Poison Apples (18 page)

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

G
eridoee, 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.

The voice came on, loud, gruff: It was a voice she hadn’t heard before, muffled, as if to disguise itself. “Keep the Willmarth woman out of this. This is a warning. Keep her out of this.”

But Ruth’s green pickup was already there in the driveway. Moira ran outdoors, her heart hammering... and hesitated. Ruth was in the barn, interviewing one of the men. She didn’t want to interfere, but she had to take these warnings seriously, angry though they made her. Ephraim was coming out of the barn as she entered; he acknowledged her presence with a vigorous nod of his head. He was one of the straight-faced ones, serious; he read books instead of playing dominoes or dRufus or flutes. He’d had a year at the University of West Indies in Kingston, but couldn’t afford to go back, he was picking apples for his tuition. She touched his arm; she had to keep abreast of the moment. “I have a book for you,” she said, “of Derek Walcott’s poems. Would you like to borrow it?”

His face lit up. Derek Walcott was a West Indian who had come out of poverty to win the Nobel prize for literature. “Yes, ma’am, thank you, ma’am.” Ephraim went into a trot and back to his picking as though the faster he moved and the more apples he picked, the sooner he would be back in his books.

Walcott, she’d read, was a black man with two white grandfathers and two black grandmothers; he called himself “a divided child”—he had compassion for both races. She thought of Stan’s fight to save Aaron Samuels, and had a rush of admiration for her husband. Stan had chosen neither Judaism nor Christianity for his faith. He was a humanist, he said, that was all, that was enough.

“You look like Joan of Arc there in the sun.” Ruth was coming out of the barn now, stretching her arms above her head. Moira admired the tanned, muscled look of them. “Positively saintlike,” Ruth went on.

Moira said, “Oh, ridiculous. I was just thinking of Stan, that’s all. I was ready to charge the enemy. The hate people. But I have something to tell you.”

She repeated the warning message, and Ruth just laughed.

“But you must take it seriously! I don’t want you to be involved anymore. We have to heed some of these warnings. We’ve already had one death.”

“Two,” Ruth murmured. “But that’s why I want to go on. I can’t stand by and let someone exploit you like this. And it’s only two more interviews: Desmond and then Rufus.”

“Let me question Rufus,” Moira pleaded. “He won’t be an easy one. He’ll feel he’s above all this. This is his orchard—at least he seems to think so. He takes anything Stan or I say—said—well, personally, like we’re raising a vendetta against him.”

“All the more reason why I should do the talking. Now go in and have lunch.”

“Have you...?”

“Done. Almond butter and marmalade sandwich, my favorite. Tim kicked me out of the barn again. I’m good for another hour. When I’m done with Rufus, I’ll come in and we can talk.”

“Okay, then, but promise after this you’ll lie low. Someone, obviously, knows you’ve been over here, that you’re doing all this questioning.”

“I can’t think of anyone outside this orchard who’d know. Except Pete—he called this morning and Sharon told him I was over here. And Pete might have told Bertha. And Bertha—”