The Cider I Pressed by Hand

“Maribeth,” he said, patient. “Your daddy’s name is on every one of those trees in the minds of the people who buy from you.”

“Roy.”

“Lyle took the machine. He cannot take the name, and he cannot take your hands. Go and press in front of God and everybody.”

My husband Carl got home from his shift at the grain elevator that night and found me in the barn with the hand press up on sawhorses. I was scrubbing fifty years off the iron with a wire brush and a bucket of vinegar.

Carl is not a talker. He set his lunch pail down, looked at the press, looked at me, and said, “Where do you want the hitch for the water.”

That is the whole measure of the man.

He did not tell me it was too much. He did not tell me to let it go and keep the peace with Lyle, though peace with Lyle would have made his own life easier at the feed store and the church.

He asked where I wanted the water.

We worked it out across three nights. Carl built a bench into the bed of the pickup so the press would ride at tailgate height, and a body would not have to stoop to crank it.

He rigged a rack to hold three bushel baskets and a frame to hang the clean pressing cloths. He found Dad’s old chalkboard, the one that used to lean against the shed every fall, and sanded it clean.

I pressed a test bushel Thursday night by lantern light to learn the rhythm of the thing.

Grind the apples to pomace. Pack the pomace in the cloth. Fold it into a square they call a cheese, and stack the cheeses in the rack.

Then turn the screw, slow, and lean your weight into the handle, and wait.

The first cider ran out amber and cold and smelled like my whole childhood. I caught it in a canning jar and drank it standing in the barn, and I cried.

I had not cried at the funeral. I had not cried in the empty shed.

I cried over a jar of cider in the dark because it tasted exactly like him.

My father planted that orchard a tree at a time over forty years. Three hundred trees on twelve acres, Jonathan and Stayman and Winesap and a long row of Golden Delicious he put in for the sweetness.

He taught me the blend before I was ten. Two parts tart to one part sweet, he always said, or you have got apple juice and not cider.

He taught me to hold a cup to the light and read the color, and to never sell a jug I would not drink myself.

I knew that orchard the way I knew my own kitchen. I knew which tree dropped first and which one held its fruit into November.

Lyle knew the books. I knew the trees. We had always split it that way, and I had never once thought he resented which half he got until the morning the press was gone.

Forty bushels waited in the cold room. A bushel is forty-two pounds of apples and makes about three gallons of cider if you work it hard.

Forty bushels was a hundred and twenty gallons, if my arms held out. I had sixty promised and sixty to sell.

Carl loaded the first ten bushels before dawn Saturday while I chalked the board. Fresh cider, it said. Pressed here. Walt’s orchard.