Dad took his place at the spout. He had gone in the house while we were setting up and come back out with Mom’s old steel bucket, the one with the dent in the side from the year it fell off the porch. He set it under the spout and stood over it, in his red flannel and the old suspenders Mom bought him.
The first of the cider came out cloudy and brown and sweet-smelling, and it ran into the bucket with a sound I had not heard in three years.
Somebody started humming. I think it was one of the brothers from the packing line. It was “Bringing in the Sheaves,” of all things, and a couple of the others picked it up under their breath, and then they all laughed at themselves and went back to work.
It was a good, long afternoon. The sun came over the trees and the frost was long gone, and it got warm enough that the men took off their barn coats and hung them on the fence. Then it cooled again, and they put them back on.
We fell into the old rhythm without having to talk about it. Grind a tub full. Build the cheese, which is what Dad calls the layers of pomace wrapped in cloth on the racks. Crank the screw down. Let it run. Knock the cheese out and start over.
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Thad ran the screw. He had the shoulders for it. The lineman took over the crank when my arms gave out, and then one of the brothers, and then me again. Ewald supervised, which is what Ewald does best, from a lawn chair by the hopper.
The jugs filled up on Ewald’s tailgate. Glass ones, gallon plastic ones, a few old half-gallon milk jugs washed out. Whatever people brought, we filled.
Ten gallons. Twenty. By two o’clock we were past fifty.
My daughter got there at two-thirty.
Her name is Wilda, for her great-grandmother, and she is eleven years old. She had been at a volleyball tournament in Benton Harbor with my sister-in-law all morning, and the minute she got out of the car she ran across the yard to Dad.
“Grandpa,” she said. “You got it back.”
“We got it back,” Dad said. “Your mother did most of it.”
Wilda looked at the press, and then at the cider coming out the spout. Then she looked at the cheese, which Thad had just cranked down hard, and the pomace squeezing out the sides of the cloth.
“How do you know when it’s done?” she asked.
Dad looked at her for a moment. Then he did something I had seen him do a thousand times and had not thought about in years.
He reached down and took a handful of the pressed pomace from the edge of the rack, and he made a fist and squeezed it, slow, as hard as his old hand could. A few drops ran out between his fingers. Not more than a few.
“That’s how,” he said. “When you squeeze it and it only cries a little, it’s done. My father showed me that right here, when I was littler than you.”
He opened his hand. “Now you.”
Wilda took a handful. She squeezed it with both hands, her face all screwed up with trying. A couple of drops ran out.
“It only cried a little,” she said.
“Then it’s done,” Dad said.
I had to turn around and look at the apple trees for a minute. I am a woman who changes brake chambers in a freezing barn at five in the morning. I had to look at the apple trees.