Applesauce, Shirley Kurtz, illustrated by Cheryl Benner, Good Books, 1992

Applesauce (cont’d)

Because things change. It’s a different century. We’re mostly limping along by ourselves. No house in West Virginia anymore, backed up to a hill. No outsize garden meant to feed a tribe. The boy and the sister and the little terror of a brother all have families of their own.

Three decades on, on a Sunday in September, we’re just two tired old heads.

That night at supper, goes the story, they ate the last of the applesauce. All her jars were empty, the boy’s mother said. It was time to make more.

Our cupboard’s not bare—we’re not Old Mother Hubbards. We still have applesauce. But we’d hate to run out.

 

The very next evening, when they were on the way home from town, going up Knobley Mountain, she told the father to stop the car, quick. Over there where she was pointing, in somebody’s yard, was a tree. It’s loaded. It’s neglected. Free apples? she wonders.

“Maybe they don’t want the apples,” said the mother. “Go ask.”

“Of course they want the apples,” said the father.

“You don’t know,” said the mother. “All those apples, and nobody’s even picked up the ones on the ground. Never mind. I’ll go ask.”

And even before she got back in the car, the boy could tell they were going to make applesauce.

Returning, next day, the father brings along bags and baskets and the older children. Up close, now, they could see that the apples on the ground were old and rotted and being eaten by bees. The best ones in the tree were way out on the ends of the branches where the father couldn’t prop his ladder, although he tried.

They would just have to shake the apples down.

They drove off the bees and heaped all the bad apples together, away from the tree. Then the boy and his sister climbed up high and sent the good ones all swishing down, and they rolled and bumped into each other and the father, too, chasing after them.

But these are bona fide orchard apples, grown in Pennsylvania. They got picked. The father paid. He brought them to Virginia yesterday in the trunk of our car.

 

There was hardly enough time for breakfast, next morning. The mother had washed some jars, and she was washing apples, and already some were burbling and hissing in pots on the stove. She gave the boy and his sister each their own panful of apples to cut up. The father has already gone off to his job.

“But they look rotten,” said the boy. “The ones up in the tree weren’t rotten.”

“They’re just bruised from falling,” said his mother. “Nobody will ever know, once they’re cooked.”

The two of us don’t leap to the task. Not until Sunday afternoon do we dredge up enough spunk. Old—gnarled—hands at it, we hack each perfect Ginger Gold, each perfect Cortland, to ruins. No grief, except for the wailing of the bands.

Collapsing in on themselves in their pots on the stove, the apples pflup pflup, sulk, grumble. The drips only muck up the stovetop’s slick glass. No tipsy coiled-round-and-around metal burners with catch pans underneath we’ll have to scour.

 

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The sister soon had a pile of pieces, still with their seeds in and their skins on, but no tails and stems. But the boy’s apples kept slipping and getting away from him and ending up on the floor.

His mother said he could help with the smushing, instead. She poured a potful of juicy hot apples into the three-legged strainer. And then, with the wooden stomper, the boy poked and pushed the apples around and down and the sauce came squishing out through all the little holes.

He thought the goggles might protect him from the squirting and the steam.

It’s the very same stomper. Same strainer, too, just dinged up. Even now it’s able to stand on its own three feet.

 

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The mother stirs in sugar. She tasted a spoonful to make sure it was the right sweetness. Sometimes everybody tasted. And the sauce goes into her jars. The mother screwed the lids on the jars and put them in the canner to boil. The lids would seal tight, and the applesauce would stay good all through the winter.

Anymore, we almost never sugar our sauce. The orchard’s varieties—Macintoshes, also, and Galas, Jonathans, Fujis, Crispins, what have you—come already loaded. What’s in our jars now is a gooder good. Older, we’re wiser.

 

      

It’s a long long day. The children fritter. They run off to play. Sometimes when the mother sent the sister to the cellar for more jars, or the boy out to the garden to empty the scraps bucket, they would be gone for quite a while. The mess in the kitchen only worsens. There was gingerbread to stir up, too. The mother always made it on applesauce days. Supper would be just a whole big gingerbread, and milk, and all the sweet, wonderful applesauce everyone could hold.

Apples still need cutting up when the father gets home. Bagfuls are still sitting untouched. He’ll help. And he promises he’ll wash the pots after the rest of the applesauce gets canned. “How about the stove, too,” said the mother. “And the table and the floor and probably the walls.”

“Maybe we could throw away those apples out on the porch,” said the father, later on that night.

“But the jars aren’t all full,” said the boy.

“We have lots more,” said his sister, although she wasn’t about to go down to the cellar and get them, herself, in the dark.

“This is enough applesauce,” said the mother.

That night, upstairs in his bed, the boy could smell applesauce. He could hear the lids on the jars popping as they sealed, and his father washing the kettles.

And when the boy slept, he dreamed the bees were whispering and he was shaking down apples and they were softly plopping and thumping down the stairs. But it was just his mother and father, coming up to bed at last.

This is probably enough. Added to what’s left in the cupboard from last season, it’ll do.

We’re by our lonesomes now. We’re worn down by time, wearied of labor, done with the nightly tucking in. Our grown children foray far, glean what they can, lay heads on elsewhere pillows, follow dreams, live their lives. Still, they sometimes come. Their children come. Even the one’s baby comes.

They’ll slurp up that same applesauce and smack their lips.

Littlest slurper. That’s soup on his face.