September Song Read Online Free PDF

of her children and struggling to raise them on her own. His charges numbered somewhere around ten thousand.
    He told the preacher the old story of Farmer Brown. How, after being wiped out repeatedly by all the afflictions of Job, Farmer Brown raised his eyes to heaven and asked, “Dear God, what have I done to deserve this?” “Farmer Brown,” said God, “you don’t have to ‘do’ anything. There’s just something about you that pisses me off.” He himself was surely one of God’s chosen, for those whom He loved He scourged and chastened. He was a Bennett, one of the spawn of the original apple vendor. God had borne a grudge against that forbidden fruit ever since Eve.
    He paused in his shaving for a moment to think about that ancestress of his. The first woman! The original! What a woman that one must have been! What a prize! In the fall of the mother of them all all would fall. A temptation … Furs? Jewels? The lure of a tropical cruise? There where the timeless fashions were the design of the Master and any ornament a detraction from the female form divine? A vacation from Paradise? Another, more attractive man? There was no other man, nor could one ever again be so attractive. Hers was the mold, and castings from it could only approximate the original. Something to tempt her to transgress against her Maker’s one prohibition …
    Something good to eat. Something never before eaten. And so she could not know whether it was good to eat or not. But she could tell just by looking. A thing mouth-watering enough to entice her to disobey the command of the Almighty and risk bringing down upon herself His wrath. There in that Garden of Earthly Delights were all the sweets: pomegranates and peaches and plums, figs, grapes, mangoes—everything to be found in your local supermarket flown in from all over the world, only tree-ripened: cactus pears, pineapples, bananas. But to tempt the original sinner to commit the original sin Satan picked from among the produce the one irresistible one. None of your kiwis nor your passion fruit. And Adam, well aware of what he was up to, and what he was incurring, not even chewing but trying to swallow it down whole. It was for having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that the first couple were expelled from their garden, before they could find their way to the tree of life everlasting. Well, life everlasting they may have lost by eating that apple, but what fruit, one a day, kept the doctor away? Not prunes, friend.
    And now God’s latest prank upon His servant Seth: a preacher for a son-in-law.
    Ellen revealed a willfulness that he would sooner have expected of either of her sisters. That lifelong docility and dutifulness of hers seemed to have been building up like water behind a dam. It now burst. It almost made him change his mind about her and press his opposition to the marriage harder. Perhaps she had in her more of the grit of which farmwives were made than he had given her credit for. But orchardmen were getting scarce hereabouts. It was unrealistic of him to hope any longer to find one for all three girls. Let Ellen have her preacher. The blessing he gave her was grudging, but he gave it. Write her off as the wild card in the deck; he had two more to deal.
    He lowered the razor and peered at his face in the mirror searching in vain for a likeness between himself and his off-spring. Those stepdaughters of Eve, his daughters, they none of them cared for apples. Bennetts—and they didn’t care for apples! Doris, the “in-between one,” as she called herself, wouldn’t touch one. Said she knew too well what work and worry had gone into it. Said that for her the sight of her poor mother, her old knees ruined long ago from kneeling to sort them, put a worm in each and every one. As for him, well, never mind how old he was but he was old—people told him so to his face: “I