Spencer stood next to me, barely breathing.
“You gotta promise.”
“Okay. I promise.”
“Spence?”
Spencer nodded. “Yeah. I promise.”
Jack nodded. Opened the stall door. Shined the flashlight inside.
I saw the boots first. Then the jeans. A flannel shirt. And when I got to the neck—
I fell to my knees. The world spun. The supper I’d had earlier came up in a rush.
Jack put his hand on my shoulder. He squatted so that his face was level with mine. He picked up some hay from the ground and used it to wipe off the remainder of vomit on my chin.
“You promised, okay? You can’t tell any one.”
I nodded, fighting to keep the rest of my food down.
Jack stood up, shaking his head. “I didn’t think he’d do this. I really didn’t.”
Spence and I stared at the body in the stall. I felt numb. “Where is he?” I asked. “Where’s Paul?”
I looked in once again at the body. The neck ended abruptly at the dull metal of a gardening spade. The edge of the spade was embedded into the dirt floor, separating Hench’s head from his body.
“He’s at home,” Jack said. “He’s doesn’t want to leave his room.”
I nodded toward Hench. “What are we going to do with him?”
“Leave him be,” Jack said. “No one’ll know it was Paul.”
“Maybe we should tell someone he’s here,” I said. “Make an anonymous call.”
“Leave him,” Jack said. “Don’t call anybody.”
Spencer spoke up. “Let’s bury him.”
We turned to him.
“We can bury him out in the orchard. Bury him deep so no one will find him.” He stepped over the body. Yanked the spade up from the ground.
We took turns digging out in the orchard under an apple tree using the spade. We dug as deep as we could, wanting nothing and no one to find him. It was cold that night, but the ground had still not frozen. Our sweat soaked our shirts and chilled against our skin. Steam drifted off of us and disappeared into the branches above. When we finally set him in the ground, we were tired and dirty. We spread out the fallen apples over the grave. Buried the spade under some hay in the barn. Rubbed the muzzle of the horse, who stood and watched, its big eyes rheumy and nervous.
IV.
The apple tree man. Old and withered, a skinny bent pervert nestled in the crotch of apple tree branches. He reaches out with long bony fingers. Strong enough to lift a twelve year old kid from the ground up into his brittle lair.
V.
I promised I would never tell a soul about what we did that day, what Paul did, what we all did when we buried Mr. Hench beneath the apple tree. Twenty-five years have gone by. The promise becomes more difficult to keep. Guilt plays its hand, seeps into the most hardened of souls and picks at it a little at a time, disintegrating the foundations.
We were kids. We didn’t know any better. It was self-defense. Hench almost killed one of us.
Rationalizations. The list gets longer as we grow older.
Meanwhile, we’ve grown into lifestyles we’ve become comfortable with. I have a wife. A child. I don’t want them to suffer the consequences of old childhood secrets. I don’t want them to become smeared by scandal. There’s safety in keeping secrets secret.
It’s been a hard choice for all of us. For Paul, for Jack, for Spencer.
For me.
But I’ve made up my mind. Just as the others have made up theirs.
VI.
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.