky's.” The four of them started for the door, but not before Geoffrey laid an extravagant tip of five dollars on the counter and said, “Sorry for the trouble, pretty lady. I'll be seeing you.” Then, smiling broadly at me, he opened the door and, with a great flourish, bowed while sweeping his hand out before him in a grandiose gesture that allowed the other three to exit before him. When he straightened up, he looked at me and winked, and, in return, I smiled a soft, grateful smile; then he, too, walked out.

I quickly went to the door and locked it while my eyes remained on the handsome young man with the dark blond hair as he rejoined his group. Abruptly, I turned away, but I wished I'd done so a half second sooner, for Geoffrey had turned around just in time to catch me watching him, as if he was sure I would be. Smiling, he lifted his hand in a wave before he walked out of the circle of light cast down from a street lamp and faded into the darkness.

Janie DeVos, a native of Coral Gables, Florida, worked in the advertising industry in the late 1980s, but left the field in 2000 to turn her love of writing into a full-time career. DeVos started her freelance writing company, Rainy Day Creations, and became a copywriter for several greeting card companies. In 2002, her national-award-winning poem
How High Can You Fly?
was published as a children's picture book through River Road Press, and a second hard cover picture book,
The Path Winds Home
, soon followed.

 

In 2007, Ms. DeVos's third children's picture book,
Barthello's Wing
, was published through East End Publishing, and was included in Scholastic Books' North American school book fairs. To date it has sold over 90,000 copies.

 

Ms. DeVos gave up city life to live in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in 2007. And though she continued to write for children, including the publication of her fourth children's book,
The Shopkeeper's Bear
, in 2012, she found that her writing interests began to change as she became more embedded in the lives and the traditions of the mountain people.

 

Ms. DeVos has made numerous appearances in schools, libraries, and bookstores, and has been a keynote speaker as well as a selected author for special events, including the Miami Book Fair International and the Carolina Literary Festival.

 

Janie DeVos continues work on her newest women's fiction novel while enjoying her not-so-quiet life with her husband and three howling basset hounds in a log cabin on top of a mountain.