By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, September 12, 1942.
“Just look at those apples on that tree,” exclaimed Jimmie Frise.
“They look like oranges,” I said.
We were sitting on Jim’s back steps in the twilight, feeling the September of it.
The apple tree in question was in the yard of the house abutting Jim’s yard and a low wire fence was all that stood between.
“H’m,” I mused. “I wonder what kind of apples they are? Spies?”
“No, they’re some queer kind of apple,” said Jim, “that tree dates back to the days when all this part of the city was suburban farms. I bet that tree is 50 years old.”
“Are they good eaters?” I inquired.
“To tell the truth,” declared Jim, “I don’t know. The bird that lives there is a queer one. He’s lived there ever since I’ve lived here. And do you know, I’ve never even spoken to him.”
“But heck,” I cried, “that little fence…”
“I know,” agreed Jim. “And I’ve been within four feet of him. In the spring, he’s been working in his garden on one side of the fence and I’ve been working on my side; we could hear each other breathing and grunting. But we have never so much as said hello.”
“Look here,” I said, “that’s not normal.”
“Sure it isn’t,” agreed Jim. “But right from the start, any time I was in my garden he walked out of his. If we happened to meet near the fence, he looked away and didn’t meet my glance. After the first few times, it became a sort of game, a sort of rule. Maybe he was as ready to speak to me as I was to him, at the start. But after a while, it became a sort of convention, an unspoken agreement.”
“What nonsense.” I protested, looking intently at those rich, red apples all so healthily clinging in the tree.
“Oh, I don’t know. I kind of like it,” said Jim. “Life is usually so commonplace. It’s nice to have an oddity like that in it.”
“Is he shy?” I inquired. “Or crusty?”
“No. I’ve often heard him joking and laughing with the neighbors on either side,” said Jim. “I know them well. We even exchange garden tools. And he’s quite chummy with my two neighbors on either side. But it just so happens, we started queer and we’re still queer. And I kind of like it. I’d be sorry to lose this situation now. And I bet he would too.”
“I suppose we should cultivate a little mystery in our human relationships.” I confessed. “Life shouldn’t be one great big Rotary club.”
“That’s it,” agreed Jim. “Every city block should have at least one haunted house.”
“Don’t those apples ever roll into your garden?” I asked.
“You’d think at least one would have, in 12 years,” said Jim. “Once I caught my boy with one of them when he was little. I made him take and throw it back over the fence.”
“So you don’t even know whether they eat good or not?” I insisted.
“I think they do,” stated Jim. “Because he takes the greatest care of them. They are some old-fashioned apple, popular 50 years or more ago but out of fashion now. That’s the trouble with apples. Certain popular kinds got a grip on the farmers, and because it takes so long for an orchard to get established, the farmers all went for the few profitable brands, spies, St. Lawrence, greenings, shows and so on. But I’ve heard my grandma telling of many a strange and beautiful apple you never hear of now – the Duchess of Oldenburg…”
“Wouldn’t that be the apple we call the Duchess now?” I asked.
“Ah, maybe,” cried Jim. “But it doesn’t taste like the Duchess of Oldenburg my grandma talked about, slightly tart to the tongue. The tallow apple, the wine apple, the pinnock … boy. I remember them; the swaar and the Vandevere, the Talman sweet and the Newton Pippin.”
“Some of those you can get today,” I declared.
“Ah,” said Jim, but they were better the way my grandma knew them.”
“Apples,” I pointed out, “were a greater delicacy in your grandma’s day than they are now. In her day, there were no soda fountains, no coke, no chocolate bars. There were no fruit stores, winter and summer, making the streets of the towns beautiful. Life was pretty drab until September when the harvest was in and life was brightened up with the orange of pumpkins and the green of squash, and the glossy brilliance of apples, September was a far greater month in the life of the world, 50 years ago, than it is now. It was the month of color, of brilliance, of great heaps of fruit and vegetables. It was the gala month, lovelier far than May or June with their pretty flowers. But nowadays, we have colored up our world so that every month is as gala as September. Even February is a is a blaze of color, with our bright and noisy homes, our resplendent shop windows, our night streets ablaze with red and green and golden lights and signs. The apple was one of the things that lived on past September into the bleak world of February. Apples in a dish on the table, in February, were a spot of color long after even the memory of flowers had faded.”
“They still taste good,” sighed Jim.
“But in your grandma’s day,” I recollected, “except for a few jars of raspberry vinegar and maybe some cider in the fruit cellar, apples were the delicacy which fulfilled the craving that is now met with soft drinks, candy bars, sodas, sundaes…”
“Mmmm,” said Jim, staring either into space or at those apples hanging in the twilight like little moons. “Can you imagine kids preferring a sticky sundae to a lovely, fragrant, spicy, crisp apple!”
“Life,” I submitted, “consists largely of thinking up something to sell. What will appeal to our grandchildren will probably be as queer to us as ice cream sundaes or coke would appear to your apple-eating grandma when she was a girl.”
“The bins,” muttered Jimmie. “Down in the front cellar. Not a bright, hard cellar like ours today, but a dim, dusky soft, mysterious. strange-smelling cellar. And at one end, great sloping bins, each holding about a barrel of apples, with slats to take out as you used up the apples. And every week, somebody had to go down and sort the bins over to make sure there were none spoiling, to start them all spoiling. And when you opened the door leading into, this front cellar, the perfume of the apples would nearly sweep you off your feet.”
“This fall,” I declared, “with sugar rationed and a lot of other delicacies likely to go short, every family ought to lay in a couple of barrels of apples.”
Temptation’s Ugly Head
Something went thud in the dusk and Jimmie and I both leaped up and walked to the foot of the yard, examining the ground eagerly.
But when we reached the fence, there it was, a good ten feet on the other side; a great, dim red apple, lying on the ground under the tree.
The house was in complete darkness. In the neighboring yards, nobody was to be seen. I leaned on the low fence, resting my elbows across into the next yard. It was like feeling the water with your toes before going in swimming.
“Maybe,” said Jim, “if we went for a drive along some of the secondary highways, we could find some of these same apples. I’d love to know what they taste like.”
“I … ah…” I said.
But Jimmie turned on his heel and walked back to the steps.
“Nothing,” he said sternly, “doing!”
Another thud.
We held our breath.
One, two, three thuds!
Jim was leaning forward, peering into the dark.
“Boys,” he breathed. “It’s kids robbing the tree.”
We rose and crouched. We crept, as only boys bent on apple stealing can creep, along the hedge of Jim’s garden, and in its deep shadow paused and listened.
From this vantage we could now distinctly hear the scrape and swish of boughs being shaken and the thud of many apples falling.
“Hey,” came a raspy whisper of a boy’s voice. “Hey!” That’s enough for now. Come down and help fill the basket.”
“Okay,” came another harsh whisper from up the tree.
But Jim took a short run and a leap and cleared the fence and I came after him a little less athletically, and we grabbed and swung around in the dark, trying to catch the villains.
But they had vanished as if they had never been there.
We stood, listening. Not a sound. Not even a scurrying of feet.
“What a shame,” said Jim, lighting a match. “They’ve shaken down dozens.”
There was an empty basket on the ground and Jim picked it up.
“We’d better pick them up,” he suggested, “and put the basket oh his back steps. It don’t do them any good to lie here on the ground all night.”
“That’s the idea,” I said, as the match went out, and I reached down and felt around until my hand encountered a dandy.
“Mmmm,” I said. “They smell glorious. Spicy”
“Put it in here,” said Jim sharply coming over with the basket.
“I was just smelling it,” I informed him.
And I placed it in the basket and reached for another. But Jim stayed right beside me, almost touching me, so that the two of us picked up apples with no chance of
any little accidents that might occur.
“Oh, boy,” I said. “Feel this one, Jim. Here’s a dandy.”
“It’s as big as a northern spy,” said Jim passing his hand affectionately around the waxy beauty.
“I bet you,” I said, “this apple may be one of those kinds your grandma used to tell about. What were they?”
“Duchess of Oldenburg.” recited Jim quietly, in the dark. The pinnock, the tallow apple, the Vandevere and the swaar.”
“Jim,” I tempted huskily, “maybe this is a swaar.”
And at that instant a blaze of blinding light cut through the night and held us.
“Aha,” said a bitter voice from the invisible region back of the light. “Ahaaaaaa!”
“Who’s that?” demanded Jim with dignity.
“Who do you think it is?” retorted the hostile voice.
“Look,” said Jim, laying the basket down, “my friend and I were sitting on my back steps when he heard sounds…”
“You didn’t hear me,” retorted the voice grimly, and from the dazzle slowly approached the owner of the house, with a flashlight in one hand and a golf club in the other.
“I beg your pardon,” said Jim stiffly. “We heard sounds in your yard. We determined that it was a gang of boys robbing your apple tree. We saw your house was in darkness…”
“Indeed,” murmured the neighbor.
“We came down to chase them away,” went on Jim thickly, “and we saw they had shaken down a large number of apples and left a basket. So we thought we would gather them up and put them on your back step rather than leave them on the ground…”
“Gentlemen,” said the neighbor doggedly “when I drove up in front of my house I caught a glimpse of a match being it in this yard. I saw no boys running out of my drive or anywhere else. I go in the house and get a club. I come out and I hear you talking excitedly and quietly together. You were naming apples, old-fashioned apples, in the voice of apple addicts. Nobody knows the names of those old apples except people who…”
He paused.
Apple Addicts
“People who what?” I demanded indignantly. “We are both very fond of apples. That is why we took the trouble to try to protect yours.”
“I’m sorry if I have made a mistake,” said the neighbor simply.
“Skip it,” said Jim stiffly.
“Look,” said the neighbor, turning the flashlight on the basket, “gentlemen try one of these. Have a bite.”
“No, thanks,” declared Jim firmly, starting for the fence.
“Please,” cried the neighbor eagerly. I want you to taste one of them, just to prove I believe you entirely. Here, please try them.”
And he handed me the big one I had been holding, and gave Jim another beauty.
The man seemed so earnest, I obliged him. I bit widely into the fat red shoulder of the apple.
One chew and I spat it out. It puckered my mouth up. It tasted like a crabapple that had been improved by the Nazis.
“What on earth kind of apple is that?” I demanded.
“I’ve no idea,” said the neighbor eagerly. “It was some experiment, maybe, of some pioneer. It’s awful, isn’t it?”
But why do you guard them so?” I inquired.
“It’s a funny thing,” confessed the neighbor “But a man will guard his apple tree even if the apples aren’t fit for hogs.”
“Well…?” said Jim, over in the dark by the fence.
“Well good-night,” I said.
“Good-night, gentlemen; thanks all the same,” said the neighbor.
And Jim and I swung over the fence and up to his back steps, where we sat down listen to September’s crickets until the 10 o’clock news.
Editor’s Note: I have a low-res copy of the artwork that I have included below.
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