By SCOTT SAALMAN
Scaramouch
Fall approaches, and the apples fall. Late-summer apples, green and dewy, scattered over this southern Indiana lawn, like remnants of a neglected game of marbles. Overhead, a rustle of branches and then the thuds of even more limb-lost apples set the Tell City morning in motion, albeit a lazy sort of motion, the slow motion of this small town with a city name, the slow, patient motion of the old bones of grandparents gathering fallen apples.
It is mid-September, and it is cider day. With pocket knives and paring knives, my grandparents carve out small flaws from the fruit’s freckled flesh – rot spots, bruises, worm holes – robbing the ripe apples of their roundness, blades dripping with juice, fingers wet and sticky from this seasonal knife-blade geometry.
It is Saturday, and my grandfather rolls out the cider mill and parks it in an apple tree’s jagged island of shade. He is one of those retired, toothpick men, a trademark sliver of wood dancing between his lips to some old song playing only in memory, perhaps his favorite song, “I’m The Man That Rode The Mule ‘Round The World.”
This is the same man, who during his prime, labored over Landing Ship Tanks at the Evansville Shipyard as part of the war effort, and after that, led a tool and die maker’s long, peaceful life at General Electric. But now, there are only these apples with which to deal and a leisurely kind of labor.
This cider mill, a muscle-driven machine from another time, was found midpoint last century, buried in some Hoosier man’s yard, the wooden hopper and top portion of the flywheel visible above the earth’s surface, sprouting from soil like a cast iron seedling. White letters are etched on the mill: LATEST IMPROVED BUCKEYE. P.P. Mast and Company. Springfield O. It was built in the 1800s. Time has paled the mill’s red paint.
My grandfather dumps the first bowl of apples into the hopper. He turns the handle with his left hand, his right hand hovering to catch any apples that may hop out. Immediately, there’s that glorious crunch of apple as the rolling blades in the hopper’s base cut the stems, the peels, the cores, the apples’ meat, and suddenly I’m gone again, a kid again, in this sweet, apple-scented Saturday morning.
It is a time machine, this cider mill, and I’m taken again to 20 years ago, waiting anxiously behind my barefoot cousins, Tim and Wig and Donald, to turn the handle, keeping a wary eye on the assemblage of buckets and bowls of apples as they are emptied one by one at alarming speed.
Each cousin takes his turn, each effortlessly manhandling the handle in front of our muscular, smiling grandfather. My town-boy-tough cousins are far bigger and stronger than me, the scrawny, rural-route boy of the bunch. As much as I hope that we won’t run out of apples before my turn, I also hope we will run out of apples. The handle is hard to handle for the small and self-conscious, especially when it assumes the 12 o’clock position, forcing me to stand tiptoed and uncertain.
We never ran out of apples before my turn, though. By my grandfather’s design, I now suspect.
At the cider mill, I am eight, tiptoed and trembling. I hold my breath. I reach up with both hands to clutch the handle, feel the ghost warmth of my cousins’ palms, and muster the courage to turn the curvy, cast iron wheel round and round, faster and faster, silently praying that my hands don’t slip and cause the suddenly free-spinning handle to deliver a fearsome upper cut to my jaw, hurtling me into the treetops.
Amazingly, I failed to fail at the cider mill. The applause of cousins and crunch of apples assure me of this as I close my eyes and turn the humming wheel quite easily with my newfound confidence and strength, feeling my arm muscles tightening, feeling my body moving up and down and round and round until that juice-making machine and I are one. At eight years old, I became that cider mill.
Though I’m 28 now, and it’s just the two of us, I still keep a wary eye on the buckets and bowls of apples.
Are we to the last bucket, I ask my grandfather, anxious for my turn after so many years away from the cider mill.
Soon, he says.
After the apple pieces fall into the wooden basket below, the basket is slid forward on a tin runway to the front of the cider mill. Round boards are placed on top of the pile of apple pieces, and when my grandfather turns the thick oily screw that controls the press, the boards are forced downward, pressing the apples tightly until squeezed of their juice. The cider flows forward and drains out the lip of the runway golden and foaming as it is sifted through the sieve of the pan resting in the grass. Hornets and honeybees skim the stream of cider and bounce drunkenly, like bingo balls in a caller’s machine.
My grandfather carries the sloshing cider pan into the house and returns with another bucket of apples.
It’s the last bucket, he tells me, and dumps the day’s last apples into the hopper. My hand is on the handle, and I turn the wheel, and I hear the crunch, and I see his toothpick smile, and I’m so caught up in cider day here in this Ohio River town, a mere map speck midpoint between our boot-shaped state’s tattered toe and crumbled heel, so lost again in the rapture of Southern Indiana gravity.
Contact: scottsaalman@gmail.com. Buy his books on Amazon.