Apples of the Earth

There is a memory I have been trying to retrieve now for decades. It has slid somewhere so dark inside me, though, I can barely make out its edges. Even as it recedes farther in the distance, I still cannot keep from straining to see the one-room schoolhouse that once stood at the far corner of our farmland. Sometime during my early childhood and without my knowing, my dad decided to raze it for the sake of giving his crops a little more acreage. And though I will never likely be able to coax this structure to ever come clear again behind my eyelids, I still know the basic facts as I was told them. I know this small brick building once rested beside an apple tree with its branches long and knotted. I also know that by the time he had fallen deeply into middle age, my dad recalled this tree and former schoolhouse with regret and fondness.

Could I remember the apple tree, even if the memory of the schoolhouse had gone completely? My dad asked me this when I was almost ready to go away to college, when he must have wanted to remind me of all the beauty I was leaving, only to return home from now on every now and then. Even if I could no longer conjure the image of the place where hundreds of rural children had once gone to learn to read and solve basic math problems, my dad hoped I could at least summon the taste of the apples pulled from nearby branches, apples that had been sweeter than any others to his knowledge. He looked away from me as he said this, in the direction of where the tree and schoolhouse no longer existed.

No, I answered him honestly while wanting to lie and spare his feelings. As far as I could recall, I had never tasted the apples that once had fallen in his field of soybeans. Turning back to face me, he responded to this only by saying they must have tasted better than those from the Garden of Eden. They were that pure to his mind, that untainted. Normally never susceptible to hyperbole, he looked away from me again, perhaps embarrassed by his statement. Even in profile, however, his face betrayed a longing that, reflecting back from this distance, I cannot help but wonder if related to more than apples alone, whether his mind had begun straying toward other associations he may have had with paradise and its natural abundance.

Maybe the apples no longer growing at the corner of his field of soybeans had reminded him of other species of sweetness that in his own life were either absent or disappearing. By that period, my mom had started sleeping in our guest bedroom on what soon became a permanent basis. She said she could no longer stand his snoring, and by this time she may well have also left him alone in other ways. His life as a farmer included very little contact with other women. Apart from those in his family, a whole week often elapsed without him seeing another female body until church on Sunday morning. So if my dad’s mind happened to shift from apples to something coming closer to eroticism, I can hardly blame him. We all need memories prone to bleeding into fantasy, memories bordering on illusion.

I shared some of this with a friend I recently met for coffee. I told her about my dad’s bygone claim concerning apples that I could never remember tasting. After drifting into a few other topics, she told me how French peasants used to bury apples as penance for Eve’s surrender to temptation, for her refusal to resist eating fruit promising knowledge of evil and goodness. By these men and women deciding not to eat all those apples growing freely in their gardens, even going so far as to pluck and cover some of them with soil, they felt they were atoning for Eve’s transgression.

When I looked at my friend, almost disbelieving, she laughed and told me that she might be wrong about this, despite having lived for years in Paris. As I questioned her more about the practice of burying apples, she confessed she had no way of confirming what may be only legend. Facts alone for me, though, have always been unimportant. What always matters more is the impression that lingers long after the apple has been eaten. What matters for me about any given person or object is the feeling that floats about its edges long after the real thing has vanished.

My friend smiled at me and added that, in their willingness to perform Eve’s penance, the French have also allowed the fruit to fall along with the woman in other senses. Pomme de terre, translating to “apple of the earth” in English, means “potato” in their own, potentially more imaginative language. As the French culture developed, it seems some apples dropped so far from their boughs that they eventually began to grow from underground, forcing hungry peasants to dig beneath hard earth rather than reach toward the softer air to taste them.

However fanciful an explanation for the name of another type of food entirely, the fact remains that an apple can resemble a potato only if you have gone too long without having tasted a real apple’s sweetness. Deprivation underlies the pairing of two such different objects. A potato becomes a kind of apple only if you have become disoriented by longing, only if you have suffered from a sustained absence. I say this conscious that, with access to as many apples as I could wish for at the market, they still seem tasteless compared with those that have been lost to me, those whose purity may and may not have rivaled those once growing in Eden.

Maybe similarly blinded by yearning—not for apples but in his case for women—Christopher Columbus once recorded in his diaries that mermaids were ugly things, “not half as beautiful as they are painted.” According to historians, Columbus in truth had spotted manatees in place of those finned women for whom he lusted. Also known as sea cows for good reason—when you come closer and their bulk becomes apparent, manatees can only suggest the shape of human women when you have been at sea for far too long a time, when no other females have accompanied you on your voyage. Objects of allure are always subject to slipperiness, however. Anything elusive that also promises fulfillment can fall from heights even higher than apples from their branches. Columbus was hardly the first to mistake manatees for something different.

Throughout the centuries, their shape has suggested something more appealing for countless men who have found themselves at sea for months on end, who begin to look with desire toward fins folded over their torsos from a distance. The fact their name derives from the word for “breast” in one indigenous Caribbean language can hardly be an accident. And I would no more correct a sailor grown delirious with hunger for another body, telling him his mermaids were only manatees, than I would now confess to my dad that I had forgotten about the apple tree beside the schoolhouse that once stood on our property, had I the option. Were I only able to return to the day when we had this conversation, I would lie and tell him those apples I never tasted were even better than those Eve offered to Adam.