The Apple Orchard

 Malcolm Philip Harkness III woke on a warm, early-May morning of his ninety-first year to the sweet, delicate fragrance of millions of apple blossoms. But even before he opened his eyes, besides counting his blessings, he also pondered a dilemma.

This time of year, mornings were still dark at 5 a.m., but on this day a rare cosmic peculiarity caused a false dawn to light up the sky to the east. Nevertheless, Malcolm was not quick to leave his bed as he usually did.

He had rested deeply and well and, as usual, he had woken before the alarm. He had slept with a window open since he had been a child and the fine-meshed screen that kept out bats, birds and insects had welcomed the heady floral scent of spring into the bedroom. A scent that served as a reminder that he had to make a decision, soon.

So he indulged himself with a few more moments snuggled under the thick queen-size duvet that Althea had insisted kept you cool as well as warm. He thought about his ongoing struggle with the state burial bureaucrats, as well as the life he had led over the past nine decades. And he realized in this frangible moment of self-reflection that, besides his parents and his brother, he had loved and cared deeply about mainly three things in his life. His wife, his art, and the apple orchard. And they were all now gone, or existed in a state of peril.

He knew that at his age, by statistical averages, he was living on borrowed time. His grandfather and his father had both died in their fifties. And so far, he had been given an additional forty years on the planet’s surface. So, best not to push it, he thought. He needed to act now, to stabilize what he could, before he was no longer in control.

Althea had been dead for four years. When they had been first married, on a morning like this, with the full-blooming flower clusters on the apple trees exploding their fragrant fireworks into the sky to announce the fresh new growing season, Allie would probably have woken and shaken out that magnificent mane of hair that was between the color of Rome Beauty and York Imperial apples that grew in their orchard, and proclaimed, with a cry of joy. “Oh, Phil, I feel alive!” 

He would feign sleep and when she would sweep around the room embracing the morning and imploring him to get up and appreciate its beauty, and giving him pokes, with mock accusations of slugabed and lazybones, he would reach out from under the covers, grab her hand and pull her back into the bed and they would lose themselves in love again. He would then get up, make the coffee, and bring her a cup to the bed, steaming hot and without cream or sugar, the way she liked it.

They had loved, lived and worked together for fifty-three years and it still pained his heart when he brought her to mind. And to increase his sadness, she was one of the reasons for his current mental muddle. The apple orchard that had been the focal point of their lives for so many years was the other reason. So, there were four horns to his dilemma instead of just two.

The orchard had been a part of his life since he was born. It had been in his family for three generations. His grandfather had emigrated from Scotland and acquired eighty acres of New England farmland, which had a gentle, south-facing slope and good drainage. He had cleared a half-acre site on the highest point of land, and built a rambling two-and-a-half story house with his own hands from the lumber sawn from the white pine, hemlock, birch and oak trees he had cut down there.

He had also planted six Baldwin apple seedlings, the beginnings of what would become the Harkness Orchard. In their seventh year, the trees had produced a bumper crop of apples, which he began to sell to merchants and cider mills in the area. The orchard and the apple business had grown from there. He had married and the couple had produced three children, the oldest being Malcolm Jr., Malcolm III’s father.

Malcolm Jr. had taken over the farm and the orchard when his father died, eight years before Malcolm III was born. He had just missed signing up for World War 1, because he was too young. He was a proud and driven man, anxious to uphold the family name and make his mark on the world with the farm and the apple business. He had expanded the orchard, which by that time covered twelve of the eighty acres and featured ten varieties of apples.

In the course of growing the apple business in size, Malcolm Jr. had met and married Dorothy Whiteside, a daughter of a prosperous family that, among other business interests, owned a chain of New England grocery stores. That family alliance forged a supply chain for Harkness Orchard apples. It also helped the farm and orchard weather the great depression, which wiped out many small enterprises and families.

But the connection with the Whiteside family also raised social expectations for the Harkness clan. Dorothy’s two sisters, who lived in Rhode Island, felt that she could have done better than marry a farmer. Dorothy, stung and humiliated by this conceit, set out to prove her siblings wrong. If she couldn’t achieve elevated social status through her husband, she would do it through her son.

By the time Malcolm III was born, his mother had already mapped out his future as a member of a respected profession, such as a physician or perhaps a lawyer and she harbored secret aspirations that a position in either one of those social footholds would serve to propel her son into politics. 

Malcolm Philip Harkness III came into the world when namesakes were common and Dorothy, who became a disciple of the Emily Post Institute, seized upon the prevailing etiquette as a step to move the family upward socially. So Malcom III was naturally named after his father, who had been named after his father. It was the way things were done, after all, in the best families. And it was also understood that when the time came that he would take over the family farm and apple business.

But Malcolm III was born a contrarian. He eschewed the expectations that had been conferred upon him by the suffix III appended to his name. As a teenager he began using his second name, Philip, and became Phil, to his friends.

He pitched in to work on the farm and in the orchard as was expected of all young people then, but showed no interest in the agricultural journals and fruit-farming publications that came to the house. Instead he implored his mother to subscribe to fine-art and painting magazines. When they came, he immersed himself in them and absorbed the content as if he were taking in vitamins from the sun through his skin. It was left to his brother Royce, who was a year younger than him, to take an intellectual and academic interest in the family business.

Malcolm III desperately wanted to paint and pursue art as a career. He was painfully aware of his father’s desire to have him take over the farm and the orchard, and his mother’s dream to establish him as the third-generation head of a family dynasty. He did not actively discourage his parents’ ambitions, but he privately felt that when the time came he would quietly defer and share any inheritance with his brother Royce. Inspired by the free-thinkers of the burgeoning abstract expressionism art movement of the time, he just wanted to break free of convention, and create great paintings.

Determined to forge his own way, when the Korean War broke out, he enlisted against his mother’s express wishes. He was just old enough that he didn’t need his parents’ signature. He returned home almost three years later missing the little finger of his right hand, which had been cleanly severed by a sniper’s bullet, but otherwise unscathed.

And he still burned to make art a career.

When he came back from Korea, this time with his parents’ blessing, Malcolm applied to Rutgers University under the readjusted GI Bill, ostensibly to study medicine, but again, ever the rebel, once enrolled, he secretly switched his courses and began to study art, under the professorship of Roy Lichtenstein. The first courses he signed up for were drawing and painting fundamentals. He hadn’t picked up a pencil or a brush in almost three years and he had to re-learn his technique to adjust to the missing finger of his right hand.

Snuggled under the covers in the false dawn, he remembered the first time he met the love of his life. On a weekend study-trip to New York, while in the Metropolitan Museum of Art he spotted a young woman with hair the color of rusted iron, who was part of a tour group. He maneuvered close to them and struck up a conversation with her while they were viewing a Rembrandt that was part of a European masters’ exhibit.

He remembered fondly that the discussion got quite heated as they were comparing different schools, she taking the side of representational art and he defending expressionism and the current group of American abstract artists that were shaking up the art world, and had been dubbed the Irascibles.

They ended up leaving the group and going for coffee to continue the debate. He found out that her name was Althea Broderick, she was a student at Radcliffe, and she had also come on a weekend trip to New York with a group of other students from Boston.

That encounter was the beginning of what became a long-distance friendship that blossomed into a deep and lasting love. They both later admitted that the coffee meeting was just an excuse to see more of each other. There had been a mutual intellectual and physical attraction from the beginning.

Malcolm recalled that in his third year at Rutgers, twin-tragedy struck in quick succession. His only sibling, Royce, was killed in a freak accident on the farm when a tractor tire blew while he was cultivating the side of a slope to increase the size of an alfalfa field, and the tractor rolled over on top of him.

Ten days after Royce’s funeral, he was called out of a painting class to take a frantic telephone call from his mother. A sobbing Dorothy told him that his father, Malcolm Harkness Jr., had suffered a heart attack and died while pruning back a row of heirloom Chandlers on the east side of the orchard, where he was going to plant another row of Red Delicious seedlings.

Malcolm knew then that he had to make a choice. He decided that he could not forsake his family obligations. He packed up everything, drove away from Rutgers without a degree, and never looked back. He called Althea from the campus before he left New Jersey to let her know what had happened. Two days after that she joined him at the farm, and they were married a week later. They talked about having children, but it never happened. 

Looking back, Malcolm knew that being childless had created part of his current dilemma, but there was no one to blame. They had been having too much fun to focus on children, and before they knew it forty years had gone by and it was too late. But he wanted to leave the farm and orchard to someone who would carry it on.

The likely person was Sarah Burnside, a grandchild of Althea’s younger sister Mary, and therefore a great-niece, and family. He had considered it for a while now. Sarah was refreshingly free of class consciousness. She had also driven out from Boston on her own accord to help with the apple harvest for three consecutive seasons.

Malcolm had stubbornly resisted the tabulations on his balance sheet and all entreaties by his banker to grow the apple business past a certain size. He deplored what he saw as the industrialization of America, and made it a point to do as much of the work that he could, on his own. He employed neighbors and local help-for-hire for tilling, planting and harvesting, and took the apples to market himself. But something was missing from his life.

Then, Althea converted a room in the big rambling farmhouse to a studio and Malcolm began to paint in oils and egg tempera. Suddenly, life changed. He had Althea, they had the apple orchard that paid the bills and gave them a good living and he had his art. Life was better than good.

But a cloud began to form over the clear blue sky of their lives when Malcolm and Althea had been married eight years. The orchard was doing a brisk business and Malcolm had build a little farm stand on the highway that ran past the property. In the time of prosperity that followed WW2 and Korea, the highway was paved and tourists began traveling the route in large numbers. Althea put a few of Malcolm’s paintings on tripods in the stand, and tourists snapped them up. When Malcolm was initially reluctant to part with an oil painting of Jacqueline Kennedy, the wife of the President of the United States, a well-dressed traveler in a blue Cadillac offered them two-thousand dollars. That evening Althea and Malcolm opened a bottle of Dom Pérignon to celebrate. Life was indeed good.

But trouble started when Malcolm hired two brothers, Duane and Leroy Fletcher, to be part of the apple-picking crew for that year’s harvest. The Fletchers lived in a neighboring county on a hardscrabble acreage and the family lived by doing odd jobs and, rumor had it, augmenting their earnings by selective thievery. But Malcolm ignored gossip and believed in giving people the benefit of doubt.

It was a mistake.

The orchard had enjoyed a couple of prosperous years and he had planted two rows of Ruby Frost and Cosmic Crisp on the far side of the orchard, which had expanded over time to take up thirty of the eighty acres. Althea took the two Fletcher brothers over in the Jeep to show them where they could start picking.

When Althea got out of the Jeep, Duane Fletcher instigated an attempted rape and Leroy stood by, waiting to go second. Althea clawed, scratched and fought but the act was only averted when a foreman, Roger Atwood, came upon them and called Malcolm on CB radio. He arrived in a fury and if Althea hadn’t stopped him he would have torn both of the Fletchers into small pieces. They were fired on the spot, the police were called and the case went to court. Both brothers were sentenced to state prison. Leroy got a year, and Duane got two.  

A week after Duane was released, the Harkness roadside stand mysteriously caught fire in the middle of the night. Althea suffered second degree burns on her hands and arms trying to put the flames out before Malcolm pulled her away and rushed her eleven miles to the hospital. The wooden stand burned to the ground, along with its stock of apples and a dozen or so of Malcolm’s paintings. Everything pointed to one of the Fletchers being responsible, but nothing could be proven.

Leon and the rest of the Fletcher family sold the hardscrabble holding and moved south to the Florida panhandle. The apple telegraph, which was a word-of-mouth conduit for news, rumor and speculation that served the insider apple community well before there was an Internet, and was about as accurate, had it that the Fletchers had purchased a low-lying tract of Florida land at a bargain price because it was infested with mangroves that had incrementally crept up from the southern part of the state.

There, Leon had set up a home-brewing operation using mangrove fruit and selling the distilled product at a premium; touting the brewed extract as having medicinal properties that would treat maladies like diarrhea, and ward off diseases like malaria.

Duane Fletcher however, initially continued to make a nuisance of himself in New England. He spent another year in jail for a robbery. Following that, the apple telegraph had it that after languishing yet another six months in prison for assault; Duane had worn out his welcome in the area and had moved south to join his family selling mangrove moonshine. And good riddance.

Malcolm rose, walked to the window and smiled out over the thirty acres of fragrant blooms that were poised waiting to open up fully to the morning sun. He inhaled the heady miasma with a sense of satisfaction, and the comfort of moving ahead.

He had made a decision, well two of them. He would will the property and the orchard to their great-niece Sarah, who reminded him so much of Althea, that it made his heart ache. And he would have the Harkness-family graveyard, which was now in a fenced-off area by the house, moved to the county cemetery.

There were six Harkness graves that would have to be moved, including Althea’s, and he would buy a plot beside her, for himself. It would be expensive, but for the best.

The apple telegraph had been wrong. Duane Fletcher’s last mistake had been returning to the scene of his crimes on a cold dark night to steal something, apples, paintings, farm-equipment? It hadn’t mattered.

It was the only secret that Malcolm had ever kept from Althea in their fifty-three years together, and Sarah, who would inherit everything, need never know either. Duane’s remains were buried well below the frost-line alongside the outside row of Cosmic Crisp apple trees on the far side of the orchard.