September Song Read Online Free PDF Page B

can’t blame you for selling out. You’ve got nobody to leave the place to and you’ll soon be too old to work it yourself anymore.” He had attained his age by eating apples enough each day to keep three doctors away.
    Who were those girls of his to say they didn’t want to be apple farmers? Neither had he “wanted” to be one. He was born one. He did not choose, he was chosen. He had not asked to be left-handed, green-eyed, red-headed either, but so he was. He had cut his teeth on apples. That was what it was to be a Bennett!
    He had put all three through college. He was not one of those who thought that higher education was not for women; on the contrary, he thought it was for women only—men were meant for practical affairs. How had he paid for their tuition? With McIntoshes, Cortlands, Macouns, Red Delicious, Greenings: so many crates per credit-hour. The fruit of knowledge. Apples for the teacher. The best schooling. Vassar College! The mistake of his life. How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Poughkeepsie?
    Why had the farmboys he exposed them to all been so backward? No boldness, no spunk in any of them. To get that dowry of ten thousand trees, bridal-like with blossoms in the spring, aglow with fruit in the fall, he would have seduced one of the farmer’s daughters, any one, hoping that she got caught and he be marched to the altar by her old man with a shotgun at his back, chortling to himself all the way up the aisle.
    Certainly none of those boys could have held back out of fear that the girl’s father found him unacceptable on closer inspection. He was prepared to overlook shortcomings. He encouraged them. He bucked them up when their hopes flagged. He kept them going by misleading them about their prospects. In fact, certain shortcomings he was looking for in his sons-in-law. It was doubly frustrating because the very backwardness—sometimes the none-too-brightness—that kept them from putting themselves forward was the attribute he sought. Broad backs and brawny arms were what they were to furnish—his girls would supply the brains. He wanted his daughters to wear the pants in their families. He wanted them to twist their husbands around their little fingers.
    His stock of daughters dwindling, he opposed Doris’s marriage more vigorously by far than he had opposed Ellen’s. Another non-farmer. An undertaker—“mortician” he preferred to be called. Somebody had to do it, of course. Nothing more essential. But what more thankless a job was there? How could she sleep at night knowing what thing lay on that marble slab in the basement workshop? How could she tolerate the touch of those hands of his knowing what they had been busy at earlier in the day? How could you raise your children in a charnel house, and how did other children look on yours? How could you bear to be always in the hush of mourning among grieving survivors dressed in black? Why not a doctor instead, somebody whose business it was to keep people alive? Or better still, an apple farmer, one whose job it was to keep the doctor away.
    So with two down and only one to go, he now had for sons-in-law one to put him under and another to get him a pass to that nursing home in the sky where you play bingo in eternity. The pair of them often teamed up on the same case. This thought would in time put into his mind a scheme. A way of ensuring that his third and last son-in-law be the orchardman he wanted. More specifically, Pete Jeffers, a man like himself, with cider, hard cider, in his veins.
    One man’s misfortune is another man’s fortune. He had sometimes been the beneficiary of that one-sided exchange, though always mindful that it might just as easily have been the other way round. Apple farming had its rewards but it was a risky business. It could drive you to desperation. It could drive you crazy.
    Some years ago a neighbor of his caught a