My father always said I had witches’ eyes. “Fickle green and full of secrets,” he would hiss right before he slapped my face.
His hard heart cracks one early morning at the bakery. He falls into the oven, and when they find him, his body is charred and smouldering. The village only mourns the ruined bread. My mother sighs with relief and takes over baking the next day.
We bury him in the apple grove with an apple in his hand, as is the village custom. It is spring, and the breeze covers us in apple blossoms. It feels like the celebration that it is. That night, my mother cuts thick chunks of bread and coats them with apple butter. We eat them out on the porch, licking our sticky fingers and watching the fireflies compete with the evening stars.
As the youngest girl in the family, it is my duty to care for our family’s trees. I go every Sunday afternoon, weeding around their trunks, checking for wood-boring insects and leaf blight. In February, I prune their branches, dragging them home through the snow. They burn sweet and hot in our fireplace. I spend the most time on my grandmother’s tree, picking off any dead leaves and stroking her rough trunk. She has only just started bearing fruit, and I greet each apple with joy. I can only just remember my grandmother, how she braided my hair with quick fingers and stood up to Da when no one else would. We share the same green
eyes.
It is three months before Da’s apple tree pokes up from the soil. The middle of summer, sun scorching in the sky. I am still taking water to grandmother’s tree, trickling it around her trunk. But I give nothing to his tree. I am too afraid of the Gods to risk snapping the thin shoot, but surely neglect will be overlooked. The Gods certainly hadn’t seemed to notice it in our household. But Da’s tree is as strong and tough as him. It grows despite my disregard. Straight and tall with shiny green leaves. So I begin to curse it. Every Sunday, I tend to the others. My great-grandfather, third cousins, aunts, the little brother born months too soon. And before I leave, I go to my Da and speak all the words that I was too afraid to say to him when he was alive.
I grow faster than the apple trees and soon it is time for me to bear my own children and make my own home. But I have been helping my mother in the bakery, and now she no longer rises early to make the bread but leaves it to my capable hands. My reputation has spread, so that people from other villages travel to ours to eat my hearty loaves. Many young men want me for a bride, seeing my skilled hands and capable mind as a financial windfall. But I reject them all, choosing instead to devote myself to my mother and my family’s trees.
On my twenty-third year, Da’s tree bears its first apple. Perfect red, shiny, smooth skin. I pick it, ready to hurl it into the far corner of the orchard. But then my hand begins to burn, red blisters forming on my fingers and palm. I drop it to the ground, and the grass yellows and curls where it lands. Ants scurry out of the way, and earthworms writhe to the surface, slowlyndying.
I scoop it up with my tin bucket and hurry home. Underneath a floorboard in the kitchen is a rectangular metal box that holds our savings. With the key that hangs around my neck, I unlock it and dump the shiny coins on the floor. Carefully, I roll the apple into the box and lock it again. Placing the coins in a jar next to the box, I re-settle the floorboard.
Each day that autumn, I check Da’s tree, and if there is an apple, I hide it in the metal box under the floorboards. Seven apples he bears, before the cold and wind strip the trees to their winter skeletons.
The snow is thick that winter, and the lakes freeze solid. Animals that are left out in the fields overnight are found dead in the morning, eyes and muzzles coated in thick ice. It is on one of these frigid nights that my middle sister appears at our door, tears frozen on her cheeks. Her hands are white with cold, and she shakes as she tries to unwrap her baby from her chest. His lips are blue, and he lies very still in my mother’s arms.
“Your face,” I say, and my sister cradles her jaw.
We go to work, my mother and I. She coaxes warmth and life into the baby, and I stitch my sister’s skin back together. There is not much I can do for the broken jaw, but I spoon warm apple sauce into her mouth and wipe away the falling tears.
She stays with us until the ice starts to thaw. I send her home with a loaf of spiced apple bread for her husband.
“Promise me you won’t eat any,” I tell her.
She looks into my green eyes and promises. A few weeks later, as he’s cutting wood with their neighbour, her husband’s heart fails.
That night, I check the six remaining apples in their metal box under the floorboard. Their skin is still shiny and unblemished. They look as fresh as if I had just picked them.
Hillary McDonald lives in the South Island of New Zealand, where she teaches secondary students outdoor skills. She has had short stories published in takahē magazine, Folklore Review and Inglenooklit. She spends her free time exploring the outdoors with her family, as well as reading and writing.
Penelle Magazine 
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