Trying to write some short fiction to celebrate the darkening days. In this short inspired by the legends of the Apple Tree Man, a spirit of an orchard’s oldest apple tree who needs to be placated with gifts and offerings, a new farmer takes on an ice storm.
“It’s this cold already?” There was a glaze of ice on the red apples still left on the scraggly, stunted trees. They couldn’t be picked until they thawed, but the forecast said it would be fifty-ish by noon. We’d have to process the affected fruit in the farm shop as soon as possible if we wanted to make something of it, and I added the workload to my already hectic pre-Thanksgiving schedule. The girl in front of me, leading through the grid of trees, didn’t say anything, so I shouted louder, to make sure my voice carried over the deafening sounds of the orchard. “¿No tienes frío?”
Marisol turned back over her shoulder, her nose running and red. “Sí. Estoy congelada a muerte.” She picked up her pace, and passed three more trees before I could yell for her to slow down.
She was wearing a puffer vest over a thick hoodie, a long-sleeved t-shirt sticking out at the cuffs. Beneath the tee, heavy-duty leather work gloves were sticky with browned juice and did the work to keep her fingers warm. Her jeans were thin and threadbare, I hoped she had something underneath them, but it didn’t seem likely. Her boots clomped through the frozen mud, cracking into puddles that once held liquid that would seep into my sneakers if I didn’t change out of them before the mercury rose. I hadn’t been prepared for the orchard when her timid knock came at the back door. I was still in a robe, over my pajamas. I should have been wearing boots, too. But the knock was early, and when it came, I ran.
I spoke more than enough Spanish to communicate with my staff, the people who came to the farm from September through November to get as much fruit off the trees as they could before the hard frosts came in. Here in Yakima, the date for that changed every year, and this year, it was early. I knew that Marisol’s parents were out here somewhere, and her father also lectured her about how warm she wouldn’t be wearing fashionable jeans in the field. If he couldn’t get her to change, I wouldn’t either. The going rate for apples was thirty dollars per half-ton bin picked. I paid fifty. Some of the staff worked in the farm bakery and store, at a wage higher than minimum. They were good apples, and, more importantly, not my only source of income. For an orchard the size of mine, the expenditure was negligible. And what I got in return was far more valuable. Even if the younger among them rolled their eyes when I poked them to dress for the weather.
There was a mixed group of men and women standing at a tree in the center of the field. I saw that they were talking but there would be no way to hear until I was close– not with the orchard wind machines spinning overhead. My first cold night in the house among the trees, I thought I had woken up in a military siege– the whirring, ear-splitting rush of blades through the air made it sound like there were a hundred helicopters surrounding the farm. I called up my neighbor, despite it being midnight.
“It’s the fans, kid,” he said. “They circulate the warm air and keep the trees from freezing.”
They all thought I had no business owning the farm, and my panic over the fans would be town gossip by the time they were percolating their coffee on the stovetop, another point on the long list of why a woman with a long, blonde ponytail who spent her whole life in a city back east shouldn’t be up north and in the country. I hadn’t even noticed the propellers on high stands when I toured the land. They were part of the farm architecture, but ignored while I dreamt of cider doughnuts and pie. Now I know better. The deafening chop of the blades was a reminder that generations of farmers had gathered knowledge and learned how to best protect what they– we– had. Even if sometimes the mechanisms weren’t enough to hold the danger off completely.
The crowd parted and I saw a lump in the shadows.
“Mierda.” I turned to Marisol’s father, Gerry. “Anyone who has a shop job should go to it, and the orchard-only hands should go to the Golden Delicious apples. Once they start to de-ice, we can get them to processing as soon as possible. And when everyone’s in their places, will you bring me the Bobcat?” I tossed him the keys from my pocket. Half the crowd had already moved on.
I was alone with the body. White male, approximately 35 to 45, heavy set or just looked it under his sweatshirt, cargo pants, boots, and vest. I pulled leather gloves out of my robe pocket– wasn’t prepared enough for boots, but it seemed like almost every article of clothing I owned now had work gloves shoved in it somewhere– and plucked off his pair of sunglasses. His eyes were only half-open, and from beneath his black beanie and neck gaiter, there was a trickle of blood. I plucked a phone from his pocket and turned it off before returning it to the body. There was no radio. The Sig Sauer P320 stayed in his gloved hand.
The snap of branches let me know Gerry was back with the excavator. I stood up, and waved him off. “Thanks! You can leave it.”
He got out of the digger and looked at me. “No, let me.”
“Let you, what? You’re not here. Go help Marisol take inventory of what you pulled yesterday. With the ice, we’re going to have to make do with what we have, so I need to know what we have.”
“We have a problem.”
“Nope. If anyone has a problem, it’s me, and I know how to solve problems. It’s what I used to do.”
The older man gave me a nod. “Keys are in it.”
“Thanks.” He disappeared into the shady underbrush on his way back to the processing barn.
I lowered the bucket of the excavator, got out of the cab, and hauled the body into it. Took a bit of work; rigor was starting to set in. Our man met his end just before daybreak. I climbed back into the machinery and lifted the bucket, and took a forty-eight point turn to point the cab back from where it came. It took me long enough that I was starting to sweat under my robe, and the windmills above my head stopped whirring. The thaw was coming.
I had the windshield facing the correct direction when two uniformed cops came through the trees.
I got out of the cab. “‘Morning.”
“Unusual outfit for diggin’ work.” The tall one on the left eyed me.
I nodded up at the bucket of the excavator. “Mule deer,” I said. “Workers said it stank and they wanted it gone. Someone must have shot him and he ran off to die under my Cosmic Crisps. Don’t know if it was on my land or out there.” I waved my hand in the direction of my fence.
“Did you hear a gunshot?”
“Nope.” I nodded at the turbines. “It was cold last night. The fans were going automatically.”
“Right.”
“You can check with Earl Rohrbacher on the next farm over,” I said, pointing across the street. “If you don’t believe me.”
“I heard ‘em.”
“So why’d you ask?” I tried to look pissed off and exhausted, which wasn’t that hard.
The second officer looked down at the treadmarks in the ground. “How long did it take for you to flip that thing around?”
“Longer than I want to admit,” I said. “You might tell Earl.”
“Shame the ground is so frozen,” the tall one said. “You could track where it was killed if the mud was soft. You can’t see anything now that you ran over it a thousand times, too.”
“I didn’t think it was supposed to be this cold in early November,” I said. “If we were a pick-your-own orchard, business would be dead.”
“But now you just got a dead deer to get rid of.”
“One that’s starting to get real ripe now that the sun is out,” I pointed out. “Do you want to keep talking to me or can I go dump this thing in a hole?”
“You’re not gonna keep the meat?”
“The thing was shot, but something found it after it died,” I said, sneering. “Maybe a coyote, maybe some vultures. I can’t tell, I’m from DC. But I’m not gonna eat rancid meat that was taste-tested by a critter who doesn’t wash his hands.”
“You could give it away.”
“To who? My farmhands?”
“Well…”
“I’m not poisoning people with rancid meat, Officer.” I moved to get back in my rig. “Is that all? Did you come to my farm to ask me about a dead deer?”
“No, ma’am,” the shorter one said. “We got reports of a congregation of people who could be seen from the main road this morning. Looked suspicious.”
“To who?”
“The people who called.”
“So, you’re telling me a buncha racist shitheads are calling ICE on my farm hands?”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
“Good.” I started up the excavator. “It better not be anything like that.”
“Thanks for your time, ma’am.” They began walking back towards their cruiser, parked on the side of the two lane road that ran between my farm and the one across the way.
Marisol emerged from beneath a tree bearing little red fruits, the melting ice leaving dappled spots of moisture on her vest. She put a foot into the open door of the cab, and pulled herself up so she was standing next to my seat.
“Where are we going to put him?” she asked.
“Behind the barn, for now,” I said. “Then when the sun goes down tonight, in a great, big hole where he belongs.”
“No one heard anything?”
I shook my head. “It was smart to wait til the first freeze,” I said.
Marisol smiled. “That was smart of Earl.”
Across the street, a tall man waved with one hand, as he shifted a large bag of lime on his wide shoulder.
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