In the Orchard by Eliza Minot

Author:Eliza Minot [Minot, Eliza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

A deadpan panic fills her, lifts her, as she watches the playful autumn leaves swish their colors above the minivan like pennants over competing swimmers. All around her is uplift; all around her is foreboding. Something terrible is happening to someone somewhere; something magnificent is happening to someone somewhere. It happens all at once: a falling from a great height, a rising from the wet ground, two winds from opposite ends colliding, then hovering for a moment, like starlings taking flight together in a lift, then a dip, then a soaring away.

Maisie takes a few slow breaths, thinks of what’s ahead. The orchard. The pretty orchard with the rows of trees like people throughout history, statues of ancestors, of forefathers and foremothers, with their witchy-tipped fingers and open arms in tangled poses, all of them looking uphill, looking downhill, their roots digging as deep as their branches grow high. “Nothing prettier than an apple orchard,” her father once said. Did he say that? The pretty orchard with all the different kinds of apples. Maisie likes the Macouns best. They have a dusty blue film on them, the same that is found on black plums, that when shined up against a sweater, vanishes, so that the apple is as perfect as Snow White’s.

She thinks of the bees at the orchard that go haywire around the cider mill. They land on hands and faces. One year when Xavier was small, he got stung. He went to pick up a little pumpkin on the ground, and a bee was on the handle. He’d cried, and then cried more because he was crying in a place where strangers were watching him. Neil picked him up.

“It’s okay. Now you’ve been stung by a bee!” Neil kissed his teary cheek. “What a big boy!”

Maisie watched sidelong, maternally eagle-eyed, for any sign of an allergic reaction.

Neil pinched out the stinger. “See? It’s out.”

They all looked at it, the bee’s left-behind body still stuck to the stinger.

Harriet, a toddler then, looked at it closely. “It look like booger,” she said.

Xavier started crying again. “I didn’t mean to kill the bee.” His voice grew uneven with shortened breaths. “I only like to pick up the pum-pumpkin!”

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