WE BEGIN WITH APPLE trees. An orchard at harvest time: trees wild with growth, branches pushing into sky the color of oceans on classroom globes, blue like swimming pools and certain perfect crayons. I start up a ladder set against a tree—how else to reach the red circles of fruit? But I can go only so high. The bigger kids might catch glimpses of Lake Ontario climbing as they do. They might see past the lake and into Canada even, but I switch between the lowest rung and the ground, watching my brothers and sisters pick apples and return to earth in scurries and jumps. They call out for me to come and catch whatever shakes loose from the tree, laughing and talking, making claims over who has the most and everyone wins because you have never seen so much fruit and so many hands reaching for it.
It’s like a trip to the zoo, this place of tree and sky and my family scaling together the branches.
We have our good times, loading into the station wagon and driving to the Orleans County Fair. We travel to the center of town to see the parades down on Main Street, lining up on sidewalks, pressing our knees into Vs as we make seats of the curb, lifting our hands to direct the marching band, following the crash of tuba, cymbal, and snare. Once or twice a year our eyes go fat as moons as the majorettes pass, the flash of baton and the tap of shoes, the scrambling for candy tossed by beauty queens from flatbeds and slow-moving convertibles. We know about sparklers and the Fourth of July. We understand picnics and firecrackers and heat lightning, yes. There are birthday cakes and trick or treat and even Christmas morning, but nothing like this day: the air crisp and clean, the trees letting us into their crowns, the apples coming as they do, a shower of valentines falling into open hands.
The apple is the trickiest of fruits. It’s what did Eve in, they say. All that unbridled longing and the foolishness of allowing herself to be sweet-talked by a snake. She caved, and in doing so, became a sort of red fruit herself, maybe even a snake. Either way, Eve was emblematic as she wrapped her arms around Adam and became the source of his collapse. Snake. Eve. Adam. The order of wrongdoing. But what can be expected of a snake? What can be expected of a man, especially where a woman is concerned? So it was Eve, really, who shouldered the blame. Her shoulders were strong, at least, maybe as broad as Adam’s, for it’s said she was fashioned from one of his ribs. How odd to imagine woman made from man when everyone knows it’s the woman who bears fruit, the whole of her body bending to the task, ribs and elbows and knees working to support her growing belly. But the Bible gives us Eve with her long hair and borrowed rib resting a hand against the tree she’s already been considering as the snake winds round the trunk, all slippery skin and big talk.
I wonder if Eve came to regret it, the fruit. It’s implied, of course, because she saw right away her nakedness and covered herself with leaves. But hiding is shame, not sorrow, and what is fruit if not meant to be eaten? Where would the story be if they’d linked arms and walked right on by that glorious tree? So they fell. So they had to pack up and leave Paradise. But how much more they had to say to each other then, how much wider the world and how lasting the memory of the tree—during even the hardest of times, there would be the taste of it, brave upon their tongues.
I say to my sister when we’re older, Do you remember that time in Albion with the apple trees? I describe the lake, which I could not have seen so much as felt shimmering just beyond the orchard. Apple trees everywhere, I say, all of us reaching for fruit, the blue sky and perfect clouds. I see her as the dark-haired girl she was pushing into the branches, and think of the names of old-fashioned varieties (Winesap, Northern Spy, Queen of the Fall), swooning the way one does over long-gone days until she breaks in, You mean the time Ma signed us up to work as migrants?
We laugh then, because what else can you do when memory is cracked wide enough to include the reality of day labor? How different my sister’s recollection, how costly sometimes knowledge. Her account must be technically correct. There was never enough money. My mother did not fear hard work, enjoyed being outdoors, and would have thought it a wonderful opportunity, a day or two of picking together in the field. It’s possible someone shouted orders, saying, Come on now, the day’s half done, shooting dirty looks at my mother and her children hanging like monkeys from trees. Perhaps we were paid by the bushel. It’s likely, of course. But my impression does not catch up so quickly and the only green I remember is the press of leaves cloaking the shyest apples.
How fickle it is, memory—preferring some days to others, granting first a blue sky, offering next the sound of laughter, swelling our remembrances until a largeness seeps into the grain of things and memory itself becomes billowed and flapping. The way it renders its stories without the burden of fact. The fact is that even with so many children, there was no father to be found. The fact is that the lot of us must have looked so ragged we inspired pity in all who passed. The fact is that we were probably in the orchard as laborers. Those are facts but not the truth, which does not even speak the same language. My sister’s information adds a new layer to the scene—providing another lens through which to view the apple trees, explaining the circumstances of the day perhaps, widening the scope, to make us laugh and shake our heads as slivers of shame threaten to seep into the orchard—but making it does nothing to memory itself, which does not change, cannot change, and remains as it was to a girl too young to understand picking apples for anything other than pleasure.
Come now and let us return once again to the branches, close enough to see the child standing beside a ladder, a girl in old corduroys and flat red sneakers whose neck is sore from so much looking up as she races to catch falling fruit and tries hard to fill her basket.