The Orchard I Locked Away

What Grandpa Earl taught me

I grew up half at my parents’ house in town and half out at the orchard with Grandpa Earl, and it was the orchard that raised the part of me I actually like.

My grandfather was not a warm man in the way people mean when they say that. He did not hug much. He was not loud with love. But he showed up. Every summer from the time I was seven he had me out in the rows at six in the morning learning to prune, learning to read a tree, learning which limbs to cut so the light could get down into the middle of the canopy where the fruit sets. He taught me to drive the little Ford in the back block before my feet could reach the pedals right, with a fence post cut down to prop under the seat. He taught me to run the cider press and to sharpen a knife and to keep the books in a green ledger with a mechanical pencil.

And he taught me the one thing that saved me, though I did not know it was a lesson at the time.

I was maybe fourteen. We were sitting on the tailgate at the end of a long day, and I asked him why he still paid a lawyer in the county seat every single year to look over his papers when he already owned everything free and clear. Seemed like a waste of money to me, and I told him so.

He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Hannah, owning a thing and keeping a thing are two different jobs. Anybody can own something. Keeping it, that takes paper, and it takes you paying attention when everybody around you would rather you didn’t.”

I did not know what he meant. I thought he was just being a stubborn old man about his lawyer.

I know now that he was telling me about my own father.

The six months before

Grandpa Earl died in March. I turned eighteen in September. In between those two dates, my family became people I did not recognize.

My father, Dale Voss, had spent his whole life resenting that orchard. He never wanted it. He got out at nineteen and sold insurance up in the county seat and made a decent enough living and always, always let you know that he thought his father was a fool for pouring a life into “dirt and bugs” when he could have sold the land back in the eighties when the developers first came sniffing around after the highway went in.

My mother, Cheryl, agreed with every word he ever said. She had married into the Voss name and she wore it like a coat that was a size too small, always tugging at it, always sure that being a Voss should have come with more than it did.

And my older brother, Kyle, who was twenty-four and had never held a job past Christmas, spent that whole spring at the orchard for the first time in years, walking the rows with a man in a pressed shirt and boat shoes who I did not recognize and who did not belong on that ground. I would come out to prune and there they would be, Kyle and this stranger, pacing off distances, pointing at the road frontage, talking low and stopping when they saw me.

I asked Kyle who he was. Kyle said he was “a friend, just looking around.”

I asked my father. My father said, “Nothing you need to worry your head about, Hannah. Grown folks’ business.”

I was seventeen then. Still a minor. So I let it go, the way you learn to let things go in a house where questions get you the cold shoulder for a week.

But I started paying attention. Grandpa Earl’s voice was in my head. Pay attention when everybody around you would rather you didn’t.