by David Neal
* * *
Tom was still clearing up in the bar after closing when I banged on the side door, shouting fit to wake the whole village, which I no doubt did. He ushered me to a table near the fire, brought me a double brandy and told me to slow down, to try to get my words right, to take a deep breath. After listening to my muddled, near-delirious account of what happened at the cottage, he rose from the table to fetch the rest of the brandy and a glass for himself. His eyes were troubled when he sat back down, but his manner was as steady as ever.
“Now, then. First things first,” he said, filling our glasses. “Did you contact the police at all before you came over here? Did you call them?”
It was a sensible and practical question. I should’ve done that, and felt embarrassed to admit I hadn’t. “No…I suppose my first thought was to get somewhere I’d be safe. But we can call them now. We should do that right away!’ I stood up and felt for my phone, but as I pulled it from my pocket Tom said:
“And what will you tell them? You see, that’s why I asked. What would you say to them or anyone? That the Sleators were fighting with a monster in your cottage? Is that what you’d tell them?’
I couldn’t grasp what he was saying and went on the defensive, waving my arms about to press my point home.
“But that’s what it was like! You didn’t see it! You can’t imagine what it was like! I don’t know what it was…something sick, some sick, deformed thing.”
“A goat.”
I gaped at Tom, feeling totally exasperated. Was he making fun of me? Did he think I’d exaggerated what I’d seen? Was his look of concern the sort he wore professionally to soothe hysterics and madmen and drunks?
“It wasn’t a goat. It really, really wasn’t a goat.” I said.
He drew his chair closer to the fireplace, and studied what was left of the logs in the basket grate. Then he turned and spoke.
“Let me tell you something,” he said. “Around here we have a saying: “Three days to lay a Sleator to rest.” And do you know why? The Sleators, well…they don’t…die right. Never have. They die twice, you see. What’s buried in the graveyard behind the church isn’t what gets burnt to ash and cast upon the ground in their orchard back along the old track. I can’t change that and nor can they and it’s not for me or anyone else to say as we should. We leave them be and things go on quite well. In a place like this you make allowances; you have to or life becomes unbearable and that’s how it is. It’s just a shame you happened along when one of them decided to pass and got you caught up in something you shouldn’t have been. It’s a pity, that is. It isn’t always like that, but John Sleator was one of the worst of them and was bound to go hard.”
I studied his face, hoping his solemn expression would suddenly break into laughter, willing him to slap his big hand on the table and shout, “Oh, I had you going there!” But that didn’t happen. He looked entirely, frighteningly, serious as he sat waiting for me to speak.
“Tom—do you mean it? But how can they die twice? What was that thing? How can they die twice? What was it I saw?’
“I can’t explain that in any way you’d like to hear or in any way that would do you any good. So I say it was a goat. A goat got loose. That’s whatthey’d say. And that’s what I’d say to anyone that asked. You being a worried sort of bloke, got confused in the dark. When people from the city come down here, that can happen. They’re just not used to the dark.”
And he poured us both another brandy and we sat, not speaking, watching the end of the fire, ash falling like paper onto the worn stone of the hearth, the last dying forks of blue-yellow flame.
*
Every year the posters go up earlier and earlier—a certain sign that summer is over. No one ever sees who hangs them, but one day they appear on every bulletin board and telephone pole in town. “Seasonal Work, Overtime Available. Inquire at Genesis Farms.” There is no address or telephone number or email.
It is not a job offer. It is a summons.
No one picks up a check at the end of the harvest. We accept payment in the form of being allowed to return home, to huddle indoors through the winter and pretend only the wind is howling outside.
Living this close to the trees, we learn to fear the touch of wood. Our houses are built of brick or stone. We cover our floorboards with carpet or rugs or whatever threadbare blankets we can find. Even as children we do not climb trees.
Every year the trees are taller, and every year we swear there are more of them, though that can’t be: we are promised this much, that no new seeds will be planted, as long as we do our duty. We have never seen a sapling reach from the earth. If we did, we would rip it out with our bare hands, no matter what it did when it touched our skin. And yet, each time we return to the orchard, we find it closer to our doors than we remember.
* * *
It is still August when Evelyn hears the branches creaking and knows the fruit is growing heavy, though the leaves have not yet turned. When the posters appear, she is ready. Her harvesting knife is sharp, sharp.
Ada brings the ladder from the garage and inspects it carefully. She tightens each screw until her hand burns, then loosens them all and tightens them again. She brings out the steel cleats, her own addition, to dig into the soil so the ladder will never slip. Sometimes the trees like to bend and dodge—sometimes the branch you were leaning on a minute ago is suddenly somewhere else. Any fall in the orchard is a bad fall. Any broken skin is an opening. So Ada is determined that Evelyn will never fall.
Everyone works in pairs: one to hold the ladder and one to climb. Most partners trade off from tree to tree, or day to day. Evelyn insists that Ada stay on the ground. She knows people notice and talk about it, that some women even use it to needle their own husbands: Evelyn loves her wife so much she won’t hear of her going into the trees. Such devotion, such selflessness.
Evelyn knows she isn’t selfless. She knows she isn’t brave. She knows that to lose Ada would be more than she could bear. Deep in the least generous corner of her heart, she is determined to be the one who dies first.
* * *
“The first day is always the hardest,” says Ada when they wake before dawn on the morning the harvest begins. Evelyn nods. It isn’t true, but they have to say it every year to get themselves past the inertia of dread. Tomorrow their hands will ache and their backs will cramp and they’ll have to do it again.
It is cool in the still-dark when they leave the house, but not cool enough—Evelyn knows the day will be hot. They both wear heavy jeans, boots, long-sleeved shirts, and gloves. Ada’s hair is cropped ruthlessly short, but Evelyn insists on wearing hers long, so she wraps a bandanna around her head. It is tied too tight and will make her head ache as the day goes on, but cutting her hair off would be conceding something that she can’t define but knows she can’t lose.
The worst part of harvesting is that the fruit does not want to be cut from the tree. The first fruit Evelyn drops into the basket hanging from her shoulder grows impossibly heavy and threatens to topple her to the ground. Evelyn holds onto the ladder and grits her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut and thinks she will die, but the feeling passes and the weight becomes bearable again. The fruits have short attention spans; if a ploy doesn’t work quickly, they abandon it. Some of them grow fiendishly hot as Evelyn holds them steady and slashes their stems, but her gloves protect her from the worst of it.
She has cotton balls stuffed in her ears, in case the fruits begin to whisper, as they sometimes do—secrets, threats, or just an interminable tuneless humming that could drive a person to stick her knife through her own hand. One of the fruit’s favorite tricks is to pretend to be a harvester and convince the person on the ladder that they are the fruit. The town loses a few that way every year.
Not everyone uses cotton: with her ears stuffed, Evelyn won’t be able to hear Ada if she shouts from the ground to warn of danger. But they have a simple code worked out. Ada beats the lower rungs with her fists and Eve
lyn feels the vibrations in her feet. One strike means look up, two means look behind you. A ceaseless tattoo of bones on metal means get to the ground, jump if you have to. They’ve never yet had to use the last one.
It’s slow work, but by the time Evelyn is ready to break for lunch, her basket is full. She carries it to the barn and sets it in the row outside with the others. No one ever sees the door open, but later all the full baskets will be inside.
She grabs an empty basket while Ada unpacks their lunch of sandwiches and carrots—they don’t eat fruit this time of year. They walk half a mile in the hot sun back to where their truck is parked, and eat sitting in the back, saying little. It’s cool and shady under the trees, but no one eats there.
Evelyn and Ada sit in silence for a minute or two when their food is gone. Finally, Evelyn takes a slow breath and reaches for Ada. They lace their fingers together, skin to skin for the first time in hours, and squeeze. Then they put their gloves on and go back to work.
* * *
At the end of the day, Evelyn soaks in a cool bathtub with a splash of lavender oil, a luxury she feels guilty for allowing herself but one she can’t resist. She closes her eyes and tries to visualize the day’s tension rinsing off her skin along with the sweat.
Ada comes in and sits on the edge of the tub. She showered half an hour ago and her short hair is already dry. She runs her fingers across Evelyn’s forehead. Evelyn catches Ada’s hand and kisses the inside of her wrist.
“Thank you for keeping me steady,” she says. She is referring to the ladder and more. Evelyn has suggested, not just once, that they leave this horrible little town that doesn’t even have a name, that can’t even be found on a map, and go somewhere you can eat what you pick from the trees. Ada is the one who always talks her out of that idea. If they leave, what’s to stop someone else doing the same? If one person abandons their duty in the orchard, why not an exodus? And then what? Fruit ripening on branches until it falls to the ground, rotting, fermenting, attracting insects who gorge themselves on the liqueur and—there is no imagining.
No one ever leaves. Harvesting is terrible. Not harvesting would be worse.
Evelyn tries not to think about it, tries not to imagine what their lives would be if they had been born somewhere else, if they were just two ordinary women in their ordinary home, tired from their ordinary work, about to fall asleep and dream ordinary dreams. She tries not to pretend they are those women as Ada leans over the bathtub and kisses her deeply, then pulls her to her feet and leads her, dripping, into the bedroom. Forgetting who she is and where she is makes remembering all the more painful. Evelyn reminds herself what waits for them tomorrow, even as her thighs are wrapped around Ada’s waist, their bodies marking the sheets with lavender-scented silhouettes.
Later, Ada combs the tangles out of Evelyn’s still-wet hair while Evelyn’s sweat dries on her lips. “There’s one good thing about not being able to get you pregnant,” she jokes. Evelyn tries not to tense, but Ada must realize she doesn’t find it funny, because she falls silent again.
Ada isn’t wrong—they’re probably two of the few people in town making love tonight. No one wants to find out what a baby conceived during the harvest might look like, or act like, or do. Even with every advantage of modern contraceptive care at their disposal, most women who aren’t married to women just abstain until the trees in the orchard are bare again.
Natalie Milton didn’t. Evelyn was only twelve or thirteen back then, Ada maybe ten, so neither of them have clear memories of when or how people realized that Natalie had stopped leaving her house. And they certainly weren’t part of the group that went and banged on her door and refused to go away until she let them in, but they’ve heard about it so many times, know the story so well, they remember it like they were there.
The least-horrifying thing about Natalie, when she opened the door, was that she was visibly pregnant. Before they could process that, they had to take in the fact that she was naked and covered in soil—not filth, but rich brown dirt, packed an inch thick on every part of her body below the neck. Green grass poked through under her arms and between her legs. Evelyn always pictures an earthworm burrowing on Natalie’s belly—she can’t remember if someone told her that or if she just made it up.
“Can I offer you a drink?” Natalie asked politely. Someone pushed past her into the house and saw what looked like Natalie’s husband Michael, standing in a planter pot up to his knees, with vines growing around his body. Accounts differ on this point; some say the vines didn’t just cover Michael, they came from him, sprouting from his eye sockets and under his fingernails.
Up to this point the story, and therefore Evelyn’s and Ada’s imagined memories, is very detailed. Now it starts to disintegrate. No one wants to talk about what happened next, about the screams and the sound of splintering wood that echoed up and down the street. Someone in the town must have been the last person to see Natalie Milton in one piece, but no one will admit it was them. And if anyone laid eyes on what was inside Natalie Milton, they haven’t breathed a word of it.
So it’s a good thing that Evelyn can’t get pregnant with Ada. It’s a blessing. Ada has said this so many times Evelyn feels she has no choice but to believe it.
“We could adopt,” she said once, and only once. The look Ada gave her said without words everything Evelyn already knew about the unfairness, the cruelty, of taking a child from the outside world and bringing it into the inescapable shadow of the orchard.
They will go on like this. They will hold each other, and harvest the fruit, and eventually die, assured if nothing else that they have given the trees no new lives to devour. Evelyn lies awake, her arm growing stiff and tingly under Ada’s weight, telling herself that will be enough.
* * *
Maybe it’s the exhaustion after a sleepless night; maybe she is distracted, dreaming about the child she will never have. Whatever the reason, Evelyn’s mind wanders for one crucial moment while reaching for a fruit, and a thorn stabs her in the arm. The trees never had thorns before, but that’s no excuse for letting her guard down, she scolds herself, staring at where the three-inch spike of wood pierces straight through her flannel shirt into the soft crook of her elbow.
For the first moment, it doesn’t hurt—all she feels is a pleasant sensation of warmth. Then the pain explodes up and down her arm, and Evelyn jerks backward and the thorn breaks from the branch, still lodged in her skin.
Evelyn screams. Her fingers are numb—she clutches convulsively at the fruit she was just about to pick. Its stem breaks, but it seems to roll from her fingertips faster than she can get a firm hold. What could happen flashes before her eyes as clearly as though she actually sees it: the red-black, fist-sized fruit plummeting to the ground, splitting open, leaking juice quickly absorbed by the thirsty soil. The horror of that vision eclipses the pain in her arm.
She lunges, one hand gripping the branch above her so hard her fingers ache, reaching with the other farther than she would have imagined possible. It’s almost as if the fruit hangs in the air, waiting to fall, for one impossible sliver of a moment—just long enough for Evelyn to grab it in her fist and squeeze.
Through the cotton stuffing her ears, Evelyn hears Ada shouting from below. “I’m fine,” she yells back, her own voice too large in the muffled silence inside her head. “I thought I was going to drop one, but I didn’t.” She doesn’t mention the thorn.
The force with which Evelyn caught the fruit has crushed it. Inside the dark, gleaming skin, the juice is a startling shade of sunshine-yellow. It drips into the folds of Evelyn’s leather glove. A smell rises from it, sweet and tart with just the slightest hint of bitterness, that makes her mouth water. She lifts her hand halfway to her lips before remembering that she must not, must never, taste the juice.
Evelyn’s arm throbs where the thorn she almost forgot about is embedded. Wincing, she reaches behind her to put the mangled fruit in the basket on her back, then turns her attention to r
emoving the thorn. Is there something else she should do first? She feels it like a name she can’t quite remember, slipping away the more she tries to get a hold on it. The splintering end of the thorn rises from her skin like a bloody island from the sea. Evelyn pushes the skin around it apart with her gloved thumb and finger to get a better grip.
She holds her breath to steel herself against the pain, but the pain is suddenly gone. Evelyn’s eyes widen as she stares down at her arm. A drop of golden juice, transferred from the tip of her finger, gleams in the wound, and Evelyn feels herself swell with an immense and beautiful feeling of peace. Everything in all the world is all right, or will be soon. She grasps the thorn and pulls. It comes out clean—when she looks back at her arm, there is neither pain nor blood, just a small, neat opening like an eyelid with no eye inside. Then that closes too, and the skin seals itself shut without a scab or a scar.
“How odd,” Evelyn says out loud. She giggles at the sound; she’s not sure she’s ever said the words “How odd” before. She feels slightly intoxicated. It’s a beautiful day. She tosses the thorn into her basket, and begins harvesting again, humming softly to herself.
* * *
Ada notices the rip in her shirt when they get home that night. “Did you get cut?” she asks urgently, peering at Evelyn’s arm.
“It must have caught on a branch,” Evelyn says with a shrug. “Probably when I thought I was going to drop that fruit and panicked. I didn’t even notice it tearing.”
Ada shakes her head. “We’ll patch it up when we have a free minute, but wear something else until then. I don’t like the idea of you climbing around up there with loose threads that could snag on…whatever.” Evelyn imagines herself scaling the ladder naked, leaping acrobatically from branch to branch, juggling whole armfuls of fruit. It’s funny, but she knows Ada won’t think so, and she keeps the image to herself.
