The Harvest My Neighbor Took

A Quiet Few Weeks

I called Fran the next morning. Fran has run the fair office for nineteen years and she is smarter than the whole fair board put together, which is why she is the secretary and not the president. She keeps a candy dish on her desk with a handwritten sign that says TAKE TWO, and she answered on the first ring.

She was quiet when I told her. Then she said, “Corinne Rudd was in my office on Monday. Filled out the heirloom form herself. I remember thinking it was odd that she’d entered a variety she had never listed before.”

“What did she call it?”

Fran read it to me off the carbon copy. “Rudd Heritage Blush. Grown on the Rudd family farm since 1961. Entered by Corinne Rudd, grower.”

I closed my eyes. “She gave it a name.”

“She gave it a name, a date, a story card, and a paragraph for the program, about a father-in-law who grafted it from a tree his grandmother brought from Germany. Lorraine, that land has not grown a thing but corn since before I was married.” Fran let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “She told me that if she took the blue this year, the board would have a hard time not making her its next president. The vote is that same Saturday, the afternoon session.”

I told Fran what Cecil had told me. I asked her for one thing, and I said it as plainly as I could. Please schedule the open judging, the old way, with the microphone, on the stage in front of the grandstand. Please do not tell Corinne why. Please let her think it is a courtesy to our family.

Then came the waiting, and the waiting was the part I had not planned on. For three weeks I watched the Rudds’ sign from my porch. Cars pulled up all day Saturday and Sunday. I watched weekend families ask about the secret grafting, and I watched Corinne put a hand over her heart and tell them about her father-in-law and the old orchard. A woman from Lancaster in a camel coat bought two whole bushels for her daughter’s wedding because she said it was such a lovely story, and Corinne tied each bushel with a ribbon.

I did not say a word to any of them. I stayed on my side of the road with a roll of grafting tape, binding the splintered limbs that could be saved, the way Boyd had once shown me when a storm took a branch off the third tree and I held the flashlight. Emmett called every night and asked what I was planning, and every night I told him the same thing. “I am planning to sit in the grandstand like I have every October of my married life.”

Opening Saturday

The Marlow County Fair opens at nine, but by ten o’clock that Saturday every seat in the grandstand was taken and the folding chairs along the rail were two deep. Word travels fast in a town of four thousand. Everyone knew that Corinne Rudd, the woman with the sixty year old family orchard, was entering the heirloom class with a variety nobody had heard of, and that Cecil was doing the open judging for the first time in ten years.

I wore the black dress from the funeral. Emmett walked me in, and Bev saved a seat in the fourth row with her pocketbook on it. Three rows in front of us, in the second tier, sat Dean Rudd with his cap in his lap.

Corinne was already on the stage in a new cream silk blouse with a ruffled collar. On the long judging table in front of her sat a basket lined with a white linen towel, and in it eighteen apples in a pyramid, each polished until it shone. A little card on a stand read RUDD HERITAGE BLUSH, GROWN BY CORINNE RUDD. She smiled at the church women. When her eyes found me in my funeral dress, she smiled wider, the soft, tender, pitying smile of a woman who has already won.

Fran stepped up to the microphone to announce the heirloom apples, and my whole body went cold.