Armona

ARMONA / Roberta Spear A breeze lifts the orchard dust and the heavy heart of fruit lets go. Women and children line up in the humid corridors of the packing shed, sharing the heat, its warped halo. There is no talk of rest this day, just the day itself. And a syrup that makes the fingers stick together, like cups set out to gather more coolness, more darkness, even after the gifts of summer are taken back. Once, on a dare, I walked five miles at dawn to join them for the day's orders. If you could slit a seam and make the pit leap into a ringing bucket thirty times in one minute you had the job. We worked quickly, rolling casabas and plums down the wet splintered tables, twisting the stems off the crotches of fruit. In one, a small dark chamber where a black widow was sleeping, waiting for that moment when she and her young could ride that sweet river into sunlight. She might have said pardon me or let me pass in peace, but she lunged straight toward me from her sleep, pleading like the others for more coolness, 180 · The Missouri Review more life. I threw my knife into a roadside ditch and paced the miles back to town. For as sure as the heat had singed each cloud out of the sky, that kid who'd dared me here lay chuckling in his late-morning sleep. The workers said that once, years ago, it had happened much this way. But instead of a boy, a grown man who called himself the deacon, who kept two women and should have known better. One day, the women came from different farms to these crumbling sheds only to discover they'd been peeling the same peach all along, dividing its juice. Some said his shoes were still lashed to the rafters above us and, when the wind slid through the slatted ceiling, they creaked like the two black doves, love and death. When we were kids, we called this town Aroma for the smell of life which has come and gone, and left its stain under the nails long after the black flesh of branches has dissolved. And for the one carried down from the rafters, who wore gloves and a jacket on the hottest days and loved the aroma of money, a ripe freestone, like a piece of ass with the heart cut out. How could anyone have known that the heat would pass? That, in the shadows, the crisp leaf of apple, a fork of almond Roberta Spear The Missouri Review · 181 were springing inch by inch from the stubble. Or that a harder season would follow— One of husks and cores, and a wind barely getting by, lifting its soft thumb up for a ride to another county. 182 · The Missouri Review Roberta Spear ...