Read Online September Song by William Humphrey - Free Book Online

passed on to him. He had housed them, fed them, clothed them, educated them, nursed them. Yet it was not he alone who had done that. He had been a link in the chain. Fruit from trees set out by their grandparents had paid their bills. Did they owe nothing to those who had worked and worried and denied themselves and put aside for their unborn offspring? Were they now free to do just as they pleased, mate to their fancy, outside the strain, without consideration for their forebears? He had expected that their long-lineaged genes would shape and guide them. They thought the world began with themselves. For him the world was ending with himself.
    â€œFather,” she said, in a different, a reflective tone, “you ought to have traveled. Seen something of the world. Then you wouldn’t think that the sun rises and sets over this farm of yours.”
    How he hated it when people, especially young whipper-snappers, told him what he should do or should have done!
    â€œTo have one spot of earth that is all the world to him—that is what I call a fortunate man. That it costs him work and worry now and then makes it all the dearer.”
    â€œWhat reward has it brought you?”
    â€œIndependence! I have been my own man.”
    â€œIndependence! You’ve been a slave. Ten thousand masters you’ve got. You belong to those trees. They don’t even let you sleep.”
    It was always hard work; chainsaws and tractors made it dangerous work. Throughout the growing season you were often out on the sprayer all night long, and the chemicals were hazardous to your health: to your lungs, your eyes, your skin. When it came to spraying you were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t. The insects and the fungi could blight and canker your fruit, but the chemicals that poisoned them also poisoned the birds that ate them. Worse by far, the chemicals killed the bees upon which your whole operation depended, without which your blossoms went unpollinated. It was not like that in the original Garden of Eden. Those gates at which the flaming sword would be set kept out the bugs. The Hudson Valley lay east of Eden—though in the spring you would have thought it was Paradise regained.
    There was no season of rest. Harvest-time did not bring months by the fireside in your carpet slippers. Pruning—a never-ending job—was done in the depth of winter, mowing at the height of summer; you shivered and you sweltered. The trees of each variety ripened separately; you were at it sixteen hours a day. The apples must be sorted, graded, packed, shipped. The “drops” must be gathered from the ground and sent to the cider mill. You might find that before you had time to wrap the trunks to protect them, the deer had eaten the bark of your saplings and killed them. Five minutes of hail or six months of drought—hard to say which was the longer to live through—and your crop was gone.
    But with the pickers in the trees singing like birds—if birds could warble words—and shouting jokes to one another, and with that red river of ripe fruit flowing along the conveyor belt—was it you who grew all that? Construction workers on skyscraper girders, tugboat crews, road-menders, assembly-line workers, schoolchildren from here to California would polish off lunch with one of your apples.
    Meanwhile, sure, like farmers everywhere, he pore-mouthed. Once when he was inveighing against his hardships one of those sons-in-law of his commiserated with him by saying he couldn’t understand why anybody in his right mind would go in for it.
    â€œYou’re not in your right mind!” he said proudly. “You don’t ‘go in for’ it. You’re born to it. It’s in your blood.”
    His worst year was to have been his best. The weather was balmy. With the warming of the days, like popcorn in a pan, first a few blossoms, then more, then in a burst the trees whitened. The air was