The Apple Tree That Kept One Apple

"That one is mine," says the apple tree, and she curls her topmost branch tighter around the reddest apple on her crown, which is the one thing on her she has not promised away.

A crow drops onto the fence rail and looks up at the apple a long while before it troubles itself to speak.

"You could give me that one," says the crow. "The high one, the red one."

"There are apples in the grass, and windfalls under every branch of me, and you are welcome to the lot of them," says the tree.

"There are," says the crow, and does not move on the rail. "I asked for that one."

"It isn't ready."

"It's redder than the barn."

"Then it isn't ready to come down," says the tree, and she folds the branch in where the crow cannot see it, and the crow goes over the hedge without a word.

All summer she has given away the low fruit and the small fruit and the fruit with a worm hole started in it, and no child who came up the lane has ever been refused. But the apple on her crown took the whole of August to make, and turned the color of a barn door. That one she keeps.

A boy comes up on his toes, and the branch lifts away before his fingers get near.

"Not that one," says the tree. "Take the one by your hand, take two, take an armful."

He shrugs and eats a windfall instead, and never learns what he was refused.

A woman comes through with a basket on her hip, humming, and reaches for the red apple with the practiced hand of somebody who has picked off other people's trees all her life. Sideways goes the branch, and her fingers close on air.

"There are forty apples on me," says the tree, "and thirty-nine of them are yours, and you may have every one."

She never looks up, and she is already reaching for another.

A girl comes last, near the end of September, when the light turns thin and gold, and she stands a long while with her hand shading her eyes.

"That's a beautiful one," she says, to nobody.

"It is."

She picks a smaller apple and walks home swinging her basket, and she is the last of them, though the tree has no way yet of telling.

October empties the orchard. The basket season is done, and the tree stands in a bare field with one red apple hanging off her crown. Mid-month the crow comes back and sits on the rail exactly where it sat before.

"Still yours?" asks the crow.

"Still mine."

"The children have gone, and nobody is coming out here for it now," says the crow.

"Good," says the tree.

The crow tips its head at a brown mark on the apple's cheek, no bigger than a fingerprint. "Something else wants it," it says, and goes.

The mark widens through the last warm week, and the skin puckers and goes dull, like a held smile gone tired. Wasps come to it, and after the wasps the flies, and the sweetness in it turns into something the tree has no word for. By the first frost the apple hangs black and shrunken at its stem.

A third time the crow comes and looks at the black thing on the branch.

"You can have it," says the tree. "Take it, it's yours."

"No."

"I grew it all summer. I grew it for you."

"You didn't," says the crow, and does not come down.

The apple falls on a gray morning with a sound she has never made before, a soft thud into the wet leaves. Nothing comes for it. The frost silvers the grass over the top of it, and the tree stands bare all winter.

What you hoard ripens rotten.