The Harvest My Neighbor Took

She saw us, and she did not hurry.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I said. My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.

“Don’t be selfish, Lorraine,” she said. “I’m going to sell them. We could use the money.”

“Those are Boyd’s trees,” Emmett said. He had taken one step forward, and I put my hand on his arm, because he had a sleeping child on his shoulder and a tight jaw and I did not want him to say what his face was saying.

Corinne looked at the child. She looked at the cap in his hand. Then she looked at me, and she said it with a little shrug, the way you would mention that it looked like rain.

“He’s gone now. They’ll just rot.”

She laughed. It was a short, easy laugh. She swung her other leg over the rail and dropped onto her own side of the fence, and she turned around with the bags hanging from her shoulders and said, not even to me, more to the road, where two women from the circle were walking back to their cars, “Poor thing. Grief does make people hysterical.”

Then she added, in a voice only I was meant to hear, “Thirty-one years of him winning, Lorraine. It is awfully quiet over here now.”

I stood there and let that sentence go all the way in.

The Morning After

At first light I put on Boyd’s barn coat over my nightgown and walked out to the orchard. I want to describe what I saw, plainly, because I have found that people who have never lost a thing like this do not believe it until I say it slowly.

Every tree was bare.

Not picked the way a person picks, taking the good fruit and leaving the rest. Stripped. The long lower branches had been wrenched down and snapped, and the broken twigs lay scattered through the wet grass like straw. Fruit on the highest limbs was gone too, which meant somebody had used a ladder, and when I turned around I found it. Boyd’s tall wooden ladder, the one he had built himself, had been dragged across the field and left leaning against the back fence, where it stood like a dropped coat. The crates he had stacked by the barn in August, thirty-two of them, were gone. In the whole orchard I found maybe a dozen apples. They were on the ground, bruised, with the marks of a heel on them.

I want to tell you I felt something noble. I did not. I felt like someone had taken a knife to the one thing he left me and then gone inside to make coffee.