The Cider Press We Carried Home

They walked it off the patio, across the gravel, and up to the open tailgate of Ewald’s pickup. They set the front feet on the tailgate and slid it in on a blanket. Nobody grunted. Nobody swore. Thad’s face went red as the flywheel, but he did not set his corner down until Ewald said to.

I strapped it down myself with both ratchet straps, front and back, the way I would strap a bus seat. Then I checked them twice.

When I turned around, Marla was still standing at the gate. She had not moved. She was looking at the empty spot on the patio where the press had been, with the four bolt holes and the rust marks on the concrete.

“I’ll fill those,” she said. “Before he gets up.”

“Marla,” I said.

“Go,” she said. “Go on. Dad’s waiting.” Then she pulled the gate shut and locked it.

The whole thing took forty minutes, start to finish.

We drove home slow, Ewald in front with the press, the rest of us behind him with our flashers on. People at the farm stands turned to watch us go by. A man in front of the feed mill took his cap off.

When we turned up Dad’s road, the first thing I saw was the baskets.

There were bushel baskets of apples lined up along the ditch at every mailbox, all the way up to Dad’s drive. Somebody had told somebody. Somebody always does, on a road like ours.

And in Dad’s yard, on the bare spot under the Northern Spys, there was a sheet of plywood laid level on cinder blocks, swept clean, waiting.

Dad was standing beside it with his cane.

We set the press on the plywood the same way we had lifted it, six men on Ewald’s count. When it was down, Dad walked all the way around it once, slow, with one hand on the oak. He did not say anything. He stopped at the flywheel and touched the bright new paint.

Then he bent, slow, with his new hip, and looked at the screw and the tub and the spout. He ran his finger in the spout and looked at it. He knocked on the tub slats with his knuckle and listened, the way a man knocks on a melon.

“Tub’s dry,” he said. “It’ll leak for an hour till the wood swells. Then it’ll be fine.” He straightened up. “Somebody get me some water for the tub.”

I bolted my pipe handle onto the flywheel hub. It fit. I gave it a turn, and the grinder turned over with the same old clank I had heard every October since I was born.

Dad closed his eyes when he heard it. Only for a second.

By noon there were bushel baskets all over Dad’s yard.

They came up the drive in pickups and on foot and one in a wheelbarrow. McIntosh and Jonathan and Northern Spy and Golden Delicious and a few russets from Ewald’s old tree that nobody else has anymore. Dad always said the best cider is a mix, and the road brought him a mix.

The men in their barn coats and caps took turns at the hopper, tipping in a basket at a time. I took the crank. I pushed up the sleeves of my green chore coat and turned it with both hands, the way Dad taught me at twelve, keeping it steady so the grinder would not choke.