I drive to the town of Hendricksville, an hour drive from where I live, past rolling hills, fields of corn, soybeans, the autumn sun turning the dead stalks a rust-tainted gold. Flocks of geese fly overhead. There is the smell of farms, hay and manure and soil, a smell I like, and I breathe it in deeply. It’s the smell of natural things, and it feels as if I’m preparing the soil of my own soul, strengthening it for the oncoming winter, the task ahead.
I wait until night and drive to what was once Hench’s farm.
The land was bought up by the Braemer Family Orchard. A couple more rows of apple trees were planted. A pumpkin patch. Raspberries. The barn was torn down years ago, and a Quonset hut sits where the house once was.
There’s a new fence now, too; straight rows of wire stretching into the distance, evenly placed signs warning of the electricity that flows through them. I stand a moment, leaning on the handle of my shovel. I can see no break in the wire, but there’s a maple tree close to the fence with a large branch just low enough for me to reach. I toss the shovel over. Jump for the branch. I feel like a kid again as I swing up and over. I retrieve the shovel. Find the tree I’m looking for. It’s late in the season and I see no apples left in the branches. I stop and listen. Look. It seems safe. I kick aside the layer of dead fallen apples beneath the tree and begin to dig.
The dirt comes up easily. The roots have already been broken through.
There is something cleansing in this. I pause to light a cigar, digging slowly enough so as not to let the growing ash fall with the effort. It falls when I hit the marker I’d placed there six years earlier. Another shovel. There’s a plastic bag knotted around one end of the shovel, and inside that is a bloodied pillow case and a gun.
Not Hench’s gun.
A different gun.
Another secret I’ve promised not to share. A promise I made to myself.
VII.
Let me tell you another reason why apples scare me.
End of summer, four years ago. Our first summer in our present house. You’d think I’d have noticed our neighbor’s apple tree before purchasing our house, but we bought it in the winter, when the unpruned branches were bare, and it looked no different than the other trees scattered throughout the neighborhood. But when the blossoms appeared in the spring, I became frightened.
By the time the fruit was the size of walnuts they dripped blood.
They whispered to me.
As they grew, eyeballs appeared. Dismembered fingers and toes. Lips moved. Tongues clucked disapproval. I heard them at night, giggling, commiserating, splintering through the wall to my soul.
Middle of the night, late September, I slid a black windbreaker over my pajamas, and grabbed a hacksaw from a hook in the garage.
As I sawed at the base of the apple tree, I ignored the apples dangling above me, ignored their accusations, the feel of blood dripping on top of my head. I ignored the smell of rot, and the sound of a gun being fired through a pillow into an old friend’s head.
Guilt is a dangerous thing.
I sawed it into small parts. No one woke up that night, no lights came on. The only sounds were the screams of dying apples as they hit the ground in a series of sickening splats, like the sound of skin being broken, like the sound of blood squirting across the ground.
Or across the sheets of a rumpled bed.
Guilt.
VIII.
I will say this only once.
Six years ago, I killed one of them. One of my friends. I shot Paul through the head with his own revolver. He begged me not to, but he gave me no choice. It had to be done.
The day before, he called me on the phone and talked about guilt; of how he could no longer live with it, how he’d recently found out that Mr. Hench had family down in Tennessee who still visited the grave they’d erected when he disappeared from the face of the earth. Paul told me how he called Hench’s brother and talked to him, and told him he knew Mr. Hench, of how he’d pestered him, and how he was sorry for all the trouble he’d caused.
“What else did you tell him?”
I heard Paul crying on the other end. “Nothing. But I don’t know how long I can hold it in. It’s killing me.”
“Think of what it would mean to Polly. How could she support herself with you in jail?”
“I was only a kid.”
“Doesn’t matter.” My grip on the phone tightened. Sweat trickled from my ear into the receiver.
“Whatever happens, happens,” he said. “I can’t live like this.”
I paid him a visit the next night. Luck was with me. His wife was playing Bridge across town. He was asleep in bed when I found him. I told him I was sorry, but we’d made a promise.
I intended to hold him to it.
I grabbed his wife’s pillow, held it firmly over his face, and pumped two bullets into it. I worked fast to remove him, remove any evidence.
Polly came home a full hour after I left.
IX.
Guilt.
X.
I pull up the old shovel from the grave beneath the apple tree and look up at the moon through the tree’s branches. Something catches my eye, silhouetted against the moon, a black pulsing orb, breathing like some hungry creature. There’s an apple left, after all.
I set down my shovel at the edge of the grave, my cigar halfway done, and walk quietly back to the electric fence. I hoist myself up and over via the maple branch, find my car and open the trunk.
XI.
Two years ago, Jack called.
Told me of how he wanted to tell someone, how he was thinking of seeing a psychiatrist to get some of the past off his chest.
“Have you told anyone yet?” I asked.
