The Pecans Grandma Sold in Her Own Name
So Travis set up her chair under the big Stuart, and she settled into it with the blanket over her knees and a thermos of coffee at her feet, and she ran that grove like a general.
“Hunter, you start at the trunk and work out. Don’t go hopping around. Macy, honey, you pick up after the roller. It misses the ones in the low spots. Amy, the ones with the shuck still stuck on, put those in a separate bucket. Dale will dock you for trash.”
I had not picked pecans since I was fourteen. It came back fast. The ground under those trees was covered in leaves gone yellow and brown, and the pecans hid in them, and you got down on your knees in the leaves and felt for them, and the cold came right through your jeans.
The roller pickers were the old wire-cage kind on a long handle. You roll them over the ground and the nuts push through the wires and get trapped inside the cage, and when it fills, you spread the wires over the bucket and shake them out. Travis got them all rolling again with a can of oil and a pair of pliers.
The kids complained about the cold for exactly ten minutes. Then Hunter figured out that whoever filled a bucket first got to pick the music in the truck on the way home, and after that I could not have stopped them with a fire hose.
“No fair,” Macy hollered. “He’s got the good tree.”
“They’re all good trees,” Grandma called back. “Your great-grandpa grafted every one of them. Pick faster.”
Travis worked a half shift that first Saturday. A transformer had gone out on the north end of the county, and when the co-op calls, he goes. He came out after one o’clock still in his work boots and took a roller from Hunter, and he worked under the trees until it was too dark to see the ground.
By dark on Sunday, we had picked eight trees clean and started on a ninth, and I had found muscles in my back I did not know about. We stacked the sacks in Grandpa’s shed to dry.
That night, Macy fell asleep at the supper table in her hooded sweatshirt with a pecan still in her hand.
The second Saturday was colder, with a wind out of the north that brought the leaves down in sheets. Grandma would not hear of staying inside.
“I sat in that house all week,” she said. “I’m going to sit out here and watch my trees.”
So we put her lawn chair under the big Choctaw and tucked the blanket around her, and she pointed and bossed and told stories all morning. About Grandpa selling pecans to buy her a wedding band, because he could not afford one the year they married. About my mother and Sherry when they were girls, fighting over who got to ride on the back of the tractor.
“Sherry always won,” Grandma said. “She was little and she was fast. Your mother would get so mad.”
It was the first time all fall I had heard her say Sherry’s name in a voice that sounded like it belonged to a little girl.
About two o’clock, Macy came over to the lawn chair and leaned against the arm of it. Her cheeks were red and her nose was running and the front pocket of her sweatshirt was full of pecans, so full it hung down in front of her like a kangaroo pouch.
“I’m saving these,” she said. “For eating.”