The Prince of the Apple Towns: A short story by Michael Fine

by Michael Fine, contributing writer

© 2026 by Michael Fine

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

 

It was never enough.  Nothing Brian Amherst did was enough to make a go of the orchard, let alone make the orchard what he knew it could be.

The work of an orchard is endless, thankless, work.  When you dig a ditch, you have the ditch to look at, at the end of the day.  When you drop a tree and then cut and split the wood, you have a wood pile done and ready to burn, and can feel the warm stones of the hearth in your imagination, if not the same day in the fireplace.

But orcharding isn’t one and done.  The trees and nature itself are fickle.  There is pruning in the winter, when the air is cold and the ground is hard, pruning being real work on a ladder, twisting yourself into unnatural postures.  You have to reach and stretch.  The wear and tear on the muscles of your hand and wrist, your pruning hand and the ache in the shoulder of that hand isn’t something you expect, it being easy to prune a single branch but a different thing altogether to burden that hand, wrist, elbow, and shoulder over and over, thousands of times in a single day, so the muscles ache and the ligaments stretch and then spasm as you make your body go far beyond the capacity of that body, something you have to do for days.  Then you have to face the indignity of the cleanup, the cart pulled behind an aging tractor, the cut branches lifted by pitchfork or by bending at the waist for the branches the pitchfork missed  — and then you have to feed all that woody mess into the wood furnace, which smokes and bellows with the roar of the fire.

Prune so a bird can alight through the branches.  Prune so each branch is horizontal, so each branch can see the sun, when the sun comes back in the spring.  Prune so each branch can grow strong enough to support the weight of the fruit, in the years there is fruit.  All this is work done and time invested with the sometimes vain hope the sun will shine and the rain will fall and the frost will end and not return, all on our schedule, all timed as we understand how the timing should work, which is not necessarily the schedule of the planet, the climate, the trees or the prevailing winds.

And then we spray.  And spray.  And spray.  The first, the dormant oil, goes on in late winter.  I load the spray tank, which I pull behind my tractor, and my heart breaks a little, which makes no sense, spraying being so much of an orchardist’s work: which also includes testing the soil, inspecting the trees every day for pests or scale to stay ahead of nature, (which evolves these beasts to defeat my work), then spraying again and again.  I wear protective gear when I spray: a hazmat suit and goggles and a full-face mask and gloves. Spraying should not bother me, but it does: I am interrupting nature, distorting it, foiling it, trying to get ahead of it, and something dies inside me every time I back the tractor up to the tank and couple them, fill the spray tank, and start off.

The spray wand is no delight. You aim and stretch and are never sure you have coated every surface, the underside of all the branches and the verticals at each tree’s crown. The mist coats you and clouds your goggles. You smell and the air smells and the tractor smells and all the while feel like you are a traitor to the very earth you are trying to protect, by these arcane and so-called organic practices, which also fool the earth and the trees into giving forth fruit.  Orcharding is more like giving birth than anyone knows, as you stretch and groan and push and pull to extract from the earth what the earth doesn’t really want to give, the earth wanting to hold its parts and its production for itself, letting loose only what it must let loose of and only in its own time.

There is no profit, not really. We wrench fruit from the earth, milk it or yank it out, wrap our fingers around it, with forceps, like an obstetrician who wraps the head of a baby stuck in the birth canal with forceps and then extracts it, knowing that the fruit will last only a moment and the earth will eventually reclaim us.

Even so, the damage we do to the earth in this effort will come back to bite us. Even my careful husbandry drains nutrients from the earth and leaves less nourishment in the soil and more toxins in the air than there was, once upon a time.   Our rape of the earth will beget the monsters which will eventually destroy us all.  Genetic monsters from inbreeding.  Deserts instead of forests. Black skies. Drones screaming through the air, looking for people to kill.  You can’t fool mother nature after all. The pendulum always swings both ways.

I fertilize in early spring and once again in late summer, a thick ring of compost spread around each tree, shoveled by hand from a wagon pulled behind the tractor which I load with a front-end loader.  My back and arms ache.  It’s good work but it makes for long days and tired shoulders.  I like the sun that falls on my back and legs while I’m working.

I haven’t said much about picking.  Two men used to come up from Jamaica every year for five weeks of picking in the fall.  They were good on the ladders.  Better than I’ll ever be.  Now I pick and Diedre picks and even Diedre’s mother picks.  We leave the lower branches for pick-your-own.  We have a small parking lot, and people park along the stone walls in September and October, but they go away after the first frost, after the days get shorter and it starts to rain.

We get the fruit in.  When there is fruit.  This year it was dry in June and July when we needed rain of an inch a week.  Half the crop of last year.  Last year we had one deep freeze in February, down to 5 below.  No peaches.   In good years the price collapses, because everyone in all the orchards has full fruit, when we exceed the capacity of the stores to stock and of buyers to buy and of eaters to eat – so apples are more plentiful than eaters of apples — and the bottom drops out of the market.  Then I have to sell fruit for less than it costs me to produce it, the contribution of the earth being unrecorded and unrecognized.  The price drops. So whether I want to or not,  I donate my labor and my aching back, although I’m not sure what charity, what poor person, what widow or orphan or homeless person is the beneficiary of my largess.

If I had five good years of production, and everyone else had drought or scale and so the price held, I’d make some money.  Then I’d build my own cold storage and put up a big solar array to power it.  I’d have fruit to sell in March and April and beat the orchardists from South America and their jet planes which fly fruit in when the price is best, beat them at their own game.  Then I’d plant more trees and build a new store and market. I’d put in a little restaurant and hire a string trio to play Mozart on the patio in the sunlight in September, when the sun is still good.  I’d plant a vineyard.  I’d bring back the men from Jamaica or their sons and daughters, if I could find them, though I hear tell that Jamaicans now work in air-conditioned call centers and drive to work so are unlikely to want to pick fruit anymore.

.

Diedre was burning out.  This wasn’t the road trip she signed on for.

It was August and hot.  She was big now. She couldn’t get comfortable anywhere, in any position. Sweating, always sweating, even at night.  The sun set but their bedroom under the eaves held the heat, even when they opened the windows.  Brian turned on the attic fan and then brought in two fans and ran them full blast.  There isn’t much comfort in blowing hot air from one place to the next when the air is hot.  Brian had been spraying and smelled of neem oil, copper and sulfur – like bug spray and rotten eggs.  He suited up and he showered after he sprayed but you don’t get away from the smell.  It sticks to your nostrils and your eyebrows and sits in the fat of your liver and brain so you exude it, even when you do your best not to bring it home.  The air was heavy with the taste of those sprays which sit roasting on the trees and the apples, even when the spraying is done.

Diedre was a romantic, a dreamy sort, who had grown up on books and around ideas and always imagined a life on the farm, a simple life of gauzy mornings, of wrapping her hands in the rich earth, the cocks crowing at dawn, the cattle lowing on the ridge at sunset, the chickens clucking in the yard, a life of eggs and butter and cheese and the waxy smell of the dairy, with abundant apples and grapes and peaches and pears in season, her world being filled with life and fecundity and overwhelmed by its peace and beauty.

Brian was the man of her dreams, tall and chiseled, his skin burned red by the sun, his hands coarse and hardened but his soul thoughtful and giving.  Even so, Diedre had been carried away, not so much by Brian himself, but by her own imagination about the life she thought she wanted.

Real life is different, of course. There was the loan, and payments every month, apples or no apples. There were permits and regulations.  Taxes due every quarter.  Forms to fill out.  Licenses needing renewal.  Pruning.  Then spraying, every two weeks, starting in late winter.  Weather to fret over.  Not enough rain or too much rain.  The hard frost you need to send the trees dormant but not too much cold late in spring.  Or not too much of a freeze in deep winter, which wrecks the peaches.  Brian tired at night.  Brian silent.  The deer which come through and attack the trees and the blossoms in the spring.  The endless work and the endless need for money of which there is never enough.

Farming, orcharding, is a business, just a business like any other.  People screw you:  the sprays and fertilizers which are always going up in price, despite promises.  The grocery stores want local fruit but buy from New York instead because their price is half your price, as the big orchards in New York dump their overproduction.  The pick-your-own people, who are rowdy, park their cars on the neighbors’ yards — and steal fruit. Or throw apples at one another and leave what they’ve picked on the ground.  Picking.  Running the store.  Weighing apples. Endless work and worry, with no promises made and no promises kept.  No gauzy sunlight in the morning coming through white muslin curtains as you sleep late, lollygagging in bed.  Not ever.  You fall asleep exhausted just after sundown.  And you rise with the sun, every single day.  You never get ahead.  There is no time to dream.

But Deidre had grit.  That’s what she told herself.  I am made of stronger stuff than this.  I can keep on working.  I can pull my own weight.  I will work until the baby is born.  Babies are born. She remembered the story of women elsewhere, poor women in some distant Asian land, who work in the fields every day, and when it’s time to give birth, lie down in the fields and push their babies out on a blanket in those fields, let the afterbirth deliver, tie their own cords and bite the cord off, bury the afterbirth, carry their babies in to their huts, hand the babies to their sisters or mothers and then go right back to work in the fields. Their husbands take to the bed, moaning with pain, while the women continue to work.  If those women can do that, Diedre thought, I can do this.  I have it much easier than they do.

.

It was nine at night and the sun was gone when Brian came in from the tractor shed.  The sun was gone but there were still traces of light, orange and purple traces in the west just over the ridge where their best trees were, the Honeycrisps and Cosmic Crisps and Jazz, the varieties that should earn them pin money, if they could ever get enough rain.

It had been a long day.  First Brian lost a tire on the tractor.  Then the sprayer failed.  He had a backup sprayer which was old and not as powerful, so he had to go slow and take his time, making sure he had covered all the fruit.  The fruit was still green and getting ready to ripen but the hot weather had brought out spider mites and aphids. Brian was sure that cedar apple rust would follow, his life of endless work and challenge being what it was.  So he sprayed and then three hours later sprayed again to wash the spray residue off the fruit.

It was quiet in the house when he came in.  The screen door banged behind him, and he closed the oak kitchen door, given that he was in for the night.  He heard the hum of the fans in the kitchen and the living room, and the deeper rumble of the attic fan above him, but he didn’t hear Diedre calling, telling him she’d be down, that dinner was on the table.

And then he noticed: dinner was not on the table.  There were no pots on the stove, filled with pasta or rice.  There was no salad, the lime-green-and-white lettuce holding up carrots and red peppers and bright red sliced tomatoes and the pale white succulent cucumber flesh, the cucumber seeds swirling about a pale center –and no basil mixed in for aroma, all these riches from Diedre’s garden that Brian had come to expect every night.  The table wasn’t set.  There wasn’t a pitcher of water and one of iced tea on the counter, ready for Brian to drink, to slake his thirst before he washed his hands; that, before sitting down to dinner, when he and Diedre looked at their food and each other that one time in the day, and talked or didn’t talk, but always ate together and rested.

“Diedre?” Brian called.  Quietly.  In case she was sitting in the living room.  The lights were on in the living room, and colors from the television screen flashed in that room.  The television was on but the volume had been turned down.

“Diedre?” Brian said again, a little louder, as he walked around the first floor.

He climbed the stairs.

“Diedre!” he said again, louder yet, demanding, insistent.  He wanted to be heard.  Where was she?  Why wasn’t she there?

.

Diedre was on the floor in the bathroom, on her back.  Her eyes were open but unfocused.  She was breathing in slow deep labored breaths, with spittle coming from her mouth.  Her arms were clenched and her knees were drawn up.  She was shaking her arms and her legs, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, the shaking coming and going in waves, punctured by her deep slow labored breaths, which seemed like sighs and which seemed to stop for almost a minute between breaths.  The floor was wet beneath her and the air smelled of stool.

Brian called 911.

.

The doctors were careful not to promise anything.  Eclampsia, they told him.  Happens in pregnancy.  Causes seizures.  Did she keep her 30-week prenatal appointment?  Get exercise?  Watch her diet?  Get enough sleep?  Was she taking her prenatal vitamins?  We don’t know how long she was seizing.  People get brain death when they seize for a long time.

Like it was Diedre’s fault.  Or Brian’s.

.

The doctors always sounded like they were hedging their bets.  The first twenty-four hours matter, they said. Twenty-four hours.  Maybe thirty-six.  What she does or doesn’t do in that period predicts the outcome.  If she wakes up.  When she wakes up. And then we’ll know exactly how much damage was done.

Brian forgot about the orchard.  He stood at her bedside, a guard dog.  Wake up, he yelled at her, in his own head.  You have to wake up.

But she was unconscious, unmoving, breathing through a tube, on a ventilator.  The ventilator whooshed in and out.  Deep breaths with long pauses in between them, her whole chest moving when the ventilator kicked on. Which it did with precise regularity, a very slow clock, a metronome marking the slowest imaginable tempo. Diedre’s skin was white, pasty and wet with just a little sweat, glistening, or maybe it was wet with a face cream the nurses put on.  She smelled like powder and face cream.  The room smelled like air freshener.  With a hint of body stink, of feces and urine and sweat, underneath.

The ventilator whooshed.  Diedre’s chest rose when the ventilator whooshed and fell when it stopped. The monitors beeped.  Tiny lights flashed on and off.  The machines were in control.  There was no Diedre present.  Come on, Brian yelled, inside his brain, to himself.  Wake up Diedre.  You have to wake up.

.

After a week they talked to him about a tracheostomy, talking some nonsense about how you can’t stay on a ventilator forever.  It was silly.  She was going to wake up.  Anybody could see that.  She was almost ready.

Then they started to hint, to manage expectations, to hang crepe, to let him know that Diedre might never wake up after all.  They started to use words like, it’s sometimes kinder… and let their voices trail off.  A social worker asked if Diedre had a living will.  Would she want to live like this? the social worker said. Live like what? Brian asked, although he knew the answer.  Live like a vegetable, on a ventilator, not that vegetables breathe or can have anyone breathe for them. Vegetables grow in the sunlight.  Or deep in the dirt.  Nothing like this.

Geez, Brian thought, Diedre is sick for the first time in her life.  She isn’t old and decrepit.  Why are they in such a hurry?  People get sick.  People have seizures.  People get unresponsive.  Then they wake up.  It happens all the time.  The nurses and the doctors and the social workers had Diedre dead and buried even before she got to the hospital, even before they had tried to make her better.  Give the woman a chance, Brian said, to himself and to them.  Give Diedre a chance.  Diedre, come on, wake up, he said to her, out loud, once in a while but mostly in his head, when he stood by her bedside.

.

They tried to show him the babies.  He couldn’t look. Diedre’s parents came. They took the babies home.  The trees were heavy with fruit, but Brian didn’t pick it.  The orchard stayed closed.  Deer started grazing on the drops and on the hanging fruit itself.  There was no one to chase them away.

.

And then one day Diedre’s eyes fluttered open.

Brian went to get a nurse.  The nurse went to get a doctor, a young resident.  The resident called her attending.

“We’re not sure what it means,” the resident said.  She wore green scrubs and had circles under her eyes. “It could be a simple autonomic response. The eyes open and close automatically.  The brain is not necessarily involved.  Open eyes doesn’t mean Diedre is awake or thinking.  They could be opening automatically.  Automatically, the way elevator doors open when they get to your floor.  Or the way a teapot turns off when the water boils. Open eyes don’t mean significant brain activity, thinking, or feeling.  They don’t mean that Diedre is back.  It’s too early to tell.”

“She’s waking up,” Brian said.  “I know it.”

The resident doctor didn’t reply.  She went back to her workstation and peered at her computer.  But the nurses came more often.  One nurse, also dressed in scrubs, who had dark skin and beautiful black braids that looked like a luxurious curtain, braids that she pulled back when she was working, who said her name was Cheryl and who had a hint of an accent that Brian couldn’t place, came in every few minutes.  She had a take charge presence and a loud, clear voice.  Cheryl touched Diedre frequently, wiping her brow or repositioning Diedre in bed. She came in quickly when the IV machine began to beep.  Or she came to empty the bag which held Diedre’s urine.  Or she came in to stand at the bedside and enter data on the computer near the wall. She put a hand on Deidre’s forehead, hand, arm or shoulder whenever she came in.

She knew something, that nurse.  She knew what Brian knew.  That you don’t give up on people.  That we stand on each other’s shoulders.  That we are made from and for touching each other.  That our souls are called into being by touching each other as our feet touch the ground, that you can bring the self and the soul into being by being together, by calling out, by hard work and hope, the way you bring back a fire by surrounding embers with tinder and then blowing on those embers, the way you can reach down into a sewer and pull out the keys that you dropped.

Diedre opened her eyes and blinked, although she didn’t focus, and didn’t seem to be seeing anything. Diedre, the real Diedre, wasn’t there, wasn’t back yet.  But she was  somewhere, alone in a dark room, not close but not that far away.  She can hear our voices, Brian thought.  But only as a murmur.  She can’t understand our words.  But she knows we are here.

.

We want a miracle here, Brian thought.  We deserve a miracle.  Diedre deserves a miracle.  We want Diedre to open her eyes and try to speak.  Or we want Diedre’s parents, Jeff and Lisa from Somers, Connecticut, an accountant and a WIC nutritionist, to bring the babies (there were twins, a boy and a girl) into the hospital to see their mother, and we want Diedre to hear their gurgling and their crying and then awaken, to sit up and pull out the endotracheal tube and begin speaking, to hold her babies and go home so Brian could go back to the orchard and pick the apples from the trees as the sun set in the west, in a sky flaming gold, orange, mauve and purple.

.

That wasn’t what happened, of course.

.

But things got better, nonetheless.

Diedre awoke, slowly.  A new doctor knew how to lighten up on her sedation.  A respiratory therapist came in and out, changing the settings on the respirator to drive Diedre closer to breathing on her own. Cheryl, her nurse on days, kept touching her on the days she worked.  Brian watched and began touching her as well and started speaking to Diedre out loud.

.

Diedre began to move her head and then her arms and legs.  She had a tracheostomy after all, which meant it wasn’t easy for her to talk, but she started forming words with her lips, and her eyes began to focus.  The doctors stopped looking sad and gloomy when they came into the room and stopped avoiding Brian, but they still traveled in a pack and there was still no one to sit with Brian and Diedre’s parents, still no one who acted like they were in charge, no one who could see Diedre as well and healthy. No one who was completely in Diedre’s corner, pushing for her.

Brian never knew where they stood — or what was going to happen, and when. The doctors changed all the time — every few days or weeks.   Brian and Diedre’s parents could never keep track of who was who.

The social worker came and went. Always talking about rehab and discharge but never clear on what was going to happen next and never promising anything.  A physical therapist and a speech therapist appeared.

.

Diedre began to look at Brian.  They arranged to bring the babies in.

 

There were setbacks.  A urinary tract infection which made her less responsive.  A pneumonia which gave her a fever and made her cough.  There were a few days when Diedre stopped responding, after she got sedation at night when a young nurse told a new resident Diedre seemed restless and in pain.  It took six days for her to wake up after that sedative, and while she was un-or-less responsive, the social worker started talking about whether Diedre would want to live like “this” again.  Even though it wasn’t clear what ”this” was or was going to be.

.

Three months passed.  Diedre went to rehab.  Then she came home.

.

It was November. The clocks were moved back. It was now dark at 4:30 PM.  The sky stayed grey.  It rained.  We had the first frost and before long there was frost on the ground and on the windshields of the cars almost every morning.  The branches of the trees were bare.  The ground was covered by brown leaves that scattered when the wind blew, which was often.  The wind shook dead branches loose from the trees, which fell in the street.  Some whole trees, mostly dead ashes, fell on driveways and lawns. The grass turned tan.

There were bright red and yellow berries on some low bushes, but no other color.  There were some ground sparrows rustling in the bushes and the occasional bluejay but the other birds were gone.  The squirrels were still active but had stopped their endless chittering.  The nights were silent now – no singing tree frogs, no chirping crickets. The deer came out of the deep woods to browse, the fawns now yearlings and without spots, their coats grey now, not red-brown.  Hawks circled.  The air smelled of woodsmoke and diesel oil, not insecticide and certainly not of cut grass, mowed hay, or the pollens of spring and summer, that distantly remembered perfume.

.

Brian and Diedre’s parents did the best they could to make Diedre’s homecoming a joyous event.  They put balloons around the house, and a big WELCOME HOME sign in letters of different colors over Diedre’s hospital bed, which had been set up in the living room.  There were two cribs set up in the dining room, for the days when Diedre’s parents would come with the babies and sit with Diedre while Brian worked.

Cars and pickups filled the orchard’s little gravel parking lot and lined the street: neighbors and friends, some of the town’s few farmers, and a town council person or two.  Brian’s mom.  His brother and Diedre’s sisters.  All hoped to be there and somehow fix what was broken, to somehow restore what had been lost.

.

The white patient transport van pulled up to the house.  It had emergency lights and sirens, of course, but the lights weren’t flashing.  This was transport only.  No longer life and death.

The ambulance attendants lowered Diedre in her wheelchair, using a hydraulic lift that whirred as the wheelchair came to the ground, the electric motor whirring in the quiet but cold fall air, under dark skies.  A light rain was falling.

Brian stood by himself next to Diedre. The ambulance attendants pushed the wheelchair to the house.  Diedre’s arms and legs were strapped to the wheelchair and she was held up by a Posey, by a white vest restraint  that was tied to the chair, even though she was able to sit on her own now and say a few words, and she was able to stand with support but was not yet ready to walk on her own.  She was able to bring a fork or a spoon to her mouth but wasn’t quite ready to feed herself, not yet.  That would come with time and practice, doing the same thing over and over again, recreating her muscles and her control over them by use and repetition.

Diedre’s skin was pale.  Her pale skin stood out.  Everything else was tan, grey or brown.  But the sweat or lotion on Diedre’s skin glistened, and her dark brown eyes, which were duller than they had once been, sparkled none the less.

The ambulance attendants pushed the wheelchair up a ramp, which Brian built the week before, with materials and help from the men and women of the volunteer fire department.

They came into the house, which was warm and filled with people.  There was a cake on the dining room table, next to the cribs.

.

People applauded, the kind of spontaneous applause that breaks out when a passenger plane lands in Europe, Asia or Africa, places where life is still a miracle, not a property right, places where human beings do not assume that anything will ever work as it can or should.

.

Then both babies began to cry.  Diedre’s mother and Brian’s mother each lifted one, jostling them and cooing.  The babies quieted.

The ambulance attendants brought the wheelchair next to a hospital chair which was next to the hospital bed in the living room.  They untied Diedre’s arms and legs and then untied the posey.  Then with one attendant on each side of her, Brian took both of Diedre’s hands and helped her stand.

People applauded again.

Diedre’s hands were fleshy, warm and moist – not like Brian’s hands, which were hard and sinewy.  Brian helped Diedre as she shuffled to turn in place and helped lower her into the chair.

Their mothers came over with both babies and lowered them, one after the next, into Diedre’s lap, each mother standing on one side, there to support the babies or lift them again in case Diedre needed help.

Brian knelt in front of the chair, one hand on each child.

“Ryan,” Diedre said.  “And Samantha.”

Both babies gurgled.

Then Samantha spit up.

And their life together began at last.

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Many thanks to Carol Levitt for proofreading, and to Lauren Hall for all-around help and support.

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