Among wild apples and empty places
November now, and the old apple trees have all lighted their signal-lamps, showing you where the old houses used to stand.
It’s fall for certain because I smelled someone was burning slab — the bark-laden out-edge offcut that’s discarded when small sawmills find exactly where the two-by-fours and two-by-sixes are hiding inside big spruce logs.
You look for apple trees the way you look for songbirds in a thicket: you let your vision go soft, not so much focusing as letting your eyes seek out shapes: the right shape of tree, full in the hips but still remarkably rounded. The right colour of changing leaves: more colour than their neighbours, with a higher orange, in a way. And the apples: not so much looking for the individual apples, as looking for the spray of them across the tree.
Found one on the Cemetery Road, where a wind-sculpted tree with plenty of big apples up high towered over its surroundings, a tree old and ignored enough that shoots had shot up from the ground all around it like soldiers guarding a keep. I pushed through the thicket and climbed it to try an apple (sweet, dense and grainy — applesauce apples), then found the remains of the house’s foundation nearby, scattered with toppled and broken chimney brick, the top of a kettle and what remained of the bottom of a galvanized bucket. A shallow dip where once there had been floor. It’s haunting, being in places where there were once people, laughter, noise, life, and now, there’s not — now, a clearing with nothing that could even be called a path.
Down in the valley where the brook flows with escaped mint as well as water, I found a tree I didn’t know at all when I walked across an open field to look at a different apple tree, a small specimen with cankered black scab on most of its small hard apples. But from there, I realized I could see the shape of another tree, its leaves still surprisingly green against the blue sky. The curved dome of its top told me what it was before I even saw the apples.
Bright, bright red apples, white as bone inside but streaked with fine pink lines. The skins a little extra-thick the way wild apples often are, but the insides sweet and bright and acid.
An eating apple: I’ve eaten wild apples from a thousand trees, but true eating apples are few and far between. Sweet enough that my lips were sticky.
The problem?
No sign of a homestead. Was it just one magic apple core, flicked away years ago, its seed the result of a specific and fine genetic pairing?
I finished that first apple, collected more.
Turned back to walk to the road, and a trick of the light made the four foundation walls surface through the grass sea for just an instant, a perfect rectangle where there had been none a moment before. Then, it was effectively gone again.
Honestly, I shivered. But.
But I’d already eaten the apple.