The Cider I Pressed by Hand

The Neighbor’s Hand Press

Roy Haskins farms the quarter section east of us. He is seventy-one years old and he has forgotten more about apples than most men learn.

He came to the door in his sock feet and listened to me tell it. His jaw got tight in a way I had not seen since his wife passed.

“Lyle sold Walt’s press,” he said. Not a question. He just needed to say it out loud to believe it.

“Thursday the grinder goes too.”

Roy went out to his machine shed without another word, and I followed him.

In the back, under a tarp and a layer of dust, sat a cast iron hand press. It was small, the kind a family keeps for its own jugs, a grinder hopper on top with a crank, and a screw press below.

It would do a bushel in the time the big press did ten.

“It was my mother’s,” Roy said. “Nineteen and forty something. It still turns.”

He ran his thumb along the frame.

“You are welcome to it as long as you need it, and I will not hear a word about rent.”

I put my hand on the iron. There was a little rust at the screw, but the wood was sound.

“Roy, I have sixty gallons promised. This thing will take me a week of pressing to do what the big one did in a day.”

“Then you had better not do it alone in the shed where nobody sees you.” He has blue eyes that go sharp when he is about to be smart. “You have got a stall at the Saturday market, girl.”

“I do.”

“Press it right there on the tailgate. You let the whole town watch you turn that crank. You sell it by the cup.”

I did not understand him at first.