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The next day Samantha toiled around the house, tidying here and there, and occasionally leafing through the copy of Atypical Plant Phenotypes that Dina had left. She did not mention the old man either to Mike or Kevin. Instead she busied herself positioning and repositioning the apples, buffing them and shifting them about the basket until satisfied that they caught the light to greatest effect. At one point she browsed through the newspaper, stopping only briefly to note the exchange rates for produce commodities and precious metals. Afterwards, she sat for a while on the back porch, skimming the book and relaxing in the sun. Then she went inside again and rearranged the apples once more. Beyond that, her routine seemed unaltered by the presence of the golden apples.
Kevin, on the other hand, occupied himself in the orchard. He found a place where two trees stood so close together that he could climb up one and down the other. In another spot a large colony of ants had built a hill and were apparently laboring to increase its size. Elsewhere he came across two ravens perched amid the branches of an ash. While he played, he periodically glanced up to see if they were still there, and each time their tiny eyes seemed to be riveted upon him. At one point he picked up a stick and threw it at them. But they were far too high, and the stick clattered harmlessly against the lower branches.
According to Dina, Kevin was the first ever to have discovered such flawless golden apples. There had been others, she said, but none had had the clarity that these displayed. At her request he had taken her into the orchard to show her the tree where he’d found them, and she expressed frank disbelief that a tree so battered and damaged could produce any fruit at all, much less apples as perfect as these.
She asked for another apple to confirm her tests. One, she insisted, had been insufficient to establish even the basic parameters like chemical composition of the skin, or the fructose content of the extracted juice. If only she had another to use as a control, she said, she could confirm her findings and provide Samantha with all the answers she could want. The university was willing to compensate them for the apples, of course.
Samantha nodded politely as Dina explained her intention.
“I’ll have to ask Kevin,” Samantha said. “He found them.”
In the morning, the old man was again standing at the base of the driveway when Samantha emerged from the house.
“What do you want?” she said, stooping for the newspaper.
“The apples,” he said. “Those that remain.” His nearly bald head gleamed in the morning sun, and he regarded her levelly.
“The college wants to buy them,” she said. “Make me an offer.”
“I won’t haggle for what is mine,” the old man spat. His knuckles creaked against his walking stick.
“If you can prove they’re yours,” Samantha said, “you can have them. Otherwise, the college gets them.”
“What will they do with them?”
She shrugged. “Study them, I guess. Maybe grow some.”
“Your son carries them about like trinkets.”
“He found them,” she said.
At the opposite edge of the orchard stood a small farmhouse, dusty white and desiccated. In the yard a tire swing hung from the branches of an oak, creaking back and forth in the late afternoon breeze. Dangling the basket from his arm, Kevin made his way through the brush separating the yard from the orchard. He tore a clump of tall grass and headed for the tiny barn in the shade of the farmhouse. Low in the western sky, the sun glinted off the four apples as they tumbled in the basket.
The lawn was overgrown and tangled, twining about Kevin’s ankles as he moved purposefully across the yard. Once or twice it snagged him, and he stumbled, always careful to keep hold of the basket. At last he reached the little barn, and he lifted the latch from the door.
Inside, the air was hot and moist and smelled of livestock. An ancient goat bleated at Kevin as he entered, raising its head to look at him. The poor animal shivered as if with a palsy, and its coat was coarse and dotted with bare patches. Flies buzzed about its eyes and nostrils, and though it huddled in its pen like a prisoner, it climbed painfully to its feet as Kevin approached.
Kevin set the basket on a small bench near the door and offered the handful of grass to the goat. It chomped eagerly at the greens, devouring them. While it ate, Kevin petted it on the head, but soon its joints seemed to surrender to the ache of age, and it sank again to its knees. It swallowed the last of the grass, and Kevin crouched before it, reaching through the boards of the pen to scratch behind the goat’s ears.
For a moment the goat appeared not to notice the apple that Kevin placed among the straw and dung of its pen. Then the goat sniffed at it, its tongue sampling the gold skin as if it were a normal apple. When the goat bit into it, its teeth pierced the skin with a crunch that sounded nothing like biting into a lump of gold.
Kevin watched intently, as if he feared that the pulp might turn to metal between the goat’s teeth, but soon the goat took another bite from the apple. The gaps where it had bitten glittered in contrast to the smoothness of the skin, and the goat worked its jaws distractedly. Soon only a small scrap of the skin remained, the sunlight glowing feebly on the irregular edges.
If the goat felt strange at all after eating the golden apple, its posture conveyed nothing.
When Kevin returned to the orchard, he found that the ravens had vanished, but the old man now stood at the base of the ash. He raised a fleshy hand in greeting as Kevin approached.
“Hello, Kevin,” he said. “I thought I might find you here.”
“Hi,” Kevin returned.
“Are those the apples?” he asked, pointing to the basket.
“Who are you?”
“I watch over the orchard, sometimes.”
They walked to the stream, where they sat on a large, flat rock. Kevin kept the basket at his side, the last apple hidden beneath a towel.
“How old are you?” asked the old man.
“Almost eleven,” Kevin answered immediately.
The old man seemed to consider this, tracing a tiny circle in the dust with his walking stick. “Ten years old,” he muttered. “What will you do with the apples?”
Kevin pulled a handful of grass from the ground and tossed it into the water. “Mom likes them,” he said. The grass floated quickly downstream and was gone. “Maybe we’ll sell them.”
“You haven’t eaten any, have you?”
“What’s so special about them? Besides the color, I mean.”
“Suppose I said they belonged to me?”
At this, Kevin paused, staring into the old man’s weathered face. “What happened to your eye?”
“I lost it,” he said dismissively. “I had a hard lesson to learn.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Sometimes.”
Kevin covered one eye with his hand and looked around. “Must be hard to see.”
“Not any more.”
“I found them, you know,” Kevin said.
“But I lost them,” the old man went on. “Many years ago.”
Kevin shook his head. “I picked them myself.”
“May I see? Don’t worry,” he said with mock seriousness. “I won’t eat it.”
Kevin reached into the basket and withdrew one of the apples.
Between his fingers the light flickered on the surface like sunset on the stream.
“Here,” he said, presenting it. “I know you won’t eat it, ‘cause you got no teeth.”
The old man grinned, exposing his gums. He cradled the apple as though afraid it would shatter if handled too roughly. Withdrawing a clean, white cloth, he buffed the apple gently, appraising the shine after every few strokes and finally returning the apple to the basket. He squinted at Kevin with his one eye, and the old man’s face lit like dawn. “Can you show me the tree?”
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