Defective (2 page)

Ma grabbed her by
the arm and hauled her through the orchard and home. Jelly held
onto the bag the entire way and by the time they arrived at the
house Ma was fuming. She barked an order for Santa to get dinner
started. Santa, who was already cutting up potatoes and carrots and
parsnips, looked up, saw her mother's expression, and ducked her
head back down to her task.

Ma grabbed a short
pearl apple switch from its hook on the wall, put Jelly over her
knee and gave her four sharp whacks. She had beaten all of her
children this way, starting from a young age. She used it to remind
them not to show off; she believed it would make them as strong and
resilient as the trees they tended.

After they'd eaten
supper, Jelly started to talk about the bag again. Ma reached for
the switch but Pa interrupted.

"What’s that?"

"It talks to me,"
Jelly said, taking the neatly folded bag from her pocket. "Made in
China." She pointed to a line on the bag. "Fifteen per cent post
consumer plastic."

"What’s China?"
Narrow asked.

Ma and Pa ignored
him.

Pa sat back and
scratched his chin. He knew it was writing but he couldn't
understand how Jelly could read it. He recognized some words,
mostly place names that others had pointed out to him: Piggy
Gristle, Hap Road, Battery, Delora.

Ma couldn't read
at all and so the children hadn't been taught. She'd taught them
basic math — the weights and measures they needed to know for
orchard work — but Ma thought that reading was a waste of time when
their job was to tend trees.

Pa's gaze fell on
the wood stove.

"What does that
say?" Pa asked, pointing to the line of raised black marks over the
door of the stove.

Jelly took a few
steps closer. "McIntosh Foundry. Patent Pending. 1872."

"And that?" Pa
pointed to an apple crate.

"Prince Edward
Island Potatoes."

Ma snorted. "How
do you know that?"

"They talk to me,"
said Jelly. "They tell me what they are. In my head."

"Make sense, girl,
or I’ll get the switch again."

As Jelly scrunched
her eyes closed in concentration, Pa got up from the table and
disappeared out the door. When Jelly opened her eyes she smiled.
She pointed to her cleaned plate.

"What’s that?" she
asked Ma.

"You mean the
plate?"

"How do you know
it’s a plate?"

"Because..." A
look of confusion passed over Ma’s face. "Because it just is."

"That’s it. It
just is. That’s how I know."

Pa returned with
two items in his hands. He handed them to Jelly.

"
How to Grow
and Care for Fruit Trees
and
Making Hard Ciders
," she
read out loud.

For the next
several weeks, whenever Jelly and Pa were together, he’d ask her to
read out what the books said. Over the next three years the
Landlord noticed not only an increase in the apple harvest but a
vast improvement in the quality of the cider.

"It’s hard to
explain," Ma now said.

She looked out at
the moon. Mixer wasn’t even a year old, yet he was more disobedient
than any of her other children. He had deliberately defied her the
other day. He had looked at her the whole time he was climbing the
ladder up to the vat. None of the children were allowed near the
vat.

She’d run across
the room, grabbed him around the waist, ripped him from the ladder
then stood him up and thumped him hard twice across his diaper.
Mixer squealed and wriggled from her grasp, crawling fast for the
open press house door. Ma’s hand felt numb, soon it began to feel
hot. She looked down at her palm. It was bright red, the red of an
overripe pearl apple. It itched and swelled and she had to soak it
in cold water for several minutes before it returned to normal. She
was drying her hand when Mixer reappeared at the press house door.
He looked at her. He looked at her hand.

"Try," Pa
said.

"It’s been a while
since we had a baby in the house. Maybe I’ve forgotten what it’s
like." Ma rubbed her palm.

"Well, I guess
that’s possible," said Pa. He yawned again.

"Go to sleep. I’m
just being silly."

Ma lay down and
rolled over, facing the window. The moonlight fell on her profile.
She lay awake, thinking, for a long time. For a fleeting moment she
thought that perhaps she was too hard on her children but then she
remembered the alternative. She knew what it was like to be
different.

Upstairs, the
moonlight also fell on Mixer's face; his eyes were open.

Ma continued to
beat her other children whenever they disobeyed her, but whether
Mixer deserved it or not, she never laid a hand on him again.

___

It wasn’t just Ma
who had misgivings about Mixer. One night when he’d gotten up to
use the outhouse, Forest had caught his then two-month old brother
standing up in the crib beside his parents’ bed, looking out the
window and waggling his fingers as the wind lashed at the pearl
apple trees. In the morning Forest decided he’d dreamed it but
after that night whenever he looked at his brother he felt
uneasy.

Porkchop disliked
Mixer but couldn’t say why. Whenever she held him she didn’t feel
love or affection as she did for her other sisters and brothers,
only anxious to be away from him. Porkchop had noticed that Bull
always seemed to wrinkle his nose whenever he was near him and that
Jelly and Jones avoided him entirely whenever they could.

Only Santa truly
enjoyed being around him. He would throw his pudgy arms around her
neck and hang on, sometimes for hours. She put him in a sling when
she worked in the orchard or in the press house so that he could be
close to her. If Ma wasn't around, she would hum and sing softly to
him. She had songs for all sorts of things; songs about food and
how good it was for him, songs about safety, and songs for when he
was too sleepy to go to sleep.

He was almost two
and hadn’t yet learned to walk. Narrow had tried to teach him but
Mixer was uncooperative and Narrow had eventually given up. He
could crawl but preferred to be carried. Mixer was big all over
with large blue eyes, a wide nose and a square jaw, but his largest
feature was his enormous rear end. Whenever he tried to stand he
would wobble a little then topple over. He didn’t talk; what sounds
he did make were unintelligible grunts and moans. His family, even
Santa, shrugged and called him a slow learner.

___

The second thing
Mixer knew with certainty was that he wanted what the Landlord had:
power over the land and power over the people on it.

___

Mixer learned at
an astonishing rate. He knew the orchard's schedule and every role
and task in it. He knew the value of each member of the family.

He knew that any
one of his siblings would protect him at any cost; that was how
they’d been raised by Ma and they obeyed her. Obedience was a trait
he was already putting to good use; he liked being carried from
place to place. Pa was useless; a lazy drunk who would be lost
without Ma. There was no need to keep him around. Ma was managed
for now but Mixer knew that was only a matter of time. She was one
of them; she’d figure it out eventually.

Mixer didn’t need
to worry about many others. Very few people ever came to the
orchard. Every now and again a wagon driver would deliver supplies
from the Landlord and there were the semi-regular visits from the
Constable, PC Pierre, who came by as part of his rounds or to bring
Pa home. He seemed to like the family and that could be useful,
too.

The Landlord
fascinated Mixer. The Landlord owned the orchard and much of the
land surrounding it. Mixer studied how he commanded Ma and Pa and
the others to do his bidding, even when he wasn’t physically there
to tell them. He was a vulgar, ugly man but wealthy and imposing so
he could do as he pleased. He smelled of soap and leather and,
sometimes, his mother. This had puzzled Mixer at first. Until he'd
learned the Landlord's schedule.

On days that he
picked up his cider, while Pa and the others loaded kegs of cider
and crates of apples into the wagon, the Landlord would settle up
with Ma. Settling up meant balancing what the Landlord provided —
room, board and a small garden plot — against the family's labour.
The Landlord always took some change.

Autumn

Ma and Pa died on the
same day.

Pa was swarmed by
a band of Pharaoh’s bees. He ran about trying to shake them off but
they stung his fleshy upper cheeks and soon the skin had swelled so
much he couldn’t see where he was going. He ran and ran; the bees
followed. Ma and the children ran after him, saw him run up towards
the cliff that overhung the valley, saw him fall over the edge to
the rocks below. Ma, running in front, had held her children back
from the cliff’s edge. She held onto the skinny pine tree that hung
over the valley and looked down. She shook her head and led them
back home.

Ma drowned later
that day in a vat of cider rescuing Mixer. All their lives Ma had
warned the children not to go near the enormous fermentation vat,
for any reason. Ma spotted Mixer crawling along the top of it.

The lip of the vat
was slippery and, with a small sploosh, Mixer was in. Ma tore up
the ladder, jumped in and flung her son up and over the side. He
landed on his well-padded bottom and crawled away, shaking his head
back and forth, flicking cider everywhere and licking his thick red
lips. The steel vat was three-quarters full and the inner sides
were slick with a soapy combination of pearl apple residue, yeast,
sugar and water. It was too slippery for Ma to get hold of the
sides and she couldn't swim.

Porkchop could
have opened the valve at the bottom and drained the vat but Mixer
silently reminded her that the Landlord would be coming soon for
his cider. Ma and Pa always said the cider came first. Then there
was Ma, who was a stickler for the rules. Listening to her cries
for help, Porkchop quietly ordered her siblings to their daily
chores.

Santa found Mixer
in the herb garden, digging in the dirt. She scooped him up and
held him tightly in her arms.

___

Two days later the
Landlord came to collect his final batch of cider for the year. He
rode his wagon into the barnyard. Porkchop was sitting in the open
door of the press house oiling clippers when he arrived. The others
were all out in the orchard, at Porkchop's order, pruning the
trees, mulching and raking, picking up any stray apples they'd
missed. They did these things every fall. She didn't see why this
year should be any different.

"Where’s my
cider?" he boomed at Porkchop.

She explained what
had happened. He was quiet for a moment, looking at the girl.
Almost a woman, he thought. She was looking at her boots and he
could barely see her face. What he could see was half covered in
the flat brown hair that flopped over her eyes.

"That still
doesn’t answer my question," he said. "Where’s my cider?"

"It’s still in the
vat."

The Landlord
considered this and decided that the cider would still be okay. She
couldn't have been in there that long before one of them had fished
her out, he thought. Besides, the drunks at the Piggy Gristle would
never know the difference.

"Why haven't you
kegged it? C’mon then. Get your brothers and sisters in here and
start working. I'll wait if I have to."

The mother might
be gone, he thought, but this one’ll do.

"We’re not allowed
near the vat," Porkchop told him.

"Then how did you
get your mother out?"

Porkchop lifted
her head and her hair fell away from her eyes. She didn’t say
anything. The Landlord’s face became very white. He left in a
hurry, driving his horses at top speed back to Battery where he
ordered PC Pierre to deal with the situation.

___

Two days later,
after the Constable had updated him about the orchard, the Landlord
sat in his office, fuming over his lost profits.

"For obvious
reasons, I dumped the cider," PC Pierre had told him.

The last batch of
the year was always the sweetest. His patrons would never have
known and surely the alcohol would have killed off any diseases the
woman had had.

The Landlord
wasn't happy to lose his best pressers. They’d been a good
investment. At first it had only been the pair of them, newly
married, working the orchard, and even though he’d been eventually
forced to raise their wages to the family rate, set by the county
for a maximum of two adults and two children, they kept pumping out
so many kids he was getting many years’ worth of free labour for
the price of four. He was even legally allowed to garnish a portion
of their wages by leasing them a small vegetable plot on his land.
There had also been some other fringe benefits.

He was, however,
relieved to be rid of their brood. Whenever he had gone to sample
the early pressings or conduct surprise inspections he had always
encountered the children. He avoided looking at them unless he had
to. He was almost certain that some of them were defective but all
of them made him nervous, even Titania. At night he dreamt of her
cherubic face, blonde hair and voluptuous body but whenever he
encountered her during the day she made him feel as though she were
looking right through him.

He needed to hire
someone to work the orchard but he didn’t want another family this
time or a local. That left the coastal labour auction and the next
one wouldn't be held until spring.

Well, he thought,
at least they’d gotten most of the work at the orchard done before
the end of the year. The trees would survive the winter
untended.

___

PC Pierre gently
pulled his mule, Josephine, to a stop. Pater liked to lurk in the
bushes near the bend in the road and jump out at people. He scanned
the area then blew his whistle three times. Dealing with Pater was
the more pleasant of the tasks that had been set before him. His
first had been to recover the children's mother from the vat.