Beneath the Apple Leaves(100)

“I don’t need a Sunday school lesson, Mr. Morton,” Eveline hissed.

He laughed at this. “Don’t you find it interesting at least? Here is my sister-in-law named Lilith who refuses to obey me and runs off with my wife. Then you, dear Eve, come to me, offering your body. Doesn’t that strike you as fate?”

“My name is Eveline Kiser. Not Eve.”

He ignored her proclamation. “And you being tempted by my charms all along,” he went on. “Eve couldn’t wait to taste that apple.” He touched the red bite marks that lined his chest. “Eve couldn’t wait to bite that apple, eh?”

“Never believed much in the story,” she growled to the devil himself. “Always believed it wasn’t Eve who bit the apple. . . .” She paused and thought of Wilhelm hanging in the apple tree. “It was the apple who bit Eve.”

With that, she lunged for the deed, but Frank was quick and slid it from her reach. “I told you, we ain’t done yet.”

He touched her face almost lovingly, stroked her chin and her cheeks, reached up and petted her hair. And there his palm stopped and he pressed the top of her head, pushed her into a grave. She knew what he wanted, something she never did to her own husband.

“Kneel down, Eve.”

*

When Eveline Kiser left that tiny office, it was dark outside, dark inside. She was numb. Cold or heat could not have had an effect, did not exist against her skin. She had done things in that room that she didn’t know humans were capable of doing to each other. He had left her sore and wounded, depleted of anything human, made her feel more animal than woman.

She stumbled through the Morton kitchen and out to the lane and up to the street. The air came hard to her lungs and she was running, didn’t even know she was running until the stars blurred and the moon followed at a rapid pace above and to her right. She stopped and screamed. Screamed at the moon like a wounded wolf and she screamed until she fell to her knees in the road and melted into the rough gravel, let the tiny rocks press into her skin and she couldn’t feel them, couldn’t feel anything.

She pulled herself up. Her thighs shook with the stress of opening and widening. But she was not a victim. This in her soul she knew. She had done what she had not as a victim but as a soldier. What she had done was not sex but spite, a defiant dare against a man who had tried to ruin her family. And she had won. She had used him with her body, his own weakness against her strength.

But victim or not, she had nothing left now. Her substance gone. She had given it all away in battle and now lay wounded and half-dead. She had won, but she was too bloodied to know victory.

Eveline stumbled forward, the sword in her gut, taking one step at a time. Forward. She saw the lights of her farm and she ran again. She ran with legs that wobbled toward those lights and the safety and the warmth of what was real. There, in her home, she would wash and scald the remnants of that man and those memories from her mind. She would hold her children and tell them that all would be all right. She would tell her nephew that he would not have to go back to a life underground. But part of her feared that she would not be able to say any of those words, that she might collapse into what she had done. By walking into her house, she might soil it forever.

Eveline turned into the Kiser lane. Her property. Her home. Andrew and the boys were in the yard holding a lantern, shining the light to see the woman coming toward them. She tried to fix her hair, tried to hide the selling of her soul to the devil.

Edgar, her little boy, ran up to meet her. She smiled ruefully at her innocent child who was going to hug her. And she wanted him to embrace her more than anything else in her life. She opened her arms out to receive him.

Instead, he barreled toward her in a fury of fists. “Where have you been?” he shouted, and feebly punched her skirt. Tears streamed down his face. “We had no dinner. You didn’t tell anyone where you were!”

She froze and her jaw dropped at the boy’s anger. He cried out, “You only think of yourself! You don’t think about us anymore since Papa died!” He shook with anger. “You don’t care about any of us!”

Her blinking quickened and everything dropped away. She pulled back and with a thrust of iron backhanded her son clean across the cheek, sending him flying into the dirt.

“How dare you!” she attacked him blindly. She hit him with fists against the ground. “How dare you!” she screamed.

“That’s enough!” Andrew seized her arm, met her eyes hard so she heard him through her haze. “That’s enough, I said!”

She pulled her arm away, saw her child on the ground bruised and crying, and the world blurred. She ran to the house, stumbled over roots and rocks. Dying. Running. Death. Running. She went behind the log pile and grabbed the ax, the weight making her drag it rather than carry it. She pulled the ax and her broken body to the apple tree, swung hard and like a maniac at the trunk.

“How could you!” Eveline wailed, slammed the ax into the trunk again, splaying only a chip of bark. “How could you leave me!” She swung the ax, screamed at every futile hack at the ancient bark. “How could you do this to me!”

This tree had fed them with its septic apples, lured them with its bounty, then held her husband as his neck broke. This tree mocked her, shaded living limbs over her dead babies and husband. She had loved this tree and it had poisoned her. She was Eve. She was tempted and now fallen. But she would not fall alone.