Part 1 — The Concrete Slab on My Land
The third concrete truck was leaving my driveway just as I turned onto the lane.
I had to steer my Buick partly into the grassy ditch to give the driver enough room to pass. He raised two fingers from the steering wheel in greeting, and I returned the gesture automatically. That is simply how people acknowledge each other around here.
Only after the truck had disappeared down the road did I begin wondering why a ready-mix truck had been on my property.
I had spent the morning in Bedford getting my eyes examined.
Brian’s pickup was parked behind the barn when I arrived. Two unfamiliar trucks stood beside it.
I got out and started walking toward them, still wearing my good shoes.
It was a considerable distance from the house, past the barn lot, the old loading chute, and the gate Carl had installed in 1989.
The entire path was torn up with tire tracks.
Three heavily loaded concrete trucks will make a mess of soft April ground.
I rounded the corn crib.
And there it was.
A broad slab of freshly poured concrete occupied the middle of my back lot.
Gray, wet, and smooth as the floor of a church.
That morning, the same ground had held nothing more than orchard grass and a killdeer.
My son was kneeling along the far edge, working a steel trowel over the concrete.
Two unfamiliar men were guiding a long-handled float across the middle.
None of them noticed me.
“Brian.”
He lifted his head.
Concrete covered his arms nearly to the elbows, and a streak of it had found its way into his hair.
He smiled as though he were a boy who had finally managed to start a stubborn lawn mower.
“Hey, Mom. You’re back early.”
“What is this?”
“It’s a pad.”
He rose, his knees cracking as he straightened.
Brian was forty-one now, with twenty years of working beneath other people’s farm machinery behind him.
“Thirty by forty. Six inches thick, on account of the lift. For the shop.”
“What shop?”
“My shop.”
His voice was gentle, almost patient, as if I had simply forgotten a conversation we had already had.
“I’ve got a steel building coming in June. Bolts right down to this.”
I examined the concrete.
Metal anchor bolts protruded along its edges, evenly spaced in neat rows like teeth.
“You poured this on my back lot,” I said.
“It’s the only flat piece on the place that isn’t good for anything.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
He dragged his hands down his jeans, managing only to spread the wet concrete around.
“Mom.”
He lowered his voice, speaking as though we were in a waiting room and he did not want to disturb the other patients.
“Come on. It’ll all be mine soon enough anyway.”
I have spent a great deal of time thinking about that sentence.
Brian did not deliver it with anger.
He did not sneer or raise his voice.
That was what made it hurt so badly.
He said it as casually as someone observing that rain was on the way.
To him, it was an ordinary fact.
I was sixty-seven years old.
There was a pot roast thawing in my kitchen.
And my son had just looked across forty feet of wet concrete and spoken as though my remaining life were merely a delay in his plans.
“I see,” I said.
“I’d have asked, but you’d have fretted over it, and the trucks were scheduled, and…”
He raised one hand, then let it fall.
“It’s done now. It’s a good pad, Mom. Dad would’ve liked it.”
“Would he.”
“He’s the one who…”
Brian stopped.
One of the workers called out that the north corner was beginning to set, and Brian turned toward him.
“I’ve got to work this while it’s wet. I’ll come up to the house after.”
Then he knelt beside the concrete again.
I remained where I was for another minute.
Fresh concrete has a particular smell, damp and chalky, like the bottom of a creek after someone has turned over the stones.
Along the distant fence, the killdeer ran back and forth, crying over her disturbed nesting place.
I walked home.
In the kitchen, I took the pot roast out of the sink and returned it to the freezer.
I had lost all interest in preparing supper for anyone.
Brian never came up to the house that evening.
A little after six, I watched his truck leave the lane with the other two pickups following behind.
At eight o’clock, Stacy called.
My daughter-in-law has never been someone who lets a man do all her difficult talking.
She has worked at the pharmacy counter in Paoli for eleven years, and she speaks plainly.
“Evelyn,” she said. “He told me tonight you didn’t know.”
“I did not.”
“He told me in February you’d said it was fine.”
I remembered February very clearly.
Brian had been sitting at my kitchen table, talking about possibly building something behind the barn someday.
I had answered, “We’ll see.”
In our family, those words have always meant no.
“I said we’d see.”
Stacy sighed.
“I’m not calling to make excuses for him,” she said. “I’m calling so you know what’s in that ground before you decide anything.”
“Go ahead.”
She had the receipts laid out in front of her.
I could hear the pages moving.
Twenty-three cubic yards of concrete at $160 per yard came to $3,680.
The gravel base cost another $900.
Reinforcing steel and lumber for the forms totaled $620.
The two brothers from near French Lick, who did concrete finishing on the side, had charged $800 for their labor with the power trowel.
I added the figures on the back of my electric bill as she read them.
“Six thousand dollars,” Stacy said. “Even. That was the tax refund and every bit of what was left of his severance.”
My figures matched hers.
“And the building?”
“He put a thousand down. The rest is on payments.”
She paused.
“Evelyn, he’s been fixing hay balers in our driveway since January. The landlord’s given us a letter. He’s got a man’s combine head sitting in pieces in Dale’s machine shed because he’s got nowhere with a roof. He’s not sleeping.”
Some of that was familiar to me.
The farm equipment dealership in Orleans had been purchased by a larger company after Christmas.
The new owners dismissed four mechanics and retained the two youngest.
Brian had been the best mechanic they employed.
I knew that.
“He should have asked me,” I said.
“He should have. I told him so tonight, and I wasn’t nice.”
She hesitated again.
“What he said to you. About it being his. Did he say that?”
“He did.”
“Oh, Evelyn.”
“Good night, Stacy. Kiss Josie.”
After hanging up, I went into the living room and sat in Carl’s chair.
I rarely sat there.
A neighbor who later heard what had happened asked why I had not ordered Brian to remove the concrete.
I considered that possibility for a long time.
But a concrete slab cannot simply be undone.
Someone would have to bring in a skid loader with a hydraulic hammer, break the slab into pieces, and haul the rubble away.
That would cost money.
It would leave damaged ground behind.
Six thousand dollars belonging to a young family would become a pile of broken concrete somewhere behind a barn.
And Brian would still need a place to work.
More importantly, none of it would change what he had said.
The concrete was not what wounded me most.
I could walk around a concrete slab.
What I could not walk around was the phrase “soon enough.”
As I sat in Carl’s chair, I had to admit something uncomfortable.
Brian had not invented his assumption entirely on his own.
Carl died six years earlier, in October.
His heart stopped in the barn lot.
The gate was standing open, and he had a feed bucket in his hand.
That winter, I sold our cattle.
I rented sixty-one acres of tillable ground to Dale for a fair cash rent.
The back lot, where we had once cut hay, gradually returned to grass.
Whenever anyone asked about it, I said I was too old to bother doing anything with the place.
For six years, Brian had watched his mother live alone on eighty acres, with one kitchen light glowing in the evenings and very little happening outside.
Perhaps it was not surprising that he thought I had finished with the farm.
He had been wrong to speak as though my death were already part of his business plan.
But I had been telling people, in my own way, that my useful years were over.
That night, I opened a drawer in Carl’s desk.
It was a drawer I usually left alone.
Beneath old tractor manuals and a bundle of Farm Bureau calendars held together with a rubber band, I found a nursery catalog from the spring of 1987.
I knew exactly where it would be.
I had put it there myself.
Page fourteen had one corner folded down.
Apple trees.
Thirty-nine years earlier, I had circled six varieties with a blue ballpoint pen.
I was twenty-eight then, with a three-year-old child following me everywhere and more plans than I could count.
In the margin, Carl had written in his square carpenter’s handwriting:
Back lot. When we get to it.
We never did.
There was always a practical reason.
The back lot provided the closest hay.
When we had money, we needed another baler.
When we had time, the money was gone.
Carl would tell me we would get to it, and I knew he meant it.
I was married to that man for forty-one years, and I would not trade a single one of them.
But that night, with the catalog resting across my knees, I realized something.
Two men had now told me to wait.
Carl had promised we would get to the orchard someday.
Brian had spoken as though the farm would be his soon enough.
Both were talking about the same two acres.
And somehow, through all those years, I had never planted a single tree.
I slept soundly that night.
Once I make up my mind, I usually do.
The county extension office opened at eight.
I called at 8:01.
Mr. Pruitt had worked as the extension agent for Orange County for nineteen years.
Purdue University called people in his position educators now, but around here he was still the county extension man.
He had once stood beside Carl in our hay field during an armyworm outbreak and had never once scolded us for waiting too long to call.
“Mrs. Baker,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“I want to put in a garden. A big one. Sweet corn, a cutting garden and an orchard. On about two acres.”
“When are you thinking?”
“This year.”
“It’s the fourteenth of April.”
“I know what day it is, Mr. Pruitt.”
He laughed and said he could visit Thursday.
At nine that Thursday morning, he arrived in a county pickup carrying a soil probe, a white plastic bucket, a three-hundred-foot measuring tape, and a bundle of wooden stakes.
We walked toward the back lot.
Mr. Pruitt was tall and spoke slowly.
He was comfortable with silence, which is something I have always appreciated in a person.
He examined the ruts left by the concrete trucks.
Then he studied the slab.
The concrete had dried from dark wet gray to a pale gray, and someone had covered it with plastic weighted down by boards.
“That’s new,” he said.
“That’s my son’s.”
“Ah.”
He waited.
I offered no further explanation.
“Brian’s a good mechanic. He kept my dad’s old Oliver going about ten years past its time.”
“He is a good mechanic.”
“Where is it you want the garden?”
I pointed around the concrete.
“Here. North of it, east of it and south of it. All the way around but the west side. He’ll need the west side to get a truck and trailer in.”
Mr. Pruitt studied me for a moment.
I suspect he understood far more than I had said.
One reason he had kept that job for nineteen years was his ability to recognize when something was none of his business.
“Let’s see what you’ve got to work with,” he said.
He spent the next hour collecting soil samples.
Fifteen cores came from the proposed garden area and another fifteen from the orchard ground.
Each sample was taken six inches deep, following a zigzag pattern so no single section would dominate the results.
Everything went into the white bucket.
“Purdue doesn’t run the soil itself,” he explained. “I mail it to a lab up north. Eighteen dollars a sample. You’ve got two samples.”
“Thirty-six dollars.”
“You’ll have numbers in about a week. I can tell you now what they’ll say.”
He crumbled a little soil between his fingers.
It was the familiar reddish-brown clay loam of our area, with limestone lying not far beneath.
“You’re sour. This ground hasn’t seen lime since your husband quit cutting hay off it. I’d guess a pH of five-eight, and you want about six and a half for most of what you’re wanting to grow.”
“Can I plant anyway?”
“You can plant anyway. Corn will forgive you. Lime’s slow, though. Put it on this fall and it’ll be working by the time those trees care.”
He then led me to a crusted patch of soil roughly twenty feet northeast of the concrete.
The grass there had turned gray across an area about the size of a bedsheet.
“This is where the trucks washed out their chutes,” he said. “Don’t plant anything here. Not this year, maybe not next. That’s raw cement in the dirt. It’ll burn roots.”
“I wouldn’t have known that.”
“Most don’t.”
He returned to the pickup for his stakes.
They were pointed pieces of oak, an inch by two inches and three feet long, tied together in bundles of twenty-five.
He handed me one bundle while he retrieved the tape.
The stakes were heavier than I expected, perhaps twelve or fifteen pounds.
They smelled of freshly cut oak, sharp and sweet, with a little sourness beneath it.
A roll of orange marking tape stuck out of his shirt pocket, and a three-pound hammer hung from his belt.
“Where do you want your line, Mrs. Baker?”
“At the concrete.”
“Most folks leave a strip. You’ll want to get a mower around a building. A ladder, come time to clean gutters.”
“I know what most folks do.”
He nodded.
“Then that’s where we’ll start.”
He positioned the first stake six inches from the northwest corner of Brian’s slab.
Then he drove it into the spring ground.
The hammer made a flat, hollow knocking sound against the oak.
I had not heard that particular noise in years.
Three blows were enough.
Mr. Pruitt tied a strip of orange tape to the top.
It fluttered in the breeze.
He used the measuring tape to square the corners, the same method Carl had used when laying out the machine shed in 1981.
Thirty feet one direction, forty feet the other, and fifty feet across the diagonal gave a true right angle.
I held the end of the tape and passed him stakes one at a time.
By noon, orange flags marked lines extending north, east, and south of the concrete.
Three sides of a box, with Brian’s slab sitting inside its open western edge.
The marked area covered roughly two acres, excluding the concrete and the sixty feet on the west that I had deliberately left clear for vehicle access.
“Corn on the north,” Mr. Pruitt said, “so it doesn’t shade your flowers. Flowers on the south, where you can see them from the house. Orchard on the east, where the ground rises. Cold air runs downhill. A late frost will settle in the low spots and take your bloom.”
He had just begun winding up his measuring tape when Brian drove through the gate.
My son stepped out slowly.
He left his truck door open and looked from one orange flag to the next.
His eyes followed the lines all the way around the slab.
“Mr. Pruitt,” he said.
“Brian.”
“Mom. What is all this?”
“A garden.”
“A garden.”
Brian approached the nearest corner stake.
It stood six inches from his concrete.
The orange ribbon brushed his knee.
“Right up against my pad.”
“Right up against your pad,” I said. “In my field.”
Mr. Pruitt became suddenly fascinated by the crank on his tape reel.
“I can’t get around the building with that there. I can’t get a ladder up. I can’t…”
Brian pushed his cap farther back on his head.
“You’re doing this to spite me.”
“No.”
“Then what do you call it?”
“I’ve wanted an orchard on this ground since before you could ride a bicycle,” I said. “Your father always said we’d get to it. I quit waiting Monday night. Somebody reminded me I may be running short on soon enough.”
I saw the words reach him.
His expression tightened around the eyes, the same way it had when he was ten and I caught him doing something he knew was wrong.
Then his face closed.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How did you mean it?”
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
“You’ve got the whole west side,” I said. “Sixty feet. Mr. Pruitt says that will turn a pickup and a twenty-foot trailer, and if it won’t, you tell me and I’ll move a stake. I’m not stopping your shop, Brian. I’m planting mine.”
He stood there a little longer.
Then he climbed back into his truck and carefully reversed all the way toward the gate.
He did not disturb a single stake.
Mr. Pruitt lifted the tape reel onto his shoulder.
“Enterprise and GoldRush,” he said, continuing as though our conversation had never happened. “For your apples. Both of them bred up at Purdue. You won’t have to spray for scab, and they bloom near enough together to set each other. I’d put a Liberty in for a third. There’s a nursery over by Salem that might still have bare-root stock in the cooler, if you call today.”
“I’ll call today.”
“I thought you might.”
And for the first time in nearly forty years, my orchard was no longer something I was waiting for.
It was something I was actually going to plant.
Part 2 — The Orchard That Changed Everything
Dale came on Saturday to plow the ground for my corn and flowers.
He turned over an acre of old sod.
When I asked what I owed him, he said he would accept a dozen ears of sweet corn each week once the crop was ready.
He refused to take money.
His wife, Kim, sent a jar of pickled beets along with him.
I never did find out why she chose beets.
I suspect she had heard what was happening on the Baker farm and wanted to contribute something.
By Sunday, practically everyone at church knew about my plans.
The apple trees arrived the following Thursday.
There were twelve altogether.
Five Enterprise.
Five GoldRush.
Two Liberty.
They were bare-root trees, their roots wrapped in damp newspaper and plastic in the trunk of my Buick.
At thirty-two dollars apiece, the bill came to $384.
I wrote the check without hesitation.
A bare-root apple tree does not look particularly promising.
Mine resembled twelve switches someone might have cut for driving cattle.
Each was about as thick as my thumb and five feet tall, with a fistful of brown roots at the bottom.
Not one carried a leaf.
I was halfway through digging the planting holes when the school bus stopped at the end of my lane.
Josie stayed with me on Thursdays because Stacy worked until seven.
My granddaughter came running across the barn lot, her backpack bouncing against her shoulders.
She stopped beside the first orange stake as though it marked a fence.
“Grandma. What are the flags for?”
“That’s where the garden goes.”
“What are the sticks?”
“Those are apple trees.”
She looked at the bundle of slender trees resting in the shade, their roots tucked inside a damp feed sack.
Then she looked at me.
At nine years old, Josie had inherited Carl’s ears and Stacy’s habit of studying a person until she was satisfied she had been told the truth.
“They’re dead,” she said.
“They’re asleep. You plant them asleep. They wake up in the ground.”
“How long till there’s apples?”
That was the same question I had been asking myself all week.
“Four years,” I said. “Maybe five.”
She counted on her fingers.
“I’ll be thirteen.”
“You will.”
“How old will you be?”
“Seventy-one.”
“That’s not that old,” she said, and picked up the spade.
I had to turn my face toward the fence for a moment.
We planted all twelve trees before dark.
I dug the holes while Josie held the slender trunks upright.
Then I worked the loosened soil around the roots with my hands.
Mr. Pruitt had explained the proper method.
The hole should be wide rather than unnecessarily deep, with the roots spread outward like fingers.
The graft union, the small knot where the apple variety joined its rootstock, needed to remain two or three inches above the soil.
Otherwise, the tree might grow from the rootstock instead.
Josie found that fascinating.
“It forgets?”
“It turns into whatever the root was. Some old crab.”
“Then we won’t let it.”
She tied orange ribbons to the trees so we could locate them easily in the surrounding grass.
When we reached the final Liberty tree, planted at the highest point of the rise, she tied on two ribbons instead of one.
“That one’s Grandpa’s,” she said. “So he gets some.”
Josie had been three when Carl died.
I doubted she could truly remember him.
She knew him through the photograph on my refrigerator and through the way our family still fell silent whenever a red Farmall tractor passed on the road.
“That one’s Grandpa’s,” I agreed.
I pressed the soil around the little tree with the heel of my hand.
And I kept pressing long after the roots were properly covered.
When I finally straightened, I noticed Brian’s truck parked near the gate.
The engine was off.
I had no idea how long he had been watching.
He was looking at his daughter standing among the newly planted trees, orange ribbons tangled around her fingers.
From that distance, I could not tell what he was thinking.
I decided not to try.
Brian lifted one hand.
Josie waved her entire arm.
He did not come over.
The rest of the summer passed in the way farming summers always do.
There is too much happening while you are living through one, and somehow it seems very short once you begin telling the story.
I planted my first sweet corn on May ninth.
Carl’s old soil thermometer showed sixty degrees two inches below the surface.
The variety was Peaches and Cream.
I planted it in a block four rows wide rather than one long row.
Corn depends on wind for pollination, and a single row can lose too much pollen to the surrounding countryside.
Two weeks later, I planted another block.
Two weeks after that came Silver Queen.
I wanted the ears to ripen in stages instead of having everything ready on the same Tuesday.
By the middle of May, I was planting the cutting garden.
Mostly zinnias, because they are forgiving flowers.
I added cosmos, sunflowers along the back, and a row of gladiolus for funerals.
That last purpose may sound gloomy, but it really is not.
There is nearly always someone who could use flowers.
In June, Brian’s steel building arrived.
A flatbed delivered bundles of red steel and white trim.
Brian and the two brothers from French Lick spent nine days putting it together.
I will give him credit.
It was a handsome building.
The concrete foundation was perfectly level, and the walls stood straight and square.
But now the shop was surrounded on three sides by orange stakes.
On the north, corn had reached knee height.
On the south, the first zinnias were beginning to bud.
Brian never pulled up a single stake.
When he installed the gutters, he positioned his ladder on the very edge of his own concrete rather than stepping onto my marked garden ground.
He did not complain.
Neither did I.
In July, visitors began arriving.
Mr. Pruitt came first.
One Tuesday morning, he brought four girls from the local 4-H garden club.
He wanted to show them how to cut zinnias so they would last in a vase.
You cut early, while the morning dew is still on the flowers, and place the stems directly into water.
The girls returned every Tuesday afterward.
They filled buckets with flowers and carried them to the nursing home on the west side of town.
One of the aides told me about a resident who had not spoken since Easter.
He spent an entire afternoon holding one of our sunflowers in his lap.
Then people from church started coming.
Word had spread that the sweet corn was tasseling.
Some drove out simply to see how the garden was progressing.
Donna from the choir brought her mother, who was ninety and had grown up four miles away.
The older woman stood at the edge of the orchard and said, “Somebody finally put trees on the Baker back lot.”
She sounded almost as though she had been waiting for those trees herself.
Every visitor entered the same way.
They drove down my lane, past my barn, through the gate Carl had installed, and parked on the sixty feet of gravel I had left open in front of Brian’s shop.
By then, his business was operating.
He had put a hand-painted sign beside the road.
A baler occupied one bay, while the combine head he had been repairing sat in the other.
Most mornings, farmers began arriving around seven.
I had not marked out my garden to embarrass my son.
But I could see the effect it was having.
Anyone coming to his shop had to pass a quarter acre of flowers.
Customers would climb out of their trucks, look around, and remark on the garden.
“Your mother’s got this place looking like something.”
“I didn’t know Evelyn was still farming.”
One day, I overheard a conversation while kneeling among the gladiolus, pulling weeds.
A farmer from near Hardinsburg was speaking to Brian.
“Nice spot you’ve got yourself here, Brian. This your place?”
I kept my head down.
There was a pause.
Then my son answered.
“It’s my mother’s,” Brian said. “I’m just on it.”
I spent the next few minutes pulling weeds with unusual care.
The Peaches and Cream corn ripened on the final day of July.
I peeled back the husk on an ear and pressed my thumbnail into one kernel.
Milky juice appeared.
It was ready.
A week earlier, Brian had come to my door with a suggestion.
“Coons will strip it the night before you pick if you don’t fence it. I’ve got a charger.”
He installed two strands of electric wire around the corn patch, one six inches above the ground and the other twelve.
The charger ran from his shop.
That had been his idea entirely.
I set up a card table at the end of the lane.
Beside a handwritten sign, I placed Carl’s old coffee can.
People could take a dozen ears and leave whatever money they wished for the food pantry.
Two days later, the corn was gone.
The coffee can contained $212.
On Sunday, August second, I invited my family for supper.
Only Brian, Stacy, and Josie.
Some conversations are better held around a small table.
I made pot roast.
It was the same roast I had returned to the freezer on that awful afternoon in April.
Alongside it, I served green beans cooked with bacon, sliced tomatoes, and twenty-four ears of corn that had been growing on their stalks less than forty minutes earlier.
In the middle of the table stood a quart jar filled with zinnias.
Josie had cut and arranged them herself, placing the shortest stems in front and the taller ones behind.
We said grace.
Brian led the prayer his father had always used.
His voice remained steady.
For a while, supper was quiet.
Fresh corn has a way of keeping people from talking, because eating it takes both hands and most of your attention.
Josie had butter smeared nearly to her ears.
Then she set down her cob and wiped her hands on her shorts.
She knew perfectly well she was not supposed to do that.
“Daddy, whose farm is this?”
Stacy stopped moving her fork.
“Why do you ask, honey?” Brian said.
“Because Emma at 4-H said it’s Grandma’s farm. But the man with the green tractor said, ‘Tell your dad he’s got a nice place.’ And they can’t both be right.”
She looked from her father to me.
“So whose is it?”
Nobody had coached her to ask.
I would never have used my granddaughter that way.
She was simply a child who wanted the facts to make sense.
Unfortunately for the adults, she had chosen the precise moment when we had all become comfortable avoiding the subject.
Brian placed his corn cob on his plate.
He carefully lined it up with the edge, just as he always lined up his wrenches.
Every instinct I had as his mother urged me to rescue him.
I wanted to tell Josie that it was the family farm and encourage her to finish her beans.
Instead, I kept my hands in my lap.
This was Brian’s question to answer.
He looked directly at his daughter.
“It’s Grandma’s,” he said. “All eighty acres. It was hers and your grandpa’s together, and since he died it’s hers. Every fence post.”
“Then how come your shop’s on it?”
“Because I put it there without asking her.”
Josie’s eyes widened.
In her world, doing something that important without permission was almost unimaginable.
“You didn’t ask?”
“No, ma’am. I did not.”
Brian turned toward me.
I could see how difficult it was for him to do it.
“And I said something to your grandma the day I poured it that I’ve been ashamed of ever since. I told her it would all be mine soon enough.”
“What’s that mean?” Josie said.
“It means I talked like I was waiting on her to be gone.”
His voice grew rough.
He stopped briefly, gathering himself.
“And I’m not. Mom, I’m not waiting on anything. I lost my job, and I was scared, and I had a letter from the landlord and nowhere to put a man’s combine. I told myself you were through with this place so I wouldn’t have to ask you for it. Because if I asked, you might say no. And then where was I?”
The room became so quiet that I could hear the refrigerator running.
“I wasn’t through with it,” I said.
“I know that now. I’ve got two acres of proof I have to walk through every morning.”
Stacy gave a watery laugh.
So did I.
“I’ll tell you the truth, though,” I said. “I was close to through. You weren’t wrong about that part. I’d said so myself for six years. What you were wrong about was who gets to say it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you might have asked. I’d have fretted. Then I’d have said yes.”
Brian lowered his elbows onto the table and covered his face with his hands.
For a moment, he remained like that.
A grown man with butter from the corn still shining on his wrists.
Then he lifted his head.
“Dad told me I could build back there.”
I had not expected those words.
And suddenly, the argument over my back lot was no longer only between Brian and me.
Part 3 — A Dollar a Month and Twelve Apple Trees
I sat looking at Brian.
He continued.
“The summer before he died. We were fixing the gate. He said, ‘When you get tired of working for other men, put your shop on the back lot. It’s the only flat piece that isn’t worth farming.’ I’ve carried that around six years, Mom. I thought it was settled. I thought it was mine to do.”
I needed a moment to take that in.
Carl had promised our son a place for his future workshop.
And Brian had held on to that promise through six difficult years.
Then I stood and walked to Carl’s desk.
I opened the drawer and retrieved the nursery catalog from 1987.
When I returned, I opened it to page fourteen and placed it beside Brian’s plate.
He looked at the circled apple trees.
Then he read the words written in the margin.
Back lot. When we get to it.
“That’s Dad’s writing.”
“It is.”
“He promised it to you.”
“He promised it to both of us,” I said. “That was your father all over. He never could tell anybody he loved no. He’d have given that back lot to four different people and then stood out there scratching his head, wondering where to put them.”
Brian laughed.
Then the laughter disappeared, and he pressed the back of his wrist against his eyes.
Josie climbed down from her chair.
She walked around the table and leaned quietly against her father’s arm.
She said nothing.
Sometimes that is the kindest thing a child can do.
“Well,” I said, once I trusted my voice. “It turns out there was room.”
Brian was the one who raised the subject of rent.
I want to make that clear.
“I ought to be paying you,” he said. “For the ground. I should have been from the first day. I can’t pay much yet. The building note’s three hundred a month, and I’m only just…”
“A dollar,” I said.
“Mom.”
“A dollar a month. And one day’s work. First Saturday of every month, seven o’clock, my list and not yours.”
“That’s not rent. That’s charity.”
“It is not. Have you seen my list?”
Stacy laughed out loud.
“You’ll earn it,” I said. “I’ve got a deer fence to go around twelve apple trees before the bucks start rubbing in September. I’ve got four ton of lime to spread in October. I’ve got a gate your father hung in 1989 that drags. And every month you’ll hand me a dollar bill, in person, at this table, so that neither one of us forgets whose farm you’re on. Or that you’re welcome on it.”
Brian studied me for a long moment.
Then he stood and extended his hand across the pot roast.
I took it.
His hand was now twice the size of mine, hard and rough from years of mechanical work.
Across his thumb ran a scar from the first lawn mower engine he had ever taken apart.
He had been eleven, working on our back porch.
We shook hands.
“Josie’s the witness,” Stacy said.
“I’m the witness,” Josie announced solemnly.
Then she looked puzzled.
“What’s a witness?”
“It means you saw it,” I told her, “and you’ll remember.”
Brian opened his wallet.
He had a five-dollar bill and several ones.
He selected a single dollar, laid it beside my plate, and smoothed it flat against the table.
“August,” he said.
I carried the bill to the windowsill and dropped it into Carl’s old coffee can.
It was the same can I had used for the sweet corn donations.
The day before, I had delivered the $212 to the food pantry, so the can was empty.
A dollar bill makes no noise when it falls into an empty coffee can.
Somehow, I heard it anyway.
Then I cut the pie.
On the first Saturday of September, Brian arrived at my door ten minutes before seven.
We spent the day building protective fences around the apple trees.
Each tree received a ring of woven wire five feet high, supported by steel posts.
Brian drove the posts.
I held the wire in place.
We worked until four in the afternoon.
At breakfast, I had told him about one more change I planned to make.
I was moving the garden boundary back four feet along all three sides of his workshop.
That would leave him enough space to mow around the building and set up a ladder to reach the gutters.
Around noon, without my having to remind him, he began removing the orange stakes.
One by one, he pulled them from the ground and drove them back in four feet farther out.
The hammer made that same flat, hollow knocking sound.
He tied the orange ribbons back onto every stake himself.
“Most folks leave a strip,” I said.
“That’s what I hear.”
In October, we spread lime across the garden ground.
Two tons per acre, following Mr. Pruitt’s instructions.
In November, Brian rehung the gate Carl had installed back in 1989.
And on the first Saturday of every month, Brian brings me another dollar bill.
He hands it to me in person at the kitchen table.
I put it in Carl’s coffee can.
There are four dollars in it now.
I have not decided what I am saving them for.
Josie believes they should go toward apples.
By winter, each of my twelve trees had a ring of mulch around its base.
Every trunk wore a white plastic guard to protect it from rabbits.
Twelve little trees standing inside twelve wire cages.
They still did not look particularly impressive.
But on the last warm afternoon before Thanksgiving, I walked out to the orchard.
The lowering sun cast a reddish light across the harvested cornfield.
I stopped beside the Liberty tree at the top of the rise.
The one with two orange ribbons.
Carl’s tree.
I leaned closer.
Along its slender branches were tiny brown buds, no bigger than grains of wheat.
They were already formed, tightly closed, waiting through the winter.
Next year’s leaves.
Already there.
I have decided that waiting is not always a bad thing.
It depends on who asks you to wait.
And whether you have agreed to it.
Behind me, I could hear an air wrench working inside Brian’s shop.
A radio played.
Above both sounds, my son was whistling slightly off-key.
Carl used to whistle that way too.
I will be seventy-one when those apple trees begin producing fruit.
Josie says seventy-one is not very old.
I intend to be standing right there when the first apples are ready to pick.
