“He gets a good yield,” was all my father said.
There was a patch beyond the white barn where Tommy kept a few useless things, but first off, it was a small area, and second, the junk was lined up in a shipshape row. He had retired from being a financier and taken up farming, plowing his fortune into shiny new machinery and planting fashionable varieties and always looking for the next sensation. He looked like an executive on vacation, a man who wore fleece sweatshirts to farm, a chiseled, gray-haired playboy in loafers with no socks. Because he’d been sitting at a desk all his life and keeping fit on a treadmill he now had energy to burn, a horse crashing out of the gate.
There was a house up a tree for the customers’ children. Even though I was too old for a playhouse I climbed the rope ladder while Tommy and my father talked their business. The house had a bright-red metal roof and yellow shutters, and inside a blue wooden telephone that had stacking parts, a baby toy. What did we have at our orchard for the children? A flock of sheep. Also we kept four goats plus Roger, the neutered billy with tremendous curly horns. Goats and lambs greeted the shoppers, dutifully eating apples from any outstretched hand.
Maybe, I considered, a visiting child to the Sykes farm on the busiest selling day would fall out the playhouse window, land on her head, and be paralyzed for life. But then for probably about the fiftieth time since the four–five split I remembered what Mrs. Kraselnik had said about putting good in the world. Still, I didn’t care, I didn’t—and anyway where had following her instructions gotten me besides losing the Geography Bee? And what’s more, such a wicked wish could not be helped when it came to Tommy.
After my father had talked to the big Mister for what seemed like a full hour we walked through the bright clean selling area, past the sorting shed where the ladies in season wore clear plastic shower caps and gloves to grade the fruit, as if they were in surgery, past the cider room with the gleaming press from Holland, a press that was so mechanized all Tommy probably had to do to make cider was remotely press a button. We toured the storage shed where he kept every supply imaginable on freshly made pallets. The room smelled of that new wood. There were decorated paper peck bags with smiley faces within the apple logo, and bushel baskets yellow as butterscotch with bloodred rims, and towers of plastic containers for their famous pies, and the great tall bags filled with cider jugs, tightly packed in rows, Tommy Sykes a captain of industry.
He used controlled atmosphere, a regulated room with precise amounts of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, to keep the apples firm, and he was also experimenting with a new technology involving 1-methylcyclopropene, a colorless gas that naturally slowed ripening and aging, Tommy always on the cutting age, Tommy with endless capital to invest in his operation. And no Sherwood to dog his steps and blow up at him. He showed us the chambers for each, my father exclaiming, my father reduced to saying “Ahhh,” and “Tommy, this is amazing.” Although it was summer, Tommy had saved a certain amount of last year’s crop for a lucrative taffy apple account, Tommy supplying a high-end candy store in Milwaukee. And so on the way back to our car he offered me one of those lollipops, straight from the assembly line in their commercial kitchen.
“What kind of apple?” I asked.
“The little connoisseur!” He laughed. “More interested in the apple than in the thick shell of gooey caramel? Thick and soft right now—I’m telling you.” He was all melodious-like, taunting. “And studded with peanuts.” When I didn’t respond he said, “The apples are Honey Crisp.”
The Honey Crisp had just come on the scene, a variety my father had brought home from a conference in the last year to try. I knew that a Sykes Honey Crisp would be fracturey hard but have no flavor, knew for a fact that Tommy had no idea when varieties were ripe and should be picked. But even under the best of circumstances the showy Honey Crisp was without character, a fruit only a philistine would grow.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“You don’t like Honey Crisp?” Tommy said. “That what you’re telling me, young lady?”
“I prefer the heirloom varieties.”
“I see! I see!” He tried not to laugh some more.
I didn’t care that I sounded prissy. Tommy Sykes thought an apple with no real distinction was going to make his fortune—so let him.
The men walked on amiably and shook hands heartily at our car. As if I were a small child my father had to remind me to say good-bye to Tommy. “Bye,” I obeyed, and climbed into the car.