Devil’s Lake

“It is a library of apple trees. Library, a collective noun,” he stressed to me in the middle row where he found me lying on my back.

I had apologized for trespassing into his garden. I didn’t know library then. I didn’t even think to say orchard. I was twelve and struck with love with every leaf that brushed my shoulder and I had been driven out of Oma’s house by a yearning that pulled me forward by the heart.

To be deposited in the first place I’d ever seen where the trees lined up in rows. When you grow up in the forest you see magic in the order of orchards, though I didn’t know till it knocked me to the ground.

“Like a parliament of owls, a hive or grist of bees.”

I might have fallen romantic for him if it weren’t for his round gold glasses with stems disappearing into the tops of his stiff white beard. Glasses always make me think of our Bard which made me think of fathers. With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, I thought, though if I’d had a moment more it might have been What a pair of spectacles is here! Let me embrace.

Oma couldn’t learn me like this man might be able to, library master and stern, though it was always thanks to Oma I knew the words of our Bard and therefore had any words with which to say, “Library is dukedom large enough! Sir,” and decide this man would be my father. I hadn’t ever yet had a father.

First I had to leave his apple trees, my new-found home, and race back down the forest path to Oma’s house where I might wrap up the rest of my earlier life.

Jagd was cutting up a duck jaggedly at the table. He threw a white-pink coin of fat when I came in. It stuck to my cheek for a second before it fell to my chest.

“Muss up her dress, you will, you mean fool. Come here, baby,” Oma said from her chair.

Jagd laughed and laughed like he always did. Raw juice dripped into a puddle on top of one of his boots.

Oma pulled the lace bib of her dress up to wipe off my face. Her bib was stained with a newish map of spills, but then it had never been white. She patted my clean cheek sharply.

“Now where you been, Apfel baby!”

She had me sit on her lap in the way I always did, pretending to sit but really just hovering my bottom so as not to crush her thin old legs. My own legs and bottom were very strong from this tradition.

I hovered over Oma’s lap till it was time for dinner, dried deer Jagd hung in strips from the ceiling. Oma made him dunk his hands in the water basin before he pulled the meal down and to spite her he ate three portions.

“Why do we have to keep him?” I whined to Oma in dinnertime ritual.

“When a boy only knows one thing and that’s how to be mean you don’t want him going out spreading your name around,” Oma said. She paused for me to chime in with her, “More than kin and less than kind!”

Then we laughed, Oma more. She didn’t seem to notice my constant thinking on this evening about fathers and how to get mine. After a while she fell asleep in her chair, her chin nearing her spattered bib, and Jagd got up to go wherever he went in the evenings.

“Bye Mama,” he said to Oma as he left, because we were after all a well-trained family, even if as uncle and niece Jagd and me were apples and pigs, only related in that we grew on green earth. He let his gross brown tongue loll at me as a last cruelty before he was gone for the night.

Oma didn’t respond to my knock on the chair or table or singing, so I knew she was really asleep. I started to straighten the house. I stretched out the time it took to wash our knives, wipe the table, wipe out Oma’s gazunder, dump the water basin, straighten the bed blankets, and sweep the floor. Oma wouldn’t look around and regret me once I was gone.

Even though it was nearing dark I walked three trips down to the river to fill up the tub.

I took my dead mother’s gray-blue dress down from where it sat folded in a shelf carved into the wall, beautiful. Oma took it out sometimes when we practiced lines about family or tragedies. I found my own good dress too, rust orange and frilly. Into the tub with both of them.

After clapping three times in the dark to check Oma, I took the cake of good soap from its shelf and went over the dresses lightly. Both felt like clouds or petals in comparison to the dress I wore. My dead mother’s dress was the softer flower.

I took off my everyday dress and cleaned it too. It took more vigorous scrubbing. Since there was no underwear to wash, being that Oma didn’t believe in it, and no clothes to put on that weren’t wet, I rocked back and forth in my bare skin, scrubbing.

Then I knotted up as much of myself as would fit in the tub and soaked in the smell of the soap. I got out and crouched beside it to dunk my head underwater and hold it as long as I could so my hair floated out to all sides like I was Ferdinand underwater listening to Ariel’s song.

Or like I was a sweet apple tree spiked with new growth, fallen upside down in the roaring sea. That’s the kind of thing I thought at twelve.

“Curtsied when you have, and kiss’d the wild waves whist, foot it featly here and there,” I sang softly to my cleanness. In a kind leaving gesture to sweet sleeping Oma who’d taught me good for my future, I unbuttoned her lace bib with care and dunked it into the water till it was a good overall gray.

Though I didn’t use any extra soap on that. She’d have smelt it, and then she might have known and tried to stop me.

“Hark, hark, I hear the strain of strutting chant-i-cleer, cry cock-a-diddle-dow,” I sang in the morning, walking out with my basket.

“Blackberries are blackening!” Oma called after me. I nodded along with Full fathom five thy father lies to let her know that berry collecting was exactly my plan. Though my neck caught a bit at father.

I marched till the forest was thick enough to hide me changing into my rust orange dress. I put my everyday dress in its place in the bottom of my basket, under the straw.

It had been Oma’s birthday when I last wore it and the rust orange dress needed to be taken down. The dress showed a length of little girl legs. That at least should work for catching a father, I figured.

On to the orchard, my new world.

At the fence sat a floppy dog I hadn’t seen the day before. It stood up when it saw me coming and I feared it’d bark and make me look like a pest, but closer up I saw its eyes were half-closed and its crooked legs shook. Old dog.

“Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” I said to it. Its tail wagged once and made its whole body wobble. It let me slip through the fence without calling attention.

“Doggy doggy,” I crooned and let it smell my feet. It flopped down, unconcerned. One friend made. I’d never had a dog. I told it his name would be Schlappig and he’d be let in the great orchard-house at night for warm food and a lie on the rugs.

Staying outside the rows in the short grass I strolled a wide arc around the place, so if the library keeper saw me he would know me to be honest, not planning to steal anything at all. No apple man could ever love an apple rustler. Apfel Apple, I thought, my chest and brain all palpitating from the perfect lines the trees made. It could be my own name.

The man was so engaged in a branch of tiny fruits when I finally came into his view that I had to twirl around in my dress and sing Full fathom five very loudly to make him notice me.

“Sir! Hello, Sir!” I shouted.

“Oh. Are you here to pick your own? We don’t open for that until October.” He shook the branch lightly at me. It did not yet occur to me that when he said we, we aren’t yet open or we aren’t yet ripe, he might mean himself and the apples or himself and the trees only, that he might never think of including anyone else.

“I think, Sir, that I’d quite definitely like to pick and purchase your apples when they’re grown full out and they’re ready, but as for today, I’m interested to see with what kind of work you grow them, Sir.”

He rolled a fruit between his thumb and finger, lightly. It was plump and freckled and looked like my heart. I thought him a man who could bruise nothing.

“I have an interest in apples, Sir.” Brevity is the soul of wit and mine snapped him to decision. He waved his sweet hand across the expanse of the orchard.

“This is no day’s lesson. My name is Don Olfwinckle.”

“My name is Apfel.”

“Apfel. A wonderful name.”

“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls,” I told him. Wit is also the soul of wit.

He let me follow him around the orchard. He was looking for cork spot.

“It appears as small dimples or darker spots on the developing fruits. We may not be able to see it at this stage, but with diligence we can catch any sign of it before many fruits began to suffer,” he told me, holding down a largish green apple with no visible blemishes. He plucked another, high above my head, with a brown crevice.

“Cork spot,” I gasped for him.

“No. Codling moth. There will be a larva in that apple. You might have learned to call it a worm, but you have learned incorrectly.”

He pulled a small shining tool from his pocket, silver with a hook on one side and a blunt prong on the other. He pressed the prong onto the healthy side of the apple and rubbed it in a circle until the skin dented with a darker green. “This is the way cork spot will present.”

Don Olfwinckle put the apple in my basket and moved down the row. In my following him I learned to identify apple scab, sooty blotch flyspeck, and damage from cutworms, earwigs, and leafrollers. The evidence of all of these problems would present on the fruit, he taught me.

Tomorrow he would go through and study the leaves. He preferred to focus on one aspect of tree health at a time, he said, so each part receives his full attention. Two days every week were devoted to monitoring.

“Of course we must also train, prune, thin, fertilize, clean up, keep the grasses short, and harvest. There is also the science.” He smiled at the thought of science but my heart warmed at we.

“But have your apples ever had any of these diseases? I can’t imagine it. They are so well cared for.” I patted his sleeve.

“An orchard near to mine has suffered greatly from cutworms and cork spot. The cork spot, particularly, shows a weakness in the land that is not to be taken lightly.”

This reprimand ended our orchard walk. Don Olfwinckle needed to get to his specimens. I asked if I could try his magnifying glass and walked toward the house with him but the conversation did not extend in a natural manner. I despaired failing to hold onto my father.

He stopped at a small shed between the orchard and the house. “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“God has lent us but this only child, Sir!”

“Take these for you and your parents, then.” The shed led to a cellar and he fetched three balls of brown paper. He unwrapped one to show me. It was perfectly orange.

“Haven’t got a father!” I needed to establish my availability.

“Belle de Boskoop, last season’s crop. They are too tart to eat when we pick them and sweeten when stored.”

So I knew it was important to have patience with the good man Don Olfwinckle. His gift filled the whole of my body and threatened to spill out my eyes, but thanks to the teachings of my Oma I didn’t stumble for a second in my response.

“I do desire to learn, Sir, and I hope if you have occasion to use me for your own turn you shall find me yare, for truly, Sir, for your kindness I owe you a good turn.”

Pompey. Our bard may have made him a prattler but I delivered his lines with rhythm and sincerity.

I flitted home, stopping only to change my dress and rearrange the tokens nestled so fatly and full of sugar in my basket.

“Welcome, brave Warwick! What brings thee to France?” said Oma and snatched at my basket.

I jerked it back, not to keep the fruit from her but from fear she’d dig her knobby fingers past the straw and feel my rust orange dress. A Belle de Boskoop in its wrapping jumped over the side and hit the dirt with a hard crinkle.

“You don’t find paper in the forest, baby! Where have you been?”

“Slutting,” Jagd said, chewing.

“I have not been! These are gifts from an apple librarian, who is teaching me lessons.” I unwrapped the other two Belles and brandished them. Oma didn’t glance at them. She had unwrapped the paper on the fallen apple and was holding it close to her eyes.

Now Jagd snatched.

“You’d better not, I was going to give you one, stupid! There are three of us and three apples, stupid!” Jagd was the only person who could make me sound so unlearned. Oma must have noticed. She put the fallen apple down.

“Better not eat that yet, bad boy. Give it here.” She polished all three apples with her lace bib and I was glad I cleaned it. Then she lined them all up on the dirty lap of her dress.

“Now,” she said ceremoniously, “what lessons are there to learn about apples?”

She hunched forward with wide eyes while I told her about cork spot, apple scab, sooty blotch flyspeck, cutworms, earwigs, leafrollers, and the maturation of the Belle de Boskoop.

She seasoned my descriptions of apple afflictions periodically, “Faith, as you say, there’s small choice in rotten apples,” “a goodly apple rotten at the heart,” “Foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear and have their heads crushed like rotten apples!”

Oma did love to learn.

I slept with slices of Belle de Boskoop in my stomach. I had eaten eight slices, one full apple, and so had Oma and Jagd. I wondered how their stomachs felt, Oma’s sitting up in her chair, Jagd’s off doing whatever Jagd does. My slices weren’t breaking down like rabbit or blackberries would. They were reassembling into one great orange sun that burned right under my heart.

Before it was light and Oma’s head rose from her chest I was in my rust orange dress and climbing through Don Olfwinckle’s fence. The old dog wasn’t on duty yet, but Don Olfwinckle was. He was bent over a low branch, his spindly gold glasses hanging on the end of his nose. He didn’t seem to be breathing.

“Hello!”

He didn’t turn around.

“Mister Olfwinckle, Sir?”

“Ohh,” he said. “Uhh.”

“Is everything all right, Sir? It’s your Apfel here.”

“A child’s eyes!” He plucked the leaf he held from its branch with a force that shocked me and thrust it at me. “Look! Tell me what you see, if you see, well, don’t let me taint your perception. Just what do you see!”

The leaf was a green teardrop with sharp teeth around the edges. A pale vein bisected it and smaller ones branched off and curved toward the tip. Where they led, a small spot the color of my dress. I would have passed it over if anyone else had asked me to look.

“There is a small orange spot, Sir.”

“Uhh.”

He began a full-tree search. He untangled each leaf on each branch and studied it. I was his double-checker. We worked until the sun was high in the sky and I grew hungry for the dried wild hog in my basket, but I knew I could take no breaks.

“Is this a spot?”

“It is a hole, Sir.”

My dress was shining orange through the hole. He looked at it with distaste.

“Is this a spot?”

“Yes. Out, damned spot,” I whispered at the leaf.

The tree was infected and the trees around it. He stopped our search after four full trees. I snuck a piece of hog. Even a girl devoted to her a father has to nourish herself, and me maybe more than other girls because I was still working so hard to get him.

He disappeared into the cellar shed and reappeared with a wheelbarrow full of giant rectangular bags. We placed six bags on every other row. This took many trips back and forth with the wheelbarrow.

“Horticultural cornmeal. Thirty pounds per every one thousand square feet will stimulate beneficial microorganisms which will eat any fungus in the soil,” he explained.

He walked along the rows ripping each of the bags open with a tool from his pocket, and I followed, spreading cornmeal with my feet. I sang Full fathom five under my breath in the sea of porridge. We kept brushing against each other in the storm, my father and I.

This done, he turned to me. Warning weighed down his face. “We must go into the woods.”

“But, my good lord, this boy is forest-born!” Of course the daughter of an orchard-keeper would be a forest nymph. I knew everything he could possibly need.

So wise so young, they say, do not live long, but my vivacity burned every bit of my body. The father of my heart was to enter my mother home.

Siblings, I thought in mad association, but that one quickly got stamped out. I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the sons, too.

He looked at me with huge, spectacle-filling eyes. “Have you seen the galls, then?”

A choking gall and a preserving sweet? Gall of goat and slips of ewe?

“Great rust orange balls that blob up the trees and send out gelatinous penile protrusions to swell and spurt out spores that spot the apple trees,” he clarified, waving his hands. Oh deadly gall and theme of all our scorns. He was glaring at my good orange dress again.

I assured him there had never been galls in the forest in my whole life. We left his orchard by way of a gate under which Schlappig slumped, asleep.

In the forest I wanted to hold my father’s hand but he was still waving them in the air. He spoke with a pain that hurt me. “Gymnosporangium juniperi-virgianae, cedar-apple rust. On apple trees it damages new leaves and will cause defoliation. Left unchecked this may kill the trees. ”On juniper species the galls grow and store up the spores which are the poison we must eliminate.”

“How awful,” I said.

We squinted into the branches above. Because he led the way we didn’t follow the path toward Oma’s house but took another, a deer path wider and clearer than my own. My left hand swung at my side and my smallest finger grazed his hand once, twice, three times. He must have thought it was a bug and snatched his hand away.

“There’s the devil!” he shouted into the trees.

And it was, a great devil of a mess like spilled orange marmalade that’d grown horns. It looked like something Jagd would put down my dress. I had never seen it before.

“I’ve never seen it before!” I said.

Don Olfwinckle looked at me with something like distrust.

“Maybe it’s new. The only one of its kind,” I offered.

But he had already hurled his largest knife to the ground in a stageworthy display of hopeless defeat.

“But I can climb trees! I can gall the devil, Salisbury,” I grasped.

“No use, it exists, all the trees must be removed immediately.”

“I can help!”

“Stay home, girl. A forest is no place for a child. There’s nothing for you in a forest.”

“But.” I stopped myself before I repeated Orlando’s But, my good lord, this boy is forest-grown. I could do better than that for my father.

He took the chance to reiterate, “There is nothing to love in a forest,” and sent me home without an apple in my basket.

“Here’s the little slutter, and a dirty one at that. But an apple, an egg, and a nut, you may eat after a slut! As long as you do the peeling and shelling yourself,” Jagd said, jumping for my basket. I tilted it fast to show the empty straw inside, afraid he’d overturn it and my rust orange dress would fall out. That evil color, which made my father hate me.

“You are, I say, spacious in the presence of dirt,” said Oma.

I had done a lot of orchard tasks, had worked hard and near the ground. I tried to tell her this.

“All down on the ground and nothing for it! Worse than I thought, slut,” Jagd said.

“Baby, come sit down.”

I hovered my bottom over Oma’s lap and let her wipe the dirt away from my face with her lace bib. Jagd made displeased noises from the table where he cut the meat. Turkey today. He hadn’t thrown any at me. My Belles de Boskoop had given me power.

“Now, baby, perhaps you should stay with your Oma for a day, sitting in my lap, because you’ve been out all day for two days now, and you know love sought is good but love unsought is better. Maybe the librarian needs time to seek you. Love is the smoke raised with the fume of sighs.” Oma pointed to our chimney. ”Ah, Juliet, I already know thy grief.”

She thought I was courting but didn’t chide me. Though she still called me baby she herself had the best man of her life when she wasn’t a year above eleven. He was the one who taught her Shakespeare.

Schlappig was by the fence when I climbed through at dawn in my dead mother’s blue dress. He looked disgruntled, but it wasn’t at me.

Men were going into the apple orchard in droves, carrying axes and shears.

“Oh Schlappig, our home,” I commiserated.

At the head of it all, my father. He stood on top of the cellar shed and shouted over all the men. He shook a great orange gall made from clay.

When he set the gall down, all the men headed toward the gate, shouldering tools and passing around large black bags. Jagd walked at the back of the group, chewing. I ducked behind Schlappig.

Don Olfwinckle hung back until the last men passed. Jagd swung his axe around and said something they all found funny. Don Olfwinckle laughed too heartily and clapped Jagd on the back.

I shut my eyes but couldn’t process the image of my father walking with Jagd like brothers, or father and son. Nothing that Jagd finds funny is good.

But I could match up Don Olfwinckle’s hunch over his apple trees with Jagd’s hunch over his meat knives. Their careful precisions. Me, chattering and being ignored or worse.

They were comrades going to axe the forest.

“Schlappig, my home,” I said vaguely.

Schlappig didn’t lick me or press his head to my face to make me feel better. As Oma would say, You must sing a-down a-down.

Or you must lay down the treasures of your body. You must away to-night. That thou among the wastes of time must go.

We must do something, and i’ the heat. Alone in the orchard, Schlappig and I.

I went to the place where the men had gathered. Piles of black bags still lay on the ground. I climbed inside one and pulled the edges up to test the weight they could hold. Strong bags.

All the ripe or nearly ripe apples in the orchard filled thirteen bags. I found the Belle de Boskoop trees and put their ripest fruits in my basket. Don Olfwinckle was right. Straight from the trees, they were sour.

Carrying two bags at a time back to Oma’s house took all morning, but Oma slept through it in her chair. I stacked all Don Olfwinckle’s work just inside the door, careful to bruise nothing.

On my last trip from the orchard to the house I ate three fat multicolored apples that tasted of mixed malice and kindness. I emptied my basket of Belles de Boskoop onto Jagd’s meat table, so he might be sure to snatch the fruit he’d liked so much first.

And Oma would be in fruit all winter, if she did preserves.

“Gentle daughter, fear you not at all,” mumbled Oma in her sleep. Duke Vicentio, Act IV, Scene I. The end of the scene.

“I am nobody’s daughter, Oma, but thank you for your well-took labour. Go to your rest. At night we’ll feast together.” The last line was the first of our Bard’s I’d ever used to tell a lie.

In my dead mother’s dress I packed my basket tight full of meat, no room for the frivolity of apples. With my meat and my wit I left the forest and never again did I find myself in a place defined by its trees. Apple or otherwise.

There is nothing to love in a forest. My father taught me so.