Chapter Six #5
In Andrei’s case, it was even more complicated than this, for Miles had learned one night from Kate, who’d tried to keep the secret but couldn’t any longer, that Andrei’s apples were hardly natural.
That, alone, he’d never grown a single apple to, ahem, fruition.
In the beginning, laboring in the orchard through spring and summer, he’d seen his fruits beset by worm and wasp and fungus.
He hadn’t been deterred; he was long accustomed to experiments that didn’t go the way he wanted.
Instead, riding that early high, when the miracle that is gardening still outshone the losses that are also gardening, he’d shrugged off his defeats, dived deep into his books, and plotted for the following season.
Paloma followed Andrei’s struggles at a distance, as he trudged through the aisles of his orchard, stopping to Yorick at his ruined fruit and shake his head.
Next year! he said. For he had figured out the problem.
But after four years spent watching her husband patiently grow the trees to fruiting height, and three more years of pestilence, she began to sense his old melancholy returning.
It was then that she had taken matters into her own hands.
A dutiful son, Andrei was accustomed, four times a year, to take a snowbird flight from Albany to Atlanta to visit his parents.
It was during one of these trips that Paloma had, after some research, called up an arborist, at Osgood Tree and Lawn, in Oakfield, across the state line.
The voice on the other end of the line was English, faint, phantasmal.
At first the man refused, for he was just too busy.
But she pleaded, and he must have recognized her desperation.
Two hours later, he came roaring up the driveway, close to sixty, truck rattling so hard that she half-expected it to fall apart the moment that he skidded to a stop.
His skin was sunburnt, his ear hair long enough to braid, the state of his overalls need not be mentioned.
He spent most of the morning tramping about and cursing.
Oh, lassie, what had her husband done? The pain!
His heart! He had half a mind to string the bastard up, except the trees were far too runty for a body.
Oh, he could labor over it, he could prune and pluck and pray and call upon Pomona, but his schedule was full, and he couldn’t get any help these days, the new generation was far too lazy.
No, he hated to say it, but this situation called for…
And here he stopped, and looked about, and leaned toward her, his breath extraordinary, like earth, like mold, the forest floor itself.
And whispered: Chemical. Back in his day, a fellow didn’t need Chemical.
He and his girls had raised an orchard without a drop of Chemical.
But the world had changed, and there were times when the physician had to put scruples behind him to save the patient.
Paloma nodded.
Osgood winked.
Within minutes, he’d hauled out sloshing tubs of incandescent liquid.
All day he labored, brew and powder, and the next day after that, and long into the night, not stopping to eat, shirt soaked with Chemical and sweat.
He vanished the morning Andrei returned, with but seconds on the clock. As her husband made his slow way up the driveway, Paloma could still hear the distant rattling of the truck.
Andrei kissed her and headed up the hillside.
The garden was silent, the trees as they had always been, and that evening, looking out upon the gathering dark, waiting for Andrei to return to the house, Paloma wondered if the visitor was but a ghost, if she’d imagined everything.
—
But whatever he had done worked wonders.
The following spring, flowers bloomed on all the branches, and from them grew little apples and peaches and pears and cherries, which became bigger apples and peaches and pears and cherries, which Andrei watched in nervous, disbelieving wonder.
He almost canceled his summer trip to see his folks, but Paloma urged him to go.
Paloma, who by then had Osgood on speed dial, under a single cryptic “O.”
That fall, their eighth in Greensbury, the harvest was so bountiful that Andrei threw a party, inviting all their friends to come and take their fill.
It was as if the trees had been saving up for those long years.
There was cider making, and pie making, and apple bobbing.
And Paloma watched her husband walking through the orchard, lifting little children to take a pear, an apple, laughing, saying over and over, No, there is no need to wash, they are organic, eat as many as you like.
She watched her sons bobbing for apples with pretty girls from school, flirting, dipping their heads, the malathion dripping from their rosy cheeks and down their flushing necks.
She saw a group of fathers industriously at the cider maker, crushing each apple into a witch’s brew of acetamiprid and spinetoram.
Did she have any qualms? Of course she did.
But every treatment has a side effect. And she was also an astronomer, accustomed to the Big Picture, and in the Big Picture, a few weeks, a few months lost to a little indoxacarb, even a lot of indoxacarb, were nothing in the context of the billions of years needed for this moment, and the billions yet to come.