Scent of Apples

by: Bienvenido N. Santos

"The Apple and the Finch" by Paul Hilario

When I arrived in Kalamazoo, it was October and the war was still on. Gold and silver stars hung on pennants in the silent windows of white and brick-red cottages. In one backyard an old man was burning leaves and twigs while a grey-haired woman was sitting on the porch, her red hands quiet in her lap, watching the smoke rising above the elms, both of them thinking the same thought perhaps, about a tall, grinning boy with blue eyes and flying hair, who had gone to war. Where could he be now, this month when leaves were turning into gold and the fragrance of gathered apples was in the wind?

It was a cold night when I left my room at the hotel for another speaking engagement. I walked but a little way. A heavy wind coming up from Lake Michigan was icy on the face. It felt like winter straying early from the northern woodlands. Under the lamp posts the leaves shone like bronze. And they fluttered on the pavements like the ghost feet of a thousand autumns long dead, long before the boys left for faraway lands, lands without great ice winds and promise of winter early in the air, lands without apple trees, the singing and the gold.

It was that same night that I met Celestino Fabia, just a Filipino farmer," as he called himself. He had a farm about thirty miles east of Kalamazoo.

You came all that way on a night like this just to hear me talk?" I asked.

"I've seen no Filipino for so many years now, he answered quickly. "So when I saw your name in the papers where it says you came from the Islands and that you're going to talk, I came right away."

Earlier that night I had addressed a college crowd, mostly women. It appeared that they wanted me to talk about my country; they wanted me to tell them things about it because my country had become a lost country. Everywhere in the land the enemy stalked. Over it a great silence hung; and their boys were there, unheard from. Or they were on their way there, at some little known island in the Pacific, young boys all, hardly men, thinking of harvest moons and the smell of forest fire.

It was not hard talking about our own people. They seemed so far away during those terrible years that I must have spoken of them with nostalgia and fervor. 

In the open forum that followed, the audience wanted to know whether there was much difference between our women and the American women. I tried to answer the question as best as I could, saying, among other things, that I did not know much about American women, except that they looked friendly, but differences or similarities in inner qualities, such as naturally belong to the heart or to the mind, I could only speak about with vagueness.

While I was trying to explain the fact that it was not easy to make comparisons, a man rose in the rear of the hall, wanting to say something. In the distance, he looked slight and old and very brown. Even before he spoke, I knew that he was, like me, a Filipino.

"I'm a Filipino," he began, loud and clear in a voice that seemed used to wide open spaces. "I'm just a Filipino farmer out in the country." He waved his hand towards the door. "I left the Philippines more than twenty years ago and have never been back. Never will, perhaps. I want to find out, Sir, are our Filipino women the same like they were twenty years ago?"

As he sat down, the hall filled with voices, became hushed and intrigued. I weighed my answer. It seemed to me, as I looked toward my countryman, that I must give him an answer that he would understand and that would not shatter some of the illusions he probably held.

"First," I said as the voices gradually died down and every eye seemed upon me, "First, tell me what our women were like twenty years ago."

The man stood up to answer. "Yes," he said, you're too young. Twenty years ago our women were nice, they were modest, they wore their hair long, they dressed proper and went for no monkey business.

They were natural, they went to church regular, and they were faithful."

He had spoken slowly, and now, in what seemed like an after-thought, he had added, "It's probably the men who ain't." 

Now I knew what I was going to say.

Well," I began, "it will interest you to know that our women have changed. The change, however, has been on the outside only. Inside here," pointing to the heart, "they are the same as they were twenty

years ago.

The man was visibly moved. "I'm very happy, Sir," he said.

Later, as he and I met outside, he gave me his name and told me of his farm thirty miles east of the city. We had stopped at the main entrance to the hotel lobby. We had not talked very much on the way. As a matter of fact, we were never alone.

Kindly American friends came along with us, asked us questions and finally said goodnight. So now I asked him whether he cared to step into the lobby with me and talk.

"No, thankyou," he said, "you are tired. And I don't want to stay out too late."

"Yes, you live very far."

"I got a car," he said, "besides..." Now he smiled. I have been watching his face and I wondered whether he could smile. He had been so tense.

"Will you do me a favor, please? he asked. I want you to have dinner with my family out in the country. I'll call for you tomorrow afternoon, then drive you back. Would you?"

"Of course," I said. "I'd love to meet your family." I was leaving Kalamazoo for Muncie, Indiana, in two days. There was plenty of time.

"You will make my wife very happy," he said.

"You flatter me."

"Honest. She'll be very happy. Ruth is a country girl and hasn't met many Filipinos. I mean Filipinos younger than l. We're just poor farmer folks, you know, and we don't get to town very often. Roger, that's my boy, he goes to school in town. A bus takes him early in the morning and he's back in the afternoon. He's a nice boy."

"I bet he is," I agreed. "I've seen the children of some ol the boys by their American wives and the boys are generally bigger than their fathers, and very good-looking."

"Roger, he'll be tall. You'll like him."

Then he said goodbye.

The next day he came, at about three in the afternoon. There was a mild, ineffectual sun shining; but it was not too cold. He was wearing an old brown tweed jacket and worsted trousers to match. His shoes were polished, and although the green of his tie was faded, a colored shirt accentuated it, He looked younger than he had the night before, now that he was clean-shaven as if ready to go to a party. He was grinning.

"Oh, Ruth can't believe it. She can't believe it," he kept repeating as he led me to his car a nondescript thing in chipped black that had known better days and many hands. "I says to her I'm bringing you a first-class Filipino, and she says, aw. go away, quit kidding. there's no such thing as a first-class Filipino. But Roger, that's my boy, he believed me immediately. What's he like, Daddy? he asked. Oh, you will see, I says, he's first-class. Like you, Daddy? No, no, I laugh at him, your Daddy ain't first class. Aw, but you are, Daddy. So you can see what a nice boy he is, so innocent. Then Ruth starts griping about the house. But the house is a mess, she says. True it's a mess, it's always a mess, but don't mind that. We're poor folks, you know."

The trip seemed interminable. We passed through narrow lanes and plunged into thickets, and came out on barren land overgrown with weeds. All around were dead leaves. In the distance were groves of apple trees.

"Aren't those apple trees?" I asked wanting to be sure.

"Yes, those are apple trees, "he replied. "Do you like apples? I got lots of 'em. I got an apple orchard. I'll show you."

All the beauty of the afternoon seemed in the distance, on the hills, in the dull soft sky.

"Those trees are beautiful on the hills," I said.

"Autumn's a lovely season. The trees are getting ready to shed their leaves, and they show their colors, proud-like."

No such thing in our own country," I said.

That remark seemed unkind, I realized later. It touched him off on a tangent long deserted, but ever there, perhaps. How often does the lonely mind take such unpleasant detours, away from the familiar winding lanes, toward home for fear of this, the long lost youth, the remembered hurt; how many times indeed, only the exile knows.

It was a rugged road we were traveling and the car made so much noise that I could not hear everything my companion said, but understood him. He was telling his story for the first time in many years. He was remembering his own youth. He was thinking of home. Now there seemed no cause for fear, no cause for pain. That would come later. In the night perhaps. On the lonely farm under the apple trees.

In my old Visayan town the streets are narrow and dirty and strewn with coral shells. You have been there? You could not have missed our house, it was the biggest in town, one of the oldest; ours was a big family. The house stood right at the side of the street. A door opened heavily on a dark hall leading to the stairs. There is the smell of chickens roosting and the familiar sound they make, as you grope your way up, the banisters smooth under the hand.

Mother sits in her corner looking very white and sick. This was all of her world, her domain. During all these years I have not been able to recall the sound of her voice. Father was different. He moved about. He shouted. He desired. Though he lived largely in the past and talked of honor as if it were the only thing.

I was born in that house. I grew there into a pampered brat. I was naughty. One day, when I was older, I broke their hearts. I saw Mother cry wordlessly, as Father heaped his curses upon me and drove me out of the house, the gate closing heavily after me. And my brothers and sisters took up my father's hate for me and multiplied it numberless times in their own broken hearts. I was no good.

But sometimes, you know, I miss my brothers and sisters. Mother sitting in her chair, looking like a pale ghost in a corner of the room. I remember the great live posts of the house, massive tree trunks from the forest. Leafy twigs grow on the sides, and buds, pointing downward, wilted and died before they could become flowers. As they fell on the floor, Father bent to throw them out into the coral street. His hands were strong. I have kissed those hands... many times, many times.

Finally we rounded a sharp curve and can me upon a shanty, all but ready, it seemed, to crumble in a heap, its plastered walls rotting away, the floor hardly a foot from the ground. I thought of the cottage of the poor colored folks in the South, the hovels of the poor everywhere in the land. This one stood all by itself as though, by common consent, all the folks that used to live here had decided to stay away, despising it, ashamed of it. Even this lovely autumn season could not color it with beauty.

A dog barked loudly as we approached. A fat blonde woman stood in the doorway with a little boy by her side. Roger seemed newly scrubbed. He hardly took his eyes off me. Ruth had a clean apron around her shapeless waist. Now, as she shook hands in sincere delight, I noticed shamefully (that I should notice) how rough her hands, how coarse and red with labor, how ugly! She was no longer young, and her smile was pathetic.

As she stepped inside and the door closed behind us, immediately I was aware of the familiar scent of apples. The room was bare. Over the dining table hung a lamp yet unlighted.

Ruth got busy with the drinks. She kept coming in and out of the rear room that must have been the kitchen, and soon the table was heavy with food, fried chicken and rice, and green peas and corn on the cob. Even as we ate, Ruth kept getting up and going to the kitchen for more food. Roger ate like a little gentleman.

Isn't he nice-looking?" his father asked.

"You are a handsome boy, Roger." I said.

The boy smiled at me. "You look like Daddy," he said.

Afterward I noticed an old picture leaning on the top of a dresser and I rose to look at it. It was yellow and soiled with finger marks. The faded figure of a woman in Philippine dress could still be distinguished, although the face had become a blur.

"Your. . ." I began.

"I don't know who she is," Fabia hastened to say. I picked up that picture many years ago in a room on La Salle Street, in Chicago. I have often wondered who she is."

"The face wasn't a blur in the beginning?"

"Oh, no. It was a young face and good."

Ruth came in with a plate full of apples. Ah, I cried, picking out a ripe one, "I've been wondering where all the scent of apples came rom. The room is full of it."

"I'll show you," said Fabia.

He showed me a back room, not very large. It was half-full of apples.

"Every day," he explained, I take some of them to town to sell to the groceries. Prices have been low, I've been losing on the tips.

"These apples will spoil," I said.

"Well, feed them to the pigs."

Then he showed me around the farm. It was twilight now, and the apple trees stood bare against a glowing western sky. In apple-blossom time, it must be lovely here, I thought. But what about winter-time?

One day, according to Fabia, a few years before Roger was born, he had had an attack of acute appendicitis. It was deep winter. The snow lay heavy everywhere. Ruth was pregnant and none too well herself. At first she did not know what to do. She bundled him in warm clothing and put him on a cot near the stove, where he lay while she shoveled the snow away from their front door. Then she carried and sometimes dragged the suffering man over the path toward the road, where they waited for the mail truck to pass. Meanwhile snow piled up all over them as she kept rubbing the man's arms and legs and she herself nearly froze to death.

As she rubbed him, tears rolled down her cheeks. "I won't leave you, I won't leave you," she kept on saying.

Finally the mail truck arrived. The mailman, who knew them well, helped them board the truck and took the sick man and his wife direct to the nearest hospital.

Ruth stayed in the hospital with Fabia. She slept in a corridor outside the ward, and in the daytime helped in scrubbing the floor and washing the dishes and cleaning the men's things. They didn't have enough money to pay the hospital bill, but Ruth was willing to work like a slave.

"Ruth's a nice girl," said Fabia, "like our own Filipino women."

Before nightfall he was to take me back to the hotel. Ruth and Roger stood for a moment at their door holding hands and smiling at me. Inside the room of the shanty, a low light flickered. I had a last glimpse of the apple trees in the orchard under darkened sky as Fabia backed up his car. And soon we were on our way back to town. His dog had started barking. We could hear it for some time, until finally we could not hear it any more; all was darkness around us except where the head lamps revealed the stretch of road ahead.

Fabia did not talk this time. I didn't seem to have anything to say myself. But when finally we reached the hotel and I got down, Fabia said, "Well, I guess I won't be seeing you again."

It was dimly lighted in front of the hotel and I could hardly see Fabia's face. He had not stepped out of the car, but he extended his hands. I gripped it.

"Tell Ruth and Roger," I said, "I love them."

He dropped my hand quickly. "They'll be waiting for me now," he said.

"Look," I said, hardly knowing why I said it, "one of these days, very soon, I hope, I'll be going home. I could go to your town."

"No," he said softly. "Thanks a lot. But you see, nobody would remember me now."

Then he started the car, and as it moved away, he waved his hand.

"Goodbye," I said, waving back into the darkness. And suddenly the night was cold like winter straying early from the northern woodlands.

I hurried inside. There was a train the next morning that left for Muncie, Indiana, at a quarter after eight.

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