In my hip pocket I carried a packet of herbal energy pills from the Mother Nature Health Food And Christian Gifts store in Dalyrimple. I’d turned thirty-nine the month before and had begun to take better care of myself. Give me enough ma wong extract and good percolator coffee, and I could get by on six hours’ sleep every night until New Year’s. Then I would lock down the whole farm and crawl into bed with the season’s accounting records, a bottle of chardonnay, and a shiatsu massage pillow. I would tuck that undulating electric friend under the nape of my neck, beneath my lower back, and near places lonely young widows don’t discuss in polite company. I would heal from the autumn strain, and I would begin to plan the next year. I was always planning the next year.
But, at the moment, two hundred acres of apple trees filled with ripe fruit waited for me like red-and-green landmarks on a map of my life. Half their crop had already been harvested into big, refrigerated bins at the storage barns; the other half would be picked over the next several months by crews of McGillens and Mexicans. The Mexicans would find their place in Chocinaw County, just as the Cherokees and Scots had, the English Dalyrimples and Thackerys, the Africans who came first as slaves but stayed as farmers, and every other creed or kind who made up our people. I didn’t hire anyone to do work so hard no McGillen would do it, nor work I hadn’t done since I was old enough to climb a tree, myself.
A soft autumn breeze made the ancient apple tree beside me seem to nod her aged limbs as if remembering. I patted the Great Lady’s trunk. The wind smelled of warm fireplaces and wood smoke, of ripeness. The big farmhouse – which I had restored to its previous splendor—sat in solid comfort on a knoll beyond that creek, overlooking the rest of the broad valley that made up the Hollow. Beneath my feet, the bones of the soldiers still rested where they’d fallen in battle, long before the first Sweet Hush tree wrapped loving roots around them. They waited in gallant silence.
In a few hours I’d open the farm’s front gates, and the first of more than 20,000 autumn visitors would arrive. About thirty employees—most of them my kin—would put enough money in their pockets and mine to keep body and soul together for another year. After taxes and operating expenses the rich preserves of two million dollars would be reduced to a modest jelly, and I always spread it thin. My personal take made me comfortable, not rich. Comfortable, considering my childhood, would more than do.
One more prayer. I was pushing my luck. “Give me the strength to earn my blessings. And please get Davis through Harvard for two more semesters with his honors average intact, and let me make enough money this season to pay for the rest of his senior year without mortgaging the front orchard, again.”
Family and home and love and death and pride. Apples still meant all that and more, to me. They weren’t just the fruit of temptation, but the ripe result of my planted dreams and harvested fears. I grew the finest apples and the finest reputation as a mother, a widow, a businesswoman, and a McGillen in Chocinaw County, Georgia. “Hush McGillen Thackery,” people said, “is a legend in her own time.”
Wishful thinking. People want something or someone bigger than their own woes to believe in. That’s why we have actors and politicians and preachers. But like most ordinary legends, I was real flesh and blood, and I dearly wanted to keep my private shames private. Due to my careful and hard work, people believed a lot of pretty fantasies about me and mine. But sometimes we rise to the occasion of ourselves. On a day like that, our legend becomes a truthful hint of who we really are.
My life had come to such a day.
I took the cell phone off my belt, checked my wristwatch, then looked at the phone and waited. I only needed one more tradition to complete my ritual. Davis always called from Massachusetts to wish me a good first day of the season. The phone rang. All right, to be honest, it didn’t ring, it played the opening bars of that old 1940’s tune, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me. Thanks to Smooch, no one would ever accuse us of subtle advertising. We had learned through long experience that apples, like most vituals of life, sold better with a side dressing of hokum and nostalgia.
I quickly put the phone to my ear. “How’s my big, smart Harvard-educated son—”
“Mother, hold on, I’ve got to get around this curve. I’m up on Chocinaw.” Wind rushed in the background, and I heard the soft roar of a powerful engine.
I stood quickly. “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you at school?”
“I can explain later. I’m heading down into the Hollow, maybe ten minutes from home. I’ve been driving since yesterday. Fourteen hours. I’m bringing you a surprise.”
“Why did you leave school? Listen, now, what—Davis, what in the world—”
“Hello, Mrs. Thackery!” a voice called out. A female voice. “Davis, tell your mother I’m looking forward to meeting her, and—”
“Eddie, get back under that blanket!”
“They obviously know I’m in this car. Hiding me under your rowing club blanket won’t fool them any longer.”
I clutched the cell phone so hard my knuckles hurt. “Euell Davis Thackery, Junior,” I said slowly. “Why are you hiding a girl?”
“Mother, I can explain . . . hold on.” I could hear him rustling around, the hard whoosh of air, and a low yell from the unknown girl named Eddie. “They’re right behind us, again,” she called. “Speed up.”
“No. No,” I said. “Dammit, Davis—”
“Mother, wait for us up by the gate, and get ready to shut it after we pull in.”
“Who’s chasing you and this girl?”
“Can’t talk! Have to drive! Love you, Mother!”
Click. I held the empty phone away from my face and stared at it. My legs started to shake. In the next second I was running for the house, leaving the silver pitcher and all my protective prayers and traditions spilled at the base of the old tree.
Mother, I’ve got a surprise for you.
I raised my son to call me Mother instead of Mama or Ma, and I called him Davis, unlike his father, who came to be called Big Davy. His father never grew up. My son had. I wouldn’t accept any compromises. And no unpleasant surprises.
I leapt into a big red van we used for small deliveries to local grocery stores. IT’S NOT AN APPLE UNLESS IT’S A SWEET HUSH, the van’s logo proclaimed beneath a delicate white silhouette of an apple tree. Driving too fast out of the yard, I ricocheted off tumbled fieldstone borders of iris and daylily beds that had been old when I was young. The farm road twisted a quarter of a mile through our front orchards before entering a broad, open area we now called The Barns.
My first little building remained as our gift shop, but its kitchen and market had been moved to much larger buildings, and the shop’s wares now included crystal and silver knicknacks, gold jewelry, fine linens, and other household knicknacks—all with apple themes. Among the barns were climate-controlled storage facilities and a rustic pavilion for our outdoor market and bluegrass music. All were surrounded by acres of graveled parking lots and carefully authentic split-rail fences.
The bumpy dirt lane vanished into the parking area then snaked out of it on the other side like a woman after a makeover, smooth and asphalted, rising up a knoll between an alley of apple trees and clipped boxwoods until it reached a handsome white double-sided gate at the civilized pavement of McGillen Orchard Road. Our red-and-white sign loomed between big, gray, stacked-stone posts.
Sweet Hush Farm
Open Daily, 10 to 6
September 1 to December 31.
It’s Not An Apple Unless It’s a Sweet Hush.
WWW.SWEETHUSHAPPLE.COM.
I pulled my cell phone off my belt as I unpadlocked the gate and swung one side back, staring at a spot where the public road disappeared into big firs and pines, hardwoods and laurel, slicked by trickles of water that seeped from exposed rock faces at Chocinaw Mountain’s base. ??
?I need you out here at the Hollow,” I said into the phone. “Pronto. There’s trouble.”
“I’m there. Ten minutes.” The deep male voice asked no questions, and I clicked the phone off. My baby brother, now Sheriff Logan McGillen, parsed out words like diamonds—a few fine ones were all he needed. To Logan, life was simple and easy to sum up. I had raised him to protect our world, and he did.
I waited.
Waiting is the hardest part of all, for a mother.
UP ON CHOCINAW, Davis—a 23-year-old senior in Harvard’s school of economics, meaning he was smart enough to know the price of his own choices—careened down the mountainside in the black 1982 Trans Am he and his father had lovingly rebuilt with an oversized engine when Davis turned sixteen. The Trans Am was everything a muscle car should be, right down to a license tag that said 2FAST. Davis kept an old picture of himself and Davy in the glove compartment. Covered in grease, their arms looped around each other’s shoulders, they grinned beside the Trans Am’s then-disassembled carcass. The car was a work of father-son devotion. It wouldn’t let Davis and his mystery girl down.
Behind him, three black SUV’s disappeared in a curve of the mountain. Davis tossed the cell phone aside. “My mother knows we’re on the way, and she’ll take our side!”
The girl peered at the back of his head from beneath a blanket in the Trans Am’s backseat. “Davis, you didn’t even tell her what ‘our side’ is. You scared her to death.”
“My mother, scared? No way. I’ve told you, nothing rattles my mother. She’ll be ready to defend us.”
“All she knows is that her son is driving like a crazy man and he’s bringing home a stranger.”
“I have a cousin who brought home a stripper from a traveling carnival. This is nothing.”
“Your logic is very reassuring. Look, I’m not staying back here any longer. I don’t intend to arrive at your ancestral home this way and let your bewildered and upset mother see me cowering in your backseat beside your Garth Brooks CD’s and a box of mildewed donuts.”
“Stay put. It’s safer back there. The donuts are like little airbags.”
“I’d rather pitch face-first through the windshield when we do a Thelma-and-Louise off one of these cliffs. It’ll sound so much more dramatic on CNN than being squashed between your front seat and the trunk, right?”
Edwina Margisia “Eddie” Jacobs—a junior in sociology at Harvard, meaning she was smart enough to know better or at least understand why she ought to know better—was accustomed to limousines and yachts, motorcades and military tanks and even, during a recent jaunt with her mother through the Middle East, a sheik’s ceremonial camel caravan. Eddie pawed her way out of the cheap Mexican blanket she and Davis had bought the night before at an interstate gas-n’-go after they left Massachusetts. She stuck a foot between the front seats. She wore thousand-dollar suede loafers with solid gold buckles.
Davis gripped the steering wheel. “Eddie, dammit, don’t—”
“Don’t distract me. I’ll fall in your lap and then we really will run off this mountainside.”
She clambered between the Trans Am’s bucket seats as Davis held the fast car to a turn that edged a creek ravine thick with boulders and giant rhododendron. The first tints of fall colored the wooded valleys flashing by on the Trans Am’s left side, and the Georgia mountain’s sharp granite shoulder rose like a mossy wall on the right. He’d been trained to drive the mountain roads by his father; he knew one wrong twist of the leather-covered steering wheel either way could kill him and Eddie.
Eddie fell into the passenger seat then snapped the car’s webbed seatbelt over her lap. Davis glanced at her. “How’s your stomach?”
She put a hand over her abdomen. “Not good.” Her freckled face went whiter, but she pushed back streamers of shoulder-length chestnut hair and forced a laugh. “This is the first time in years I’ve ridden a roller coaster without the men-in-black on board to protect me. I like it. Even if I throw up.”
“Brace yourself.”
“Don’t worry, I know how to stand shotgun on a runaway stagecoach. Or whatever that saying is.” She smiled at his profile. “I wish I could make love to you right now. You look wild.”
He flashed her a tight smile. “My room has a bed full of homemade quilts and down pillows. We’ll get naked and burrow like rabbits.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. Life in the Hollow is that simple.”
They heard a noise behind them. Eddie twisted in the seat and frowned out the back window. The black SUV’s zoomed around a curve not more than a hundred yards behind them. “Houston, we have a problem. They’re gaining, again.”
Davis glanced in the rearview mirror. Forget the perfect SAT score and the trophy shelf full of leadership awards from Chocinaw County High School and the sterling record at Harvard. He came from a long line of Thackerys who couldn’t resist a dare on wheels. No one could catch a Chocinaw County racing man. Not alive, at least.
He thought of his father. And downshifted.
Eddie shook her head. “Don’t you dare give up now! You told me nobody can outrun your family on Chocinaw Mountain.”
“And I told you I wouldn’t get you killed, either.” He eased one foot onto the brake. “The game’s over. We made it this far. All the way from Boston. Nobody thought we would. My mother’ll never forgive me if I do something stupid. I’ll never forgive myself. I couldn’t even begin to ask you to forgive me, either. That’s all that matters.”
“You’ve told me your mother is the strongest person you know. You told me she’ll support our right to be lead our own lives. How is it going to look to her if we give up when we’re this close to her doorstep? What kind of girl will she think you’ve brought home? A loser!” Eddie clutched the sides of her seat. “I’m not giving up! I love you, Euell Davis Thackery, Junior, and I trust you with my entire future! You said your father taught you how to drive this car faster than any man in your county. Now, drive!”
The fragrant autumn wind whistled through the car’s open sunroof like a song of defiance, luring all the souls of the men and women who’d braved old Chocinaw to settle in the fertile valleys below. Davis swallowed a lump in his throat, took one look at Eddie’s adoring face, and decided a man didn’t let his woman down on Chocinaw.
“I love you, too! Hold onto your cute little ass!”
Eddie gasped as he floored the gas pedal and gave a yell. The Trans Am spiraled down the sides of the old mountain. Davis drove with a light-fingered skill his father would have admired. The car was doing ninety by the time Davis and Eddie passed a handsome wooden sign that welcomed them to Chocinaw County, Home Of The Famous Sweet Hush Apple. The tires squealed like a mountain haint as Davy swung onto a shady two-lane heading into Sweet Hush Hollow. He flashed by a green metal sign that proclaimed it McGillen Orchards Road, then a white metal sign pointing out it was also State Route 72, and finally a second big wooden sign set up by the state park service.
Now Entering The Scenic Sweet Hush Apple Byway.
Davis yelled again. He’d made it. He was carrying his woman home to a legacy of faith, sacrifice, hard work, and the finest southern apple ever grown. Home to live like an ordinary girl, home to stay, home to be welcomed by his mother, the most famous Hush in a line of Hushes since Hush the First said a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian prayer and planted an apple seedling over the bones of soldiers in the wild Hollow.
Me. Waiting.
Without any warning.
I HEARD THE LOW roar of the Trans Am coming up the road. I was as sensitive as a mother cat—I recognized the sound of my kitten. Clenching the gate’s top board, I said a prayer in favor of the lowslung car, though I hated the damned thing. I had nothing against racing, just something against my son dying before me. The Trans Am flashed into view, going at least eighty and fishtailing a little. I du
g my fingernails into the gate and braced my legs. He’s his father’s son, too.
Davis looked calm and determined. He had the Trans Ams’ windows open, always loving the feel of the mountain air. His short, dark hair moved wildly in the rush of wind, but nothing else about him registered any chaos. My son. Methodical. Smart. Sensitive. Honest. Kind. Adored by girls and manfully respectful of them, as I’d taught him and his father had demonstrated to him, at least in public. A strong leader. State Star Student.
He’d won Georgia Junior Entrepreneur of the Year as a high school senior. I swear to God I didn’t push him to be an over-achiever. All right, so maybe he’d sensed my urgent need for him to make wiser choices than me. At any rate, he was my wonderful son.
Please, be careful. Please, God don’t let him get hurt. When he was a child I’d actually made a secret list titled THINGS I COULD NOT SURVIVE. At the top of the list were these words: Seeing Something Bad Happen To Davis. I wouldn’t let myself be more specific. Some superstition told me it was bad luck to put a worst fear into writing.
The girl (at that moment I was thinking of her as The Damned Girl Who Has Lured My Son Into Some Kind Of Trouble) sat up straight in the passenger seat, holding onto the dashboard with both hands, looking forward, her face calm, too. They were two of a kind. Somewhere, her mother must have listed that moment as a worst fear, too.
Davis braked expertly, whipped the Trans Am through the gate, slid it to a stop, then leapt out and strode to me, making sure he put on a smile. Tall and lanky and darkly handsome like his father, he was dressed in khaki trousers, good dress shoes, and a rumpled dress shirt with onyx cufflinks. I blinked in surprise. My unpretentious, jeans-wearing son, in onyx cufflinks. “Such a grown-up young man,” people had said since he was a child. But when had he really become a grown man? I suddenly had a grown son. I knew women my age still raising babies. Crazy women, but still. “Talk to me,” I said.