Sorting Apples by Ann Marie Potter

“One of his girls, the youngest I think, got killed by that thing a few years back. Got her scarf caught and strangled.” Like many of her father’s words, poorly formed and slick with alcohol, these came with a belch.

Ronnie stared at her father, then at the machine that had murdered Mr. Pendergrass’s youngest daughter. She’d never seen an apple sorter, but she guessed that the layers of rust and chicken shit meant it wasn’t used anymore. Why did Mr. Pendergrass keep it here in his barn, where he’d have to look at it every time he fed his cows or used his tractor? Maybe he didn’t feel all that bad about losing a daughter. Maybe all farmer’s daughters were expendable. After all, Ronnie could play the part of her father’s sidekick, take the wheel when he was too far gone to drive, but she couldn’t do the heavy lifting like the boys on the haying crew. Or like a son.

In her father’s eyes, she’d been born useless, and nothing could ever change that. Once in a while Ronnie got upset about it, but mostly she brushed it away, along with her irritation towards her mother. Talk about useless. In bed by five in the afternoon. The house was a trash pit and her mother’s cooking, when she cooked, was barely survivable. There were times when Ronnie wanted to calf-bawl for her mother’s attention, but Ronnie kept her mouth shut.  Her mother’s tirades were like pieces of flying glass; they always hit close to the vein and scooped out flesh on their way through.

Mr. Pendergrass returned, carrying a Stroh’s for Ronnie’s father and a Coke for her. Ronnie and her father had been making their daily rounds, visiting her father’s drinking holes. They’d started their morning at Jack’s Tavern, where her father drank beer and Ronnie stuffed quarters into the jukebox. She liked the song selection at Jack’s more than those at the Blue Star or Clyde Haven’s place, where Patsy Cline had been crooning since the fifties. She saved her quarters at Haven’s, instead sitting beside her father at the narrow bar, consuming Coke and warm bar-cheese while Clyde flipped through games on the sports channels. Ronnie spent the time trying to figure out who was winning, all the while thinking how much she loved music and hated sports. Beside her, her father stared straight ahead, his hand motions signaling a lively internal conversation.

Summers could be lonely. When Ronnie didn’t see her friends every day, it was like they didn’t exist. She went to the district high school but, even with every small town around funneling its kids through the doors, it was still pretty small. For the most part, she’d been with the same kids since the first day of her school life. There had been bullies, especially in junior high. It seemed like she was serenaded by dog barks every day for years when she waited her turn to get on the school bus. But ignorant twits were the least of her problems and they barely registered. About a half hour before school got out, her stomach started hurting. It wasn’t the bullies on the bus that twisted her guts, it was not knowing what she would find when she got home. School was predictable, bullies and all. Most of her teachers liked her and she got good grades in everything but math. Her handful of friends were like faithful cogs in a clock mechanism that made a comforting, never-faltering sound of business-as-usual. She missed that when the last of the snow-days had been made up, the tests were all taken, and see-you-laters said.

Summer wasn’t all bad, though. Rural Pennsylvania was beautiful. About half the farm was mixed woods—pine and spruce mixing in with beech, maple, and black cherry. She would spend hours out there, watching the birds and looking up the shrubs and wildflowers in her field guide. She studied forestry in her agriculture class and liked to identify the trees. She took measurements and notes that nobody would ever see, but it made her feel like a real scientist. Her favorite thing was following the stream and looking for minnows in the flowing parts and tadpoles in the resting parts. She’d flip the shale and look for crawdads. She’d found an old, rusted still about a half-mile in, but it hadn’t been used in years. Last summer, though, she found a meth lab and had to avoid that part of the woods. Suddenly, her safest place didn’t feel so safe.

Now her father and Mr. Pendergrass were talking about the yield potentials for alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil. As far as Ronnie could follow the conversation, alfalfa was winning, hands down. She sat on a bale of straw, wiggling her toes in her barn boots and shifting her Coke hand-to-hand. Another month and she’d be back in school and the guy on Channel 4 would be talking about snow. Then Lake Erie would have her first snit of the season and Ronnie would be making two a.m. bar runs to keep her father from falling asleep and freezing to death in the truck. Everything would freeze and she’d have to drag out fresh buckets of water to the dogs. Winter days were longer and the work harder, but Ronnie loved the snow. She’d walk out into the field behind the house and stand in the middle of all that soft whiteness and silence and think about New York City. She’d gone there on a choir trip last winter. Manhattan in the snow had made her weep.

Now Mr. Pendergrass was talking about replacing his corncrib. Ronnie played with her ponytail and tried not to stare at the apple sorter. She wanted to get closer, to see if she could figure out how it worked, which arm or lever or wheel had done the deadly deed. It didn’t look half as scary as the hay rake she pulled every summer.  One of the kids in her ag class lost an arm mowing hay and Ronnie thought about that every time she climbed on the father’s old JD 2010.

Ann Marie Potter

Her father was standing up now, handing his empty back to Mr. Pendergrass. It was only three o’clock and he was still fairly steady on his feet. Ronnie guessed they had one more bar-run to make before going home to feed the animals. She stole one last look at the apple sorter and thought about all the things she knew and all the things she didn’t.

Image: Pixabay.com – Old wooden barn in a field.