The Cider I Pressed by Hand

What My Brother Said

I called Lyle from the shed and he did not pick up. So I drove the four miles into town and found his truck at the hardware store.

He was in the paint aisle holding a can he did not need. Lyle has always been a man who shops when he feels bad, the way some men drink.

I knew the second I saw his shoulders that he had done it on purpose, and that he knew that I knew.

“Where is the press,” I said. I kept my voice flat. Our mother raised us not to make a scene in front of the Hendersons, and the Hendersons own the hardware store.

“I sold it,” Lyle said. He put the paint can back on the shelf and faced me. “Dad’s estate has to settle, Maribeth. The press was part of it.”

“You did not ask me.”

“I do not have to ask you.” He said it gently, which was worse than if he had snapped. “I am the executor. It is my job to turn things into money and split it fair.”

“You still could have asked.”

“And between us, you should not be running that orchard at all.” He kept his voice low and reasonable. “It is sixty trees too many for one woman. Dad let you play at it because you were his favorite. That is not a plan.”

He said the next part like it was a kindness.

“A woman has no business trying to run a press and a market stall and twelve acres by herself.”

I have had men say smaller things to me and lost my temper. I did not lose it then. I think I was too far past angry to find it.

“How much,” I said.

“Six hundred. Cash. The man is coming for the grinder Thursday.”

Six hundred dollars. For a press that made us four thousand dollars of cider every fall and had paid for itself ten times over.

Six hundred dollars for the sound of my father humming while he turned the screw.

I stood there and did the arithmetic of what a thing is worth against what it costs. That is a thing you learn on a farm and never forget.

“You could have sold the press to me,” I said. “I would have paid you six hundred.”

Lyle looked at the floor. “It is done, Maribeth. Let it be done.”

Why I Could Not Just Call Somebody

I want to say here what everybody on our road asked me that week. I asked myself the same thing a hundred times.

Why did I not call a lawyer. Why did I not call the sheriff. Why did I not stop him.

Because he was right about the one thing that mattered.

Dad died without much of a will, just an old page that named Lyle executor and said to divide everything equal between the two of us.

The orchard was land, and the land had to be sorted out slow, through the county, with a man in a tie who charged by the hour.

But the press was not land. The press was a tool in a shed.

The executor is allowed to sell the tools and put the money in the pot. It was legal. It was his right.

It was rotten to the bone, and it was legal.

I called the lawyer anyway, a nice man named Prewitt who had done Dad’s page for forty dollars back when forty dollars meant something. He listened to me and he sighed.

“He can sell it,” Prewitt said. “I am sorry, Maribeth.”

“There is nothing.”

“If you fight it you will spend four thousand in my fees to claw back a six hundred dollar machine. And you will be fighting your own brother in front of the whole county, and you will lose the orchard to the lawyers before it is through.”

He let that sit a second.

“That is not advice I like to give. It is just true.”

So there was no phone call that fixed it. There was no sheriff to come.

There was a week until pressing season. There was a brother who thought a woman had no business. And there was me.

I hung up the phone and stood in my kitchen and looked out the window at the trees my father planted the year I was born.

Then I went to see my neighbor.