The Cider I Pressed by Hand

The Market on Saturday

The Saturday market in our town sets up in the lot behind the Methodist church. Two rows of tents and tailgates, and it has run every fall for longer than I have been alive.

I have had the third stall from the end since I was twenty-three.

We got there at six and set up in the gray light. Carl backed the truck in and dropped the tailgate, and we lifted the press onto its bench.

I packed the first cheese while the other vendors were still carrying in their tomatoes and their mums.

Rhoda from the egg stand came over with her coffee. She stood looking at the press, then at my face.

“That is not your daddy’s press,” she said.

“No. It is Roy Haskins’ mother’s press. Lyle sold Dad’s.”

Rhoda is sixty years old and she does not gasp at things. She set her coffee down on my tailgate very deliberately.

“Press it, honey. I am first in line, and I am buying a gallon.”

She did not leave. She stood right there by the fender with her arms folded, like a woman guarding a gate.

When the first customers drifted down the row at seven, there was already a person at my stall. And people go where people are.

I ground the apples and the crank bit and squealed and settled. I packed the cheese and stacked the rack and turned the screw, and the cider came.

It came slow, a thin amber rope of it, running down the channel Carl had bent from a piece of flashing. It dripped into the glass jug.

The smell of it went down the whole row of tents on the cold air like a bell ringing.

A line formed. I am not going to pretend I understand all of why.

The crank was slow work. A bushel took me the better part of twenty minutes, where the big press would have done it in two.

My arms learned the weight of it fast. You lean in at the top of the turn and let your body do what your hands cannot, the way you lean into a stuck lug nut.

Some of it was the smell. Some of it was the strangeness of a woman cranking an iron press on a truck in this day and age.

But some of it, I think, was that the town already knew. A town like ours does not keep a secret for a full week, and Lyle had sold that press on Monday.