Sweet Hush Page 2

  As a child, I became determined to make people taste us, again.

  THE FIRST ELEVEN YEARS of my life, before Daddy died, were perfect. Mama sang as she worked in the orchards beside him, Daddy was always cheerful, or at least seemed that way. And I was their apple princess, the fifth Hush McGillen of Sweet Hush Hollow, the prettiest place on the face of the earth. It bloomed in the spring, ripened like a womb in the summer, fed our souls in the fall, and slept in the kindest dreams of sanctuary all through the cold winters.

  McGillen orchards paraded across the broad creek valley and up the feet of Chocinaw, Ataluck, and Big Jaw Mountains, covering terraces built by generations of backbreaking McGillen labor. We had a saying in the family: True Sweet Hush Apples can only be grown by God and McGillens. There was something dark and rich and haunted in our soil, the old folks whispered.

  “That kind of earth always produces the most satisfying fruit,” Daddy said.

  I had no idea we were poor, and I had not yet begun to understand what our relatives meant when they mourned the last evidence of our family’s grand past—the monogrammed silver pitcher Daddy polished lovingly and displayed atop an old pine table. There was a time, I heard old aunts say, when our family didn’t have to sell off its fine heirlooms.

  As far as I was concerned, all the fine heirlooms were still with us. They grew in splendid, blooming beauty around me on our hillsides and were recorded in the dusty agricultural texts in the living room’s simple oak bookcase. On the living room wall, in a place of glory above our sag-backed plaid couch, hung the one, the only framed piece of fine art in our home: A 1909 botanical rendering, in full color, of a Sweet Hush apple.

  “It was first published in the big federal agricultural references of the time,” Daddy explained, telling the story repeatedly to me when I was a child, as if it were a bedtime story or a favorite ghost tale. I loved the look of pride on his face when he spoke of our former grandeur. “A pair of men were sent here from Washington. They sat in the orchards with the whole family watching as one painted a perfect specimen of a Sweet Hush apple and the other one studied dozens of apples and made notes.”

  Then Daddy would open our very own aged copy of the resulting glorious government tome and read the men’s conclusions solemnly, as if reciting from the Bible: “The ripe Sweet Hush fruit is deep red in color, bordering on burgundy; the fruit is uniform and round in shape, of medium size; the stem is thick and long in an acute, blackish, unlipped cavity; the basin large and shallow, unfurrowed; the flesh extra crisp and very white. The apple ripens from September to December; it stores well over winter, and holds its flavor in cooking.” Daddy always paused at that point, gathered his breath, then recited the most important part of all in a deep, profound drawl. “The taste is like pure fresh honey mixed with the finest cane sugar. There is no acidic aftertaste in a Sweet Hush. Every bite seems to melt on the tongue. A truly spectacular apple.”

  Truly spectacular. Imagine. Government men using superlatives like that, without being bribed.

  Mama, being a small part Cherokee, would stand beside Daddy and offer her Cherokee grandmother’s advice. “The Sweet Hush is the best apple for what ails you, Granny Halfacre said. Because sweet apples settle the stomach and clean the intestines and soothe the heart.” Years later I would think back on those words with a certain wry sorrow. Surviving as an apple farmer did, indeed, take heart, guts, and a strong stomach.

  But as a child all that mattered to me was the miracle of our association with one of God’s finer gifts, which, by no small measure of pride, was my namesake.

  “My own little prize apple,” Daddy called me. “Just like your mother.”

  I had Mama’s angular face and long, knob-tipped nose, her wide, down-turned mouth and Cherokee cheekbones, but Daddy’s strong chin and deep green eyes. No hair-cut or perm ever kept my rust-brown hair from shagging around my face like a horse’s forelock. People never said I was beautiful, but they always said I was a looker. But then, so is an albino calf. Daddy said I had green-apple eyes. I turned a raw, unripened stare on the world outside Chocinaw County, daring that world to take a bite out of my happy, hardy self.

  Until finally, it did.

  AT THE START of apple season in 1974, while Mama was at her backbreaking job waiting tables at the Dalyrimple Diner, I poured cider from the silver pitcher onto the gnarled roots of the first Sweet Hush tree and cried until I thought my head would burst. Daddy had died while working in the orchards the summer before with Mama holding his head while I ran for help, and I would never stop missing him. I was only twelve years old, and still so in love with my own daddy that the world began and ended with his passing. “You’ll own the Hollow one day,” he’d told me not long before he died. “I know you’ll make it proud of you. You’re the fifth Hush McGillen. Don’t ever forget that.”

  I had to do something, or the farm would be lost. The fame and fortune of the old days were no more than a moldering Studebaker in the main barn and the remnants of the silver service we’d had to sell. I understood, now.

  All we had left were our apples.

  I lugged two empty bushel baskets, a plank, a handful of paper sacks, a cardboard box full of freshly-picked Sweet Hushes, and my baby brother Logan through the orchards and up the long dirt lane from the farmhouse to McGillen Orchards Road. I set up my homemade table and stood beside it holding a big sign I’d made on a square of cardboard using red house paint.

  THE ONE, THE ONLY

  REAL SWEET HUSH APPLE

  NO WORMS

  NO ROTTEN SPOTS

  55 CENTS A BAG

  2 BAGS FOR ONE DOLLAR

  I had noticed that people from Atlanta had started driving through the Hollow. They’d come up the new spur off the interstate then turn right on the state route, meandering through the mountains to look at the scenery before heading home to their subdivisions and shopping centers. I had been counting the number of Atlanta station wagons that parked every Saturday and Sunday in the tall Joe Pye Weed near our weathered mailbox. People got out and took pictures of our farm. I walked up to the paved road once and looked back at the Hollow to see what intrigued them. I saw the broad valley filled with rows of apple trees, the round mountains rising behind them, and the pretty rooves of our farmhouse and barns peeking from a grove of huge beech trees on a shady knoll. All I saw was home, but I loved it dearly.

  If I wanted to keep it, I had to make it pay like it had in the old days.

  Within thirty minutes, I got my first customer. I’ve never forgotten her—an old, silver-haired Atlanta lady driving her sisters through apple country in a Cadillac with a fading Nixon For President bumper sticker. “Why are these the ‘real’ Sweet Hush Apples, honey?” she asked, smiling.

  “Because, Ma’am, ours are the only Sweet Hush apples in Chocinaw County that are grown over the bones of about a hundred Yankee soldiers.” I made a dramatic gesture toward the orchards. “Who were killed by Rebs on the back side of our Hollow during the Battle of Dalyrimple, in 1863.” I paused for effect. “My Great Great Great Grandmother Hush McGillen The First said apple trees don’t mind the dead. So she planted her first trees right over the dead soldiers’ graves. And ever since, Sweet Hush Hollow has grown the best apples anywhere. Because bones are roots and roots are bones. That’s what my mama says, and her mama was part Cherokee Indian, and you know that Indians know the spirits of the earth. What they say is true.” I took a deep breath. “That’ll be a dollar for two bags of apples, please. And a quarter if you want to take any pictures.”

  The old lady and her sisters laughed and bought my whole box of apples. “I’d pay just to hear you tell tall tales,” she said. She touched my red-brown hair. It was long and impossibly wavy, and I’d bound it up with a string from my overalls’ pocket. “You look like you were grown from the earth inside a farm-fairy’s ring. You stay this pretty and this lively
in using your imagination, and people will buy apples from you right and left.”

  After she drove off, I put Logan in a wheelbarrow and pushed him back up the farm lane to get more apples, frowning and chewing my tongue as I went. “Logan,” I said, “People will buy apples if you throw in a story they can take home with ‘em.” From then on I would relate the gloriously weird story of the Civil War dead beneath our orchard’s heart to everyone who stopped. It sold apples.

  Two hours later I’d moved forty bags of Sweet Hushes and collected somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty dollars. I pulled the bills out of my jeans’ pockets at every opportunity to count it with trembling fingers. In 1974, it was a fortune.

  I heard a motorcycle and looked up the paved road between the deep trees and rhododendrons. Davy Thackery cruised over a knoll. His sister, Mary May “Smooch” Thackery, hung on behind him, her dark-brown Thackery curls waving like mad in the wind. Some families never quite catch the brass ring of respectability. The Thackerys were that kind, though most of them had sweet, placid natures and worked hard to stay middle class. They were known—and to tell the truth, revered by many—for their legacy of illegal liquor and their wild talent with fast mountain cars. After all, professional stockcar racing had its roots in the Southern back roads of the 1940’s and 50’s, when bootleggers in souped-up sedans packed with whiskey outran government agents. Thackerys were a Chocinaw County legend in that regard. No Thackery had ever been caught in those old days—alive, at least—by the revenuers up on Chocinaw Mountain.

  Davy grinned at me under his own set of girly Thackery curls, and my heart beat faster. He was only thirteen, a year older than me, tall and lanky and quick to punch anyone who bothered him. But his eyes were sweet and blue whenever he looked at me, and I was desperate to love and be loved by a new fellow, now that my father was gone. Davy’s daddy had died young, too, racing stockcars on the Southern dirt tracks, and then his mother deserted him and Smooch. Smooch had turned eager-to-please and needy. Davy had turned reckless and angry. They were being raised by a sickly grandmother in town. She couldn’t control Davy. But I could. I thought.

  “Hey, Beautiful,” Davy said jauntily. “What crazy thing are you up to now?”

  I blushed. Beautiful. His bullshit was my one weakness. “That’s Mr. Jetters’ motorcycle, you thief.”

  “The dumb old bastard won’t miss it for at least an hour.”

  Smooch hopped off worriedly. “You said he let you borrow it!”

  He chucked her under the chin. “Well, Sis, I lied.” Davy sat sideways on the cycle’s leather seat, surveying my ramshackle baskets and boxes. “Your mama sent us out here to see what’s goin’ on. Somebody told her you’re sellin’ apples like a gypsy. She’s afraid you’ll get run over or knocked in the head. I told her I’d take care of you.”

  I pulled out my wad of bills. “I believe I’m doin’ just fine, thankyaverymuch.”

  Smooch gaped at me. Her eyes gleamed. “Oh, I wish I were rich, too.”

  “Mama can buy a lot of groceries with this money.”

  Smooch picked up my cardboard sign and studied it. “I’d leave off the part about the worms and the rotten spot. That only gives people bad thoughts.”

  “I’ll re-do the sign, later.”

  “Let me, oh, let me! I want to help, please, please! I’ll make you a new sign with fancy curlicues on the corners.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Smooch had a talent for drawing, plus she spent a lot of her time figuring out what people wanted to hear. I felt sorry for her, and I could use her public relations advice. I looked at her and Davy. “If y’all help me sell apples to the folks from Atlanta, I’ll give you two dollars each for the whole day.”

  “I’m hired!” Smooch said.

  But Davy only looked down at me with his troublemaking, sky-blue eyes. “I’ll help out just because you asked me. But I’m not gonna kiss anybody’s ass from Atlanta. They’re all Jews and niggers and snotty rich shits.”

  This was the kind of moment in which smart girls turn stupid and blind. I should have gotten in his face and read him my personal riot act. I should have recognized that there was too much anger in his view of the world, but I was already in love with him, so I let it go. But I knew: Words mattered. Ideas mattered. Reputation mattered. My mother was one-fourth Indian and I’d heard people call her names and say Daddy shouldn’t have married her. Even my own Uncle Aaron and his damned kids. My own cousins. “Would you let people call me nasty names like you use?” I asked Davy somberly.

  He bristled. “Anybody calls you a nasty name where I can hear, I’ll kick his ass.”

  “Then please, please Davy—” I smiled—“You’re such a fine person. Don’t talk that way yourself. Promise me.”

  “All right, all right. If you don’t like it, I won’t say it.”

  “Good.”

  “Not where you can hear, anyway.”

  I bristled and almost said something back, but then a yellow Volkswagen van came up the road. “Look friendly,” I ordered.

  Smooch, Davy and I lounged by the roadside. Smooch waved, and I held up my sign. The Volkswagen stopped. A man got out carrying a pair of cameras with long lenses. “Man, oh man, this is the most beautiful place in the mountains,” he said. “It’s really got the whole back-to-nature thing going for it. Garden of Eden. I can feel the chi, you know. The good energy. Wow.” His lip sported a mustache, and he wore his hair in long sideburns. We gaped at him. Men in Chocinaw County religiously shaved their faces and kept their hair in god-fearing crewcuts.

  “That man’s a hippie,” Smooch whispered.

  “That man’s a customer,” I countered.

  Davy stepped ahead of Smooch and me, balling up his fists. I dodged in front of him, holding up my sign. “Sir, welcome to Sweet Hush Farm. Parking’s free if you buy apples, but if you’re just here to take pictures, it’ll cost you a quarter.”

  “That’s a deal, gorgeous.” Grinning, he handed over the quarter, and I pocketed it. “So can I take a picture with you in it?”

  “Hell, no,” Davy said.

  “It’s for the newspaper in Atlanta.”

  “The big one?” I asked.

  “That’s right. I’m a photographer.”

  “This’ll sell apples,” Smooch said in my ear.

  I nodded fervently. “Yessir, I’ll be in your picture, but only if my friends can be in it, too.”

  Smooch squealed with delight. Davy scowled until I linked my arm through his. I held the sign up with my free hand, but Smooch took it from me. “I’ll hold the sign, and you hold up the cash,” she whispered.

  “Good idea.” I plucked the wad of bills from my jeans and raised it high.

  The hippie photographer laughed and began snapping photos.

  That Sunday, thousands of people saw our color photograph on the front page of the Atlanta newspapers’ Dixie Living section. I didn’t tell Ma about the photographer. In Chocinaw County, good girls didn’t talk to hippies.

  People gathered at the diner after church, bringing their Dixie Living sections with them. Ma was working the lunch crowd and hadn’t caught on, yet. Davy, Smooch and I loitered in the kitchen and exchanged worried looks. People didn’t get their pictures in the Atlanta papers unless they were wicked or in politics, or both.

  “Doris Settee McGillen, look here, are you deaf, dumb and blind?” a customer said to Ma. The woman held up the paper, laughing. “Your daughter has been consorting with the great wide world without telling you. What goes through that child’s mind?”

  Ma stopped in the middle of the restaurant, her lean arms full of dirty plates, her blue polyester waitress uniform speckled with cream gravy, her long braid of brown-black hair bobbing as she ducked her head and stared at my picture in the state’s biggest newspaper. She read the words below it, mouthing them silen
tly. Life is sweet for ‘Sweet Hush’ McGillen and her roadside apple business. Ma looked stunned.

  “I’m up shit creek,” I whispered. Smooch moaned.

  Davy put an arm around me. “I’ll kick anybody’s ass who calls you ‘sweet.’”

  I leaned into the warm crook of his arm and peered harder out the kitchen door, watching Ma. Slowly she lifted her chin. Gravy dripped off a dirty plate onto her stained white tennis shoes. She stared at the grinning neighbors looking up at her from their tables, dressed in their Sunday clothes, able to afford a fancy fried-chicken lunch after church. “I’m not blind,” she said loudly. “I see that I got me a daughter who knows how to sell apples. She’s Hush McGillen The Fifth, all right, and she’s earnin’ the name. Y’all will sure see, too—the Sweet Hush Apple ain’t done for in this county. I am flat sure that one day my Hush will prove it.” Ma paused. “Now, ‘scuse me, I have to yank her up by the hair and yell at her.”

  Everyone laughed and applauded. I burned. They thought I was a joke. That’s when I knew I’d become somebody just to spite everybody else. They’d have to take me seriously. I’d take myself.

  Ma and I sat at the farmhouse that afternoon with a framed snapshot of Daddy on the old wooden table between us and the amazing newspaper picture beside it. She bounced Logan on her lap. She didn’t really look angry, just bewildered by my ideas. The first hint of redemption began to spread over my chest like the warm menthol salve Mama rubbed on me whenever I had a cold. I burrowed my head on her shoulder. She smelled like breast milk and apples and Marlboros. “I know I’m a strange bird,” I said. “Everybody says so.”

  “Well, well,” Ma said. “Well.”

  She smoked a cigarette and pulled up her t-shirt so Logan could suck at her right nipple. She looked from Daddy’s picture to the newspaper clipping to me, connecting us by line of sight as if asking him what kind of McGillen charm he’d bred inside her twelve years ago. She was only twenty-six years old, with dark, tired eyes. You could see the Cherokee in her high cheekbones and strong mouth. She cursed when she thought I didn’t hear, drank beer when she thought I was asleep at night, whipped me or pinched me purple on the back of the arm when I needed punishing. She sang solos at the tiny clapboard Gospel Church Of The Harvest In Song, prayed like a preacher but worked like a dog to keep food on the table. She was mourning Daddy, and she was scared.