Golden Delicious by Christopher Boucher

Author:Christopher Boucher [Boucher, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-511-7
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2016-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

D’ARCY SPICE

1987 wasn’t an anomaly; the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was wrong. The apples came back smaller the year after that, and smaller still—no bigger than crabs, in fact—the following year. In 1990, no apples grew at all—all the trees in Appleseed were bare. The Board of Select Cones voted to bring in a soil expert from the margins, but all she could do was confirm that the pagesoil was barren—she couldn’t say why or how to solve it. So the Board of Select Cones summonsed the Memory of Johnny Appleseed and demanded a solution. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed held out his hands to them. “I’m really not sure,” he said. “It has something to do with the stories we’re telling. They seem to be sapping the soil.”

The Memory was dismissed, and from then on, vilified. Or is it villainized? Cast out, outcasted: turned away at his favorite restaurants, denied meaning at his bank, locked out of his own apartment. Soon he was homeless. Rumor was he was sleeping on the streets or in the deadgroves. Sometimes you’d see him outside the Why, handing out brochures.

A host of theories ran through Appleseed: the blight was a curse, prayed upon us out of spite; it was some sort of wildword virus; it was a plot, spearheaded by East Appleseed to destabilize us. Meanwhile, we prayed for a different story, or a better ending to this one.

Overnight, it seemed, Appleseed lost most of its meaning. The applers tried swapping out their central ingredients for another—oranges, lemons, pears—but to no avail. Have you ever had a pearburger? A raw lemon? Ye—uck. Soon, applers began to leave town, hitchhiking over the margins toward richer harvests. The Planters who stayed in Appleseed gave up on perishables and tried their luck with solidifides: they planted chairtrees, for example, or fields of refrigerators.

It wasn’t long before the town’s appleloss hit home. My Mom lost hours at the hospital and had to pick up a shift at Appleseed Mental. That was the thought of small potatoes, though, compared to my Dad’s predicament. First, his tenants started sending in partial-meaning payments, forcing my Dad to hound them—to drive over to the apartments, knock on their doors, and ask them face-to-face where the meaning was. A few times I went with him. Once, we were driving down Belmont Street when we saw a pair of overalls who owed my Dad meaning walking toward the building. We parked the car and followed him inside. The overalls, who used to pick apples at Berson’s Farm before it shut down, answered the door with a four-foot cigarette hanging out of his mouth. When he saw it was my Dad, he nodded and leaned against the doorframe. “Ralph,” he said.

“It’s the ninth, Jaime,” said my Dad.

“Yes, it is,” said the pair of overalls.

“Nine days late,” said my Dad.

“Yes,” said the pair of overalls.

“Where is it?”

“I don’t have it.”

“You have to pay your rent, Jaime,” my Dad said.

“Do I?” the overalls said.

Soon it wouldn’t matter—more than half of my Dad’s tenants stopped paying.

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