​​
 Here’s a story I remember my father telling more than once.  It has been passed down as part of the family lore.  In the photo above, you can see the third generation of my family to enjoy the orchard.  That is my  daughter Bethany, during a visit in 1973, carefully raking the pine needles away from some young pine trees that were planted long after Uncle Charlie departed.  In the foreground is one of the few surviving apple trees, still not very large after 50 years trying to grow in its contaminated site.

Do you have an Uncle Charlie? That may not be his name, but they share a characteristic: an enormously fertile brain and little or no common sense. Uncle Charlies have the most wonderful schemes for making money fast—but for them the motherlode almost always turns out to be fools’ gold. They can dream up any number of ways to do a task faster, easier, or cheaper—but somehow the result rarely achieves any of those goals.

Our family’s Uncle Charlie was the youngest of my grandmother’s three brothers. There was Uncle Harry, the chef, who claimed to have been married five times but “only churched twice”; Uncle Freddy, a respectable businessman and breeder of champion bantam poultry, and Charlie, who apparently was standing behind the kitchen door when the common sense was ladled out.

Charlie died before I was born, but the stories about him were current in the family for decades afterwards.

My grandmother and her sisters said, “Poor Charlie—the youngest and best and dead the soonest”. Like so many people Charlie dead was thought of more charitably than Charlie alive.

Somewhere in the 1920’s Charlie had lost his wife. It was never clear to me whether it was due to death, divorce, or just plain carelessness. Charlie’s penultimate adventure was a trip “out west” to seek his fortune—and possibly to escape his mother, the last of the Ironclads. The trip, as so many projects before it, ended in failure…and a severe case of double pneumonia.

It was a weakened but not noticeably deflated Charlie who came to recover at my grandparents’ home. He must have dreaded the inevitable snorts he knew would come from my pragmatic grandfather, Albert. A son of immigrants, a self-made man who left school at 14 to be a pinsetter in a bowling alley, Albert had worked his way up to a seat on the Boston Stock Exchange when that was still an independent entity to be reckoned with. He had little patience with dreamers, claiming that a man could starve faster on dreams than on anything else except maybe tree bark.

Uncle Charlie came up with a succession of Rube Goldberg schemes for helping out around his niece’s property. In those halcyon days, servants were in good supply and Grandpa Albert saw no reason for Charlie to pay his way, especially since Charlie’s help usually ended up costing money—either to implement or to repair.

The high point of Charlie’s home improvement schemes came the day he noticed the two-acre field beside the house. For years it had lain fallow, like an old carpet spread out to air, and nobody had given much thought to it…except Uncle Charlie. He decided it needed some arboreal embellishment, and somehow convinced Albert to fund the purchase of a dozen young apple trees.

“Think of it, Albert: a mass of lovely blossoms every spring, and apples every Fall. Why, we could recoup the cost of the trees in one season if we sold the apples at a roadside stand…”

“And thousands of bees all over the place all summer!” growled my grandfather, unimpressed with the thought of founding a family fortune on apples.

“Well, I could get hives for the bees and we could sell honey, too,” went on Charlie, who never needed the enthusiasm of others to bolster his spirits.

“Or we could get hives from the bees,” grumbled Albert, recalling a recent drama with one of his daughters and a suddenly discovered bee venom allergy.

Thinking to keep Charlie out of his hair, Albert gave in and said he’d buy a dozen young Macintosh trees if Charlie wanted to plant them. Perhaps he thought a healthy outdoor activity would keep Charlie from thinking up any other hare-brained projects, at least for a few weeks. What Albert never really understood was that for Charlie, it wasn’t the job, it was coming up with new and different ways to do it that held the fascination for him. Just how new and different Charlie’s ideas on orchard planting were the family soon found out.

One Saturday in April, Grandpa Albert was sitting on the back porch reading the Wall Street Journal for relaxation after a hard week at work. My grandmother was driving the new housemaid to distraction with conflicting advice about how to hang wet wash. Not having been raised in luxury, Grandmother was still uncomfortable with having ‘help’, although she liked the result.

Suddenly there was a cry from the field. Albert peered suspiciously over his paper and asked, “What’s that dam’ fool brother of yours doing, Marion?” (Albert rarely mentioned his brother-in-law without prefacing his name with some epithet or other.)

The cry came again, this time more clearly: “Pow-DAH!”.

“By the Lord Harry, he’s yelling something about ‘chowder’. Didn’t last night’s supper agree with him?” Albert’s hearing had never recovered from those early years in the bowling alley; fine distinctions between vowels often went astray.

“I tell you, I’d send him home to his mother if she hadn’t threatened to move in with us if I did!” said Albert, rattling his newspaper and returning to his perusal of the state of Consolidated Lobster stock.

Before anyone thought to investigate the meaning of the cries, the whole world seemed to fly apart. A tremendous explosion rocked the house, followed by what sounded like a dozen cows dancing on the roof. The new housemaid stopped screaming just long enough to give her notice.

The dancing cows proved to be great clods of earth and sod, hitting the roof, rolling into the gutters, and dropping down into the back yard. The hens went into fowl hysteria—three of the Leghorns never laid again and one died on the spot.

When the barrage was over, my grandfather just sat in his chair and slowly turned purple as he crumpled his paper into a small, tight, and dirty ball.

“Marion,” he said, “if Charlie hasn’t already killed himself, I intend to finish the job.”

Luckily, dyspepsia overcame Albert before he overcame Charlie. By the time the barnyard fatality appeared at the dinner table that night, relative calm had been restored. Well, at least some of the relatives were calm—my grandmother had retired to her bed with a migraine. She had seen enough of Charlie’s disasters to prefer to sit this one out. Albert and the four children shared the roast chicken with Charlie as he recounted the events leading up to The Great Explosion.

“With the days getting warmer, and some good rain predicted, I didn’t want to take too long getting those young trees into the ground,” he said. “I started digging the first hole, but you know that field has been fallow for decades, and it was hard going, even with a mattock, to make a decent sized hole. And you know, Albert, you gotta give young trees a chance to put out roots easily or they won’t thrive. I read that in the Essex Agricultural Society book about orchards. “

Charlie helped himself to more stuffing and gravy. (Fortunately, the Irish cook was made of sterner stuff than the vanished housemaid, so the family was being fed even if not laundered and tidied.)

“I don’t know why you’d be upset, I was only thinking of protecting your investment in those trees, Albert. And you couldn’t get a dozen neater holes. All we gotta do now is pop in the trees, water them well, and soon you’ll be eating your own apples.”

Charlie’s new and improved method of orchard preparation had had a bit too much of the major ingredient—black powder. He’d dug 12 small, neat holes, packed them with blasting powder, wadded with old newspapers, laid 12 trains of powder back to a central spot, and ignited them. And he’d remembered to yell “Pow-DAH!” to warn everybody before hightailing it for the nearest shed.

“It looks like the original Blasted Heath,” grumbled Albert, observing the remains of his two acre field the next day. “You could put a full-grown blue spruce in any one of those holes.

There not being much one can do with a dozen holes in a field except put something in them, Grandpa Albert decided to carry on with the orchard plans—with a reservation.

“I will hire a professional nurseryman to plant the Mackintoshes,” he announced. “Charlie is not to even look at them until they are well-settled. What guarantee do we have he wouldn’t get one of his lame-brain ideas and plant coconut palms?”

For good measure, Albert had a row of fast-growing white pines planted between the house and the orchard, to cut off the view of Charlie’s Folly. He claimed it gave him hives.

Charlie stayed around just long enough to see that the orchard had taken root, and then quietly died of some ordinary complaint. I am sure that would have annoyed him—he’d much rather have checked out with a diagnosis of something exotic. Something like Tasmanian Rainforest Fever or Mad Badger Disease.

Perhaps it was the excess blasting powder or perhaps it was just the peculiar touch of Uncle Charlie, but that orchard was never quite normal. All but one of the trees were small and oddly stunted, and the fruit—when there was any—apt to be strangely shaped. But the odor of apple blossom on a warm night in May is the sweetest in four counties.

And if you sit very quietly in the orchard when the moon is new, you may glimpse a furtive shadow. It might be a wisp of fog from the marsh, or a silent night bird…or it might be Uncle Charlie, with just one last fantastic sure-fire scheme. But don’t worry—Albert is sure to be not far behind, waving his newspaper and yelling, “Charlie, you so much as touch those dam’ trees and I’ll send you down to stay with your mother!”