The Apple

Harlan: Let me tell you about a woman who gave nearly everything she had away, and who got one fine thing at the very end, and never got to use it. Harlan: Her name was Mary Elsie Phillips Hawthorne, but the family just called her Elsie, and she was the wife of William Claude Hawthorne and the mother of his children. She was born in eighteen eighty-nine in Hempstead County, Arkansas, and if you'd met her you'd have remembered her, because there wasn't much of her to meet and all of it was bright. She was a wisp of a woman, small as a girl, with a great pile of thick red hair pinned up on top of her head, and red freckles scattered across her face and down her arms, and pale blue eyes that held kindness and just a hint of mischief. When she came into a room, you knew it, partly because she dipped snuff like many a rural Southern woman of her day, and the smell of it came in with her. Harlan: There's a story the grandchildren tell, from one cold winter day when Elsie walked over for a visit. The whole house had pulled up close around the wood heater, as close as you could get without scorching, and somebody set a chair by the warmth for Grandma. And a little one leaned against her chair, the way children do when they know a person likes them and might have a treat in her pocket. Harlan: She did have something. She reached into the big pocket of the pinafore she wore over her dress, and she drew out a single apple. One apple, the only one she had. The child reached for it — of course the child reached for it — and Elsie said, gently, no. "I brought this for the littlest one," she said, meaning the frailest of the twins, a baby girl born too soon who stayed thin and needed it more. And then, so no one would feel left out, she peeled that apple in a careful spiral and handed the strips of peel around — "here, you've got a mouthful of pretty teeth to chew this" — and fed the soft sweet flesh of it, bite by bite, to the baby who needed it. When it was gone she tossed the core in the fire, and before she left she ran her fingers through a child's curls and promised, "Next time, I'll try to bring you an apple." Harlan: That was Elsie entire, in one apple. Her daughter-in-law, Maggie, used to say that Elsie would give away whatever she had if somebody else needed it more. It was simply how she was built. Harlan: She never did bring that next apple. The record is plain about why. Harlan: It was April of nineteen forty-nine, and something good had finally come to Elsie: her husband had bought her a washing machine. You have to understand what that meant to a farm woman who had scrubbed a family's wash by hand her whole life. She was beside herself. And being Elsie, her first thought wasn't to keep it — it was to share it. "I'm going to take my new washer over to show Maggie," she said, "and we can wash the clothes together." Because wash day, in those years, was also visiting day, and the joy wasn't just the machine, it was the doing-of-it alongside someone you loved. Harlan: But the machine was heavy, and it would have to be hefted into a mule-drawn wagon, and her son — a man who'd inherited her very same red hair and her very same red temper — flat refused to lift it. The record is silent on the exact words; the family is not silent on what they cost. Mother and son stood there and argued, both of them too stubborn to bend, both of them yelling. And in the middle of it, Elsie's heart simply stopped. It was her second attack, and this one took her, almost at once. She never spoke another word. She never washed a single load in that new machine. Her son carried her to her bed and laid her down, and the manner of her going — in anger, over a kindness she'd been trying to do — haunted that man to the end of his life. Harlan: There's one more thing, and it's the thing I'd have you remember her by. Elsie had a small, particular fear: she did not want to be taken from this world with dirty feet. More than once she'd asked Maggie to come quick when she died and wash them, so the undertaker wouldn't find them so. And Maggie kept that promise. She got a pan of warm water and a cloth and a bar of soap, and she washed Elsie's feet, and scrubbed them clean, exactly as she'd been asked. Harlan: So that is Elsie. A tiny red-haired woman who gave the only apple to the child who needed it most, who got her one fine machine and thought first of sharing it, and who was sent on her way clean, by a promise kept. We don't get to choose the day. But we do, every one of us, get to choose what we hand to the people around us while we're here. Elsie chose the apple. Every time, she chose the apple.