after they began feasting too much on the local deer population and the Landlord thought it would be both fun and useful to institute a dog-killing contest. The tenant farmer who killed the most dogs got double his salary for the month. Pa never won. The contest ran for six years until the dogs had been almost wiped out.
Narrow was worse than her husband for taking things apart but, unlike her husband, her middle child put things back together again. When he was about nine months old he woke up the household taking apart his crib. The slats had given way and he'd gone straight down, landing on his bottom. When Pa brought his tool box to fix the crib the next day, Narrow had crawled over to the box, rummaged for a moment and brought out a screwdriver. Narrow could almost always fix or build or create anything with whatever resources were available.
Titania was Ma's special daughter.
Twins were sometimes considered defective simply because they were twins. Most people did accept that twins existed naturally in nature, but identical girl-boy twins, like Jelly and Jones, were unusual and therefore highly suspicious. They were so alike that it wasn't until their hair began to grow that Ma began to cut her son's but not her daughter's hair so that she could tell them apart.
Jones never learned to crawl. One day, as he sat cross legged on the floor of the press house he had hopped across the room. Ma had been standing at the pressers, enormous square wooden boxes with tight wire mesh-topped lids that were pressed down onto the pearl apple mash. The juice flowed through the boxes into a trough that was connected to a pipe to the fermentation vat. She thought she had closed the press house door but she'd suddenly felt a breeze by her ankles. She looked around and found Jones in one corner, gnawing on his thumbnail. He hopped back to where he'd been. She'd seen a blur across her vision and her son then reappear on the other side of the room.
Jelly had learned to talk early. At six months she was able to tell her mother, in a few words, what she needed, a diaper change or food. Her defect deepened the day she found a plastic bag caught in one of the pearl apple trees in the orchard. The bags were useful things if they didn’t have many holes in them, but their numbers had dwindled with each passing year.
Ma was teaching Jelly to forage for medicinal and edible plants and had taken the four-year old into the woods one autumn day for another lesson. Jelly had the right temperament for it. Patient. Observant. Curious.
On their return home, the press house and barns in the distance, Jelly caught sight of the bag. She carefully untangled it and smoothed it out on the ground.
"Made in China," she said.
"Stop messing about with that," said Ma impatiently. She needed to start supper; needed to make sure that Santa started supper.
Jelly continued to study the bag. It had a line of black marks on it.
"That’s what it says. Made in China."
Ma grabbed her by the arm and hauled her through the orchard and home. Jelly held onto the bag the entire way and by the time they arrived at the house Ma was fuming. She barked an order for Santa to get dinner started. Santa, who was already cutting up potatoes and carrots and parsnips, looked up, saw her mother's expression, and ducked her head back down to her task.
Ma grabbed a short pearl apple switch from its hook on the wall, put Jelly over her knee and gave her four sharp whacks. She had beaten all of her children this way, starting from a young age. She used it to remind them not to show off; she believed it would make them as strong and resilient as the trees they tended.
After they'd eaten supper, Jelly started to talk about the bag again. Ma reached for the switch but Pa interrupted.
"What’s that?"
"It talks to me," Jelly said, taking the neatly folded bag from her pocket. "Made in China." She pointed to a line on the bag. "Fifteen per cent post consumer plastic."
"What’s China?" Narrow asked.
Ma and Pa ignored him.
Pa sat back and scratched his chin. He knew it was writing but he couldn't understand how Jelly could read it. He recognized some words, mostly place names that others had pointed out to him: Piggy Gristle, Hap Road, Battery, Delora.
Ma couldn't read at all and so the children hadn't been taught. She'd taught them basic math — the weights and measures they needed to know for orchard work — but Ma thought that reading was a waste of time when their job was to tend trees.
Pa's gaze fell on the wood stove.
"What does that say?" Pa asked, pointing to the line of raised black marks over the door of the stove.
Jelly took a few steps closer. "McIntosh Foundry. Patent Pending. 1872."
"And that?" Pa pointed to an apple crate.
"Prince Edward Island Potatoes."
Ma snorted. "How do you know that?"
"They talk to me," said Jelly. "They tell me what they are. In my head."
"Make sense, girl, or I’ll get the switch again."
As Jelly scrunched her eyes closed in concentration, Pa got up from the table and disappeared out the door. When Jelly opened her eyes she smiled. She pointed to her cleaned plate.
"What’s that?" she asked Ma.
"You mean the plate?"
"How do you know it’s a plate?"
"Because..." A look of confusion passed over Ma’s face. "Because it just is."
"That’s it. It just is. That’s how I know."
Pa returned with two items in his hands. He handed them to Jelly.
"How to Grow and Care for Fruit Trees and Making Hard Ciders," she read out loud.
For the next several weeks, whenever Jelly and Pa were together, he’d ask her to read out what the books said. Over the next three years the Landlord noticed not only an increase in the apple harvest but a vast improvement in the quality of the cider.
"It’s hard to explain," Ma now said.
She looked out at the moon. Mixer wasn’t even a year old, yet he was more disobedient than any of her other children. He had deliberately defied her the other day. He had looked at her the whole time he was climbing the ladder up to the vat. None of the children were allowed near the vat.
She’d run across the room, grabbed him around the waist, ripped him from the ladder then stood him up and thumped him hard twice across his diaper. Mixer squealed and wriggled from her grasp, crawling fast for the open press house door. Ma’s hand felt numb, soon it began to feel hot. She looked down at her palm. It was bright red, the red of an overripe pearl apple. It itched and swelled and she had to soak it in cold water for several minutes before it returned to normal. She was drying her hand when Mixer reappeared at the press house door. He looked at her. He looked at her hand.
"Try," Pa said.
"It’s been a while since we had a baby in the house. Maybe I’ve forgotten what it’s like." Ma rubbed her palm.
"Well, I guess that’s possible," said Pa. He yawned again.
"Go to sleep. I’m just being silly."
Ma lay down and rolled over, facing the window. The moonlight fell on her profile. She lay awake, thinking, for a long time. For a fleeting moment she thought that perhaps she was too hard on her children but then she remembered the alternative. She knew what it was like to be different.
Upstairs, the moonlight also fell on Mixer's face; his eyes were open.
Ma continued to beat her other children whenever they disobeyed her, but whether Mixer deserved it or not, she never laid a hand on him again.
___
It wasn’t just Ma who had misgivings about Mixer. One night when he’d gotten up to use the outhouse, Forest had caught his then two-month old brother standing up in the crib beside his parents’ bed, looking out the window and waggling his fingers as the wind lashed at the pearl apple trees. In the morning Forest decided he’d dreamed it but after that night whenever he looked at his brother he felt uneasy.
Porkchop disliked Mixer but couldn’t say why. Whenever she held him she didn’t feel love or affection as she did for her other sisters and brothers, only anxious to be away from him. Porkchop had not
iced that Bull always seemed to wrinkle his nose whenever he was near him and that Jelly and Jones avoided him entirely whenever they could.
Only Santa truly enjoyed being around him. He would throw his pudgy arms around her neck and hang on, sometimes for hours. She put him in a sling when she worked in the orchard or in the press house so that he could be close to her. If Ma wasn't around, she would hum and sing softly to him. She had songs for all sorts of things; songs about food and how good it was for him, songs about safety, and songs for when he was too sleepy to go to sleep.
He was almost two and hadn’t yet learned to walk. Narrow had tried to teach him but Mixer was uncooperative and Narrow had eventually given up. He could crawl but preferred to be carried. Mixer was big all over with large blue eyes, a wide nose and a square jaw, but his largest feature was his enormous rear end. Whenever he tried to stand he would wobble a little then topple over. He didn’t talk; what sounds he did make were unintelligible grunts and moans. His family, even Santa, shrugged and called him a slow learner.
___
The second thing Mixer knew with certainty was that he wanted what the Landlord had: power over the land and power over the people on it.
___
Mixer learned at an astonishing rate. He knew the orchard's schedule and every role and task in it. He knew the value of each member of the family.
He knew that any one of his siblings would protect him at any cost; that was how they’d been raised by Ma and they obeyed her. Obedience was a trait he was already putting to good use; he