As True Bliss lay in her bed on the morning of the eve of her one hundredth birthday, the thought that circled her mind, in the applesauce eddy of her mind, the first chunk in the applesauce eddy that her mind could sink its teeth into was please don’t let this day be my last day on earth. She had not slept well in the night, nor had she slept well on the one before this, and worse was her sleep on the one before that. It had been too long since she could remember nights of sleeping well, or sleeping some or sleeping at all, and last night’s not sleeping well was a subject she couldn’t put to rest, and it lay in her ample bed with her and took up space along with her hopes of another day. It was the last clear thought she was to entertain.
She drowsed in that bed that was more bed than she’d needed for years, the bed that grew larger over the years as her already small self lost its roundness and tautness and collapsed into a pool of slack skin that had no will of its own. She had long ago gotten used to the affront of nature taking back from her the size it had only loaned, but to lie in a bed that seemed to grow in its mockery of her predicament as she withered and diminished was downright small-minded. Petty for petty, she wished this waking nightmare on only those most like her. She spit up a little apple seed of a laugh at the thought, for ever since she could remember she had once or twice a week wished it on all three of the Lope triplets, those diminutive demon spawns born in the winter of the year of no summer, whose lungs could suck a day of its life and whose nocturnal screams from infancy on up had deprived the whole town of truly deep sleep since they were pushed up from hell all those years ago. Even long after the passings of Onesie Lope and Twosie Lope in their sixty-seventh and seventy-ninth years respectively, True harbored feelings of ill will and worse sleep on their surviving sibling, Threesie, True’s favorite if she had to choose, for it was Threesie’s screams most searing of all that pierced eardrums and shattered canning jars throughout the valley and on some nights could make a full moon run for cover. Even though the earth swallowed Threesie’s lone screams some years ago, to True their echo is a living thing strong enough to make a night of it still. She stared from the coddled milk pools of her eyes at the fading night sky above her bed that so reminded her of the paint-flecked ceiling of her bedroom, and if she could only have ten pure minutes, minutes free of Threesie’s screams, ten minutes of uninterrupted, mindless, wakeless night, she’d let her heart wander through a century of days and run it to pasture like so many sheep.
Lore has it that back when New Eden was to apples as its namesake was to hanky-panky, every family for sixty-nine square miles was as cross-pollinated as the town’s prized Granny-Macs. True Bliss’s mother, her name was Cozy, and her father, his name was Remedial, the last of the Remedials, were second cousins from two withering branches of the Bliss family tree; kin whose brief, and to all accounts, indifferent acquaintance prior to marriage never really warmed above freezing. Family and town lore has it, it took six long winters and one slow-to-start spring before Cozy and Remedial Bliss did what married cousins do in private. Everyone in New Eden was good about keeping their hush up when it came to the indifferent relations in the Bliss house, the big white house with the twelve prized apple trees all in a row, True’s house. But come spring in its entirety, when the first of the blossoms on the apple trees beyond the barn began to show and Cozy did, too, there wasn’t a set of eleven fingers in town that couldn’t count to six and a half years without pointing and laughing.
Neighbor ladies clucked as neighbor ladies will, sitting on the front porch with Cozy as she swelled through the summer and into the high corn. Down river a drop, out on the bank back of the New Eden Grangery, chuckles and snorts breezed with the blackflies as the menfolk blinked daylight over a passing jug of hard cider, nattering their own buzz about Remedial and his best friend Bull Engersol. Nothing that Remedial ever started was ever finished without Bull’s help, and there were sniggers galore that that went as much for husbanding as hoeing. Between generous swigs and hearty knee-slaps, their neck fat quivering like virgins, they’d say, Sumpin’ got remedial with Cozy, but it wudn’t Remedial. You ask me, Bull rode that cow to calf.
August stretched as far as the eye can see and then some, the apples on the trees beyond the barn grew fat and arrogant, and lore will out that it was ten days into September, a Sabbath date, that Remedial Bliss took his jug and some foolishness out to Grunts Pond and likely drowned there. Cozy’s confinement began to near its end on that very same afternoon and with the moon fully dunked in all that heavenly blackness she gave birth the following dawn to the cousins’ only child, grafted like their prized trees to standard rootstock and grown true, the daughter she named without spit from her husband. Grafting and widowhood agreed with Cozy. She wanted her daughter’s name to reflect that. So she named her True. True Bliss.
In her lifetime True had skipped to her Lou with sparklers in a sulfur haze and danced a maypole with boots laced high. She tended fevers and blisters and wounds and welts, she drank her applejack neat and ate her chervil raw, and as a girl with no concern for womanhood beyond her youth, saw relations of any amorous kind as nothing more than pennies and pins in a drawer full of nonsense. In dust heaps and scrap piles and corncribs, she trembled for mankind and her own kind over the terrible natures that the unkind unleash. She knew her multiplication tables before she learned the difference between boys and girls and what it could add up to. She could spin a cartwheel like no one’s business. She could fart a skunk. With her eyes closed she could hoe a row straight to an eighth of an inch, she could clean a gun, she could bone a fish, she could thread cornsilk through a bent needle’s eye. For as many years as she has been mistress of her own home, which is more than even she can remember, she has kept the Good Book in her front parlor; it makes a righteous doorstop. True hated her absent father, but in time forgave him his trespasses. In time she came to hate her mother more, and begrudged her her trespasses for all eternity for sending away the only boy True might have loved. Only nature earns True’s glory, and to her the only thing worthy of psalms is the sound September makes when autumn breezes the trees.
Two things known in this world are two rounds of ammunition you don’t want aimed at her for fear of retribution: one is jack-in-the-pulpits and the other is pink velvet ribbons.
True was the firstborn of the last of us all, and at last, the eldest elder we had; she was the elder every younger has always looked to for guidance. She slowed a bit in her sixties as the world sped upward, and ached in her seventies as it moved onward and away, she rusted in her eighties as it moved past her and beyond, and although she never could curse worth a darn, she bitched and pained and moaned and mourned through the seeming endlessness of her nineties till now, and here she is on the cusp of a suddenly-too-soon-century wanting to mark the occasion with the dawn of one more day. Beyond this, she’ll stop herself from thinking. She has one more night ahead in which to not sleep well, and all of eternity to catch up. Well she knows that for all its length and furor, life is as brief as a breath when compared to forever.