September Song (8 page)

What the man meant to express was his cynicism, his inborn suspicion and mistrust of his elected representatives. It never occurred to him that he was implicating his neighbor in bribery and corruption.

Tom Watkins was saying, “Well, Seth, I guess you did the only thing you could. It's not for me to judge you,” when his wife Lois burst in with, “Well, I will! You've ruined us all, Seth Bennett. Take a nice rural community and turn it into a country slum.”

“Slum?” he said, though he said it softly, not aggressively, not indignantly. “The minimum lots are three acres. And buyers must agree to spend no less than a hundred thousand dollars on their homes.” He was not excusing himself. For his part he accepted their fullest reprehension. He just wanted to do what he could to lessen the sorrow they felt for themselves.

“Three acres!” she said with the hauteur of a duchess, and with this scorn too he concurred. Not that her plot was much, if at all, bigger than that, but it was, or had been, bounded on all sides by large holdings, including his, and she had been there long enough to feel a common cause for preservation with those owners of the estates neighboring hers.

“Our life savings are invested in this place,” she said, comprehending with a sweep of her hand her two-bedroom bungalow and the one-car garage with its long-outgrown basketball hoop over the door. The humbleness of it accused him as no mansion could have done. He was the spoiler of the American Dream.

“Now?” she said. “Poof! Gone with the wind.”

He felt like General Sherman marching through Georgia, or like General Sherman might have felt if confronted by Scarlett on the doorsteps of Tara.

It was while returning home from that encounter that he had his accident. Molly had always said he was going to kill himself on that motorcycle.

He had intended on that afternoon of his accident to make one more stop. This was to have been at the home of people whom he knew well. Thus he knew there had been no death in the family, no divorce, no loss of income. He knew that the “For Sale by Owner” sign in the front yard had been put there by none other than himself. He did not stop, nor even slow down. In fact, he sped up, hoping that he had not been spotted.

He had not been watching the road. He was distracted by an insight into himself. These rounds of his neighbors in which he sought to explain and excuse what he had done and win their forgiveness were not for that purpose at all. Rather the opposite. It was their disapproval he wanted. He would have welcomed being ordered off the property that he had spoiled. He wanted to be blamed so he could blame Janet.

He went off the shoulder of the road at a sharp curve, was thrown from his motorcycle, struck a tree and broke his left arm, the good one.

Now, impatient rather than satisfied with the job he had done, he put down the razor. He loosened the drawstring of his pajamas, dropped his pants and squatted on the toilet seat. Accompanying himself, he sang:

I'll be with you in apple blossom time.

I'll be with you to change your name to mine.

What a wonderful wedding there will be!

What a wonderful day for you and me!

Church bells will chime.

You will be mine.

In apple blossom time.

He drew from the roll a length of the paper.

With that right hand of his he was clumsy at everything.

II

“Remember, she's your daughter,” said Molly.

“She's yours too. I'm not the only one to blame.”

She was helping him dress. Although the wedding party would not begin arriving until late morning, he was putting on his good clothes already rather than go through the struggle twice. With that left arm in a cast bent at a right angle, getting him into a shirt required a contortionist's act for them both. She had to button it for him just as at meals she had to slice his meat as for a child. His helplessness and dependency he blamed on Janet. But for her he would not have gone off the road that day. Ten years of motorcycling with a perfect safety record, despite Molly's prediction that he was going to kill himself on that thing one day.

“But thank you for reminding me,” he said. “I'll try not to forget. You might have pointed that out to her while there was still time. I tried.”

“Your daughter, I said. Not your slave. She has got a life of her own.”

“Yes, and who does she owe it to?”

She went down stiffly on her ruined knees to tie his shoelaces.

“You can't stand in the path of true love, Seth,” she said.

He snorted. “Love! Hah! She'll see how long that lasts.”

She was having the trouble she always had getting up off her knees. Looking down, he saw what appeared to be teardrops falling on the toe of his shoe. The readiness of women to weep over anything, or rather over nothing at all, exasperated him.

“Now what's wrong?” he asked as a matter of form.

“Nothing,” she said. Which was not what she meant but was what he thought.

“Never mind,” she said. Which meant, “You wouldn't understand if I told you.”

He was satisfied to think that was probably right.

Molly had asked the foreman of the land-clearing crew to take the day off, spare them the noise, the smoke, the dust.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Bennett,” the man said in reporting this to him. “I wish I could oblige. Like the missuz told me, your people have always been married out of the house here, and now this is your last daughter, and all that. But I can't afford to idle these men and these machines. Why, that one bulldozer alone costs a hundred and sixty dollars an hour. And of course I've got no say over the utilities people.”

The telephone company was digging trenches for its wires with a rotocutter, the power and light company was digging holes for its poles with an auger. The screech of the one and the roar of the other could be heard from a mile off. Yet though these preparations went on, the building of houses had stalled with two. The promotional literature for the Garden of Eden Estates characterized one as Mediterranean villa, the other as Adirondack lodge. They stood within easy feuding distance of each other. The raw subsoil on which they sat was fertile ground for burdocks and milkweeds while the foundation plantings of azaleas and rhododendrons looked like faded funeral wreaths. Although his prospective son-in-law had brought a stream of prospective buyers to inspect these model homes, no sites had been sold. They would be of course when the market picked up again, but for now there had been a sudden downturn.

“Bad news from Wall Street. High interest rates. Tight mortgage money. You got out just in time, Dad.”

“No apologies,” he shouted to the foreman. “I appreciate your position. You know how women are. Sentimental. No head for practical affairs. You've got your job to do. You carry right on. The bride and groom will still be able to hear each other say, ‘I do.'”

On his way to the cemetery he passed the beehives.

In blossom-time, plying back and forth daylong laden with nectar, the bees had distilled and stored honey enough for themselves and for him to market, meanwhile incidentally pollinating apple blossoms as uncountable as the stars of the Milky Way. Thousands upon thousands of untiring helpers he had. They were his indispensable partners. In exchange for their services to him he kept their hives clean, protected them against the diseases they were prone to, in lean years wintered them over with sugar syrup. More than partners, they were his friends. He could let them crawl on his bare skin without fear of getting stung.

Once, or rather always before, the hives had teemed like tenements, abuzz inside and with gossipy gatherings on the stoops. Now they stood empty, deserted. He had advertised them for sale but had found no buyer, another sign of the disappearance of orchardmen—a vanishing species. Their source of livelihood gone, the bees had left in search of another. They would have to adapt themselves to strange nectars, though it was to be doubted that the clearing of the land hereabouts would leave blossoms of any sort for years to come.

In the center of the cemetery stood a lone apple tree. Though he himself had planted it, it was old now, and time had thinned its blossoms as it had his hair. Its branches overhung several closely spaced graves. He had pruned the tree, sprayed it; he had not picked it. Its fruit had been allowed to fall—an annual offering to those who rested below. Golden Delicious they were, and on the ground they were a shower of gold. He called it “the family tree.” With him gone, no one would tend it anymore and its fruit would grow cankered and gnarled, for with him the Bennett line came to its end. It seemed to him more than ever fitting that on his and Molly's tombstone the surname should have been left off, for they were not passing it on. Beneath stones bearing their married names their daughters would lie dispersed among their husbands' family plots.

With no sons that was bound to happen. Though it was painful, he accepted that. It did not mean that the world, his world, had come to an end. He was old enough to have known varieties of apples that were now extinct. The Rock Pippin, the Repka Malenka, the Buckingham—the list was a long one. They had been hybridized with other kinds and in the marriage their names were changed. But their offspring were still apples. With him not just the name but the life that the name had stood for was dying out.

He had not bred true to type, and his failure made him feel beholden to these, his and his daughters' ancestors. He did not regret having had daughters but he could not help regretting having had the daughters he had. He blamed each for the dereliction of all, particularly Janet, the one given the opportunity to redeem the others and make herself—as she had been until then—the apple of his eye. A sense not of the impermanence of life but of his long lineage, of his deep-delving roots in this consecrated earth, was what he had always felt when straying among these graves. Now he would come here no more until he came forever.

“Speak now, or forevermore hold your peace.”

The Wedding March had been rendered on the wheezy old parlor organ, pedal-power supplied by the undertaker, while the bride descended the stairs on her father's arm. Now facing the preacher, beside the groom, stood his Best Man, at the bride's side her father, the preacher's father-in-law. Seated on chairs and on the sofa were the wedding party: the bride's mother, her sisters, the parents of the groom, and Pete Jeffers. He had been invited to stay on in the house while looking for a new job. Farther to the north, out of commuting distance, there were still working orchards, and he had made several trips up there. He had found no opening. He was here now as a wedding guest against his will, and it showed in his illness-at-ease.

“But, Seth, it's a family affair,” he protested.

“You're family. Or might have been. You had my blessing.”

He was determined that Pete be present both as a punishment to him for having been so unenterprising and as the embodiment of his own disappointment. But though he was demanding a favor of Pete, and a painful one at that, he had not ingratiated himself when, after a second tumbler of it, the hundred-proof homemade applejack began to talk: “It's all your fault.”

“Seth, you can lead a horse to water—”

“Lead a horse to water! You never even got a halter on her. How many nights did I take Molly out to some boring movie, even a double feature, only to come home and find you in bed fast asleep? Did you ever even get as far as holding hands with her? Ten thousand trees yours for the asking and all you did was drag your feet! Well, many happy returns of the day. I've got to get through it, and you're going to too.”

To make himself heard above the din outside the preacher had to raise his voice. A bulldozer was uprooting a tenacious tree with a squeal like an elephant on the rampage.

“Knoweth any person present cause why this man and this woman should not be joined in holy matrimony?

“Speak now, or forevermore hold your peace.”

Ranked like the members of a jury, the bygone Bennetts framed on the walls frowned down upon the proceedings. Forced forevermore to hold their peace, they looked to their descendant to speak now for them one and all, for all as one. The living members of the cast seemed breathlessly fearful that he might. The urge to do so was powerful. It was all he could do to restrain himself. He let his moment pass, but he had enjoyed it while it lasted. It pleased him to feel the power he had to scare them, their inability to predict him.

He had been through all this twice before. Now to come was the part he dreaded most. It had been bad enough the two previous times. On this, the third and last, he was not sure but what his tongue would cleave to his palate, unwilling, unable to utter the hateful words. And so, for a time, while all hung upon his silence, it did.

“Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?”

The father of the bride looked around him as though seeking a way out of his strait. He surveyed his kith and kin assembled for this joyous occasion. It brought to mind, like viewing the negative and the positive of a photograph, the family album he had planned for himself. Too numerous to be housed under one roof, his was to have been a compound of kin, a colony with a common aim. No parceling of the property among them. Its bounty would belong to all as one, and in years when the harvest was bad the hardship would be shared equally. The girls would babysit for one another and for advice on child-rearing would come next door to their mother. In time the school bus would again stop to take on in the morning and in the afternoon to discharge their most precious crop. Farm-reared, free-ranging, healthy, happy boys and girls, brothers, sisters and cousins, with no other wish in the world than to follow in their parents' and grandparents' footsteps. Abraham and Sarah he and Molly would be to their big brood. His last years would be his ripest, his harvest-time. He overseeing all: young minds seeking his advice, young arms carrying out his directives. More fruit than ever the farm would produce. On Sundays the women working happily in the old kitchen preparing the weekly family feast, he in his place at the head of the table, bestowing his benedictions, dispensing his wisdom, the table-talk about the weather, the prospects for the crop, the market for it, the women as interested in the matter as their men. In the lives of his successors, they living theirs as he had lived his, he would live on, a recurrent reincarnation. Garden of Eden indeed!