The Harvest My Neighbor Took

What I Asked Cecil

Cecil is eighty-one years old. He lives alone in a white house at the edge of town with a cat and a greenhouse, and he picked up on the second ring.

I told him what had happened. I did not cry, which surprised me. I described the ladder, the sign, the sixty years. When I got to the bag of apples on my counter, he did not say anything for so long I thought the line had gone dead.

“Cut one open for me,” he said.

“I already have.”

“Tell me what you see.”

I told him. Pink to the core. The star. Two seeds in every chamber.

He breathed out slowly. “That’s the Blush, Lorraine. There’s no other tree on earth that throws that seed. I’d know it blind.” Then, after another pause, in a voice I had never heard him use, an old man’s voice with iron under it: “Who’s selling it?”

When I told him, he said a word I will not repeat.

“Has she said what she means to do with the rest of it?”

“She told Bev at the circle meeting that she is entering the heirloom class at the fair,” I said. Bev had called me that morning, whispering from her own pantry, as though Corinne might hear through the wall. Bev is my oldest friend in Marlow and runs the church women’s circle. “She told Bev it was finally her year. Said she had the best fruit she had ever grown.”

“Grown.”

“Under her own name.”

There was a long silence, and then I heard Cecil chuckle. It was not a warm sound. It was the dry little noise of a man laying the last card down on a table he has been winning at for years.

“Lorraine,” he said. “Do you know what day I judge the heirloom class?”

“Opening Saturday.”

“And do you remember the rule? The one nobody uses anymore?”

I did, of course. It is the oldest custom at the Marlow County Fair. When a basket makes the final round of the heirloom class, the judge carries the fruit up onto the stage in front of the grandstand, cuts it open, and names the variety and the orchard it came from, out loud, into the microphone. Boyd had been cut open on that stage thirty-one times. Fran at the fair office had quit scheduling it ten years ago, because it ran forty minutes and nobody sat for it anymore.

“I would not want to embarrass anybody,” Cecil said slowly. “But I do believe the heirloom class is entitled to the open judging this year. In honor of Boyd. Wouldn’t you say?”