“Lord, Send Someone to Fix This Roof Before Snow,” She Whispered... Not Knowing He Was Behind Her
Chapter 5
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On Thursday, he asked what kind of apple the tall trees in the north rows were, and she told him in more detail than he needed: the name, and the year her father had grafted it, and the way it kept through February in a cold cellar.On Thursday afternoon, she showed him the press. It stood in a lean-to shed behind the house: a great oak screw press with a slatted tub the size of a washtub, a grinder on a hand crank, and a stone trough that caught the juice. The air in the shed was thick and sweet, humming with wasps.She fed apples into the hopper, and he turned the crank, and she showed him how to fold the pulp into cloth and lower the screw until the juice ran brown-gold into a bucket."Taste," she said, and held out a tin cup.It was cold and sharp and almost too sweet to bear. It tasted like the whole autumn at once. He drank it and stood with the cup in his hand, and she watched his face with an expression he could not read."My father pressed this in the same bucket for 20 years," she said. "He said the first cup belonged to whoever turned the crank.""Then it's yours. I didn't turn it. You did."She took the cup out of his hand, filled it again, and drank from it herself. She set it down on the edge of the trough, and for a moment, she stood with her sore wrist cradled and her eyes on the floor."I haven't given anybody the first cup since June."He did not ask what had happened in June. He had learned in a hard school what it meant when a person put a date in a sentence and then stopped. He only nodded and turned the crank until his shoulders burned.On the way back to the barn, she stopped beside the porch and looked at the north slope. The sagging place caught the late sun and shone like a dark tooth.Without turning her head, she said, "The almanac says snow by the 10th. That's six days. It's never right, but it's usually close."He noticed that she never went near the ladder unless she had to, and that when she did, she held her breath. But as he went to unharness the mules, he found himself counting shakes and counting days, and finding that the sum did not quite come out.That evening, the cold came down early and clear, with a band of green still hanging over the western ridge. Willa carried supper out to the porch table and set down two plates as usual. She sat for the first time; she did not wait for him to take his place before she picked up her fork."I've been wrong about you," she said.Ezra looked up from the potato. "Ma'am?""I thought you'd want something." She cut her cheese into precise squares. "I've watched you three days. You haven't asked about my debts or my father. You haven't told me what I ought to do about the roof."