The Cider Press We Carried Home

Marla came at five. She parked by the mailbox and walked up the drive slow, the way you walk into a room when you do not know who is mad at you.

Nobody was mad at her. Dad met her halfway across the yard, cane and all, and put his arms around her. He did not say anything. He just held on to her a while, out there in the last of the sun, and she held on back.

When she let go, she came over to me at the racks. “Are you mad at me?” she asked. “For not doing it sooner?”

“No,” I said. “Are you mad at me?”

“No.” She looked at Darwin, who was still at the crank, red-faced and sweating, with Thad telling him to slow down. “Look at him. He hasn’t cranked anything in his life.”

“He’s not bad at it,” I said.

“No,” she said, and she almost smiled. “He’s not.”

We pressed until a quarter to six, when the light started going long and orange across the orchard. Then we quit, because Dad will not press after dark and never has. You cannot see the pomace right in the dark, and you cannot see your neighbors’ faces.

The men loaded their jugs and went home one by one. Each one shook Dad’s hand on the way out. Thad shook Darwin’s hand, too, and said, “You’ll be back next year. We’ll need a crank man.”

“I’ll be back,” Darwin said.

Then it was just family. Dad, me, Wilda, Marla, Darwin. We sat on the porch steps with the last of the cider in Mom’s bucket and a stack of paper cups, and nobody said much of anything, and that was fine.

Before they left, Dad prayed over the supper the women had left in the kitchen, short, the way he always does. He thanked the Lord for the apples and the road and the hands that turned the crank. He did not say anybody’s name. He did not have to.

That was last October.

The press stayed in Dad’s shop over the winter, covered with a canvas tarp, with the old crank handle wrapped in a towel on the shelf above it. In the spring Dad and I oiled the screw and Wilda helped me scrub the racks.

Darwin came by the shop in April and asked if he could help sand and repaint the tub. Dad said he could, as long as he used the same red. Darwin used the same red.

He was there again this October, the first Saturday, before any of the rest of us. He had the flywheel turning before the first basket came up the drive.

The patio at the bar has a picture of the press now, in Dad’s yard.

It is a big one, framed, hung on the brick by the door where the press used to sit. Thad’s wife took it that first afternoon, from the porch steps, without anybody knowing, and gave it to Marla at Christmas. You can see the old red press on its plywood under the Spys, and the jugs on Ewald’s tailgate, and the six old men in their barn coats.

You can see me at the crank, and Dad at the spout with Mom’s bucket. And if you look close, way off at the edge of the picture, you can see Darwin standing at the end of the drive with something wrapped in a white towel, just about to start walking.

People still stop on the road to take pictures of it.