Beneath the Apple Leaves(19)
Hope they got kids, she thought. Not enough little ones so close. The land along this stretch had aged along with the bodies that tilled it. Hearing kids laughing would be nice, almost as nice as sitting in this tree forever. Almost.
The bell rang a third time. She could feel her sister’s panic as if it were her own. She sighed and looked up, took in the bright red apples like stars in twilight. Lily Morton swiveled and kissed the wooden heart between the limbs before inching down slowly and making her way back home.
CHAPTER 14
The Tin Lizzie cramped with a family on the move. While farmers were leaving the fields for work in the steel mills and factories of Pittsburgh—an exodus from rural to urban—the Kisers wormed backwards, heading to a life in reverse. So, the Ford drove from the soot-squeezed city over paved and even roads and crossed the divide from town to country—barreled onwards over narrow lanes and rocky, brickless paths to their future.
The August morning seeped hot and hazy, so humid that the fabric of even the most diaphanous material clung to the skin and squeezed beads of sweat over foreheads, under arms and down the back. Wilhelm drove, his face hard. Eveline held her stomach with each bump, tried to keep the twins from being birthed en route. Andrew scrunched in the back, his long legs bent, while Edgar slept on his lap. Will sat next to him, his head bobbing against Andrew’s arm, the cotton shirt spotted wet with the boy’s drool.
The hot car crossed deeper into the land. Towns grew farther apart. Vegetation replaced humans. Black-and-white cows dotted the hills and the air grew thick with the smell of manure and animal hair and fur. Over the miles, the sky filtered out the gray and the blue expanded. Clouds, white as down, floated in bloated puffs. The body felt clean, perspired salted water instead of toxins. Even Wilhelm breathed in the air deeply through his nostrils. The poison of the city was leaving.
The Kisers passed farm after farm—white clapboard beauties with new, glimmering silos; red barns with chocolate brown mares milling about split-rail fences. There were older farms, too, built with limestone blocks and pure white mortar. Old plows scattered like rusty tombstones attesting to years of hard labor. But beyond the homes it was the land that called forth and welcomed in open expanse. The golden hay and wheat that rippled and waved. The green spears of corn that saluted the sky above. The waves of alfalfa and clover that blanketed the hills in undulating emerald silk.
By afternoon, they passed into Plum Township. They passed a covered bridge over Pucketa Creek, whose water would eventually join hands with the Allegheny River and from there merge with the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers, the outlines to the iconic Pittsburgh triangle. All seemed to flow to that great Pittsburgh—except for Wilhelm and his family, the man who flowed backwards with his family, against the current.
From the tiny Plum town, the roads narrowed, veined off from the main street and cut through a line of corn higher than the car on each side, forming an unroofed green tunnel. As they emerged from the maize, a white farmhouse stood to the left, neat and perfect among the zinnias that bordered the picket fence. Two spotted horses galloped in a ring behind the house. And so they drove on, passed a wooded grove of oaks and maples and ragged cedars leaning toward the road, tipping roots forward as if attempting to cross.
Wilhelm adjusted in the seat, his bottom sticking to the leather. He pulled out a map and glanced intermittently back at the winding road. “Should be the next one.” He folded the paper and pushed it aside, his knuckles gripping the wheel tight as his eyes danced between each side of the road.
“I see it!” Will pointed from the back open window. “Through the trees. I saw it!”
“Looks like we’re home.” Wilhelm’s voice mixed in equal parts of expectation and terror. They rose over another mound and the entrance to the lane came into view. A ragged, metal mailbox leaned forward as a head nods in slumber. They turned into the lane and as the front wheel landed in a deep hole the car jerked fiercely and stalled.
Wilhelm stepped out of the car and inspected the front wheel, the tire ripped with the jagged edge of the crevice. “Guess we’re walking from here.”
One by one, they stepped out of the car, stretched stooped muscles and inert legs. The lane was a disaster. One side deep and nearly washed out from years of hard rain and lack of use. To the right, a long creek sliced through the land—a jagged cut, twisting and rough, with sides of clumped weeds threatening to fall into the shallow stream.
“How could they have delivered our furniture?” Eveline asked.
Wilhelm pointed at the dip below and the wood slats covering the crevice. “Must have brought the wood along, laid it out inch by inch.”
They passed the makeshift bridge, then a line of trees before the homestead stretched ahead. But there were no squeals of delight, no sounds at all.
The wood-sided farmhouse tilted, the white paint long chipped away. The wrought-iron yard fence was covered in rust and large lines lay flat on the ground sinking into the soil. One shutter clung to the siding for dear life, a pathetic black rectangle hanging on the bottom window. The roof grew black and green with moss and mildew, the edge eaten away from hard weather and vegetation. A huge, unpruned apple tree stalked the yard, so majestic the expanse nearly eclipsed the house.
But as they looked at the old house—at the broken fence and cracked slate walkway, the worn brown barn and sheds, rusted old plows and scattered and unnamable mechanical pieces—one revelation stood out more than any other: There wasn’t a blade of grass in sight.