The Harvest My Neighbor Took

For a moment there was no sound at all. Then a sound rose from the grandstand that I can only describe as a breath, eleven hundred people drawing in air at once.

“Now.” Cecil lowered the apple and put on the voice of an old man reading from a form. “Ms. Rudd’s card says that this is the Rudd Heritage Blush. It says it was grafted by her late father-in-law, from a tree his grandmother brought from Germany, on the Rudd family farm, in 1961.” He looked down at her over his glasses, gently, almost kindly. “Corinne, I would very much like to see that tree.”

She opened her mouth.

“I have driven past your house every day for forty years,” Cecil said. “I know every tree on that road. I would like you to tell me, in front of all these people, which one of them it is.”

“I think,” Corinne said, and her voice came out thin and high, “there has been some confusion, Cecil. It is a family variety. The trees are, they are out behind the barn. They are old, I do not expect anyone has ever noticed them.”

“Behind your barn.”

“Behind our barn.”

“Corinne.” It was not Cecil who said it. It was a man’s voice, hoarse, from the second tier of the grandstand, and when I turned, Dean Rudd was on his feet with his cap crushed in his fist. Half the grandstand turned with me. He did not shout. He had never been a man who shouted. He stood in the second row with his face the color of ashes and he said it so quietly that the microphone on the stage barely carried it, and yet every person in that grandstand heard.

“We do not have any trees,” Dean said. “We have never had trees. Those are Lorraine’s.”

The silence after that was so total I could hear the creak of the old announcer’s booth in the wind.

“You are confused,” Corinne said, and her voice cracked in the middle. “Dean, you are, you do not know what you are saying. I am trying to, Lorraine gave them to me. Lorraine gave me that fruit. She said that I could have it, because she could not manage the harvest on her own. Tell them, Lorraine.” She turned to the fourth row, her hands out in front of her, palms up, in the posture of the wronged. “Tell them. We have always been so close.”

Every head in the grandstand swiveled to me.

I stood up. I held on to the rail in front of me. I looked at Corinne Rudd in her cream silk blouse with the apple pyramid at her elbow, and I said, quite calmly, in a voice that carried better than I expected, “I did not give you a single apple, Corinne. I was at my husband’s funeral. You climbed my fence while I was still in my black dress.”

I sat down.

That was all. I did not say a word more, and I did not need to, because Bev stood up two seats down from me with her pocketbook in her hand and said in her loud church voice, which could be heard at the back of any sanctuary in Marlow, “I bought forty pounds from you last Sunday, Corinne. For the harvest supper. You told me your father-in-law planted those trees.”