THE MURDERED APPLE

THE MURDERED APPLE_____MURDER WITH APPLE

“ But look, it seems this apple has been stabbed” Mark tells me, showing an apple, which he has picked up from the ground. In the apple, a Plumpgum apple, full, so pot bellied that it looks like the apple is about to burst, a knife blade is stuck. Mark tries to extract the knife from the belly of the apple, but he doesn’t succeed in it. The blade is so deeply stuck, indeed sunk into the apple, as if it were gotten stuck into the apple.

Mark and I came picking apples in Harold’s orchard . Today is the second day of work.

It is mid morning, shortly after Mark has showed me the stabbed apple, when Harold broke in the orchard, riding his red horse,Gimco, a real devil for running and jumping. As always when he rides a horse, Harold wore his long, great boots, his checkered shirt, and, of course, his large, rumpled hat, worn sideways, couldn’t be missing. Harold arrived brandishing a loudspeaker. He only a little advanced in the orchard, then he stopped the horse, which didn’t want to stay still, and shouted at us, into the microphone: “ Stop working! For today your work here ends now! Youe must all come to the farm at once! On, hurry up, I wait for you!” Then he came back on his horse, which looked like a rocket, so much fast it ran that you would have said it didn’t put its hooves on the ground, that you would have said that the horse, rather than running, it were flying. All of us___we were twelve hired by Harold for the apple harvest____set out towards the farm, which was more than two kilometers from the orchard.

“ What will be this news?” someone wondered aloud , along the way.

“ Who knows why Harold wants us at the farm” someone else said.

“ Ah, he will intend to offer us refreshments” someone said, giggling.

“ You will see, if he wants that we go at farm, it will be because he needs our arms for some work on the farm”

The farm was a recently built country house, which stood out with the burnt red of its walls in the green of the flat countryside, as well as it was harmonizing perfectly with the colors of earth in autumn.

The farm was very wide in extension, but it had only two floors, the ground floor and the first floor.

The apartment in which Harold lived alone, even if he had numerous servants at his service____he preferred to call them : collaborators____was at the ground floor. There were, at his service,the cook and the gardener, the stable boy and the agronomist, and a butcher with two assistants, and there were ten guardians. Instead for the work required by the orchard, by the vineyard and even the pigs, the only animals he had decided to raise, Harold preferred to hire only temporary workers, with a duration ranging from some day to some months. No work (job) at Harold enlisted to last a year.

When we arrived at the farm, that morning, Harold was waiting for us in the courtyard, which he was measured with long strides, going up and down. From his dark, frowning face, we soon could see that he was very worried, and also almost angry. With the whip in his hand he continued to give whips on the table, on the bench, on the columns of the shed above the courtyard.

Without stopping to go up and down, he announced us, in a raspy and broken voice, so much broken it was that it seemed he was going to cry at any moment., (he announced) that someone was making a massacre of his pigs. We all knew how much Harold cared about those beasts, how he cared about their feeding , how much he cared about their well-being. He had even put a bathroom with shower for his beloved animals, which was adjacent to the barn where their food was served. And usually it was he who took care of showering the pigs, even if they didn’t seem to like it so much. On the contrary, they would have preferred to do without it. Yeah, they would have liked to not be put under the jet of the water that cleaned up , polished them, even if only for a while, since as soon as they got out of the shower, they started to roll on the ground again, preferring to roll on dirt ground.

The pigs raised by Harold, the GREAT GRAY BULLS ,are of a very special and also rare breed, since they are the result of a cross which was not only obtained with difficulty, but which also does not ensure that all the specimens of this breed, after being born, can survive after the first few days of their birth, and therefore that they can be bred ( in order to be bred ), certainly bred to make harns and sausages, salami and pork loin, and saddle of pork…..The_GREAT GRAY BULLS_____ this special bred was obtained through the cross between the Big Bug, a very big pig originally from Alsace, and the Chick Chuck Jungung, a typical Caucasian pig, small in size, but much appreciated for its delicious meat . This pig looks rather ugly, and also unpleasant, and even scary It/ has a dark skin, of an indefinable color between dark gray and muddy green. Its snout is very pronounced and also almost squared that to seem turreted. Two short, but very sharp tusks protrude from its snout,which the pig does not hesitate to use, even its claws are equally sharp and deadly.

“ Someone is making a massacre of my special animals” Harold kept on repeating, in despair.He took his head in his hands, he trampled on his hat, which he has thrown to the ground with a gesture of anger, he even gave a whip on his boots, perhaps inadvertently, since he kept on hitting with the whip.

Harokd’s pigs had not been killed either by shooting or by stabbing them, but they had been poisoned. They had ingested the poison, which had killed them, eating the apples that were part

Of their feeding, the apple from the orchard of Harold, the ones we had been hired to pick.

Even the apples from Harold’s orchard are almost special, a very tasty variation, they are also in great demand on the market. The PLUMPGIM apple, this their name, is a cross between the PINK LADY and the RED CHIEF. It has a very full look, it is very pot-bellied. When you take a Plumpgim, when it is in your hand, when you pick it ip in the crook of your hand, it looks like as if this full bodied, pot-bellied apple wants to get out of your hand, or, even , it were about to burst.

“ Where is the stabbed apple you found this morning?” I asked to Mark immediately after Harold had givrn us the news if the killing of a dozen of his precious pigs, killed with poisoned apples.

“ Here it is” Mark said, pulled the stabbed Plumpgim apple, with the knife still stuck into the apple, out of his backpack. “ You know, I ‘m wondering …..would it be appropriate to tell Harokd about …..this stabbed apple? Maybe….whoever poisoned his pigs, he also stuck the knife in this apple” I said.

After being killed by the poison, at least the vet assured it had been after they died that the Harold’s pigs had been mutilated. Some pigs had their tail cut off, some had their tail, some their paws cut off.

“ I don’t think we have to talk about the stabbed apple to Harold” Mark said, shaking his head.

I insisted: why not tell him about it, instead? “ You know, there are strange rumors about Harold and his pigs” Marl said in a whisper, avoiding to look at me. “ What rumors?” I asked.

“ Ah, they say….that Harold feeds the girls he kills to his pigs” Mark murmured.

“ What? What are you saying? I can’t believe it! Harold…would he be a killer, would he be even a serial killer? I can’t believe it!”

We didn’t tell anyone about the stabbed apple, not even Harold.

During the next a few days Mark kept on trying to get the knife out of the stabbed apple, and finally he succeeded in it. The blade of the knife, entirely stuck into the apple, was bloody.