To make the juice, ten thickly woven cloths held in place by wooden forms were one by one filled with apple pulp and stacked up on a stainless-steel tray, a stack taller than my father. The cloths were submitted to pressure, short planks set in crisscrossing fashion on the stack, stout blocks of wood on top of all of that, and finally the jacks, which would be turned periodically, the whole package compressed, tighter, tighter, every last drop forced from the pulp. Gloria’s job was first to put the apples through the washer, giving them one last inspection to make sure there was no habitat for an E. coli–type mold, or mold of any kind, no cuts or deep bruises. From the washer the fruit went into the grinder. My father then poured the pulp from the buckets into the cloths, cloths one to ten, folding them up just exactly so. My father, the master. Together he and Gloria would have decided the recipe to make the best possible blend from the available seconds. A Jonathan–Golden Delicious recipe—we are not talking the green, dimpled atrocities from Washington State, but our yellow, delicate, ripe, blushy feminine Goldens, ours a lovely, shy apple—this blend was a favorite, with whatever odds and ends were on hand and needed to be used up, varieties that wouldn’t tip the sweet-tart balance.
Every week, for the fifth cloth, Gloria put a surprise through the grinder for my father. It might be a bushel of pears or a wild variety she’d gone and picked for the occasion, or a box of something special she’d hidden away in the cooler. He’d watch the mystery pulp coming through the grinder into the bucket, white mash speckled with the green or pink skins. With his hands sheathed in the XXX Large rubber gloves he spread what looked like coleslaw evenly into the cloth. He’d smell the mash as he smoothed it, he’d pause to think, he’d take a guess. On that morning of our holiday he said, “The wild tree by the Jonathans? Is that it? Those little apples, the spotty—”
“Afraid not,” Gloria said sadly.
“Am I close?”
“You mean geographically?”
“Glooria,” he said in a teasing fashion. “I need a hint.”
“I don’t know, Jim,” she lilted. “I may not be willing.”
They were talking that way in front of Stephen. He was standing right there on the platform above the press, leaning on the old milk tank where the cider was stored before it was bottled, Stephen reading the newspaper and eating a Danish.
Just then Aunt May Hill came to check on the mechanism she’d engineered for the bottling line, a clever switch that turned off the flow of the cider at the top of the jug. She walked in with her head down, directly to her work. William and I always straightened up and looked at the ground when she appeared, maybe stealing glances at her but otherwise pretending no one unusual was present. She wore a checked shirt tucked into her high-waisted pants, the faded jeans that were neatly patched, and a blue bandanna on her head, knotted in the back, no hair showing. No part of her broad face with the knobby nose, the manly eyebrows, the fleshy mouth was ever obscured by a coiffure. While she fiddled no one said much of anything and to our relief she soon left the room, looking balefully at the box of sweet rolls on her way out. Next news, Sherwood was at the door. “Did you get the order ready for the Greek Ballerina?” He was speaking to my father.
“The pears, and she wanted Paula Reds, too?”
“A bushel.” Sherwood didn’t like the cider. He didn’t think perfectly good apples should be ground up for a drink. He stood at the door staring at the drain, refusing to see the work at hand.
My father said, “I was thinking you had the order in mind.”
Sherwood then looked at his brother, at Stephen, a Lombard who had the nerve to read the newspaper during the harvest. Sherwood said, “You want to make yourself useful?”
“What?” Stephen said.
“Do you want,” Sherwood repeated slowly, “to make yourself useful.”
Gloria turned off the grinder in order to come to Stephen’s rescue. She said, “There’s a box of pears in the middle room, Sherwood, a box that would be perfect for the Greek Ballerina. The stage of ripeness she likes.”
The Ballerina was no starlet but a sixty-year-old who’d been coming to the orchard since she was a young woman. No one had ever thought to call her by any real name.
Sherwood, with his wondrous red curls and his childlike absorption in his projects, was captivating, and yet it was safe to say that the slab of his forehead and his small, deep-set eyes had knocked him out of the running in the family beauty contest. He said to Gloria, with what seemed like sincerity and also amazement, “Oh, you know that, do you? The stage of ripeness she likes?”
My father stopped his tinkering with the stack. He said, “Yes, Gloria does know exactly that.”
We quit eating our long johns, wondering, for the first time, if Sherwood minded that Stephen was living at our house. Stephen, the streamlined Lombard, each of his features in gracious proportion to the whole. Plus, what did he think of Stephen getting together with Gloria, the employee who was in the Jim Lombard camp?
One more entrance, Dolly sticking her head into the room, three yellow jackets flying straight to the bottling line. A fun fact about Dolly was that she hated most fruits, and especially apples. She didn’t eat them. No one would dream of telling her to shut the door, and while she summoned Sherwood back to the sorting shed four more wasps gleefully sailed through to get a lick of juice coming off the tray. “This order for Mrs. Dolten is driving me up the wall,” she said with an exasperation we all could share, Mrs. Dolten famously impossible. Dolly then looked Stephen up and down as if she, too, could not believe he was taking his leisure. She plucked her donut from the box and disappeared.
That’s when Sherwood noticed us sitting on two milk crates, sweet rolls in hand. He started to blink, the sign that he was about to have an idea. “Say, Francie,” he said pleasantly. “You might want to talk to May Hill.”