Trigger warning available at the bottom of the story.
He was whistling Dixie from here to home when he got flattened by Sadie’s truck and her trunkful of apples went skittering all over the place, sending children out into the street to take some of them for themselves. They filled their pockets with fruit like a grown man hadn’t just been killed in front of them, his blood already spreading like a too-early sunset on the pavement. The only adults around jogged over to him, staring down at the big, red place where his chest caved in. Where shrieking metal had gone in and blood had flooded out. He was already dead, was the thing. And there were children reaching around their legs to snatch up the apples, wiping blood off the shiny red skins even as their elders told them off and chased them back to the woods, to the porch, to all the places where children like to hide. It was only an hour later when old man Daniel said, “It’s horrible, watching children act like that. But that’s how you know they’re children. They’re resilient. They’ll eat those apples and grow strong.”
Daniel had pull, you have to understand. He was just about the oldest thing in town and he had just enough money to help you out if you needed helping out. John--the poor son of a bitch who bled out on Main Street--had lived in the well-kept brick house next door to him. The two of them had played cards together, most nights of the week. And when Georgia from two streets over said something sly and ugly about how often John invited kids over to his house, Daniel had given her a sharp look and reminded her that John didn’t have any children of his own, nor a wife to have them with. And when Calvin, the orchard man, pulled Daniel aside and said that he didn’t like how John was shifty on his feet and how no one knew who John had come from, Daniel told him that if he kept talking like that, he couldn’t expect a little neighborly help from Daniel if his yield was less than they’d hoped for this year. Or the year after that, for that matter.
Old Daniel had defended him up until one day, where he just didn’t. If you ask me, it was when the Collins girl got quiet, when she’d stopped belting out that horsey little laugh of hers. And wouldn’t you know it, Daniel’s house was smack dab between hers and John’s--that fresh-faced farmhand who just about everybody liked. He’d come to town ten years ago saying he was looking for honest work and a place for his heart to take root. But John never confided in me. That says things about him that no amount of talking could.
To be fair, in those years, Daniel didn’t confide in me, either. But he was a busy man, back then. Whenever John invited somebody’s niece out back to see how tall the woodpile had grown, Daniel would put a hand on that girl’s shoulder and make her sweep the front porch, no matter how scrunched and red her face got as she complained. Whenever John told a neighbor boy to come over to his house for honey toast and cashews, Daniel would tell that boy’s parents that he had a yard that needed raking and he’d pay by the hour for their boy to do it. John would invite that same boy over for iced tea the next week, and Daniel would suddenly have a leaky roof that his back wouldn’t let him climb up to fix. Then John would be getting desperate and promise that blue-eyed boy toys and turtle doves and six different kinds of treasures, and wouldn’t you know it, Daniel’s arthritis started acting up and he needed that kid to help him do his shopping, cooking, and just about everything else.
All that is just to say that the kids hated him. A mean old man. Always ruining their fun. The most uppity among them would call him a biggy big-nose, talk with a sideways look about how they’d heard Daniel’s mother hadn’t gone to church and how his father had beaten her for it.
It would be a lie to say that Daniel didn’t care about that. But the Collins girl had four sisters and not one of them had stopped laughing. They’d pass his house braying, tossing their weather-beaten hair as they ferried their quiet sister back and forth from church. Like a pack of wild horses, they were--always coming into my church like their mother hadn’t told them when and where to be quiet.
Calvin, though. He and his orchard were on the other side of town. So was his little girl, at the tender age of fifteen when she stopped driving their harvest into town and started locking herself away in her room, unable to look a man in the eye. Not even a preacher could get her to look him square in the eye, and believe me, I did try.
Sadie, the orchard man’s wife, started driving their truck into town instead. It was a big old truck, with that sharp point on the hood that all Chevys had in those days.
One way or another, just about everybody asked Sadie why her girl had changed like that, how she’d managed to hit a man in the middle of the street without seeing him, and if one had anything to do with the other. It didn’t matter if you were Sadie’s mother or the town preacher. She’d say, “I don’t know anything about it,” and she said it just like that, no matter how many times you asked. She was always a woman of few words, but now she was a woman of even less, between long, long sips of her own cider. The hardest of ciders, really. Bitter and crisp enough that almost nobody else liked it.
Daniel would look at her sometimes--the way her throat worked as she tried to swallow it, the way her eyes caught on the middle distance. And he knew she was still seeing it, just like him: little hands reaching to take those apples, despite death and justice and the fact that every single one of them had just eaten lunch. They took what they’d been promised and ran, in front of God and everybody. At least, that’s how Daniel put it to me when he finally told me the whole of it.
John had promised those children everything, and by God, that’s what he’d given up to have them. So of course they took it: all at once, without a drop of shame, and with no way to give it back. A little late, maybe, but it was theirs now, all the same.
Trigger warning: mention of child molestation.