Snake Oil For Sale

The harvest was over. The farm had experienced its most productive year ever. Fruits and vegetables were in abundance and the year 1972 proved to be the most fertile ever for farmers in the Appalachians of Central Pennsylvania.

Esther had done it all herself– she planted, pulled, hoed and watered her heart out all summer long and it showed in her crops.

Back in the spring when she was planting and prepping, she wondered if she could do it all alone, without her husband’s help and expertise. She had. She didn’t need a man around the house and farm after all.

She didn’t know what to do with so much crop. She had just finished putting the last of the potato harvest in a storage area, a cave like structure dug in the side of a hill, when it occurred to her-- she hadn’t even started making apple cider. That was her favorite chore at harvest time. Her apple orchard had produced some of juiciest fruits her false teeth had ever bit into that year. She was going to make a fortune selling her "secret cider" at the local market in town.

Esther had been depressed for a long time following the death of her husband in a car accident. It felt good to be back in the swing of life, participating in the cycle of nature and the harvest again.

Much hard manual labor went into her successful crop. Day after day she bent over in the hot sun to pull weeds. She not only fertilized her fruits and vegetables with organic manure, but she purchased the newest chemical fertilizers available in Burpee’s garden catalog. The double shot of growth boosters combined with the top soil on Stone Creek Ridge resulted in potatoes the size of her breasts and pumpkins bigger than hula hoops.

The unusually wet growing season in 1972 was odd. Esther knew too much had been offered by the gods of the earth that year. She had a green thumb, yes, but this was absolutely out of control! It seemed to Esther that all that pain had seeped out of her and found its way into the soil, like a special form of fertilizing manure.

Her husband built the farm and house at the top of the Appalachian mountain known as Stone Creek Ridge in 1923. He built it for them. Life was as pure and simple as maple syrup when George and Esther married and built their farm. Children came along as quickly as Spring radishes in 1923 when their life as husband and wife began.

The harvest in 1972 was nothing like the harvests in the late 1920s. The home grown fruits and vegetables were not a necessity like they once were. Furthermore, the new fertilizers created vegetables that were too pretty to eat. "If only we had this much food when the children were small George and I would have had a happy marriage." Esther said to herself as she adored nature’s bounty. "But you couldn’t stop drinking!." she said to her dead husband who she knew was standing behind her in the form of a ghost overlooking the unusually successful harvest.

George and Esther fertilized their children in the same style in which they grew crops. The couple learned to make their own wine, moonshine and hard cider. Making babies in the farmhouse was all the couple had to do on long winter months on the ridge. Their sex was far from civil or romantic. They treated it like the spring planting season. With a good feel from their hard cider it was not difficult to get another seed to germinate in Esther’s belly every ten months.

Esther loved George despite the fact that he abused her. She was torn between a strong back hand and a man hoe that could remove all the weeds of a broken woman’s heart. And the children– she had so many children now who needed her. She drank glass after glass of hard cider, closed her eyes night after night, and allowed the master to find fertile ground in which to lay his forbidden seeds.

Laughter filled the sixteen rooms in the farmhouse during those first years of life as husband and wife. Children seemed to come along in routine in the same manner that the seasons changed. Esther delivered a few of her kids alone, without the assistance of a midwife— the children who were born during winter months on Stone Creek Ridge held a special place in Esther’s heart. Those children were her most beloved, they were the ones who were sweetest to her– those were the kids that clung to her bosom like bees to a honeysuckle bush.

But the farm was empty now. All the children but one had gone and started lives of their own. Her youngest son remained on the farm, at her pleading.

He was born during the great January blizzard.

She gave her son and his new wife Lou the farmhouse. She purchased a mobile home and parked it right smack in the middle of her apple orchard and waited.

She waited for her son and his new wife to finish planting the garden on Stone Creek Ridge. She waited for the seed that would produce her dream crop, a grandson to whom she could pass on the soul of her dead husband onto. She carried his soul with her like Johnny Appleseed.

Dropping a little of his being here and there, freeing him from the hell which consumed his confused dead addicted soul. But the true heart of his soul’s seed was waiting for something special. She knew that, and she had to wait patiently for his transition to be complete.

Esther wondered how long it would take for the spirit in that old farm house to take hold of her son and his wife like it had her when she and George first started a family. But she was ready this time. She was ready for the chaos and abuse which would surely soon follow.

She was going to send the curse back to its roots once and for all. The spirit of her husband George was far too strong for one person, even a strong farmer, to handle all alone. Esther planned to scatter the seed of the demon among everyone who lived in the local farming villages. She was not going to permit it to destroy the life of her youngest son and his family. Besides, why should Esther and her family be the only ones who are persecuted by the gods in this manner, just because they were the farmers!

She put twelve bushels of apples in her living room and plugged in her electric cider maker.
She also pulled out a large bundle of her secret spice which she stored in the abandoned barn and laid it on the sofa in the living room while she washed out the bottles for her cider.
The spice was the secret ingredient which made her apple cider so special to shoppers at the local market. The spice was grown for her by her youngest son, in a flower bed, located under the window outside the farm’s master bedroom.

She didn’t know what it was when she first stumbled upon it. She almost dug the tall green plants up by mistake, assuming they were weeds. "Leave those alone, mom!" cried her son from the farmhouse widow with a Budweiser in his hand on the Spring morning when she found the illegal plants. "That’s pot, mom!" Her son’s new wife came to the window with the sheets wrapped around her naked breasts and waved to her from the bedroom.

"Go back to what you were doing and make me my grandchildren!" demanded Esther as she winked at her new daughter-in-law and began to study the plants.

She touched the leaves of the green seedlings and felt a rush run up her arm. The deep florescent green color of the plants leaves intrigued her. She couldn’t stop fantasizing about the possibilities of the plant. "I wonder what would happen if I mixed some of that weed with my apple cider." Esther thought to herself. She never imagined that the idea of pot infused cider would make her famous in town.

The unusual green shrub grew like magic with the help of Burpee’s miracle 10-15-30 fertilizer mix. Her son didn’t know that she was the one adding the special green thumb touch to his wacky weed as it grew in the summer of 1972. But the plants grew as high as the farmhouse, and even the deer who nibbled on its leaves seemed to be as graceful as swans after a feast.
Esther knew these plants were magic, and was going to use them to perform the final exorcism on her farmland and free herself from the haunting of her dead husband George.

With the twelve bushels of apples waiting patiently for squeezing in her livingroom she grabbed a large branch of the special crop and plucked off the buds that reminded her of her womanhood. She placed them in a large pot of boiling water. Residue in the form of an oil was extracted from the boiling technique, and Ester mixed seven tablespoon fulls of the marijuana juice in each half-gallon of her cider.

Nobody complained about the high price she demanded for her cider. Her annual supply usually sold out in a day, and she had already received pre-orders for 50 gallons.

Her grandson Charlie was there to help her make cider. She made him to all the work with the electric juice extractor while she poured in the table spoons of extracted mind manipulating oil.

"Time for a break!" she insisted to her grandson. "Let me make you some toast and molasses." as she kissed his forehead in the spot along his hairline where a cow-lick grew madly.
She spread a little molasses and just a dab of her miracle snake oil on the bread.

"Take this, eat this, and do this in memory of me." she said to her special grand child as she prepared him for his life as farmer George.