Read Online September Song by William Humphrey - Free Book Online Page A

drowsy with the buzz of bees. Though the days were warm, the nights were cool: the prescription for growing. The rain was regulated as though by the Department of Agriculture. He was encouraged by these conditions to work harder than he had ever worked before. The trees sagged with fruit. Incandescent as Christmas trees they were in the glow of the setting sun when he went out to inspect his ripening crop. Money didn’t grow on trees? Who said? When they were apple trees it did! It almost restored his long-lost faith, at least for a season. God was in His heaven and all was right with the world, quoted Ellen, the Vassar College English major who would in time marry the mealy-mouthed minister. He suspected that God was out of His heaven, leaving some sleepy subordinate to mind the store. Only then would orchardmen have such luck.
    The days when school was let out and whole families came to pick apples, bringing a picnic lunch with them (he supplied the iced tubs of beer and soda) were a thing of the past. Now labor contractors went to Florida, Jamaica, the Bahamas and signed up migrant gangs. The farmer housed them in trailer camps or in area motels. They chattered incessantly as they worked. Listening to them was like getting hard of hearing: it was English they were speaking, you knew it was, yet you could not make out the words. But it was musical. They were as noisy in the trees as nesting wrens and just as merry. Last year his pickers had been Jamaicans and so they would be again this year.
    The fruit was almost ripe for picking when the state legislature, under pressure from labor unions, passed a measure requiring aliens to obtain work permits, and making it impossible for them to do so.
    He watched his finest crop go unpicked, fall to the ground and rot.
    â€œWhat do you think—life is a picnic?” he said. “Think I would sooner have had it soft? Sit in a bank making loans to people? Sell their houses out from under them? Brokers in heartbreak! I’ve fed people. And more than that. Not just staple food. Joyful food. What children love to steal. There’s satisfaction in that. No, it hasn’t always been easy. But man must eat his bread in the sweat of his face.”
    â€œFather, remember how that curse came upon us?”
    Going once .
    Going twice .
    He was like an auctioneer egging on two competing bidders.
    Except that one, Janet, was not competing.
    Going…
    Going…
    Gone!
    It was the commission he would earn on the sale of the Bennett farm that put Rodney Evans in a position to propose marriage. So, with a sense of the fitness of it which he expected him to share, he informed his future father-in-law. This commission was staying in the family.
    The terms of the sale left them with a lifehold on the house and five acres right around it. At once, even before the clearing of it began, his former land, the land of his family, was like a lake surrounding his little island. Just so he felt himself cut off from his neighbors, his former friends. The very trees, now awaiting execution, the trees whose pruning he had overseen as watchfully as a mother the barbering of her brood, reproached him for his treachery—or would have if he had ventured among them.
    On the morning a week after the closing they were awakened by noises as if war had broken out all around them: bursts of machine-gun fire, the rumble of tanks. Although expected, it still came as a shock, and they clung to each other, frightened by this upheaval in their lives. The temptation was to pull the covers over their heads and stay in bed, but drawn by a contrary curiosity he dressed and went outdoors.
    Men with chainsaws were in the trees as pruners had once been, only these were not just trimming out the unwanted suckers, they were lopping off all the limbs. Above one pile hovered a pair of songbirds protesting the destruction of their nest with its eggs. Already half a dozen trees had been topped, leaving a row of