The Cider Press We Carried Home

“You don’t have to come,” I said. “Stay here and get the yard ready.”

“I’m not going,” he said. “I’ll be here. I just wanted to read a little first.” He marked his place with an old seed packet and closed the book. “Bring it home careful.”

By eight-thirty the sun was up over the orchard and the frost was going off the grass. Ewald pulled in with his pickup, and the other five came behind him in two more trucks. They stood around in my dad’s drive in their barn coats and seed caps, drinking my coffee like it was any other Saturday.

We drove out in a line, three pickups, at a quarter to nine. It is eleven miles from Dad’s place to the bar. The trees along the highway were turning, and the farm stands were all open with pumpkins stacked out front.

Marla was already there. Her car was parked by the patio gate, and she was standing by it in her bar jacket with her arms crossed. She had her key ring in one hand.

I got out. She looked at me, and then at the six old men climbing out of their trucks, and something in her face let go a little.

“Morning, Marla,” Ewald said, taking his cap off.

“Morning, Ewald,” she said. Then she turned and put the key in the lock and opened the gate and stood there holding it.

She did not say anything else, and nobody asked her to. Every one of those men nodded to her as he walked by. Thad touched his cap brim. I want her to know, if she ever reads this, that every one of them saw what it cost her.

The press looked smaller up close than it did from the road. The mums in the hopper were half dead. I lifted the pots out one at a time and set them along the patio wall.

Then I got down on the concrete with the penetrating oil and looked at the bolts. Four lag bolts through the feet into anchors, rusted brown but not too bad. Darwin had at least used good galvanized hardware.

“Let it soak a minute,” Thad said. He was crouched beside me with his knees cracking.

We let it soak. The brothers from the packing line walked around the press, running their hands over the oak. One of them found where the old carved initials were on the tub slat, his own father’s and Dad’s, from some fall in the forties, and showed his brother without a word.

I put the breaker bar on the first bolt and leaned. Nothing. I leaned harder. It gave with a crack like a knuckle, and then it turned.

The second one turned. The third one turned. The fourth one fought me until the lineman came and leaned on the bar with me, and then it gave all at once and we both nearly went down on the concrete.

Ewald laughed so hard he had to sit on a patio chair.

Then the six of them lifted it.

I am a mechanic. I have lifted engines with a cherry picker and transmissions on a jack. I have never seen anything like six men in their seventies and eighties set their feet around a four-hundred-pound piece of oak and iron and lift it together on Ewald’s count.

“Easy,” Ewald said. “Easy. Watch the flywheel. Step. Step.”