The Cider Press We Carried Home

“I was going to bring it back,” Darwin said. “Every year I was going to bring it back.”

“I know you were,” Dad said.

Darwin looked down at the bundle in his hands. Then he unwrapped the bar towel.

It was the crank handle. The real one. The cast-iron grip on its short iron arm, black with age and smooth as a river rock where three generations of hands had turned it. Grandpa’s hand. Dad’s hand. Mine.

“I took it off the first week,” Darwin said. “People kept spinning the wheel and pinching their fingers. I put it in the drawer behind the bar.” He turned it over. “I look at it sometimes. When it’s slow. I’d take it out and look at it and think, I’ve got to take this back to Augie.”

He held it out.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got. I’m sorry.”

Dad did not take the handle. Not at first.

Instead, he bent down, slow, with his new hip. He picked up the cup of cider sitting on the press frame, the one he had not touched. Then he held Mom’s steel bucket under the spout, caught the last good run of cider in the cup, and filled it to the top.

He straightened up and held it out to Darwin.

“First cup’s yours,” Dad said. “I’ve been saving it.”

The whole yard was quiet. Ewald took his cap off. I do not think he knew he did it.

Darwin stood there with the handle in one hand. Then he shifted it to his other arm and took the cup from Dad with his free hand, and his hand was shaking a little, and some of the cider ran over the side onto his knuckles.

He drank it. All of it. He stood in my father’s yard in front of six old men and a dozen neighbors and drank that whole cup of cider, and when he lowered it his eyes were wet.

“Tastes like it used to,” he said.

“It’s the same press,” Dad said. “It’s the same apples. It’s the same road.” He held out his hand. “I’ll take that handle now.”

Darwin gave it to him. Dad turned to me and held it up.

“Rosella,” he said, “take that pipe off and put your grandpa’s handle back on.”

I took my pipe handle off. It had held all day, ugly as it was. I bolted the old cast-iron handle back on the flywheel hub with the same bolt, and it fit the way only the right part fits, snug and quiet.

“Darwin,” Dad said, “you’ve got one tub left in you?”

Darwin looked at the crank. Then at Dad. Then at the six old men, who were all looking at him.

“I guess I do,” he said.

He took off his jacket and hung it on the fence with the barn coats. Then he put both hands on that old handle and turned it. The grinder clanked over. One of the brothers tipped in a basket of Jonathans, and Darwin kept cranking, steady, the way you are supposed to, the way nobody had ever shown him.

Thad stepped in beside him on the screw. “Slow down,” Thad said. “You’ll choke it. There. Like that.”

Nobody said another word about it. Not one person. Ewald put his cap back on and went back to his lawn chair. The neighbors went back to their jugs. Wilda went back to writing names on masking tape.

And Dad, finally, poured himself a cup of cider and drank it.