The Orchard They Came To Measure
“Same thing that’s happening here,” Troy said, quiet. “There was a company, not mine, back when I was twelve, wanted it for a self storage lot off the highway bypass. My grandpa fought it for about a year. Then my dad and my uncle sat him down and told him the taxes on that parcel were going to eat him alive once the township reassessed for the bypass traffic, and he was seventy eight years old and who was going to pick sixty trees worth of apples every fall once he couldn’t, and it made sense, everything they said made sense, same as everything your son in law is saying to you makes sense.”
Brad had come over by then, standing at the edge of the bench’s shade, not sitting, listening with his clipboard down at his side.
“He signed,” Troy said. “They paved it the spring I turned thirteen. I remember my grandpa standing at the edge of what used to be his own driveway, watching the loader push the last of the Wolf River tree into a pile to burn, and he didn’t say one word. Not one. My dad kept saying, see, Pop, it’s fine, it’s done, and my grandpa just stood there with his hands in his coat pockets until it got dark and then he went inside and he never once, not one single time in the six years he had left, ate an apple in front of any of us again. Wouldn’t touch one. My grandma used to put a bowl of them on the table out of habit and he’d just look at the wall.”
“What did he get for it,” I asked, because I wanted to know the whole shape of it, not just the grief.
“Ninety two thousand for just under five acres,” Troy said. “Which sounded like a fortune to a man who’d never had that kind of money in his life, and it paid off the rest of his farm debt and fixed the roof on the house, and I guess by the numbers it was the sensible thing to do. He lived another six years after that, same house, same chair on the porch, just with no trees past the fence line anymore. My dad still says it was the right call. I’m not sure my dad ever once asked my grandpa how he felt about it after the first month, when everybody had decided the subject was closed.”
Nobody said anything for a minute. Out past us, in the Haralson row, a crow was working a dropped apple, and the sound of its beak on the fruit was the only sound in the whole yard.
“I didn’t know that’s what this was, when the company sent me out here,” Troy said finally, and he was not talking to me now, he was talking mostly to the clipboard in his own hand like it had done something to him. “They just send me the address and the acreage and I measure it. I didn’t put it together until you asked me where I was from.”
“It’s a good question to ask people,” I said. “You find out where somebody’s been standing before you decide what they’re looking at.”