My father took a hardcover book from a shelf in his “library,” which occupied a poorly lit room at the front of our house. “I got this from a guy who converted a barn into a used-book store,” he said.
“You should read the Russians. They taught the Poles. You should read the Russians and the Poles. When you’re finished, you’ll write a report and show it to me.”
I read the title on the faded cover: Fathers and Sons.
*
I put the book into a canvas bag and walked to a fallow farm. At the top of a hill, I came to an old apple orchard in an overgrown field. I sat on a pile of weeds and opened the volume. The text was hundreds of pages long.
Nevertheless, I started reading. In the novel, the main characters live with a servant on an estate in the Russian countryside. The father has a son with his wife and another son with the servant.
In the field, I attracted gnats, flies, and the occasional bee. I couldn’t focus on the story.
The trees around me held apples, but the apples were green, unripe—pitted where birds or insects had fed on them. I picked one and bit into an undamaged part. The flesh was hard and sour, basically inedible. Still, I picked a few of the apples, laid them in my bag, and walked toward a small barn. When I got closer, a brown horse looked at me over the barn’s half door. I held out an apple and the horse took it, nipping my finger as it sucked the fruit into its mouth. I held the next apple in my open palm, and the horse clamped onto the nugget without biting me. The horse’s lower jaw moved side to side as it mashed the fruit.
*
At home, I looked for better apple. I took a fresh one from the refrigerator and brought it to my face, but my mother stopped me. “You have to peel it,” she said. “In China, we peeled all fruits and vegetables. Millions of bacteria are on an apple.”
“But we’re not in China,” I said.
“Well, I remember some things.”
She skinned the apple, cut out it into four pieces, scooped out the core, and gave me the sections. I ate them but couldn’t forget the bacteria. I worried about infection.
*
“Where is your book report?” my father asked.
“I’m working on it,” I said.
“That book will give you perspective. Do you want to kowtow, or do you want to overthrow? Most people don’t even know we’re trapped in a plutocracy. Why don’t they know? Because they elected the plutocrats!”
“I haven’t read the book,” I said.
“I read it,” my father said, “and I became an artist. I moved here, to rural Appalachia. I’m not part of the system; I’m not running in the rat race.”
My father’s artworks, mostly landscapes and still lifes, hung on the walls of our house. The pieces had become less realistic over time, as he’d moved from painting with a brush to making silk-screen prints. One print showed a straight view out a front window: a mown cornfield, a hedgerow of leafless tree, a brown forested mountain, no sky. The artworks contrasted with the shabby wallpaper that had come with the rented house.
*
I took my brother and sister to the overgrown orchard, where we picked some apples and put them in our pockets. Next, we went to the small barn, looking for the horse I’d seen. We found two horses there; both had brown coats. The horses looked at us expectantly.
“Hold the apples in the flat of your hand.”
My siblings followed my advice, and the horses slurped the apples into their mouths. Their molars thudded as they ground the fruit into pulp.
“Can we ride these horses?” my sister asked.
“Where can we get saddles?” my brother asked.
“They’re old,” I said. “We might break their backs.”
As we walked away, the horses stayed in the barn, with their heads hanging over the half door.
*
“I’m just getting started,” my father said at dinner. “We’ll make our homestead into an art center. We’ll divide the space into bedrooms and studios. We’ll plant fruit trees and chestnuts in the yard.”
“There are no chestnut trees. They were killed by blight,” my mother said.
“We’ll plant Chinese chestnuts. They’re resistant,” my father said.
“Where will you get them?”
“At the university, the agriculture college. They’ll give me grafts for the trees.
“I used to gather them when I was a child. We picked pounds of nuts in their husks.”
“We’ll produce enough food for ourselves and our extended family.”
“We have no extended family,” my mother said.
“We’ll send out word, and people will come,” my father said. “We’ll start a dynasty.”
*
In the evening, while my brother and sister and I were watching television, we heard what sounded like knocks on the front door. I opened the door and looked outside but saw no one. I stepped onto the porch and felt something soft under my foot. It was a rotten apple, and there were others around it. The porch floor was sticky with brown fruit.
“Someone was throwing apples,” I said when I came back in.
“Who?” they asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone.”
I went to my father’s studio to tell him about the attack. He was sitting on a stool, with his head bent over his drafting table. His trusted bottle was on the table beside his head. I didn’t want to wake him. Anyway, I didn’t know how far gone he was. For all I knew, he could have been planning to sleep in his chair overnight.
*
In the dark, I heard something moving in the yard. I got out of bed and started to walk, yet didn’t feel awake. I looked out a window and saw one of the horses from the nearby farm. Maybe someone had left the barn door open and the horse had escaped. It looked up at me, and I understood I could ride it. I could sling myself over its back and hold onto its mane. The horse wouldn’t let me fall. We could go from one end of the town to another, looking into the unlit houses, searching for the vandals. But I was comfortable where I was. I didn’t want the get up. I wanted to slip back to uninterrupted sleep.
