The Garden Beside My Son’s Concrete
The third ready-mix truck was coming out of my lane when I turned in.
I had to pull my Buick half into the ditch grass to let him by. The driver lifted two fingers off the wheel, and I lifted two back, because that is manners. Only after he had gone did I wonder what a concrete truck was doing on my farm.
I had been in Bedford all morning having my eyes checked.
Brian’s truck was parked behind the barn. So were two others I did not know.
I walked back in my good shoes. It is a fair way, past the barn lot and the old loading chute and
through the gate Carl hung in 1989, and the ground was cut up the whole length of it. Three loaded trucks will do that to April ground.
Then I came around the corn crib and saw it.
A slab. Gray and wet and flat as a church floor, sitting in the middle of my back lot, where there had been nothing that morning but orchard grass and a killdeer.
My son was on his knees at the far edge of it with a steel trowel. Two men I did not know were
running a float over the middle on a long handle. Nobody looked up.
“Brian.”
He looked up then. He had concrete to the elbows and a streak of it in his hair, and he smiled at
me like a boy who has finally got the mower running.
“Hey, Mom. You’re back early.”
“What is this?”
“It’s a pad.” He stood, and his knees cracked, because he is forty-one now and has spent twenty
years under other people’s machinery. “Thirty by forty. Six inches thick, on account of the lift. For the shop.”
“What shop?”
“My shop.” He said it gently, as if I had forgotten something he’d told me. “I’ve got a steel building coming in June. Bolts right down to this.”
I looked at the pad. Along the edges there were bolts standing up out of the wet concrete, set in a row, neat as 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 wiped his hands down his jeans, which did nothing for either.
“Mom.” Brian lowered his voice, the way you do with somebody in a waiting room. “Come on. It’ll all be mine soon enough anyway.”
I want to tell you what that sentence did, because he did not say it mean. That was the worst of it.
He said it the way you would mention rain was coming. Kindly. As a fact we both knew.
I was sixty-seven years old. I had a pot roast thawing in the icebox.
And my son had looked across forty feet of wet concrete and seen a woman who was mostly a
matter of time.
“I see,” I said.
“I’d have asked, but you’d have fretted over it, and the trucks were scheduled, and…” He lifted a
hand and let it drop. “It’s done now. It’s a good pad, Mom. Dad would’ve liked it.”
“Would he.”
“He’s the one who…” He stopped. One of the men called something about the north corner going
off, and Brian looked over his shoulder. “I’ve got to work this while it’s wet. I’ll come up to the house after.”
He got back down on his knees.
I stood there a minute longer. The concrete had a smell, wet and chalky, like a creek bed turned over. The killdeer was running along the far fence, crying about her nest.
Then I walked back up to the house, and I took the pot roast out of the sink and put it back in
the freezer, because I was not going to be cooking for anybody.
He did not come up to the house after. I watched his truck go down the lane a little past six, with the two others behind it.
Stacy called at eight.
I will say this for my daughter-in-law: she does not hide behind a man. She has worked the pharmacy counter in Paoli for eleven years.
“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.”
In February Brian had sat at my kitchen table and said he was thinking about putting something up out back someday, and I had said, “We’ll see,” which in this family has always meant no.
“I said we’d see.”
Stacy let out her breath.
“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 in front of her. I could hear the paper. Twenty-three yards of concrete at a hundred and sixty dollars a yard: three thousand six hundred and eighty. Gravel for the base, nine
hundred. Rebar and form lumber, six hundred twenty. And eight hundred to the two men with the power trowel, who were brothers from over by French Lick and did flatwork on the side.
“Six thousand dollars,” Stacy said. “Even. That was the tax refund and every bit of what was left of
his severance.”
I had done the adding along with her on the back of the electric bill. It came out even.
“And the building?”
“He put a thousand down. The rest is on payments.” She was quiet a second. “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.”
I knew some of that. I knew the implement dealer in Orleans had sold to a bigger outfit after Christmas, and the bigger outfit had let four mechanics go and kept the two youngest. I knew
Brian was the best one they’d had.
“He should have asked me,” I said.
“He should have. I told him so tonight, and I wasn’t nice.” She stopped. “What he said to you.
About it being his. Did he say that?”
“He did.”
“Oh, Evelyn.”
“Good night, Stacy. Kiss Josie.”
I hung up and sat down in Carl’s chair, which I do not often do.
A neighbor of mine heard this story and said, “Well, it was your ground. Why didn’t you just make
him tear it out?”
I thought about it for a good hour.
But concrete doesn’t un-pour. You break it up with a hammer on a skid loader and haul it off in
chunks, and you pay a man to do that, and when he’s done you have a hole, and six thousand dollars of a young family’s money is in a pile behind somebody’s barn. And my granddaughter’s father still has nowhere to work.
And none of it would touch the sentence.
The pad was not the injury. I could walk around a pad. What I could not walk around was “soon enough.”
Because here is the part I had to sit in that chair and admit. He had not gotten the notion out of thin air.
Carl died six years ago in October. His heart, in the barn lot, with the gate open and a feed
bucket in his hand. I sold the cows that winter. I rented the tillable ground to Dale, sixty-one acres at a fair cash rent, and I let the back lot go to grass, and I told anybody who asked that I was
too old to fool with it.
For six years my son had watched his mother keep one kitchen light on in the middle of eighty acres and do nothing. Is it any wonder he thought I was through?
He was wrong to say it. But I had been saying a version of it myself.
There is a drawer in Carl’s desk that I don’t go in. That night I went in it.
Under the tractor manuals and a rubber-banded stack of Farm Bureau calendars was a nursery
catalog from the spring of 1987. I knew it would be there. I had put it there myself.
The corner of page fourteen was turned down. Apple trees. I had circled six of them in blue ballpoint, thirty-nine years ago, when I was a girl of twenty-eight with a three-year-old hanging on
my leg and a head full of plans.
In the margin, in Carl’s square carpenter’s hand, it said: Back lot. When we get to it.
We never got to it. There was always a reason, and they were good reasons. The back lot was the
only close hay. The year we had money we needed a baler, and the year we had time we had no money. “We’ll get to it, Evie,” he’d say, and he meant it every time.
Forty-one years I was married to that man, and I do not hold one day of it against him.
But I sat there with that catalog in my lap and understood that I had been told to wait by two men now. One of them said, “We’ll get to it.” The other said, “Soon enough.”
And both of them had been talking about the same two acres.
I slept fine. I had made up my mind, and I have always slept well once that’s done.
The extension office opens at eight. I called at one minute after.
Mr. Pruitt has been the county extension man in Orange County for nineteen years. Purdue calls him
an educator now, but nobody around here does. He stood in our hay field with Carl the summer the armyworms came through and did not once say, “You should have called sooner.”
“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. He said he could come Thursday.
He came Thursday at nine in a county pickup with a soil probe, a white plastic bucket, a three-hundred-foot tape on a reel, and a bundle of wooden stakes in the bed.
We walked back together. He is a tall, slow-talking man who does not fill a silence just because one is available. He looked at the ruts. He looked at the slab, which had gone from wet gray to a pale dry gray and had a sheet of plastic over it weighted down with boards.
“That’s new,” he said.
“That’s my son’s.”
“Ah.” He waited. I did not add anything. “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?”
“Here.” I pointed. “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 looked at me for a moment. I believe he understood the whole thing right then, and I
believe the reason he has lasted nineteen years in that job is that he didn’t say one word about it.
“Let’s see what you’ve got to work with,” he said.
He pulled soil for an hour. Fifteen cores for the garden ground and fifteen for the orchard, six
inches deep, zigzagging so he didn’t favor any one spot, every core into the plastic bucket.
“Purdue doesn’t run the soil itself,” he said. “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 core in his fingers. It was the red-brown clay loam we have here, with the limestone not far under it. “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.”
Then he walked me to a place twenty feet off the northeast corner of the slab, where the grass
had gone gray and crusted in a patch 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 went back to the truck for the stakes.
They were oak, an inch by two, three feet long, sawn to a point, twenty-five to the bundle and tied with twine. He handed me the bundle while he got the tape. It was heavier than I expected, twelve or fifteen pounds, and it smelled like a lumberyard: sharp and sweet and a little sour, the way fresh
oak does. He had a roll of orange flagging tape in his shirt pocket and a three-pound hammer hung in his belt loop.
“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 slowly.
“Then that’s where we’ll start,” he said, and he set the point of the first stake six inches off the
northwest corner of my son’s concrete and drove it.
I had not heard that sound in years. A hammer on an oak stake going into spring ground is a flat, hollow knock, like somebody at the door of an empty house. Three licks and it was in. He
tore off a foot of orange tape and tied it at the top, and it lifted in the breeze.
He squared the corners with nothing but the tape. Thirty feet down one side, forty down the other, and if the line between them measures fifty you’ve got a true corner. Carl laid out the
machine shed the same way in 1981. I held the dumb end of the tape, and I stood there in my straw hat with the bundle of stakes on my arm, handing them over one at a time like a nurse.
By noon there was a line of orange running north from the slab, and another running east, and
another south. A box around three sides of Brian’s pad, with the pad sitting in the open mouth of it.
Two acres, less the slab and less sixty feet on the west I had told him to leave clear.
“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 was winding the tape when Brian’s truck came through the gate.
My son got out slowly. He stood with the truck door open and looked at the stakes, turning his head to follow the line of them all the way around.
“Mr. Pruitt,” he said.
“Brian.”
“Mom. What is all this?”
“A garden.”
“A garden.” He walked to the corner stake, the one six inches off his concrete, and looked down at it. The orange tape flapped against his knee. “Right up against my pad.”
“Right up against your pad,” I said. “In my field.”
Mr. Pruitt had become very interested in 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 back. “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.”
It went into him. I watched it go. His face did what it used to do when he was ten and I had caught him at something, a kind of flinch around the eyes, and then it closed over.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How did you mean it?”
He opened his mouth and nothing came.
“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 a while longer. Then he got back in his truck and backed all the way out to the gate,
careful, without touching one stake.
Mr. Pruitt hung the tape reel on his shoulder.
“Enterprise and GoldRush,” he said, as though nothing had 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.”
Dale plowed the corn and flower ground for me on Saturday. When I asked what I owed him for
turning an acre of old sod, he said, “A dozen ears a week, once it’s on,” and would not hear anything else.
His wife, Kim, sent a jar of pickled beets down with him. I don’t know what the beets were for. I
think she had heard. By Sunday the whole church had.
The trees came the next Thursday. Twelve of them, bare-root, wrapped in wet newspaper and plastic in the trunk of the Buick: five Enterprise, five GoldRush and two Liberty. Thirty-two dollars
apiece. Three hundred eighty-four dollars, and I wrote the check myself and did not flinch.
They do not look like anything, bare-root trees. They look like twelve switches you’d cut to drive cattle. A thumb thick, five feet tall, with a fist of brown root at one end and not one leaf.
I had the holes half dug when the school bus stopped at the end of the lane.
Josie comes to me Thursdays, because Stacy works till seven.
She came across the barn lot at a run with her backpack beating on her, and stopped at the first
orange stake as if it were 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 switches lying in the shade with their roots in a wet feed sack, and
then at me, to see if she was being teased. She is nine. She has Carl’s ears and Stacy’s way of
looking at you until you tell 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?”
Now, that question. I had been asking it of myself all week.
“Four years,” I said. “Maybe five.”
She worked it out 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 look off toward the fence row for a minute.
We planted all twelve before dark. I dug, and she held each tree straight while I worked the dirt back in around the roots with my hands. Mr. Pruitt had told me how: a wide hole, not a deep one,
the roots spread out like fingers. And that knot low on the trunk, where the apple was grafted onto the root, has to sit two or three inches above the ground, or the tree forgets what it is supposed to be.
Josie liked that. “It forgets?”
“It turns into whatever the root was. Some old crab.”
“Then we won’t let it.”
She tied a strip of orange tape to every one, so we could find them in the grass. On the last tree, the Liberty at the top of the rise, she tied two.
“That one’s Grandpa’s,” she said. “So he gets some.”
She was three when Carl died. She cannot possibly remember him. She knows him from a photograph on my icebox and from the way all of us still stop talking when a red Farmall goes
by on the road.
“That one’s Grandpa’s,” I agreed. I pressed the dirt down around it with the heel of my hand, and I will tell you, I pressed a good while longer than the tree needed.
When I straightened up, Brian’s truck was sitting at the gate with the engine off.
I don’t know how long he had been there. He was looking at his little girl standing in a row of sticks with orange tape on her fingers. I could not read his face at that distance, and I did not try.
He lifted a hand. Josie waved with her whole arm.
He didn’t come over.
Now I am going to go quickly, because a summer is long to live and short to tell.
I planted the first corn on the ninth of May, when the ground at two inches read sixty degrees on Carl’s old soil thermometer. Peaches and Cream, in a block four rows wide and never in one long row, because corn is pollinated by the wind and a single row just blows its pollen into the next
county. I put in a second block two weeks later and Silver Queen two weeks after that, so it would not all come ripe the same Tuesday.
The cutting garden went in the middle of May. Zinnias, mostly, because they forgive you. Cosmos.
Sunflowers along the back. A row of glads, for funerals, which sounds grim and isn’t. Somebody always needs glads.
In June the building came.
It came on a flatbed, in bundles, red steel with white trim, and Brian and the two brothers from French Lick put it up in nine days. I’ll be honest: it was a handsome thing. He had that pad dead level, and the walls went up square.
It also stood in a box of orange stakes, with corn coming knee-high on the north side of it and the first zinnias budding on the south.
He never moved one stake. I’ll give him that. He hung his gutters with the feet of his ladder on the
last inches of his own concrete, and he didn’t say a word about it, and neither did I.
July is when the people came.
Mr. Pruitt first. He brought four girls from the 4-H garden club on a Tuesday morning to learn how
you cut a zinnia so it lasts: early, with the dew still on, straight into a bucket of water. They came back every Tuesday after. They cut buckets of flowers and carried them to the nursing home on the west side of town, and one of the aides told me a man there who had not spoken since
Easter held a sunflower in his lap all afternoon.
Then the church. Word got around that the corn was tasseling, and people started driving out just to look. Donna from the choir brought her mother, who is ninety and grew up four miles from
here. The old lady stood at the end of the orchard and said, “Somebody finally put trees on the Baker back lot,” as if she had been waiting on it herself.
And every one of those cars came down my lane, past my barn, through Carl’s gate, and parked
on the sixty feet of gravel in front of my son’s new shop.
Because by then he was open. He had a hand-painted sign at the road, a baler in one bay and the combine head in the other, and farmers were pulling in most mornings by seven.
I did not stake that garden to shame him. But I am not a fool either, and I could see what it was doing.
Every customer who climbed down out of a truck had to walk past a quarter acre of flowers to
get to the shop door. And every one of them said some version of the same thing.
“Your mother’s got this place looking like something.”
“I didn’t know Evelyn was still farming.”
I heard him say it once myself. I was on my knees in the glads, and a man from over by Hardinsburg said, “Nice spot you’ve got yourself here, Brian. This your place?”
There was a pause. I kept my head down.
“It’s my mother’s,” Brian said. “I’m just on it.”
I pulled a good many weeds very carefully for the next few minutes.
The Peaches and Cream came ripe the last day of July.
You peel one back and put your thumbnail in a kernel. If it runs milky, pick. Mine ran milky.
Brian had strung two strands of hot wire around the whole patch the week before, six inches and twelve inches off the ground. That was his idea, not mine. He came to the door and said, “Coons
will strip it the night before you pick if you don’t fence it. I’ve got a charger.” He ran it off the shop.
I put a card table at the end of the lane with a hand-lettered sign and Carl’s old coffee can, and I
told people to take a dozen and leave whatever they liked for the food pantry. In two days there was two hundred and twelve dollars in the can and not an ear on the table.
On Sunday, the second of August, I had them all to supper.
Brian and Stacy and Josie. Nobody else. Some things want a small table.
I made the pot roast, the same one that had gone back in the freezer in April. I made green beans with bacon, and sliced tomatoes, and two dozen ears of corn that had been on the stalk
forty minutes before. In the middle of the table was a quart jar of zinnias Josie had cut and arranged herself, short stems to tall.
We said grace. Brian said it, the one his father always used, and his voice was steady.
It was a quiet meal for a while. Corn will do that. You can’t talk and eat it. Josie had butter to her ears.
And then Josie set down her cob, and wiped her hands on her shorts, which she knows better
than, and said:
“Daddy, whose farm is this?”
Stacy’s fork stopped.
“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 him to me and back. “So whose is it?”
Nobody had put her up to it. I would sooner have cut off my hand. It was just a child wanting the facts straight, at the exact moment the grown people had gotten comfortable not saying them.
Brian put his corn down on his plate. He lined it up with the edge, the way he lines up wrenches.
I didn’t help him. I am his mother, and every string in me wanted to say, “Oh, it’s the family’s, honey, eat your beans.” I kept my hands in my lap and my mouth shut. It was his to answer.
He looked at Josie.
“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 went round. In her world that is about the worst thing a person can do.
“You didn’t ask?”
“No, ma’am. I did not.” He turned to me then. It cost him something to turn. I could see it across his shoulders. “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 went rough, and he stopped and got hold of it. “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?”
It was quiet enough to hear the icebox 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.”
That got a wet laugh out of Stacy, and it got one out of me.
“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.”
He put his elbows on the table and his face in his hands, and he stayed that way a moment, a
grown man with corn butter on his wrists.
When he came up, he said, “Dad told me I could build back there.”
I had not expected that.
“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 sat with that.
Then I got up and went to Carl’s desk, and I came back with the catalog from 1987. I opened it to page fourteen and laid it by his plate.
He read 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, and then all at once he wasn’t laughing. He put the back of his wrist against his eyes.
Josie got down off her chair and went around the table and leaned against his arm, and didn’t say
anything, which is a gift she has.
“Well,” I said, when I could. “It turns out there was room.”
It was Brian who brought up the rent. I want that known too.
“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.”
He looked at me a long moment.
Then he stood up and put his hand out across the pot roast.
We shook. His hand is twice the size of mine now, and hard as a hoof, and there is a scar across the thumb from the first lawn mower engine he ever took apart, on my back porch, when he was eleven.
“Josie’s the witness,” Stacy said.
“I’m the witness,” Josie said, very grave, and then, “What’s a witness?”
“It means you saw it,” I told her, “and you’ll remember.”
Brian took out his wallet. He had a five and some ones. He laid a one on the table by my plate and smoothed it flat.
“August,” he said.
I got up and put it in the coffee can on the windowsill. Carl’s can, the one that had sat at the end of the lane. It was empty, because I had taken the two hundred and twelve to the pantry the day before. A dollar bill makes no sound going into a can. I heard it anyway.
Then I cut the pie.
He was at my door the first Saturday of September at ten till seven.
We built the deer fence. Woven wire, five feet high, a ring of it around every tree, held on steel
posts. He drove the posts and I held the wire. It took till four.
At breakfast I had told him one more thing. Four feet. I was moving my line back four feet on all three sides of his shop, so he could get a mower around his building and a ladder up to his
gutters like a Christian.
Around noon, without being asked, he walked the three sides pulling my stakes and driving them in again four feet out. The same flat knock. He tied the orange tape back on every one himself.
“Most folks leave a strip,” I said.
“That’s what I hear.”
In October we spread the lime, two ton to the acre, just the way Mr. Pruitt wrote it out. In November Brian rehung the gate. Each month there is a dollar bill on my table on the first Saturday, and each month it goes in the can. There are four in there now. I don’t know what I am
saving them for. Josie says apples.
The trees went into the winter with a ring of mulch around each one and a white plastic guard on every trunk against the rabbits. Twelve sticks in twelve wire cages. They still don’t look like much.
But I walked out there the last warm afternoon, the week before Thanksgiving, with the light coming low and red across the corn stubble, and I looked close at the Liberty on the rise. The one with two ribbons.
Buds. Small as grains of wheat, tight and brown, all up the stem. Next year’s leaves, already made and waiting.
Some waiting is all right, I’ve decided. It depends on who told you to do it, and whether you
agreed.
I could hear an air wrench going in the shop behind me. A radio. My son whistling off-key over the top of it, the way his father did.
I’ll be seventy-one when those trees bear. Josie says that’s not that old.
I plan to be standing right there.
