The Cider Press We Carried Home

Darwin Haverkamp is married to my sister, Marla. They have been married thirty-four years. He owns a bar out on the highway between our place and the lake, a low brick building with a gravel lot and a patio out front facing the road.

He is not a monster. I want to say that plain, because it matters for what I did later. Darwin coached Little League for ten years. He came to Mom’s visitation in a suit that did not fit him and stood by the door all evening shaking hands.

But Darwin has always wanted things to look a certain way, and he has never had much money to make them look that way. The bar was his dad’s, and it has been losing money since the tourist traffic moved to the new places closer to the beach.

“I’m doing a harvest party on the patio,” he told Dad that September. “Pig roast, the whole thing. Just let me borrow the old press for a weekend, Augie. It’ll be a draw. I’ll have it back before you’re off the walker.”

Dad said sure. Dad has said sure to everybody his whole life.

Darwin came out with two of his bar regulars and a trailer, and they loaded it up. I was at work. Marla called me that night to say the party had been a big success and people loved the press.

That was the last time it was in our family’s hands for three years.

The first time I drove past the bar after that, I nearly went in the ditch.

The press was sitting on the patio by the road, under a string of lights, and it was bolted down. I could see the lag bolts through the feet into the concrete from the highway. There were flower pots of orange mums sitting in the hopper.

I pulled into the gravel lot and sat there with the engine running. I could see the grinder from my seat. Somebody had painted the flywheel a brighter red than it had ever been, and the cast-iron crank handle was gone from it entirely.

I did not go in. I went home and called Marla.

“He just likes it there for now,” she said. Her voice had that tight sound it gets. “Rosie, please. He’s under a lot of pressure with the bar. He’ll give it back. Let me handle it.”

So I let her handle it. That October, Dad got off his walker and called Darwin the first Sunday of the month. “Next weekend, Augie.” The second Sunday. “Next weekend.” By Halloween Dad stopped calling.

That was the year nobody on our road pressed cider. The neighbors stopped by anyway, with their baskets, and Dad had to stand in the yard and tell each one of them the press was out on loan.

People have asked me why I didn’t just call the sheriff, or walk into that bar and say the obvious thing to Darwin’s face.

The answer is my sister. Marla is three years older than me. She sat up with me through the measles and taught me to drive a stick shift in Dad’s orchard truck. She married Darwin at nineteen, and she has stood behind that bar six nights a week for most of her life.

If I had gone after Darwin, I would have been going after Marla’s husband, in Marla’s bar, in front of Marla’s customers. And Dad said it plain at the supper table one night the second fall.

“A press is not worth a family,” he said. “Your mother would say the same. Leave it be.”