Jeffrey Amos

Witness Trees

The Town Charter.

The town of Ada, Texas was founded in the shade of an apple tree on August 15^th, 1887, when Arthur Gentry, Caleb Mills, and Levi Wilkes signed the town charter beneath the largest tree in Obed Durhing’s orchard. A mural of the event, completed with mythologized detail, is painted in the lobby at city hall: three men in frock coats, the charter cascading from an oak table in a way that defies physics, and the apple tree bursting with bright pink spring blossoms despite the late summer date painted in small and meticulous script across the top of the parchment.

The orchard is gone now, replaced by the square and the park at the end of Post Oak Road, but the apple tree still stands, now 116 years old. Not the oldest living fruit tree in the United States—an honor that belongs to the Endicott Pear Tree in Massachusetts—the apple tree’s age is still remarkable, owing in large part to the efforts of several groundskeepers and an arborist on loan from the state university’s extension office. The tree is larger than most apple trees—more than forty feet tall with a crown diameter of thirty-seven feet. It forks in the middle, thick branches reach toward cardinal north and south precisely, and when the wind comes off the river and through downtown Ada, the leaves sound like wrapping paper shivering. Obed Durhing sold most of his farm to the city, platted the year before the town was incorporated. Where the orchard once stood is the city’s courthouse, the first fire department, and several three-story stone buildings today housing a law practice, an art gallery, and a pizza parlor. And the park where the tree stands. 

Durhing’s Charter, which is what the people of Ada call the tree, is not a reference to the paper document on which Ada was founded, but Obed Durhing’s tree under which the city charter was allegedly signed. It stands in the center of the small grassy park, a three-foot tall ornamental fence surrounding it. A large metal plaque, hammered into the earth by the Sisters of Ada, tells the tree’s story. There is another tree in the park, nameless and not nearly as old, planted for the sole purpose of pollinating Durhing’s Charter.

This tree, our tree, is a symbol of Ada’s beginnings, a message of community and longevity and fecundity—and the city council has voted to cut it down.  

The Crime.

Jesse Dawkins was nineteen, two years older than Melissa Markham and her friends, but he was sort of infamous in the coffee shop scene among teenagers who took themselves to be proto-beatniks, though they were merely writers of raw and earnest poems. Jesse went to the parties and the open mic nights to sell quarter bags of shake and the occasional tab of acid. He was odd in a way difficult to describe—a feeling more than an understanding. Perhaps this: in puberty, a young person’s foot often grows before the rest of their body catches up. If the teenagers in Ada were the whole body, Jesse was that foot. Too large, too awkward, and he left you vaguely self-conscious for having been seen with him. He was gangly. He had a loping kind of walk and a tendency to chew his upper lip when he was thinking. He had a thick mop of hair like Joey Ramone, and he only wore band t-shirts—Modest Mouse, Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters—that were too large in the stomach and too short in the sleeves. He had graduated high school a year earlier but had stayed around town. Pathetic but ultimately harmless, so Melissa Markham and her friends tolerated him, even bought his weed every now and then even though it mostly just gave them headaches.

Melissa was a high school senior and different from Jesse. She was short, five three on her tiptoes, with bright blonde, almost colorless hair. Confident. Vibrant. An awful temper, biting wit, and the skill to wield both. Melissa was the kind of person who attracted people and things to her—and she had, unfortunately, attracted Jesse.

The gifts of flowers, the drinks at the coffee shop, the free pre-rolls, and the months of dogged pursuit brought Jesse no closer to winning Melissa’s heart. She accepted his gifts, seemed almost to like him, but yet, never quite. Jesse longed for an invitation of some kind. At night, he would sometimes fantasize about rescuing her—from what? A freak fire at the coffee shop, perhaps, or oncoming traffic, or even the rain. He spent hours on dial-up perusing websites and chat rooms, desperate for dating advice, and that’s how he came up with the idea of the love spell.

At first, he didn’t think it would work. Not really. But during the weeks he planned, idly at first and then with more fervor, he came to think that if anything might make Melissa fall in love with him, this would be that thing. The spell he conjured was not a spell so much as a hodgepodge of various traditions and bogus rituals he’d read about on the internet or found in books at the occult shop on Harroway. To be fruitful, the spell he created required taking a life of some kind, and he decided that in order to give the spell the best chance of working, he would need something big. Something of historical significance. He decided he would kill Durhing’s Charter.

For a week that autumn, Jesse sat under the tree from dusk until just before dawn. Using a sewing needle, he carved Melissa’s name and the things he loved about her into seven white beeswax candles (he’d read about the carving and the necessity of the beeswax in a gift book on love spells). The things he wrote about her were boring and superficial (even Jesse must have realized it): her hair, her smile, the smell of her shampoo, the way she chewed her nails when she thought no one was looking, her natural sense of style.

He washed the candles in Florida Water (this he’d taken from a GeoCities website that auto-played a MIDI version of Typo O Negative’s “Christian Woman”), coated them in a mixture of brown sugar and cinnamon (someone in an occult chat room suggested this), and while these candles burned down to pools of wax on the farmhouse plate he’d stolen from his mother’s china cabinet, Jesse circled the tree reciting Psalms (from the gift book on love spells) and pouring gallons of Velpar across the tree’s root bed (the chat room, again).

By the end of the week, the grass around the base of Durhing’s Charter had died and the tree’s leaves had yellowed. A week and a half later, nearly half the tree was bare, its limbs drooping to the ground.

Melissa didn’t fall for Jesse. Jesse was arrested for vandalism.

Though the papers wrote about the crime as though he’d enacted a brutal, premeditated murder (which, of course, he had), his sentence was, some felt, extraordinarily light. Charged with felony mischief under Texas Penal Code 28.03, the damage estimated at just over twenty-five hundred dollars, Jesse’s sentence was nonetheless reduced to a Class C misdemeanor. He was fined four thousand dollars and sentenced to six months of community service. He moved away once he served his sentence. Some of us heard he’d gone off to L.A., but no one knew anything for sure.

Charter Days.

Charter Day was established by the city council in 1982, and since then elementary school children—fifth graders primarily—make field trips to the tree each fall. The date of Charter Day had no historical or social significance; it was merely at a convenient time in the school calendar. On those days, the children were loaded into school buses and driven downtown from their suburban classrooms. Given Ada’s population of about 135,000, this was not a grand excursion, but the children were freed from school for the day. Nearly everyone from Ada, those who remained and those who left to find new lives elsewhere, has hazy and indistinct memories of the cool lawn and grass-stained jeans, the greasy and warm sandwiches from plastic bags, the feeling of sudden freedom, the annual reprieve from fluorescent lights and the odor of stale ketchup that lingered in the halls of their schools.

Each Charter Day someone was dared to eat one of the apples. It wasn’t illegal, nor was it dangerous, but it had the electricity of something forbidden, like touching a museum display or drawing on the pew sheet in church. Each year, someone would select fruit fallen beneath the tree, its dusky green color not at all like the bright waxy reds displayed in baskets at the grocery stores, and they’d bite into the apple while other children stood around the eater in astonished silence.

The apples were not good. They were mealy, tasteless, and if they were the same apples Durhing grew, it’s best he sold the farm.

Those children would grow up and forget Durhing’s Charter in the way of most novelties from youth—a recollection, a joke, an unnecessary but strangely delightful quirk from home. Ada’s residents passed the tree sometimes on their way to work or to the restaurants and bars downtown on weekend nights, only glancing as they passed the familiar park. Durhing’s Charter’s limbs were decorated with twinkle lights in the summer, empty boxes wrapped in gift paper were set around the tree’s trunk near Christmas. The tree another landmark in the city’s march through the seasons. Sometimes in passing, someone might remember their Charter Day, the docent’s short lecture, and the mushy, tasteless apple, but beyond the Parks and Recreation employees few visited the park until Jesse Dawkins poisoned it.

Hexazinone.

A tree knows—or rather, is aware—of the place where it lives. In 116 years, Durhing’s Charter had known something of the changing city. Memory is complicated, a projection, but somewhere stored in the earliest core of the tree’s rings was a recollection, a physical artifact of the rootstock’s planting in the dark loam of Durhing’s Orchard, the scion grafted into the cut rootstock. Its roots had strained, spread into the dark soil, fibers growing outward in a slender net. The tree stretched, healing from the graft, in a years’ long sigh. Its limbs still recollect and bear the traces of the weights and ties that made the limbs grow outward, the feeling of sunlight and rain and wind on its leaves.

Durhing’s Charter knows the sensation of woolly aphids eating its leaves and the new buds in spring. It knows the coddling moths burrowing into fruit before they mature. It knows the feeling of its roots under the sidewalk stretched before it on Euclid Avenue, how the earth there is dry, more compact. It knows the feeling of footsteps—children’s, the groundskeepers’, the late-night drunks relieving themselves in the dark corners of the park. And it knew Jesse’s feet, the long spiral he walked, night after night, for a week in September.

Velpar is Dupont’s name for Hexazinone, a highly soluble, broad-spectrum herbicide. Each morning at 7:30, after the pressure of Jesse’s feet passed beyond the park’s wrought-iron gate, the sprinkler system turned on for fifteen minutes, and the Velpar that Jesse spilled across the root bed sank deeper into the bottomland soil. The tender hairs of the roots took the poison up with the water, saturating the soft green and spreading through the tree along the bands of fibers in its trunk, up into the limbs and into the leaves—the mealy green apples, too.

Durhing’s Charter did not know, specifically, that the feet circling at night and the feeling of choking were related, but days after those nightly visits, the chanting and the rhythmic vibrations in the darkness, the distant warmth of a burning candle, the tree strained weakly in the sunlight. It could feel but no longer taste the sun. Slowly, it felt less and less, and as the weeks went on and its leaves wilted, it became confused by sudden numbness despite the warm sun falling on its crown.

Parker Yapp, RCA.

The City Council voted to pass an emergency bond to restore the tree, and Ada’s Department of Parks and Recreation sent for a specialist from the university’s extension service. Parker showed up days later—short and stocky, prone to wearing cargo shorts at all times, a spray of dark gray hair. The arborist had grown up in Florida, but he’d come to Texas for college and stayed there because he’d fallen in love with the austere beauty of the Hill Country.

He was a sour man, preferring the solitude of the ranch where he lived to the city, even one as small as Ada. The parks service put him up in an apartment downtown overlooking the square, and when he arrived in town, he was treated something like a celebrity. He was feted by the city council those first nights, his picture was published in the city paper, he received gifts of free meals from local restaurants downtown. Ada had pinned their hopes on the squat arborist from Pensacola.

After the poisoning, Durhing’s Charter resumed its place in the center of the town’s life. Ribbons were tied on the gate, stuffed animals left behind, as well as get well cards and flowers. Clusters of people gathered each evening, lighting candles and singing folk songs to the tree—“Turn, Turn, Turn” and “Amazing Grace” the most common. Church groups came to hold prayer vigils so popular the police had to shut the street to traffic. Even the soberest, least superstitious of businessmen assumed a respectful silence when they passed the park’s gate.

Parker announced that, given the amount of herbicide used, it was a miracle there was any life in the tree at all. (By this time only a small spray of green still emerged from the crown.) With spades and shovels, Parker and his team of workers carefully excavated the roots and replaced the dirt with a few thousand pounds of clay loam dredged from the river. They applied a sugar solvent to the roots. They replaced the antiquated sprinkler system with a new one, one that every fifteen minutes would mist the tree and its roots with fresh spring water. They trimmed back the dead limbs—the west side of the tree and most of the crown. Now, half its size, the tree looked more like a windswept scrub clinging to life.

In his apartment over the little park, Parker spent his evenings perusing soil composition tests, scanning articles for new approaches. He would sit on his small balcony and watch the glow of votive candles waver on the sidewalk. When the newspaper asked, his prognosis was dire. The city spent a fortune on reviving the tree. Parker worried he wouldn’t be up to the challenge.

Camila Garza.

Copper Cove High School’s favorite biology teacher lived alone in a small apartment near the school. In the mornings, she woke early, had a cup of coffee and dry toast for breakfast. She practiced twenty minutes of yoga, took a shower, and looked over her lesson plans before she walked the half mile to campus past the neighborhood swimming pool and the park. She was long and lean with dark salt and pepper hair. She had an ex-husband, God knows where, and a son who now lived in Illinois with his wife and children. Sometimes he would fly her out to their house in Schaumburg for the holidays, though he rarely came back to Ada for any reason. Camila had not seen her grandchildren since her vacation in June, and they were now getting to the age where she could talk to them on the phone for any length of time. In other words, they were getting to the age where they were interesting, and she wished Carlos was closer so she could see them more regularly.

On weekends, she visited the farmer’s market downtown and met with friends—some from work, some from the gardening classes she took for fun. She participated in river clean-ups, kayaking along the bank, gathering Styrofoam cups and faded aluminum cans from the low brush near the water and collecting them in the rubber sack tethered to the boat. She would not have described herself as lonely, but lately she wondered why she stayed in Ada—beyond work, beyond the farmer’s market, her volunteering, the few friends—she wondered why she stayed in this town so far away from the rest of her family.

She couldn’t have explained why the news stories about the tree affected her the way they did, though she suspected it had something to do with this distance. The tree, wilting and pruned, had a forlorn quality to it. When she saw the tree, she saw herself. Alone. Not isolated, but sort of just there. When she told her friend how she felt, her friend said, “Oh Cami, you’re not that old,” and Camila didn’t bother to say that this had not been what she meant at all.

On weekends, she visited the park, tracking the arborist and his team’s work. The tree’s excavated roots looked not at all like branches as she had expected, but like human arms, twisted and coiled and knotted, reaching from the earth. She watched the men with their squirt bottles spray the roots down, wiping away the yellow mud and collecting it in buckets to be examined. And in the coils of the exposed roots, Camila saw faces, too. There was nothing special about this, to see faces and human forms in the patterns of gnarled roots, but it affected her deeply.

In bed at night, faces and hands came out of the darkness toward her—not in any menacing way, but with a clawing desperation. A desperation to be seen, to be touched.

She clipped stories from the newspaper. She raised money for the restoration in her classroom.

In late spring, after months of care, the tree produced its first blossoms. It was a Wednesday morning, and Camila heard about it on the radio. She skipped work, calling in and saying that she had woken with a stomach bug and couldn’t keep anything down, could they please call a substitute, then she took the city bus downtown. When she arrived, dozens of people had already gathered, and more were coming down the sidewalk.

Small rosy flowers dotted the tree in bright clusters. There were not many, not so many as there were in other orchards, but each one seemed a bright ray of hope. Parker Yapp was there, talking with a newspaper reporter and smiling. It was the first time that Camila, despite having seen countless pictures of the man, could recall him smiling.

On the far side of the crowd, she saw three of her students. She wanted to duck behind the man beside her, and she saw that they—Daniel, Leticia, and Raheem—moved to do the same. But none of them did more than flinch. At last, Camila held her hand up and waved. She felt her eyes stinging. They waved back at her.

“It’s wonderful,” she mouthed to them, choking over the words. And they nodded back to her. It was wonderful.

That night, she thought to call her son, to tell him about the tree. But she waited, deciding she would call him over the weekend instead.

New Fruit.

A long feather dips into the blossom of an apple tree, the dwarf apple trained to cordons at the edge of the park, and rubs against the anther and stamen, taking wet pollen. That pollen falls from the feathers into small clay bowls and dries in the dark corner of the Parks and Recreation office. Two days later, pollen drifts into a shallow plastic bucket. New feathers, dusted with the dried pollen of one tree’s blossoms, rise up the side of ladders into the healing limbs of Durhing’s Charter. The feathers fall into the bright pink blossoms, one by one, and rub against the pistil. Each blossom, dusted by hand. An operation so important, it cannot be trusted to the caprice of bees.

In the late summer, the hypanthium swells. Durhing’s Charter’s limbs grow heavy, weighed down with growing fruit.

Melissa Markham and the First Apple.

Since Jesse’s arrest—since he confessed to the reason for his vandalism and since that confession was published in the newspaper—Melissa had not visited the tree. Her friends had. Her parents too. They all wanted her to join them, and they were upset when she refused. It seemed they all thought that she, of all people, needed to visit the tree. To confront it, Melissa thought, what had happened? To apologize to it, the tree? She couldn’t tell which. “I didn’t have anything to do with it!” she exclaimed to her parents. “Why should I go down there?”

“No one is saying you did, Sweetie,” her mom sighed. “Just thought it would be good for you.”

“I wish the damn thing died and you all would just leave me alone.”

Throughout the rest of the school year, she tried to avoid the stares. You would have thought eventually teenagers would find something else to obsess about, and of course they did, but Melissa felt as if she dragged the tree with her wherever she went. When Ms. Garza proposed the theater department (Melissa was the secretary of the Drama Club) put on a talent show to raise money for the tree, Melissa was incensed. She was the sole protest vote.

Melissa didn’t hate the tree. She hadn’t even thought about it until Jesse tried to kill it with a few gallons of herbicide. But every time Durhing’s Charter was mentioned, Melissa felt like she was blamed. And secretly, she started to wonder if she was somehow responsible.

That spring, just as the news reported the first pink buds on Durhing’s Charter, Melissa received her acceptance to Texas State. She wanted nothing more than to make it through the summer, to move to San Marcos, and leave this place—the miserable town and the miserable gossip and the miserable Jesse-fucking-Dawkins—behind.

Most summers, Melissa worked as a lifeguard at the neighborhood pool. A job she’d loved but quit because she knew that every parent lounging on their folding chairs with their pale legs thrust out into the sun watched her from behind their Clive Cussler and Nicholas Sparks paperbacks. The news reporters might have finally stopped calling, but people will still gossip. Melissa knew.

Her first weeks at Texas State were not at all what she had hoped. She felt strangely alone, suffocating in a sea of people who seemed to have no difficulty finding and making friends. Only months before, she would have thrived in this new environment, but now she couldn’t seem to emerge from beneath the shadow of a dying apple tree. It’s so stupid! she thought. She went to a party with her roommate, a girl from Waxahachie who inexplicably smelled like asparagus, at one of the frats. Melissa drank too much and broke her ankle on the walk home. The ankle needed two screws, and Melissa spent most of the fall semester on crutches. When fall break came around, her parents insisted she come home for a few days.

That was when her friend Jennifer, a year behind her in school, convinced her to at last go to the park. “There are apples now.”

“There are apples at the grocery store 365 days a year.”

“Mel, get off your ass and see that everything is okay for once.”

They took the city bus downtown, a ride that Melissa felt like a cold swelling in her gut.

The park wasn’t packed, but it wasn’t empty. The new fruit was less a novelty than the blooms had been. But families still congregated in the park, the bright noon sun high overhead, and ate picnic lunches. As they approached the park’s gate, Melissa noticed a group of kids from their school at the back. One of them, Kenneth—who went by the unfortunate nickname Geezy—had a nylon string guitar, and he was strumming the chords to a Radiohead song.  

“Can we leave?”

“Absolutely not,” Jennifer said and took Melissa’s hand, pulling her into the park. They selected a small patch of grass far from the tree where Melissa lowered herself slowly to the ground. Jennifer talked, but Melissa wasn’t paying attention. She watched the other kids recognize her, nudge each other, and nod her direction. Screw them, she thought. I’m in college. Who cares what they think? But she turned to the grass, picked clover, and shredded it between her fingers.

Then a breeze, like something ordained, fell through the park. It tossed the tree limbs, loosening an apple which thumped against the earth.

It surprised her, the apple. The fruits growing from Durhing’s Charter were no longer the dull yellows they had been for generations. Now they were bright red, almost iridescent in the sunlight.

Later, Melissa would not be able to explain why she did what she did. Perhaps because she was sick of the whispering, the stares. Perhaps because she wanted to do something shocking, shocking even to herself. Perhaps there was something greater, some divine message in the crimson skin of the apple reflecting the afternoon light from the grass beneath the tree. Whatever the reason, Melissa stood, bouncing on one foot until she caught her balance, picked up one of her crutches and went to the apple. She knew the eyes of everyone in the park were on her. She stooped, grabbing the side of the crutch for stability, and with her free hand snatched up the apple. Once she’d stood and regained her balance, she shined it on her shirttail, an action borrowed from a Disney cartoon.

“Mel, don’t,” Jennifer called. Melissa wondered about the poison that might still live in the tree—could she get sick from the herbicide? She decided not to care. And with that decision, a strange freedom. It wasn’t that she wanted to make herself sick, to die even, God knows. But in that moment of not caring, she felt somehow freed from almost a full year of anxiety. The crack of her teeth breaking the fruit’s flesh filled the park. Echoed through the city. Could even have been heard one hundred and eleven miles south at Texas State where her roommate sat with their dorm window cranked open because the A/C wasn’t working. Melissa felt the thrill of the sound surge under her skin.

She hobbled back to where Jennifer sat, lowered herself to the ground, and finished the apple, bite by bite. “How is it?” Jennifer asked.

“Best thing I’ve ever tasted.”

That night, she lay in her bed and watched the night sky through her bedroom window. It had been years since she had done this, she thought. It felt like the sun glowed under her skin. Like that warmth relaxed all the muscles in her body—the trapezius, the rhomboid, all of the muscles in her neck and shoulders felt soft, smooth, and round.      

She left the house that night and walked on her crutches through the streets of her parents’ neighborhood, noticing how the blue light of the moon made the asphalt sparkle, how the lights in upstairs bedroom windows burned bright in the shadows like lanterns. She looked at her hands in the light of the moon, traced the lines in her palm, felt the strangely acute sensation of simply being in a body.

Melissa slept that night on the wicker sofa on her parents’ porch and woke just as the sun slanted through the changing leaves of the sugar maple. She rose and slipped quietly into the house, her parents not yet awake.

The Taste.

Anyone who tasted a Durhing’s Charter apple that autumn described it this way: simple, surprising sweetness blooms across the tip of the tongue; neither saccharine nor sugary; hint of tartness like thread on the back of the pallet; perfume bringing flavors together; nothing acidic or vinegary.

Rosewater. Simple syrup. Earth. Peat. Honey.

Leticia and Mark.

Eaters came, it was bound to happen. More tried the apples. More felt the strange lightness, the sense of seeing closely.

Teenagers visited the park. They gathered in small groups, five or six, and they would, after a five-count, find a fallen apple or pluck one from the tree. Then, as the newly invented ritual stipulated, they would offer the apple to the first person whose eyes they met. No one knew how this ritual started, but everyone participated.

Because Mark knew who he wanted to trade with, he cheated. He kept his eyes on the grass, deliberately avoiding eye contact until he saw Leticia’s yellow Converse. She had drawn small flowers on the canvas in blue ink. Then he lifted his eyes. She was already watching him. He thought. He hoped. He held out his apple to her, demurely, cupped in his palms like a communion wafer at church. She laughed, her smile bright, and she plucked the apple from his hands and set hers in its place.

The juices slid down their throats, and as they chewed the soft flesh of the gifted apple, they glanced at each other cautiously. When they’d eaten their apples, they lay in the grass under the tree, and their world grew softer—the greens more vibrant, the sun more golden. Mark felt Leticia’s body next to his own, the warmth of her skin. He felt her fingers spread between his, and through her palm he was certain he could feel her heartbeat, the movement of air in her lungs, the animal of her being. Her lips, when they kissed, still tasted like the apple’s fruit.

They took an apple for the week, and after school Mark and Leticia would lie in her bed and cut slices for each other. They felt each other’s skin, but they didn’t have sex. Rather, their movement was strangely more intimate and innocent. They lay next to each other naked, simply feeling the other: the soft skin of her stomach, her arms, her thighs; the ticklish spot on his flank, the hair coming in badly on his chest.

“I think my heart is going to explode,” Leticia whispered to the ceiling, and then fed herself another slice of apple.

What People Said.

Dennis McIntyre, accountant: It’s like you’ve been given the ability to see with the heart of God. Or something, you know?

Bernice Waters, retired Air Force: I left a thank you note for the postman in the mailbox. I don’t know why I did that. I don’t even know him.

Margaret Tuan, chef: I watched the rain on my back patio yesterday, and it sounded like drums and wind chimes. Like an orchestra.

Candy.

Evelyn Bandy owned Dandy Bandy’s Candy, and in October, when the tree was in full production, she pulled her pickup to the park’s entrance and gathered baskets of apples. “What the hell is she doing?” she heard someone ask.

That autumn, the park had become the de facto center of town—even if they weren’t eating the apples, everyone was in the park picnicking under the revived tree. Impromptu concerts were held on the lawn, Jazz Fridays and Blues Saturdays, free painting lessons, donation baskets (full to the brim) for local charities, the food pantry, the women’s shelter. The park crowded every weekend, and at lunch and in the afternoons on weekdays. Evelyn Bandy loaded apples into the bed of her truck before an audience.

“What are you doing, Bandy?” someone shouted.

“Mind your own business,” she shouted back and continued plucking apples from the tree. She ignored them, but she could feel their watching. She felt a sense of righteousness with her movement. When she hoisted baskets heavy with apples and lugged them across the park, she thought, Take a good look, people. This is what real work looks like.

Evelyn never ate one of the apples, nor did she intend to try. A whole lot of hoopla over nothing is what she thought. But Evelyn was also a canny businesswoman and knew an opportunity when it presented itself. She skinned the apples and boiled them in chunks with pounds of sugar, cinnamon, and water, cooking long and slow until the apples collapsed and the syrup thickened. Then she heated the syrup again, added more sugar and corn syrup, and brought the pot to boil. She left the candy to harden on baking sheets and then broke it up neatly, wrapping each piece in a bright square of wax paper.

She sampled a small sliver of one of her candies, simply to make sure the recipe was right. It was fine, she decided. Nothing spectacular, but it wasn’t the taste of the candy that would make them sell, she knew. It was their origin.

The following morning, she placed a sign in front of the store, hand-painted: Durhing’s Promised Revelation Candies. “Made from real apples from Durhing’s Charter,” she said to anyone who came into the store. “One dollar a candy. Sweet and healthy.”

Business boomed. A steady stream of customers came through the store, buying bags of candy to send off to friends and family abroad. If business kept up, Evelyn would run out of apple candy by the end of the week. She’d need a new batch soon. Then, as she smoked a cigarette in the alley behind the shop that first afternoon, she realized the novelty of having an annual confection. In a kind of fever, she calculated the possible net income, with a little preparation, for the following year. If only there were more trees like Durhing’s Charter. She made a mental note to call a friend who ran an exotic fruit farm north of Austin.

“It’s kind of bullshit that you stole those apples from the park,” one teenage boy told her as he tossed his dollar, sticky with sweat, on the counter.

“You just think that ‘cause you didn’t think of it first.”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” the teenager said. Teenagers were like this, Evelyn thought. Convinced of their own righteousness. But it’ll happen to them, too. Life.

The kid unwrapped the candy, letting the wax paper fall to the floor, and shoved the sweet in his mouth. He sucked on it for a moment before he drooled it on the counter. “That’s nasty. Too sweet.”

Bandy, unfazed, scooped the wet candy off the counter and flung it into the wastebasket. “That’s an opinion, I suppose.”

KTRA, Your Local News Leader.

The broadcast was carried throughout the region. The anchors, Anna Hanson and Dan Boddie, sat at the news desk for the five o’clock broadcast. The desk, Formica and glass, the backdrop, white with wide blue chevrons. The whole set, Anna thought, looked like an airline counter from the mid-‘90s.

Anna, twenty-seven, having worked her way up from field reporter to the anchor desk, now stares down the camera lens. “What if the one thing that makes you happy could also kill you?”

Then Dan Boddie, with his perfect brick of dark hair, takes over the segment. “That’s what some people are saying about the apples from Durhing’s Charter.” The image of an apple overlaid with a biohazard symbol is superimposed on the left-side OTS. “Our viewers will remember last autumn’s brutal poisoning of a historic landmark. Since its rescue, the apples from Durhing’s Charter have been rumored to offer numerous benefits: from clearing acne scars to helping with pain relief, and even mitigating the most severe symptoms of anxiety and depression. But do those benefits come with hidden costs?”

Then the produced package. Beverly Houghton, a middle-aged woman with dull gray hair, heavy-set with the gravel-voice of a lifetime smoker, sits in a dark chair in her living room. “I thought it was a miracle. He seemed like his old self again,” she said. Then she begins to cry. “Sorry. I need a moment.”

Over b-roll of Beverly Houghton feeding her pet birds, Boddie continues. “It started when Beverly’s husband Eugene was laid off from his job as a janitor at a local high school.”

“He kept applying and applying for jobs, and I’d say, ‘Eugene, you’re a good worker. Strong man. Somebody’s gonna see that.’ But he couldn’t find a thing, and one day it was like he just kind of gave up.”

A few shots of children playing in Durhing Park in golden hour sunlight. A blonde child cradles one bright red apple, grinning. “Until one day, a miracle in the form of an apple.”

“We heard what people were saying. Can’t hurt, right?” Beverly Houghton laughs. Then she sighs. “He was just so sad. So, we tried. Things looked alright for a while.” She nods, earnestly. “They looked alright for a while.”

Over b-roll of Beverly Houghton walking down the cracked sidewalks near her home, Boddie says, “Eugene’s mood suddenly improved. He was happier. More confident. He even got a job as a bartender working Friday and Saturday nights at a nearby watering hole.”

“It was heaven. Just like heaven. I thought we were newlyweds again.” She laughs. A close-up of Beverly’s coarse hands on her lap. “But it didn’t last long,” Boddie says.

“Trouble breathing. Trouble sleeping. He said to me, ‘Bev, I don’t know what’s going on. My chest is tight. I can’t hardly get a breath.’”

“Then on the night of October 15^th, Eugene was raced to the hospital.” Cars glitter in the sunlight before the Kaiser Ada Medical Center.

“I woke up and I could tell something was wrong and I said, ‘Eugene, Eugene. What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong.’ But he couldn’t talk. I’ve never seen anything like it. It scared me so much.”

In a hospital room, Beverly sits with her husband. He’s seated in bed, his hair greasy but brushed flat—something Beverly had done before they started shooting—the oxygen tube rests gently on his upper lip, and he has trouble moving, his face is slack. Beverly smiles, holds his hand.

“Eugene Houghton had a stroke paralyzing the right side of his body. After a few weeks in the hospital, Eugene’s doctors say that with rehab they hope he’ll be able to return to a normal life.”

“I wouldn’t wish this on no one,” Beverly says. “We thought, you know, an apple a day… If people see this, learn something, then maybe it’s for the best. Be careful, is what I’d say to someone now, thinking they’d eat a Durhing’s apple for their health. Just be careful.”

Back at the news desk, Dan Boddie wears his most earnest expression. “It’s unclear now if the apples caused Eugene’s stroke, but health officials have asked the public to refrain from eating Durhing’s Apples or anything made with the apples for the time being. If you or someone you know has eaten an apple and has experienced stomach cramps, difficulty breathing, hives, extreme thirst, dizziness, or fainting, the health department encourages you to see your doctor.”

Anna Hanson matches Dan’s earnest gaze. “Our hearts go out to the Houghton family,” she says. “And we hope Eugene makes a speedy recovery.”

Then, a close-up on Anna. Her smile brighter—the transition between moods something she has not mastered yet. “Up next, turning rainwater into a musical instrument? A local handyman has designed a home gutter system that can play Pachelbel’s Canon in D. That’s coming up on KTRA, your local news leader.”

The City.

In the days following the news story, Ada’s Parks and Recreation director emailed Parker Yapp to ask if it was likely that people were ingesting any herbicide by eating the apples from the tree. Most definitely, he replied. But not any worse than if you ate a head of conventionally grown lettuce from the grocery store. The director of Ada’s Parks and Recreation office read the terse reply several times over, feeling the world around her swell with toxicity: first the herbicides and pesticides in the produce section at the grocery store, then hormones in meats, the cheeses, the beers her husband drank when he came home from work each evening, the air over the streets and highways thick with carbon and arsenic, the chlorinated solvents in her clothes, the carpets in the Parks and Rec offices still off-gassing a year after they’d been installed, whatever was in her coffee. These were things that she knew, of course, but conveniently forgot in order to live a functional life. Now suddenly she was as conscious of them as she was of her own hands.

Her email dinged again: Test the apples if you’re worried. They’re probably within safe limits.

They did. They were. It didn’t matter.

The mayor’s office and city council were inundated with emails and phone calls and letters and visitors, each one demanding to know what the city was going to do about the tree that was poisoning their children. The comparison to the chemicals in a single head of lettuce did little to calm anyone.

So, they did what any city had to do in the face of outcry. First, they shut down the park. Police tape circled the park’s perimeter and beat cops worked regular shifts guarding the entrance. Health Services raided Dandy Bandy’s Candies and took not only her stock of Durhing’s Charter’s Promised Revelation Candies, the 100 pieces she had left, but also the rest of her stock for fear of cross-contamination. She was reimbursed at cost minus labor and shut down for a week until she could have her facilities cleaned and inspected. “This is outrageous,” she said to the inspector.

“Your mouth to God’s ears,” he replied.

Every apple was removed from grocery stores—whole stocks carted to the dumpster and tossed. You can never be too careful.

People still came to the park at night, teenagers most often, and they would sneak under the tape (no hard task) to gather apples. “It’s stupid,” Raheem Khoury said to his friends as they shared an apple they’d bought from a dealer at school. “Everyone’s over-reacting. If they were dangerous, a lot more people would be sick.” Later that night, Raheem woke with stomach cramps and briefly worried if it was the apple, though he’d also consumed a bag of Red Vines, a Mountain Dew Code Red, and a Crunch-Wrap Supreme earlier that evening.

At last, after three weeks of tension and turmoil, of running high school and college kids out of the park, after fielding numerous calls, holding open council sessions and informational meetings, clarifying false alarms, releasing dozens of statements from various authorities, the mayor and city council finally acquiesced. That it was the beginning of November, that the tree would be dormant now until next spring, didn’t much matter. They needed a demonstration, proof the city government listened.

“It’s a shame,” the mayor said in an address to city council that went live to the local news station. “In restoring Durhing’s Charter, we showed the strength of our bonds, the importance of history and legacy to this great community. With this unfortunate but necessary decision, we invest in our future.”

The Tree.

Chainsaws burned against tree, and branches were lowered to the ground with guide ropes to keep them from crashing into nearby buildings. Then, when all left was a single spire, the city’s two workers cut down the trunk and with a backhoe dug up the root system. All of it was cut into cords, which were loaded into the back of a dump truck and hauled away.

No singing. No prayer vigil. No one but a producer and camera op from KTRA and reporters from a few regional newspapers bothered to watch. There was nothing spectacular about tree removal. The job perfunctory and swift. Most of the media left before it was finished.

An associate producer at KTRA, Monica Hernandez, stayed behind until the job was complete, until they had opened a hole in the sky over the park. “It sucks,” one of the workers told her. “Seeing something like that go. It was an institution.”

In the brush left behind from the tree’s removal, Monica found a small apple. Not fully developed—still slightly green around the stem, hard scars along its side where the fruit had split open and healed—but she put it into her purse and took it home to her apartment. When it finally rotted away to pulp, she cleaned the seeds in the kitchen sink and set them in a small bowl with rocks she’d collected on childhood vacations and the seashells she’d gathered at the Gulf.

 

Jeffrey Amos is a fiction and essay writer, editor, educator, and musician. For a time he was a nonfiction television producer with credits on shows like PBS’s Genealogy Roadshow, Hoarders, and Who Do You Think You Are? He has an MFA from Purdue University and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he teaches. He writes and thinks about place, the environment, family and family history.