Watchdog of the Orchard

“How many of these are good?” Rosie asked, standing on her tiptoes to read the topmost row of apple… flavors? Breeds? 

“Uh,” Max said, bending down to scan the list. There were about twenty different apples, all with their own seasons and “Sweet-Tang Rating,” marked by little pictures and graphs so small that it did not seem possible that the bulk of apple-pickers could read them with any amount of ease. In all, Max knew about five of them.

“Honeycrisp is good,” he said, pointing. Rosie’s dark eyes followed his fingertip to the apple, and she tapped its wooden outline with her little hand. “Um, Granny Smith is the real sour one that Mom and Dad put in pies. The one Bree likes. And Golden Delicious is… I mean, what else can it be? It’s delicious.”

Rosie looked from the round golden picture of the Delicious to Max’s face, brows furrowed in concentration. 

“It’s not a very special name,” she said. “If it’s that good. Why don’t they call it… the Holy Delicious?”

That was a pretty good name, Max thought.

“I dunno. ‘Cause it’s yellow, I guess. And it’s an apple, so it can’t really be holy?”

“Eve,” Rosie stated, and Max paused.

“Whoa. Yeah. Well, like, but she died or something, Rosie. She was cursed.”

“She didn’t die! Did you listen in Sunday school?”

No, he thought, I was drawing trading cards with all my friends on them.

“Yes, of course,” he said, a blush coloring his cheeks. Max cleared his throat and snatched a basket from a precarious tower of baskets, and another for Rosie. She held it with both hands, and even then it was too big for her little frame. At 5 years old, she was the runt of the Smith litter, but that just made piggyback rides a thousand times easier.

The basket bounced and rattled as she bolted toward a vast field of rich green trees freckled with red and gold, the dew stuck to their fruit glittering like coins. Rosie ran right through the split-rail fence, under the grinning face of a werewolf cut out of wood. It held its faded paw up for a high five, and Max met it with a satisfying thunk!

Gomez Pumpkin Patch and Apple Farm had two mascots: Loops the Werewolf, watchdog of the orchard, and a buddy named Barton Bites-a-Lot, a vampire never seen without a small yellowish pumpkin with black freckles he called Pepperjack. 

Max liked Loops best. There was something about that goofy, lopsided smile that resonated with him.

A sweet fragrance floated through the air, at once overpowering and subtle, like a restaurant and a kitchenette in equal measure. Max inhaled it so deeply that he felt his lungs might pop, and exhaled only when Rosie turned around and called for him.

“Maxie! Look, look! Look how pretty this one is!” 

She held an apple the shade of dawn and the size of her head in both hands, basket hooked around her elbow. It was a very beautiful apple, he thought - until he approached. A small, dented hole marred the side facing him. Max grimaced.

“Rosie, it’s got worms.”

“What? How do you know?”

“There’s a big worm hole in the side. It looks like… I won’t say what it looks like, but it’s nasty.”

Rosie turned the apple in her hand, a deep frown on her face.

“We should give the worm a better home,” she said sternly. “We should let it stay in a cardboard box and just feed it apples, that way it isn’t sticky and nasty all the time but it still has its favorite snack.”

“Maybe it likes its apple,” Max said, rubbing his hand over his stubbled chin. He’d shaved that morning; he’d have to shave again before he went to bed. “You don’t buy a house you don’t like. I mean, not if you’re a worm. I think worm economy is pretty simple, you just kinda land on an apple and that’s yours now. Kinda like how Britain did, but with less of the murder and stuff. Maybe. I don’t know, actually. Do worms murder?”

“Ick-onommy?” Rosie echoed, everything else glancing off of her. She eyed the apple with a frown. “That sounds scary. Are you sure he’ll be okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” Max said. “Worms are pretty happy with wherever they land. They’re, like, the hippies of the animal kingdom. Them and raccoons.”

Rosie considered the apple for another long moment, turning it this way and that before finally dropping it like a hot stone. It bounced off the yellowing grass and tamped earth and rolled to a stop at the base of a skinny tree, branches heavy with fruit.

“Let’s start here,” Max said, yanking a bright yellow apple from a low-hanging branch.

“I can’t reach that high!”

He dropped the apple into her basket and crouched. Like a squirrel, she climbed onto his back, light-up Sketchers blinking at the edge of his vision and shining off the frames of his glasses like fireworks. Nerd glasses, his friends would joke, but they complimented his face well - and it was nice to see without the hassle of jamming his fingers into his eyeballs.

It went like that for about twenty minutes and a billion trees. After the fifth - minute and tree - Max hauled Rosie onto his shoulders and let her stay there, grabbing at apples as they passed beneath the branches. She cried out when a twig snapped back and hit her on the finger, but when a panicked Max asked if she was okay she answered with a shrug and a laugh.

“Here,” she said, dropping an apple over his head. He caught it before it could smash into one of the baskets, turned it in his hand and tossed it aside when he found a big dent in the side anyway. Rosie did not seem to notice, and in the next second he was catching an entirely different apple, this one red where the other was green, perfectly spherical and shiny. He added it to her basket, hanging from his right elbow.

“Slow down, Missus Rosa,” he said with a tsk. Another apple. This one glanced off his thumb and popped him in the gut; not painful, but startling. “They’re starting to fight back. I don’t wanna die by fruit. I’m already at risk of a grape-death, don’t add apples to the list.”

“How come you’re the only one in the family that can’t eat grapes?” Rosie asked, this time leaning over Max’s head to lower the apple into his hand. She hauled herself back up with help from a solid grip on his bleached hair, uncomfortable but not intolerable.

“How come I’m the only boy in the family? I’m a special case.”

The fading light stretched Rosie’s giggling form into a long shadow. A three-quarters moon hung in the sky - waxing gibbous, he recalled. That meant, what? A week until the full moon? Less? He’d have to break open his astronomy textbook and check.

“We’d better hurry it up,” Max said, eyeballing the baskets. One overflowed. The other was about half full. Maybe he had been a bit too generous filling Rosie’s basket. How on earth were they going to eat all of these apples?

“Aw, okay,” Rosie said.

Max walked the length of one more row, catching and tossing apples as Rosie dropped them, and by time they reached the end, his basket was overflowing too. 

Audrey’s gonna kill me, he thought as he started back toward Gomez’s main barn. And we still gotta load up the pumpkins.

At the very least, luck was on his side. Audrey, his elder sister by two years, and Bree, his younger by four, did not show until the baskets had been weighed and measured and he coughed up the last of the money he’d made at the ice cream shop that summer. 

“Max!” Audrey exclaimed the moment he’d sat Rosie at a small table with the apples, now tucked away in a pair of the thickest paper bags he’d seen in his life. “Two bags? How many did you guys pick? Did you get Rosie the kid baskets?”

“The what?” He asked, and suddenly he recalled the much smaller plastic bins next to the fancy wicker baskets he’d snagged. “Oh.”

Bree plopped a pumpkin onto the table next to the apples. Rosie ogled at it.

“That’s huge!” She said, slapping her hand on the side free of dirt. “Let’s make him scary!”

“No!” Bree said. “We’re making him cute. I picked out the pumpkin so I get to decide what he looks like.”

“That’s not what Mom said!”

“We vote,” Audrey said. “When we get home. That’s how this works, guys. Every year. Gabi and Mom and Dad are part of the family, too. C’mon.”

Bree sighed and Rosie dug into the second bag of apples, hauling a big green one from the bunch. She handed it off to Bree, who brightened. 

“Thanks.”

“Don’t ruin your appetite,” Max said. “We’re gonna have chili. Have you guys ever had Gomez Chili? It’s good.”

“I’m twelve, Max,” Bree answered with a playful roll of her eyes. “Not four.”

“Well I’m five,” Rosie added. “Can I have some?”

“Duh,” Max said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the card his mom had given him, the one she’d insisted paid for everything; he had nodded along as if that was what would happen. 

He held it out for Audrey, who shook her head and pulled her own card from her purse.

“Nah,” she said. “I don’t wanna spend Mom’s money. I’ll be back, okay guys? Bree, watch Max and Rosie. Make sure they don’t get into too much trouble.”

“Hey!”

Audrey winked, and Max sat at the little table with his hands folded politely in front of him. Bree bit into her apple more like a creature than a girl and grinned at him with a mouthful of juice and white flesh. He flicked a crumb stuck to the table at her. She yelped.

The massive barn doors were open, and the smell of bonfire smoke and Loupsbrook’s fragrant pine trees drifted into the building, mingling with the hodge-podge of sweets and salts and fruits and vegetables. The moon was brighter now, the sky darker, and in the distance a wolf howled.

Less than a week, he thought, green eyes fixed on the night sky. He glanced down at his fingernails, where black had begun at the bed, and curled his fingers into his palm. 

Only a few more days.