The Orchard They Came To Measure
Troy stood up off the bench. He walked a few steps into the row, past where Brad was, and he reached up without really thinking about it, the way a person reaches for a thing their hands remember even when their mind has not caught up yet, and he picked one of the low Haralsons, and he turned it over once in his palm, and he bit into it.
I watched his face do the thing a face does when a taste goes straight past the tongue and lands somewhere behind the ribs.
“That’s it,” he said, almost to himself. “That’s near exactly what his Wolf River tasted like. Tart first, then it opens up sweet at the back.”
“Arvid grafted most of these himself,” I said. “Bought root stock from a man in Decorah and did the grafting in our kitchen in the evenings for about four years running until he had the varieties he wanted. There’s a McIntosh two rows over he was prouder of than he ever let on.”
Troy stood there a long moment with the half eaten apple still in his hand, looking down the whole row of trees the way you look at a church you have just realized you are standing inside of.
Then he turned to Brad.
“I’m not going to write this one up,” he said.
Brad blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not going to recommend the site to Prairie Rock,” Troy said, and his voice was not angry and it was not dramatic, it was just finished, the way a man’s voice gets when he has already had the argument with himself and does not need to have it with anyone else. “There’s eleven other parcels on my list this month that are just dirt. Fallow ground, old lots, nothing growing on them but weeds. I’ll find them a site. I’m not going to be the one who does to somebody else what got done to my grandpa, not when I’ve got eleven other places I could put a storage lot that nobody’s going to stand at the edge of and watch burn.”
“Troy, come on,” Brad said, and for the first time all morning his voice lost its patience, went thin and a little high. “We already talked numbers. This is the best parcel for the access road, you said so yourself an hour ago.”
“An hour ago I didn’t know whose orchard it was,” Troy said. “Now I do.”
He looked at me then, not at Brad, and he said, “I’m sorry for the tape on your tree, ma’am. I’ll pull it down on my way out.”
“Leave it,” I said. “I’ll want to remember this fall for a while yet.”
He nodded like that made sense to him, and he shook my hand again, and he told Brad he’d call the office that afternoon and that Brad should feel free to tell Prairie Rock he was welcome to ask for a different field surveyor if he wanted a second opinion, but it would not change Troy’s own recommendation. Then he walked back to his truck, a plain white pickup with the company’s name on the door in green letters, and he drove off slow down our lane the way you drive when you are not in any hurry to get wherever you are going next, because you are still somewhere else in your own head.