The flawed and the runes among the turnips Peter boils in the pasture, in a wash boiler that has been mustered out of the kitchen, over his very own fire. It is a pleasant thing on a nippy fall morning to have a fire at one's face in the blue out-of-doors, and the color of its burning fits in with the color of the burning maples and birches. The geese leave looking for tender grass in the pasture and come hissing and cackling around Peter and his lire. For they know turnips when they smell them cooking. Peter mashes the vegetables up for them and spreads a golden banquet Out for them on the dead grass. The geese gobble up the red-hot turnip mash, jerking their thick necks back and forth and opening their bills wide to cool off between bites. There are a hundred of these gray beauties fattening up for the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons. and the family turnips put delectable pounds on their waddling legs.
Then it is apples. The farm turns golden and red with them, in the cellar, the storeroom, the barn floor, in the tool shed, and the attic. The girls of the house chop in the wooden trays till their arms ache, and Mother makes mincemeat by the barrels and lays it down in stone crocks belowstairs. The house reeks of apples and cinnamon and hot sugar. Pies overflow the oven with candied juice. Uncle Timothy gets outside a whole crinkly universe of an apple pie at one sitting. Mother's greatest specialty in pies is her pork-apple. She bakes that in a skillet. The pared apples are five inches deep in it, and they are mixed with dices of far salt pork. The fruit and meat arc laced with ribbons of molasses, brown sugar is added, and the top is put on it with breathing holes shaped like the lines of wild geese winging south, and the pie is baked an hour in its deep dish.
Peter lives in the high branches in the orchard, and his broadside tingles from the apples his brethren cannot resist winging him with when his mind is not on them but on the biggest apples at the top of the tree. He waits to get his revenge, and when his brothers are picking up stray fruit below him, he seizes two loaded boughs and shakes them like a hurricane with all his body. A red avalanche buries James and Andrew and John. Innocent Uncle Timothy gets smacked on his bald head, but his head is hard, and he makes no more of big apples than of so many raindrops.
But the loveliest apple picking of all could happen no place in the world except on a seagoing farm. It takes place far from the house and all tame things. It is in the ancient orchard on the seaward point of the farm, and the orchard is walled in by pinewoods. No road goes to that orchard, it is too wild and remote and lost. So Father and the boys go to gather these apples by dory, and that turns work into an unheard-of joy. They row to the picking under a lapis lazuli sky when the day is young. There they pick the small tart fruit, descended from the Indians' apples, festooning gnarled old trees. Some of the trees are prone, but they still bear. Some are only hollow cylinders of trees marked with the cuneiforms of a century of wood-peckers and sapsuckers and yellowhammers. The apples bite back when they are bitten. They are sour as time. But Father likes to have some of these hard, wild apples to mix with his tame, to point up his mincemeat and his cider. So he turns the boys loose in the snags of the old trees' boughs. And they fill many old sacks with the fall fruit of this ancient orchard by the sea.
When the day is old and the pines have made a blue twilight of the orchard, the men and the boys sling their sacks of Indian apples on their backs and go bent double towards the water. They wade the dead grass and stagger blind through the pinewoods, as partridges go up like a bolt of thunder. Uncle Timothy carries two bags above his broad hips, and he is too great a temptation for Peter. The boy slips his sack off his back and gets a hard apple. He puts all he has into it and burns his uncle with a bull's-eye. Uncle Timothy bellows a bull's roar, but he goes grimly on, unable to straighten up and turn on his tormentor. But he knows without looking whose arm threw that apple. And Peter's own back will burn at the shore from the venom in Uncle Timothy's hard hand. He will get his. going home a crying at the sea. The day is long, and a burnt man remembers.
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