Applejack dreamed of roots sleeping in the dark earth. They curled and kinked, having grown over long decades beneath the blackest of soils, wide and fat and strong. As broad as the boughs in the air above, as strong as steel, as solid as the bedrock beneath.
The heartbeat of the world was the only sound in existence, slow, steady, stolid. The primal rhythm of existence: night, day, night, day; summer, fall, winter, spring. The slow waves of spring and summer heat, trickling through the topsoils above; in the colder seasons, the brewing blood-heat of the earth, returning to the world above those stocks of warmth that the depths had hoarded against leaner and chillier days.
This was the truth of the dream: darkness and heat, life and time. This was the truth in the dark; this was the world beneath the lies.
Applejack awoke with a warm feeling in her heart. The barracks were chilly, and cold, and empty. It was a Saturday morning. Everyone was out for the holiday, either home on weekend passes, or out honkytonkin' and alleycattin'. Applejack was the old lady of the barracks, the only E-4 you'd find in this barracks, or really, any other women's barracks in the service. She could have gotten a small housing allowance, but it wasn't nearly enough for a single E-4, not by itself, and the other costs in living off-base was just money over the damn. Applejack preferred to save her pennies, and send them home to the farm when she could.
Then Applejack remembered her schedule, and sprang to her feet, efficiently making her bunk and putting away her night-stuff. No time for a shower, and no point to it, either. The lieutenants were practicing for the tournament coming up, they were expecting the gym to be in order, and their punching-bag up and bushy-tailed. There would be time enough for a shower afterwards.
Applejack's life on the fort had grown to focus more and more around the boxing gym in the last six months. Her sergeants had expressed their disinterest in her complaints about the... situation firmly enough, and had begun to curtail her involvement in the actual day to day work which was her only real distraction on base other than, well, the gym.
We'll see what they have to say about that once the paperwork goes through.
Applejack pulled on her PT gear, and jogged for the gym. As usual, she was the first there in the little cootie-designated corner that the female butter bars had claimed for their own. She got to work putting things into place for the lieutenants' morning routine. Tape, clean head protection; gloves, fresh towels.
She braced when the first three lieutenants breezed into the gym, five minutes late as always. By then, the rest of the gym was already jumping with various male soldiers working the bags and going through their warm-up exercises. Applejack's flock of lieutenants weren't all that flighty and princess-like, not really. Not by civilian standards, at any rate. But by Applejack's late father's standards... oh, well.
It wasn't the place of a mere E-4 to lead the ring-knockers through their warm-up paces, but Applejack generally did it anyways. The coaches didn't care to get involved in the women's PT, not after an incident that had occurred a year or two before Applejack had been assigned to Fort Red Shirt. Nobody cared to import or assign a female PT specialist for the base lieutenants, so they just... made do. And Applejack was that make-do.
The warm-up exercises she led them through weren't really enough to get Applejack sweating; what was sufficient to challenge her ladies barely got her own blood pumping. But the lieutenants needed the jump-start, and they sweated just like anything else with skin and pores. She moved faster and faster as they approached the end of the exercise, cycling through push-ups, punch-outs, punch-hops, split-squats, punch-outs and so forth.
Applejack thought that some of the lieutenants showed promise. Two of the three that showed up before the rest of them, at any rate. Fleetfoot's footwork almost justified her name, and Misty Fly had a solid cross. If only Fleetfoot could punch as well as she took them, and if only Misty Fly's jabs were strong enough to set up her crosses and uppercuts.
Applejack had maneuvered those two into working against each other in the first ring, while she had climbed into the second ring with a new butter-bar named Surprise to evaluate the newbie and see what she had to work with. The new lieutenant had proven to be... bouncy, was all that Applejack had figured out, when a shout from the floor drew her attention away from her sparring. Which of course was when the butterbar chose to ring Applejack's bell.
The slightly rattled soldier waved off the apologetic officer's embarrassment with a grimace that at least attempted to be a grin, and went to climb out of the ring in the direction of whomever it was that wanted to interrupt PT. As Applejack regained focus, she realized that she was looking at the first sergeant, in ASUs. And he wasn't smiling.
Applejack came to attention.
"Follow me," said the first sergeant.
Someone had finally looked at Applejack's reports, it would seem.
Still damp from her shower, Applejack looked at the contents of the locker at the foot of her bunk. Three and a half years in the service, and it didn't come to more than this. Admittedly, she'd done her best not to accumulate stuff, knowing how much the Army expected you to move about, and that she couldn't afford to live in actual housing, not even in the little allowance they gave them for housing, if they left the barracks… but some small acquisitive part of her was disappointed in her own frugality.
Made it easy enough to pack up, though. A ruck, and a duffel, and the locker was emptied out. She looked at the spare box of nine-millimeter ammo, and realised that she'd have to retrieve her automatic from the armory before leaving. She was going off base, and would be off base for the foreseeable future. She packed her fatigues in the duffel, and put on the ASU, beret last.
Applejack dug her keys out of the pocket she'd kept them in on the back of the ruck, and looked at them. She only really drove the Jeep enough to keep it in condition. She'd heard of people who left cars sit so long that the gas went bad in the tank, the oil dried up, tires… so she made sure to get off base every now and again.
She'd be off base for sure, now. Not even a new assignment. Detached duty.
It took forever as usual to check out her personal weapon from the armory, but she eventually made it through the paperwork and the process. As she stowed the locked case away in her ruck, Applejack thought to herself, trying to remember what else she was forgetting.
Applejack looked down at her rank tabs, and realized that she shouldn't go off base with her old Specialist tabs. The PX should have sergeant tabs, shouldn't they? Her eyes fell on the wad of paperwork the sergeant-major had thrust into her hands. E-5… the PX should still be open?
She thought it would be a simple purchase, but Applejack didn't account for the presence of Sergeant Doberman. Why was he working on the weekend? Master Sergeant Bilk's cronies almost always took every opportunity to dump unpleasant and irritating duties on their underlings. Applejack had expected one of the civvies, Sugar or Palm maybe, but Doberman…
"Congratulations on the promotion, Sergeant Applejack," said the grey-complexioned brute as he rang up the patches and stripes. "We knew you had it in you."
"Much obliged, Sergeant," Applejack said, looking the crook square in the eye, and holding her paperwork down on the counter. He hadn't even looked at it. They already knew.
"The Master Sergeant has a vehicle ready for you at the motor pool. Authorized, of course. We want you to be properly outfitted for your new assignment."
"That's alright, Sergeant. I have my own Jeep. No need for the taxpayer to pay for my chaufferin'."
Doberman looked disappointed. "You haven't made any decisions which cain't be undone, hillbilly. Step smartly, and all this blows over. It's a big Army, you know? Tough to go it alone."
"Much obliged, Sergeant. You have a good rest of your tour, and I'll have my own. Give th' boys my regrets, won't you?"
He bared his teeth at her as she left the PX, her duffel over one shoulder, and the ruck over the other. Applejack wondered whether there was something wrong with the pool vehicle she had been 'assigned' by the suddenly-helpful villain who ran the base Motor Pool. Brake lines artfully loosened? Sugar in the tank? Something far more subtle?
She recalled the scene in the sergeant major's office. Applejack had expected the first sergeant to take her back to his own office, but instead they'd gone to the big man's office. It had been crowded with senior non-coms, generally sorted into the stern-looking and the sulfurous. The first sergeant had delivered her to the senior non-commissioned officer's graces, and she'd stood stiffly in her sweaty, fouled PT uniform as a staff sergeant from Legal had walked her through her whistleblower's reports.
Applejack had worked over those carefully drawn-up reports for a week and a half, and then sat on them for another two weeks before submitting them via the most obscure channels she could justify. That had come up before the sergeant major's desk, as the staff sergeant from Legal had raked her over the coals for the delay between cited incidents and the report date. Her explanations answered all of the first sergeant's questions, and eventually the interrogation wound down.
Applejack rather thought that if the room hadn't been full of angry senior non-coms, they'd have batted her back and forth for hours. But those men – and they were mostly men, aside from the incredibly starchy staff sergeant from Legal – were busy men, all of them, and even if almost all of them had liquor cabinets stocked by Master Sergeant Earnest Bilk, they only had so much time to watch a lowly E-4 get rattled to see if she would fold.
The sergeant major had finally thrown a wad of paperwork at Applejack, and grunted. Another sergeant from Legal had stepped away from his previously-silent position beside the door, and explained. She was promoted, effective immediately, and was expected to show up for scheduled hearings in six weeks. It would take that long for the Army to collect officers sufficiently off-base to not have liquor cabinets stocked by the Bilk gang, and for JAG to assign someone likewise somewhat objective.
In the meantime, Applejack's time at Fort Red Shirt was coming to an abrupt end. They'd chosen to send her off into the boonies to count paper clips and dust bunnies among the mothballed armories and reserve centers up in the mountains. As far away from Master Sergeant Earnest Bilk and his cronies as the senior non-coms could arrange on short notice.
Honestly, it was the best Applejack could have hoped for. She had halfway expected stockade time for having dropped a dime on command's favorite chiseler. She collected her boxing gloves and head protector from the gym, not making eye-contact with anyone she saw.
The last pass was across the heart of the base, empty and echoing with the absence of the usual fatigued crowds that normally took up Fort Red Shirt's vast training facilities. The next batch of infantry wasn't due until Tuesday, a Tuesday that Applejack that would never see. She'd kind of liked the base when it was full and teeming, bustling with its actual purpose. Red Shirt without its combat-course trainees and instructors was hollow, sere – meaningless. The corruption of Bilk and his grey brigade of cheats was barely noticeable when the rest of them were there to swamp them in meaning and intention.
Applejack's heart was in her throat as she turned the keys in the ignition of her Jeep Cherokee, deathly afraid that this would be the time that the car finally gave up the ghost and refuse to start. That after weeks if not months of neglect, something vital had failed, and the old relic had finally slumped into nonfunctionality.
Come on, come on…
Not this time, the engine turned over with an offended squeal of aging belts. She let it idle for a minute to give the sweet old girl some time to find her voice.
Applejack drove out of the long-term parking lots, and slowly made her way across the base's empty asphalt, almost alone on the road. The semi-familiar buildings passed on each side, all built in that permanent-temporary dispirited fashion that had become so inextricably associated with the Army in her mind.
The twice-life-size statue of General Red Shirt rose in front of the main gate of the Fort, his sword held high over his head, dead greened-bronze eyes staring northwards in rebellious contempt for the nation which his namesake fort celebrated and protected. The dead rebel had always been a peculiar choice in Applejack's opinion for a combat training facility, but it had something to do with postwar unity between reunited loyalists and rebels. Even today, accents on the base were more like her country drawl than the flat northern bark whose ancestors had won the war and put down the southern rebels. The South didn't have to rise again – they ran the military in most regards, staffed it, trained it, operated it.
The old rebel's bronze sword burned with the fire of the mid-day sun, seeing Applejack off as she rode off the base, once again away from home and into exile. Angel with the burning sword.
She'd won. She'd done what she'd intended, ignored the opportunities to take it all back, refused to bow her head to lies and corruption. Bilk and his cronies would be called to account.
Why did it feel like a defeat?
Applejack found a motel on the side of the interstate up near the Tennessee border. The major she was supposed to report to wouldn't be in the office until Monday morning. She had all of Sunday to kill before she was supposed to report to him at Joint Base Cornpone. There wasn't much up there aside from the ammunition plants and the town that munitions manufacturing supported, or at least, so Applejack supposed. She'd never been in these mountains before.
Granny Smith's people had been from this land, once upon a time, before they'd been driven out by the government, the government and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Second Flood, its victims had called it, as Applejack had heard it. But not forty days and forty nights, but forever – as long as the cities of the heartland needed their power, that was how long that their world would lie under water. Once upon a time, they said, the valleys had looked down on the hills, and wealth laid in the bottomlands. The Apples and their proud neighbors had thought that their prosperity would stretch into an eternal future of agricultural industriousness, of rich bottomland productivity.
Then the government men came with their surveyors, and pointed with their sticks, and said, this farm would fall under the waters, and that wouldn't. That family home, and not this. That life, and not this.
And now an army munitions plant sat beside a great hydroelectric dam and fed the nation's military-industrial complex with the drowned ghosts of the past.
Applejack spent the day discovering that there weren't any open bars on a Sunday in Virginia, and that she didn't care for services in churches she didn't know. She walked out of one Accordist service, and just sat in her Jeep outside of a second one, watching the front door of the church, wanting to go in, but not able to get out of the car.
She spent the afternoon in a diner, reading every newspaper she could find, and after running out of newspapers, going over the scanty paperwork the command sergeants had given her, wishing there was whiskey in her coffee.
There wasn't much explanation in the orders she'd been handed. Just report to so and so, detached on escort and conveyance duty to the BRAC – the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. Honestly, Applejack had thought that the BRAC was as mothballed as the facilities which had once been that organization's responsibility to close and consolidate.
She supposed it was a government thing. Once a bureaucratic organization was established, it took an act of dreadful violence to put that creature back into the grave. Homes were fragile and delicate – organizations were eternal and deathless. Thermonuclear apocalypse could come and bring fiery Armageddon to mankind, and bureaucratic zombies like the Base Realignment and Closure Commission would continue to stumble along through the ashes and labor mindlessly as they surveyed the ruins.
Applejack checked her watch, and realized that her folks would be out of church out on the west coast in a half-hour or so. She paid her tab at the diner, and went over to the big truckstop across the way. She'd seen a display earlier…
After buying a disposable phone and some minutes, Applejack returned to her motel room. It took a bit of fiddling about to activate the phone and use the minutes-card, but soon enough she got her people's number into the awkward device. She sat on the motel-room bed and mourned her lost access to free long distance on-base. This disposable business wasn't cheap, not by Applejack's standards.
"'Ello, Apples. Who is this?"
"Granny! It's Applejack, how was church?"
"Ha ha Applejack, Mac, it's Applejack! And you know how church is, that fool of a pastor can't preach for love er Harmony. Waste of my time, dagnabit." Granny Smith had been going to the same church for thirty years, and had complained about the preacher every single Sunday, as long as Applejack could recall.
"Ah, anyways, how are you girl? The Army treatin' you right? You eating proper? None of this eastern slop they feed you boys?"
"Ain't nothing like your home cookin' Granny, but I get by, I get by. Look, I wanted to-"
"Look here, Applejack, we need you back here, this town is goin' straight to perdition, I tell you what! Ain't nobody left we know, the neighbors are kickin' up a fuss again, and I swear to Harmony I'mma gonna choke on the stench that's comin' out of those damn hippies' curin-barns!" Both farms on either side of the remnants of Sweet Apple Acres had been converted to pot plantations in the last decade. Their operators and Granny did not get along in the least. The owners of those plantations were absentee landlords, and weren't around to take their share of Granny's wrath.
“And that's another thing! Old Fruited Plains sold out! Our corn fields, Applejack, our dang corn fields!”
“Ain't the lease gonna revert to us if'n he's not farming any more?” Applejack asked, suddenly wondering if there could be something she could do back home.
“Tain't what the co-op guy says. Empty Drawers is mostly in the pocket of the hippies anymore, that traitor. Says the lease transfers to the new owners, and they're gonna plant more locoweed, you know they is! And hire more greasers straight out of Olancho or Santa Ana to work the acres. Damn Mexicans!”
“I didn't think those places were in Mexico-”
“Well of course they ain't! The coyotes don't bring up honest Mexicans anymore! They's all foreign Mexicans, so Mexican they don't even come from Mexico no more!”
“Granny, it don't sound like you have any room for me back home-”
"There ain't no more home left back here! Ain't nothing left in this town but hippies and the damn foreign Mexicans. Yew would not believe what has happened to CHS since you and yer friends left town! Ah have to look outside now an' again to make sure that Macintosh didn't up and move us to Tijuana when I wasn't lookin!" Granny could go on for hours on the subject of the 'damn Mexicans' if you didn't derail her. Telling her that Apple Bloom's best friend Scootaloo was Latino didn't even faze Granny, in her opinion Scootaloo's family with its unorthodox arrangements was more hippie than Mexican, anyways.
"-and those girls are gonna get into trouble I can't get 'em outta one of these days, it ain't like the old days, Applejack! 'Taint just the old locoweed and whiskey, ain't even that rockity-crackity stuff anymore. The new poisons they're playin' around with, well damnit. I worry about these poor Mexican kids, ain't nobody should be 'round this garbage, I don't care how Mexican they is!" Wait.
"What's this about the girls and trouble? Is Apple Bloom not behavin'?" Apple Bloom and the rest of her 'CMC' were in their last year of high school, and were in a position to get into real trouble if they weren't minding Granny Smith and their folks.
"Well, she ain't thirteen any more, that's for sure. Ever since she and her little friends sprouted breasts, the boys have been sniffin' round here like a pack of Mexican-jabberin' dogs. And not the cute little Mexican yappy dogs they has on the tee-vee. Big, hungry-lookin' junkyard-guardin' type hounds. If'n I could get Apple Bloom outta town and somewhere safer, that'd be a weight offa my mind, Applejack. Speakin' of which, I want you back here."
"First off, you know I've got six more months owed. I ain't goin' nowhere. And secondly, if you'd just think, you know y'all still don't have room fer me on the home place. The orchard barely can support the three of ya, we ain't getting the fields back, and you've been workin' that part-time job at the school so long the town thinks your name is Lunchtime Granny."
"We can make the space, dagnabit. It ain't a family without you here. Wait, that doesn't sound like the place you usually call from. Where you at, Applejack?"
"I'm in a motel room up in the mountains. That's what I was callin' you about."
"I thought you was makin' your weekly Sunday call? What is this about?"
"I got a promotion, Granny. Sergeant. It should be good for a little bit more in the monthly checks."
"You always send back too damn much, Applejack, I don't know what it is you live on up there!"
"You know they give us food on base, and the barracks. But that's coming to an end, thought. I'm gonna have to find something more permanent than a motel room later this week. I report to my new boss tomorrow. Not even sure where I'm going to fetch up until I talk to him."
"What, you're leavin' that big Virginny base? Well, good enough. You never sounded happy at that place. Where in the mountains are ya?"
"Uhh…" Applejack looked over at the local newspaper laying folded on the dresser, waiting to be tossed into recycling. "Some burg called Dashville. It's just convenient, I'm not sure where they're gonna be putting me. I'm supposed to be working for that base-closin' commission."
"What? I thought that thing wrapped up a decade ago?"
"Ah, you know how it is with the government, they never really let go of a thing once they put a name to it. I guess I'm gonna be carrying the name-placard around for some officer while we pretend to do somethin' productive."
"In the good old days, the Army was good for somethin' other than burnin' my tax money in latrine-burn-barrels! Your grandpappy fought the gooks on a tenth ah what you all waste every day!" Oh, lordy… "Wait a damn minute, did you say Dashville? With a D?"
"Uh, yeah? Dang near on the state border, I could spit and hit Tennessee."
"Well, bless yer heart, Applejack, you're back on Apple land, or close enough as to be the same! Your cousin Goldie Delicious and her kids owns half that city! Or they did once upon a time, before those wastrels went and plowed under perfectly proper orchards to put up cheap housin' fer the railroad boys and whatnot! You gotta go look in on her, Applejack, she ain't answerin' her phone anymore, I'm worried about that girl."
The conversation continued to ramble on, as calls back home to Granny Smith always did. Most of the time, Applejack just supplied sufficient yeses to keep up her side of the exchange. This time, Granny wouldn't let her off the phone until Applejack agreed to go over to Goldie Delicious's home-place and look in on her ancient second cousin twice removed.
The Dashville Apples had once owned the better part of a township on the edge of a small city. When the TVA had driven the rest of the Apples out of the mountains, the Dashville Apples had stayed put, and grown prosperous on their rich soil and their nationally-famous apples, and expanding during the fat years during the great war in Europe.
As Granny Smith had said, they'd also prospered when the neighboring town had expanded, and when the end of the great war had also ended the long agricultural boom, they'd cashed in by selling an enormous swathe of their lands to developers for what became an endless tract of small, neat suburban houses. At the time, those houses been generously sized, but even to Applejack's eyes, today the little boxes looked kinda dated, and on the small side of tiny.
You couldn't say the same about Goldie Delicious's house, though. It sat on a wooded rise at the back of one of the neighborhoods which had, once upon a time, been Apple orchards. It wasn't anyone's idea of a mansion, but the original farmhouse had been expanded repeatedly, with two garages converted into living-space, multiple extensions built off the back of the building, and the front porch enclosed and converted into a front parlor. It was nobody's idea of pretty, but it was big and well-built for all of its Frankenstein's-monster rambly chaos.
Behind the house stretched acre after acre of the remnants of the old apple orchards. They looked neglected in the waning light, barely recognizable as proper orchard-trees, shaggy and aging and untended. If someone was supposed to be taking care of that mess, they were doing a shit job of it. Applejack shook her head in dismay at the waste of such prime acreage as she got out of her Jeep and picked her way between the overgrown shrubs and the lawn grown rank.
Applejack knocked on the front door, looking through the slightly-dingy windows. She could see movement inside, but no lights to speak of. She found a doorbell mounted slightly off-position from where you'd expect it, recessed somewhat and half-hidden behind an overgrown bush that was encroaching on the doorstep. The alarming, off-kilter bell howled before beginning to ring, the buzzing of a poorly-mounted solenoid in the mechanism making almost as much noise as the bell proper.
The noise caused an explosion of half-seen movement inside the house, and that was strange enough for Applejack to try the latch of the door, which she found to be open. She let herself into the large, darkened foyer, and fumbled around until she found the light-switch. There were dust bunnies and furballs everywhere, rich and expensive furnishings left to gather dirt and fur under piles of paper and books and keepsakes everywhere around her. Nothing human could be found, but a pair of arrogant cats stared at her from their perches on high-backed leather chairs sitting to Applejack's left.
"Cousin Goldie? Are you in here? Your front door is open. Granny Smith gave me your address, and told me off to come down here and see how you was doing. You in here?"
Applejack took off her beret, and stuffed it under her arm, looking around to see if she was supposed to take her shoes off. Nope, not one of those households. Unless I've come in the wrong door, and there's a mudroom somewhere?
Applejack advanced cautiously, deeper into the house. Dirt and dust and cat-fur was everywhere, and half of the lightbulbs were burnt out. Cats crept around her as she advanced, abandoning rooms as she entered them, and re-occupying them in her wake as she went. There were empty bowls everywhere, as well as overflowing pans of kitty litter.
Applejack finally found her cousin sitting in a kitchen at the back of the house, staring at nothing in particular as the setting sun shone through a westward-facing window, out through a stretch of the orchard, better-kept than the parts she'd seen from the road.
"GAH! Where the hey did you come from!" cried the wizened little lady, wide-eyed in her applewood kitchen chair. "Officer, I didn't call fer anybody, ain't nobody wantin' trouble here!"
"Cousin Goldie! I've been yellin' for you for ten minutes now-"
"I don't know where Jonagold is, officer! He ain't been by here in months! We don't know nothin' about any stills here!"
"-I'm Granny Smith's grand-daughter Applejack and – wait, who? What still?"
"Jonagold's still! I figger that's the only reason the police would be breakin' into my house like this!"
Applejack looked down at her ASUs, and realized that Cousin Goldie had mistaken her uniform for that of – what, a policeman's? Who was Jonagold?
"No, no, ma'am, I'm not th' police, I'm your Cousin Applejack!"
"My who? Oh, I have to sit down again. Oh, I don't feel so good." Goldie looked up at Applejack again, her eyes watery and wavering. "I know you, don't I? Gala's new daughter in law. Buttercup, honey, why'd you go and cut your hair like that? New husbands don't like it when their brides go and change their looks like that. Bright Mac will be so mad. And wearin' a policeman's uniform? Is it October again already?"
"No, ma'am, I'm not Buttercup – that was my mother. I'm Buttercup's daughter, we met once, a long time ago at a family reunion. You remember Buttercup's daughter Applejack?"
"Oooh, cooee, look at you, Applejack, is it? Weren't you the cutest little thing, getting under your brother's feet and causin' all that fuss… How is your darling mother. I like her."
Dead these sixteen years, thought Applejack, but she didn't say it. "Granny Smith sent me up here to look in on you. You don't look so good, Cousin Goldie. Can I get you something?"
"You get me something? I should be getting you something, honeychile. Oh, look at my manners, let me get up an'-" The old woman tried to get back up out of her chair, but wavered and fell back, her legs folding up underneath her.
Applejack crouched beside Goldie's chair, and looked her in the eyes, and examined her cracked lips. Applejack frowned to herself.
"Cousin Goldie, you don't look well, you sit right there, and let me see if I can't find some water here." Applejack went rummaging around with her cousin's faint guidance, pointing out where the glasses-cupboard was. She rinsed out a glass, and then looking at it closer, gave it a better scrubbing before shaking it out and filling it with water from the tap.
The old woman drank the whole glass, and asked for another. After downing the second one, she looked a bit less glassy herself.
Applejack apologized for getting into Goldie's personal space, but checked her temperature anyways. The old lady was burning up, lord knows from what.
"Cousin Goldie, do you take any pills? Do you have anything you're supposed to be taking?"
"What, no, of course not. I don't do drugs, I never have. No doctors, neither. We've always been healthy as horses, all the Apples always have been."
Well you ain't now.
Applejack thought for a moment that she'd have to carry Goldie Delicious out to her car, but in the event, she was able to prop her up on her wobbly legs, although it turned into a bit of a production when Goldie couldn't remember where her purse and keys were. Applejack eventually found the old purse in a bowl beside the front door, half-buried under a formidable pile of unsorted mail.
While Applejack was digging through the mail for Cousin Goldie's purse – and more important, her Medicare and insurance cards – she found a yellow-pages book that she took with them.
From that, it was just a matter of figuring out which Urgent Care clinic was open on a Sunday afternoon in a backwater like Dashville.
The nurses were kinda starchy initially about a very distant cousin bringing in a confused and horribly dehydrated senior citizen, but Goldie's insurance cards and Applejack calling Goldie's actual children while she was waiting settled them down. Applejack had found an old address book in Goldie's purse, and after a couple false starts had gotten a hold of her cousin's second son, Mandarin Orange. After some barking back and forth, they'd established common Apple ancestry, and he was trying to remember who was supposed to be keeping an eye on his mother.
Applejack put the phone aside when the nurse came back to tell her what was going on.
"Well, the good news is, she's got nothing really wrong with her physically aside from a cold, and severe dehydration. Make sure she's drinking enough, and see that she takes some decongestants. She's surprisingly healthy given that fever, but it is only that – a common cold. And neglect, I think. How old is your cousin?"
"Aw, heck, I don't know. Hold on – Cousin Mandarin, how old is your momma? He says eighty-six. Wait, really? I always thought she was ten years younger than that. Huh."
"She shouldn't be by her own, I don't think. There isn't anyone living with her?"
"Nothin' I could see but cats. Hey, Cousin Mandarin, who's supposed to be lookin' in on your momma? A neighbor? What neighbor? Aw, hell, look, Nurse –"
"Redheart. Call me Redheart."
"Nurse Redheart, I don't know what's going on here, I just come up to look in on my Granny's cousin, and I find this. I'll straighten it out. You sure nothing's serious wrong with Cousin Goldie?"
"Nothing but some attention and bedrest should cure, I don't think. I don't love those cognitive responses I was getting, mind you, but it's hard to separate out symptoms from dehydration and a fever from actual dementia. I'm inclined to say that it's more the former than the latter, but that's a question for her proper doctor, not a nurse practitioner at an urgent care clinic. Does she have a doctor?"
"Oh, lordy, I haven't the faintest – Cousin Mandarin?"
Applejack eventually worked out with Mandarin Orange who she should be talking to, and what she should be doing for the old lady. The two Apples eventually made it back to Goldie's rambling farmhouse, and she was filled up with fluids and over-the-counter cold cures, and put into her cat-fur-dusted bed.
The rest of Applejack's evening was spent feeding irate cats, emptying litter-pans gone filthy, and trying to clear enough living space from the disorder to make it tolerable by the standards Granny and the service had beaten into her.
Applejack never made it back to her motel room out by the interstate. She ended up bunking out on one of Goldie Delicious's excavated couches in her uniform. She'd go out tomorrow and get things straightened out, find her cousin's doctor, figure out what needed doing.
Not as if the army had much use for her. And Cousin Goldie surely needed something.
She fell asleep thinking about her cousin's problems instead of her own.
That night, Applejack dreamed of roots in the earth, growing, curling under the floorboards, bursting out of that ancient Applelachian soil to cup around the farmhouse like a fortress of wood-pulp against the elements and the world.
The fixings for breakfast in Cousin Goldie's fridge were less than enthralling. Applejack had gotten out of the habit of cooking for herself in the last few years in the service, but she hadn't forgotten enough to be fooled by milk gone rancid, and fruit harboring flies and the like. She found some old plastic shopping bags balled up in a cabinet, and filled them up with the most septic samples she found in the fridge, and left them out on the porch behind the mud-room to cease stinking up the kitchen.
She and Cousin Goldie had some dried fruit and granola Applejack had found in the pantry, and the younger Apple started making up a shopping list for after work. Cousin Goldie looked better, and Applejack made sure to get her cousin a bottle of gatorade she'd bought at a convenience store on the way back from the urgent care the night before, that and some pills.
Cousin Goldie had an old TV in her bedroom that someone had hauled in there at some point and set up on a dresser across the way from the bed. Applejack left her cousin watching something on the tube when it was time to go report in to her new posting across the state line in Tennessee.
Joint Base Cornpone was a hilariously unmilitary letdown after Red Shirt. Major Silver Server had looked at Applejack, and scratching his head, told her that he didn't need a secretary.
"That's fine, sir. I'm not a secretary," Applejack said as stiffly as she could.
The major sighed, and kept staring at her. Finally, he slapped her file against his trouser-seam.
"Sergeant," said Major Server, "this is a nonexistent post. We - and by we I mean 'I' - occupy this office and keep the lights on so that whenever someone comes by or calls to asks if there is still a base-closing commission, there is, and it is me. If they closed this place up, the line-item would be removed from the budget, and someone back in the five-sided loony bin would lose the justification for a lot of other budget-items. So I sit up here, and make sure that there's a face behind that door behind you. We literally do nothing else. I tell you what - this is technically still an Army base. Go take over the security detail, they've been getting slack."
There wasn't much of a detail at the base, in fact security wasn't Army - they'd subcontracted the job to a local civilian outfit. They didn't even carry guns.
"What if someone tries to get past you?" Applejack asked the unarmed civilian guard.
"I guess I could go out to mah truck and get mah rifle?" he drawled.
"But we ain't supposed take bring guns on campus!" the other one yelped.
"Base."
"Whut?"
"Yew ain't supposed take bring guns on base, so- son."
Applejack sighed, and had them continue the tour.
It was a long, frustrating day, and Applejack suspected that it would be the highlight of her time on Joint Base Cornpone. It would be all downhill from here.
There was a straight interstate between Dashville and the town which held one of the few official army bases in that part of Applelachia. It might have been official, but it wasn't Applejack's idea of real. It was notational, a polite fiction. She already knew she was going to hate it, and decided she'd do her best to forget about it every moment she wasn't trapped inside of Joint Base Cornpone.
As the Smokey Mountains crept past her speeding Jeep, Applejack found herself fuming about that stupid lie of a munitions plant. They called themselves Army, but they weren't. Civilian contractors ran the place, operated the equipment, maintained the dam, and the only reason the Army was running security now was that the major needed something to keep Applejack out of his hair. She was starting to suspect that the only reason the major himself was there was to remind folk by his presence that the locals didn't actually own all of that plant and property, not the grand old hydroelectric dam or the power-generating plants that crouched around it like a perpetual gypsy campout, nor even the property that the little workshops and manufacturers called 'the campus'.
Driving back ho- driving back to Dashville that evening, Applejack's eyes slid constantly towards the narrow waters of the great lake which had drowned her family's ancestral acres, that stretched between Cornpone and Cousin Goldie's hometown. That watery grave held the first Sweet Apple Acres in its dark grasp. Her family had fled the flood-waters for sunny California, but they'd never really took under the shadows of Mount Shasta. Her mind drifted as she raced the shadows chasing the setting sun, settling on consideration of Cousin Goldie's neglected acres.
And the surviving orchards that belonged to this branch of the Apple family had clearly been neglected. Cousin Mandarin and his surviving brothers lived off in distant Manehattan and Fillydelphia, and either couldn't or wouldn't oversee the family homestead - that was clear enough. But Cousin Goldie surely had a good ten years left, Applejack was sure of that. She wanted to make them good years. The Army didn't have much further use for Applejack, and it was clear her time with them had been - well, not a mistake, but an investment in time that hadn't paid out.
There was Apple land here that needed time and love, which hadn't been getting it, between Cousin Goldie's infirmity and her family having moved on to other things. And there weren't anything else calling on Applejack's time, not anymore. Aside from what was looking like a dull and infuriating nine to five at the munitions plant, a nine to five which would come to an end in less than a year, when her tour of duty was up.
And everybody had made clear that nobody wanted Applejack to re-enlist. That door was closed.
The Jeep's headlights lit up Cousin Goldie's overgrown front yard as Applejack pulled around back of the house. She unloaded the Jeep onto the porch, looking out at the slightly less overgrown and gone-to-seed orchards in the immediate vicinity of the back of the house. She'd bought a lot of groceries in a Piggly-Wiggly on the new side of town, and had promptly gotten lost on the way back to the house. But Applejack had finally gotten her bearings, and now stomped through her cousin's mud-room carrying bag after bag of fresh food and staples to fill the old lady's fridge and cubbards and pantry.
Applejack found Cousin Goldie sleeping in her bedroom, and woke her for dinner. It was pretty awful fare this time, but cookin' was coming back to her. Applejack figured she might be able to produce something worth callin' dinner after only a few more misfires like this'un.
Cousin Goldie didn't say a word about how terrible the food was. Bless her.
Applejack left her elderly cousin to her evening shows on the tube in her bedroom, and went out walking in the orchards in the darkness, feeling each tree's trunks, and tripping through the brambles and the weeds. Too much of the latter, she'd have to get on that pretty soon.
There was bramble to clear, trees to trim, weeds to eradicate, lots of need for fertilizer in the right places. Fungicides, insecticides when the season came 'round again. But all in all, not as bad as it could have been. Some trees had lost limbs, and were lopsided. Applejack thought they might be able to take grafts, where healthy limbs might be saved from trees that were otherwise past saving.
Some of the trees were too far gone, though, and they'd have to go, root and stock. Applejack could handle that. Some were just at the end of their lifespans, and parts of 'em would make good solid carpenter's stock - furniture, or suchlike. Some weren't, and they'd go for firewood. Applewood smelled sweet when burned, made the best sausages.
For the worst of the worst? Applejack's father had shown her how to make punching bags, burlap sack with rotten heartwood in the core, and filled in between with silage and grain.
She figured at least one tree out there could support a decent punchin' bag.
In the morning, Applejack managed a half-decent scrambled eggs and hash.
But only half-decent.
Cousin Goldie smiled over her breakfast, nevertheless, so Applejack revelled in that warm feeling. The elderly Apple drank her juice and milk, too.
"Hain't fresh-pressed, but we ain't had fresh-pressed in a coon's age. I saw you lookin' round the back forty last night out the window. What were you lookin' at, Gala?" the old lady asked.
"Applejack, Cousin Goldie. And I was looking at the orchard, of course. Could use some work, don't you think?"
"Oh, discord's teats, of course it needs work! But ah can't find help fer love or money. And ah've tried money! Ain't nobody wants love anymore. But the boys I get in to clear the weeds and trim the boughs they just fuss about where I can see them from here, and take off with my spare apples and my cash. After a while, you give up, you know?"
"Some things," Applejack said, carefully, "take family, don't you think? I don't have a lot of spare time, but I don't think I'll be spending more than the minimum at the job. They don't really need me out at Cornpone."
"Is that right, Buttercup? How long you gonna be working out there at the munitions plant?"
She'd remembered where Applejack had been, what she was doing. Even if she kept mistaking her for other family members. Let's see where that takes us…
"Applejack, ma'am. And about six months until my service is up, Cousin Goldie. I'll be at loose ends after that. Granny Smith wants me to go back west, to do what I don't rightly know. She don't need me back at Sweet Apple Acres, there's barely enough work left for Big Mac, let alone an extra sister."
"Is that so? I always thought they'd make a better go of it out there in Californy."
"Well, you know, water rights. And the agricultural regulators ain't nobody to mess with."
"So Gala always said. Shame, shame. You know I'm alone out here. Ain't safe no more, and you seen that mess out back."
"You think you could stand to keep a boarder? I have a housing allowance coming now that I'm out of the barracks."
"Barracks! At your age, lawdy. Of course, it'd be nice to have another Apple or two in the old house. Just me and my kittens, gets a mite lonely. I could stand for the company. Especially if you keep the house in groceries."
"I figure I can swing that," Applejack said, watching the expression on her cousin's face. Was the old lady feeling pressured, would she forget in a day or a week?
"That's just fine, Applejack. I owe your side of the family for the way things fell out back in the day, between my pa and Gala's pa. Never really set right with me. We got rich, and you-all just - had to pick up stakes and go out west.
"But, I suppose life ain't fair. And my boys took off as soon as they could get away from the home place, so things even out more'n you'd think. Stay as long as you like, dearie.
"I'm sure I can find something for you to do around town. I've let things go to seed, and that's Harmony's honest truth. Dashville could use another Apple. And I think you're just the girl for the job, Cousin Applejack."
Applejack smiled at her cousin, and felt an unaccustomed warmth in her chest. Like a chance-cast seed finding, after so long, sun-warmed soil - deep, black, and well-watered.
Author's Note
This was originally written as a prologue for a sequel to Twilight In Plain Sight, and it is firmly in continuity with that story. But my plans for that murder-mystery got sidetracked, and I figured this bit stood on its own as a little character-study, whether I ever get to the adventures of the CMC in Dashville or not.
Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, totallynotabrony and the general Company.
