The Orchard I Locked Away
Bringing in the harvest
And then I did the only thing I knew how to do. I brought in the crop.
I was eighteen years old and I had ninety-one acres of apples coming ripe and a farm stand to open by Labor Day and I had never run any of it alone. I will not pretend it was easy. It was the hardest three months of my life. I called Grandpa Earl’s old crew, the pickers who had come every fall for twenty years, and every one of them came back, some of them driving four hours, because they had loved the old man and because, one of them told me in Spanish that his son translated, “Earl always paid fair and you are Earl’s.” I called the neighbors who owed him and I called in every favor the Voss name still carried in that valley, and it turned out that Grandpa Earl had spent seventy years banking goodwill exactly the way he banked everything else, quietly, on purpose, for a day he would not live to see.
We picked. We pressed cider until the barn smelled like the inside of an apple. I opened the stand the Saturday of Labor Day weekend and I stood behind the counter my great-grandfather built and I sold the first bag of Honeycrisp to Ruth Pardee, who drove down from the county seat just to buy it, and who took the bag and looked at me over her glasses and said, “He’d be insufferable right now, you know. So proud he couldn’t stand himself.”
I made the mortgage payment that was not a mortgage, the taxes and the crew and the insurance, and at the end of that first season the green ledger came out in black. Barely. But black. I had kept it. Owning and keeping, two different jobs, and I had done the second one, the hard one, at eighteen, in the year everyone said I would fold.
About the brooch
I did get my grandmother’s cameo brooch back.
I did not sue for it. I did not send the sheriff. I drove into town one evening in October and I knocked on the door of the little rental where Kyle and Brandi were living, and Brandi answered, and I stood on the step and I said, “I’d like Grandma’s brooch back. It was Grandpa’s to give, and he didn’t give it, and it belongs at the orchard.”
She could have said no. Instead she went pale, and she went inside, and she came back with the brooch in its little velvet box, and she put it in my hand and she said, so quietly I almost missed it, “I told Kyle it wasn’t right. I told him.” And I believed her. I told her thank you and I told her that if she ever wanted to come out and pick apples in the fall the pay was fair and the door was open, and I meant it, and I saw her eyes fill up, and I went home.
Kyle I have not spoken to since. He moved to the city that winter. Last I heard he was selling cars. I do not wish him ill. I just no longer wish him anything at all, which Grandpa Earl would have told me is its own kind of peace.