Bad Apple 1: Sweet Cider

  Bad Apple 1:

  Sweet Cider

  Barbara Morgenroth

  Copyright © 2010 Barbara Morgenroth

  Chapter 1

  I could smell the blood before I saw him.

  Two steps down the short hallway and I was in the kitchen with him. There was blood up the refrigerator, red handprints where he tried to hoist himself to his feet. Splatters and streaks pointing the way to the person now almost unrecognizable but for the clothes I had often seen him wear.

  I thought nothing as I turned and went for the phone. It wasn’t there. Just like Paul. He wasn’t there anymore.

  I am a girl of constant sorrow,

  I've seen trouble all my days.

  Stepping out of the house into the fading light of day, the air was fresh and clean but the smell hung on me like a dirty blanket thrown over my shoulders.

  A car pulled into the driveway and Aunt Maude hurried up to me as best she could.

  “Too late,” I said.

  She started to push past me.

  “Don’t go in.” Two nights ago, we had shared a meal with him here, when he was alive and whole. “Remember him from what went before.”

  “Can you tell what happened?”

  “Yeah. Someone was really, really pissed off at him.”

  Maude couldn’t help herself. She had to go inside and see for herself. I wondered if, at her age, she could have seen worse. Living on a farm, bad things happen all the time. This was a special kind of bad that surpassed accidents.

  “Where’s the phone,” she called from inside. “Do you have it? We should call the police.”

  ***

  I was driven to the State Police Troop Headquarters, and left sitting in a room while they did whatever police do. They thought I might know something because I had found the body.

  It was a formality, they assured me. Apparently, whoever had done this would have been covered in blood. I wasn’t, so I sat in the windowless room alone with my memories digging into me like brambles on bare legs.

  When I was a very small child, life was like a greeting card. Then my mother died and after some years, my father remarried. He died soon later and with nowhere else to go, no one particularly wanting to take a seven year old, I stayed with my new family. They were a strange group of people with fierce emotions and words with edges honed to a glint, and, at the center of it all, was my new mother who had no center.

  I thought if I just made myself small, I could go unnoticed by them, but everyone can be wrong especially when so much hope rides on it.

  One day my life changed. The sky was cloudless and cobalt, the trees had turned, the earth was dark and moist. He told everyone I lost my balance and that’s how the tractor came to run over me. I was only eight but knew I didn’t lose my balance and fall. He pushed me. And laughed.

  The family was a magnet for bad things but it wasn’t by accident. Somehow, in a way I couldn’t express then, they drew these things to them, not understanding the connection between their bad luck and their own darkness.

  I was reliving the past starting two days ago when the cop came in offering a bottle of water.

  “I’m Lieutenant Stephen Lambert.” He pointed to his nametag. “If you have very good eyesight, you probably spotted that.”

  I shook my head.

  “You can call me Steve. May I call you Neal?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said as he sat behind the desk. “I understand Mr. Covert was your friend.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Would you like to tell me about him?”

  “He taught me how to play the fiddle.”

  “I wish I could play a musical instrument. That’s something that will give you pleasure for your entire life.”

  “He was kind to us, looked out for us.”

  Steve looked up from his notes. “Who’s us?”

  “Me and my Aunt Maude. She’s not a blood relative aunt, but she’s like it.”

  “I understand.”

  I took a sip of water. It tasted like iron. When was I going to be able to go home and wash the smell of rotting blood off me?

  Steve put his pen down on the papers. “So, Neal, tell me what happened. Your Aunt Maude said you had dinner with Mr. Covert a couple nights ago.”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me about it. Did you have dinner there frequently?”

  “Once or twice a month.” I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to keep it all private and I was good at keeping secrets. “We were out in the yard cleaning up for winter.”

  No. We were getting ready to press apples into cider. But since a town cop had stopped by a couple weeks ago to tell us that’s illegal because at a farm it’s impossible to pasteurize the juice and people could get sick from bacteria, I couldn’t say that.

  I didn’t know how much he knew about us. I figured in twenty-four hours, he would know everything, a prospect I couldn’t find anything but humiliating.

  “I know how difficult this must be for you,” Steve said.

  It was difficulty multiplied. It was loss on top of loss. It was one less person in my life who I could trust, who understood anything about me. He knew what it was like to be a little bit different from everyone else and it wasn’t a bad thing for him. Maybe it wasn’t fully a positive, maybe it wasn’t something to celebrate but it wasn’t something to cry about. Not something to ruin an entire life.

  Now I didn’t know how to be so much on my own without sharing the music with Paul, without the visits and the dinners. Without knowing he was just down the road, acting silly in the way he often did, just enjoying himself and his garden. Sometimes sitting out on his patio buck-naked, trying to get a little tan on his as pale as fresh cream skin and not being embarrassed to be found that way.

  Steve twisted the cap off his own bottle of water.

  “I see here that Paul was from Westchester originally.”

  I nodded.

  “Did he have family downstate?”

  “There was a sister somewhere. He never saw her. His parents died a long time ago. He came up here to get away from everything.”

  Two nights ago when we had dinner there, music was playing on the stereo and I had relaxed into the armchair. There was a library of old vinyl albums, a hundreds of CDs, there was sheet music and books about music, most acquired at auction, picked up for a dime on a dollar. He helped me understand the music, what was good, important and timeless and what had an expiration date.

  “There’s an auction up by Syracuse this week. I’d be glad for the company. Ask Jane if she wants to go.”

  “My stepmother’s having one of her episodes,” I said.

  “You know there could be help for her. I did work at a hospital for many years,” Paul said.

  Maude continued eating. “She does have a doctor. They don’t help. I think they encourage her.”

  Paul raised his glass of cider to her. “Here’s to us. Good friends facing another winter.”

  We raised our glasses.

  I didn’t even realize I had been talking and looked at the cop.

  Steve nodded. “You’re doing real well, Neal.”

  “I don’t see how telling you about dinner can be helpful.”

  “We like to know what the victim was doing before the crime.”

  “You can say the word. Murder.”

  “Homicide.” He almost smiled. “It must be a shock to you.”

  “I don’t know what he was doing. Last time I saw him was two days ago. He could have gone anywhere or seen anyone afterwards.”

  “Let me ask you about that.”

  Don’t.

  “Did he have visitors up to the house often?�
��

  “You’ve been on the road, right? You know where I live. You know I can’t see Paul’s house from my house.”

  “You can’t protect him now, Neal. It’s a nice gesture. I’m sure you were fond of him and grateful but we’ll find out everything in the course of the investigation. We have a team at the house now.”

  “Like on television.”

  “This isn’t a purse snatching. Someone was murdered and we need to gather evidence first so we can catch the killer and then to be able to send him to prison for his crime. Yes, we’re going to go through the house with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “Paul would have hated that.”

  “The house was very neat,” Steve admitted.

  “Except for being looted.” The television, the stereo, anything that could have value on the street was gone along with his truck.

  “So go back to the visitors, knowing that if there’s an address book, or phone records we’ll have them by tomorrow.”

  “There will be no secrets.”

  “None.”

  “He wouldn’t have liked that.”

  “Why not?”

  I thought for a minute, wanting to word it well, like Paul would have done, so I didn’t give too much away. “He kept his life to himself. It’s a good way to be.”

  “Sharing your life with someone is a good thing, too.”

  I didn’t know much about that once my father died.

  “Some friends from the hospital days visited once in a while. That’s all I know. You may have noticed, I’m nowhere near his contemporary. He wasn’t going to say anything important to me.”

  Steve smiled. “You seem very mature to me, old enough to drive in a little over a month. You seem like a safe place to put a secret.”

  “People don’t always want to be the guardian for someone else’s intimacies.”

  “What did you know about Paul’s intimacies?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay. Thank you for your help. I may have some follow up questions in a day or so.”

  I nodded.

  “One last thing.”

  “Did it just come to you or was it by design?”

  “Why would it be by design,” Steve asked looking me directly in the eye.

  “To catch me off guard.”

  “I could only wish to be that clever. There’s a lot of information and I’m just trying to get a handle on it.”

  Uh huh.

  “Was anyone in your family, besides you and Aunt Maude, close to Mr. Covert?”

  Yeah, that’s what he wanted. It did catch me off guard this late in the interview and he knew it.

  “Neal?”

  “I think he tried to take my stepbrother under his wing for a while.” I said it casually, to give it no meaning.

  “Like he did with you?”

  “I was pretty young at the time, so I don’t know what it consisted of. Going to the movies or whatever. So not like with me. Just the music with me.”

  “And you think it was a friendly relationship? How would you describe it? Close? A mentor?”

  I finished my water. “You don’t know my stepbrother because you’re new here.”

  “No, what’s his thing?”

  “Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, been doggin’ my soul...” I sang without thinking.

  “You have a lovely voice.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Joe. Joe Kent. He’s in New Orleans.”

  Steve made a note of that.

  “He hasn’t been here for years.”

  Much to everyone’s relief.

  Chapter 2

  The school bus left me off on the paved road and I walked slowly along the dirt road, singing every saddest song I knew. The October sunshine was bright and warm, and wouldn’t last. I knew this before but now I knew it in a different way.

  It wasn’t just about the change of seasons, it was about the passing of life. It made me feel as old as Maude.

  The road was dusty and hard and my leg began to hurt. Ever since I had that run-in with a farm tractor and it won, the limp reminded me that heavy equipment always trumped flesh and bone.

  There was nothing to be done anymore and if there was a doctor somewhere, there wasn’t the money to afford the hospital or the fees or the surgery just to try to make me as graceful as a ballerina. I never wanted to see the inside of a hospital again anyway. The limp wasn’t so bad and it got me out phys. ed. although sometimes when I looked at my classmates, cheerleaders, running, leaping, tumbling, I thought they experienced a freedom I didn’t have. Yet there was so much I did have. Music.

  The road was lined with abandoned apple trees, and sumac grown into trees and stonewalls succumbing to gravity. The barbed wire fence was rotting, green with moss and broken like the teeth of a bum.

  I reached the small outbuilding that housed the cider press. The door was open so I knew Maudie was inside working.

  She heard me come up the steps, in the uneven way I had to do it, it could only be me. “Just in time to help.”

  I was good at rinsing. I could rinse jugs and mats with the best of them. The water came directly from the spring and it was always clear and cold as ice.

  She started to pick through a bushel of apples on the walkway just outside, tossing the rotted ones aside for the deer.

  “All they could talk about in school was Paul,” I said. “We don’t have very many murders around here.”

  “That we don’t. I remember about forty years ago, a man over in Kanah killed his wife.”

  “Why?”

  Maude threw an apple into a bushel basket. “He was tired of her.”

  “He never heard of divorce?”

  “When you’re filled with so many years of anger, some people have to act on it.”

  “You think that’s what happened to Paul.”

  “I can’t see how it could be but I don’t see how it could be anything else.”

  “Who, though?”

  I’d thought about it all day. At any other time, I knew who I’d name. It always seemed strange to me on the television news when the neighbors were interviewed and they always said “I would never have suspected. He was the nicest man.”

  How can you be that dumb? You live next door and you never got a sense there was something wrong? Or is it that you just didn’t want to know.

  I wished I didn’t know.

  “Maybe we’ll never know.”

  “You think the police won’t be able to find him.”

  “Not all crimes are solved.”

  “I don’t like the thought of the killer running around free to do it again,” I said.

  “Me, neither.” Maude stood up, straightening, stretching her back. “That cop called me today.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “He said they found a pass to the Oneida Community Museum. Did I know when Paul went there.”

  “Do you know?”

  “No.” She was silent for a while. “I wonder how many more years I can do this. My family has been making cider since they had moved from out by Hartford, around the time of the Civil War,” Maude started as she pointed southward. “There were orchards then that covered the hills. Now there are only a few trees left, antique ones. Years ago, botanists came down from Cornell to catalog these remaining trees some were so rare.”

  “I read about apples in the library.”

  “Did you read there were varieties specifically used for cider like the Roxbury Russet and Smith Cider?”

  “No.”

  “Times change. Tastes change. People buy storage apples in the supermarket with waxed skins that can’t be scrubbed clean and they’re happy.”

  The insult to apples everywhere offended her.

  “I thought the Kents had a dairy farm,” I said.

  “That, too, but people did everything they could to get by. You don’t have to milk apples twice a day.”

  “That’s a true
fact.”

  “New York was famous for its apples. The Kents shipped apples off the farm for years.”

  “What happened? There are no cows and no orchards anymore.”

  Maude shook her head as she went to the drum to dump in the apples too badly bruised to be used. They would be left for the animals. “Apple blight. Then there were wars and not enough help. Too many girl children, not enough boys, so the apples were let go and milk cows replaced the trees. But cows don’t milk themselves either and they take a darn sight more tending than an apple tree.

  “My husband, God bless him, didn’t work the farm, he had a job in the hardware store in town. Roy grew up on a farm but after the war, didn’t want to go back to all that hard work with no guarantees. At least with a real job there was a real paycheck at the end of the week. For years I kept a couple cows and tended a vegetable garden, canning like my mother had, but then it got all too hard on the knees so I don’t bother with much anymore.”

  “But you still press the apples.”

  From the ground level, she looked up to the small building that housed the cider press. It was the one her father used.

  “Making sweet cider’s a tradition,” she said with some pride.

  Carefully, she climbed up the stone steps and opened the door. “We have a couple hours work, checking over the motor, making sure the belts are still good, cleaning everything with bleach and it’ll be ready again.”

  Out the back door, there was a garbage can where the ground up and pressed-dry apples were discarded. Hunters used that as bait for deer, after all, it was hunting season and little went to waste. She turned on the refrigerator needed to store the cider for people to pick up later.

  Going back into the building, Maude and I pulled on rubber gloves, and got out the bleach and scrub brushes.

  “When Roy and the kids lived here there was always someone around but now I’m alone in the house. Sometimes it’s so quiet. I liked seeing Paul. I like seeing you,” she smiled.

  Maude’s baby sister, Harriet, lived over to the other side of the mountain but had her daughter’s son living with them and he was troubled. She had to watch him night and day. Last I heard, he had bit another child on the school bus. Before that he was going to Internet sites he wasn’t supposed to visit. Now someone had to be in the room with him when he was using the computer for schoolwork.