Grandma Buried Something Under the Apple Tree and Made Me Promise Not to Dig

When I was six, I watched my grandmother bury a box under the apple tree in her backyard at night, and then she made me swear -- holding both my hands, looking right into my face -- that I would never, ever dig it up. She said, as long as it sleeps, we are all right. And I promised, the way you promise things at six, without understanding, just wanting the serious moment to be over so I could go back inside.

That apple tree was the center of my grandmother's whole world. She talked to it. She would not let anyone pick the apples for pie -- they had to fall on their own, and only the fallen ones could be used, and the rest rotted where they lay and she would not have them touched. She said the tree kept the bad luck sleeping, and the box under it kept the tree happy, and between the two of them, the family was safe. She said this the way other grandmothers said wash your hands. Just a fact of keeping a household.

My family treated her, gently, as a superstitious old woman who had been through hard times and come out of them with a lot of odd little rituals. And there had been hard times. Her mother and two of her sisters had all died young, before my grandmother was even grown, in a run of tragedy so steep that the family in the old country had apparently decided the line was cursed. My grandmother was the one who got out, who came here, who lived to be old. She was the survivor, and survivors, my mother said, are allowed their rituals.

My grandmother lived to ninety-six. And in all those years, through every family barbecue and every autumn, that box stayed under the apple tree, and nobody dug it up, partly out of respect and partly because, honestly, it is a little unnerving to dig up something an old woman swore would end the world.

She died in October, with apples on the ground. And after the funeral, I could not stop thinking about the box. I was the only one who had watched her bury it. I was the one who had promised. And I told myself all the reasonable things -- that it was a dead woman's harmless secret, that I should leave it, that a promise is a promise -- and then one gray afternoon when the house was empty I got a spade and I went out to the apple tree and I broke my word.

It was not deep. A foot, maybe. The box was a small tin, rusted through at the corners, and inside, wrapped in oilcloth that had mostly held, were three things.

A photograph of three young women, arms linked, squinting into old sunlight. Her mother and her two dead sisters, I am sure of it, though I have no other picture of them to compare. A lock of dark hair, tied with thread. And a folded paper, brittle, covered in her handwriting, in the language of the old country, which I do not read.

I had it translated by a woman at a cultural center who did it while I waited, reading it aloud slowly. It was not a spell. It was not a curse. It was a letter my grandmother had written to her mother and her sisters, the year she buried the box, which the dates told me was the year she turned forty -- older, by then, than any of the three of them had lived to be.

She wrote that she was sorry she had lived when they had not. She wrote that she carried them every day and that the guilt of surviving was a weight she could not put down. And she wrote -- this is the part -- that she was burying them here, under a young apple tree, so that they would have somewhere to rest in this new country so far from their graves, and that she was planting the tree over them so something would grow from them, and that as long as the tree lived, she would feel that they were with her, and safe, and not lost, and that this, she wrote, is the only way I know to keep the bad luck sleeping -- to give my grief a place to lie down, so it does not follow me through the house.

That was the curse. That was the whole curse. Not a hex from the old country. A woman's survivor's guilt, so heavy she had to bury it under a tree and tend it like a grave for fifty-six years, and call it keeping the family safe, because that was easier than saying, I have never forgiven myself for being the one who got to grow old.

I reburied the box. Deeper this time, and gently, with the photograph and the hair and the letter wrapped back in what was left of the oilcloth. I am sorry I broke my promise, but I am not sorry I know now. The tree is still there. This past autumn I made a pie from the fallen apples, only the fallen ones, and I did not let anyone help me pick them up.