The Apple Row Along My Uncle’s Lane

The Sixth Tree

I want to answer the question everybody asks me, because I asked it of myself standing there in the sawdust. Why didn’t I stop him? Why didn’t I call somebody?

Because there was nobody to call. Grandpa left the orchard to Abe. The trees were on Abe’s ground.

A man is allowed to cut his own trees, and he had a chainsaw running and four of them already on the grass.

“You could have told me,” I said. “You could have told me before you started. I would have come and taken wood.”

“Taken wood for what?”

“For grafting. Grandpa taught me. You know he taught me.”

Abe looked at me for a long minute. Something passed over his face that I did not understand yet, and then it closed back up. He pulled the starter cord and the saw roared again.

I stood there while he took down the sixth tree. I did not cry and I did not shout.

I just stood with my hands in the pockets of my coat and watched it fall, and I made myself watch the whole thing, because somebody who loved that tree ought to.

When it was down and he had shut the saw off for good, I asked him one thing. “Can I have the brush?”

He gave a short laugh. Not a cruel one, exactly. A tired one. “Take all you want, Celeste. Saves me burning it.”

So that is how it started. With a man who wanted his sprayer path clear, and a niece who asked for the branches he was going to burn.

How Grandpa Taught Me

My grandpa was Arthur Hendricks, and he farmed apples on the Fruit Ridge north of Grand Rapids for sixty-one years.

He was eighty-nine when he died, two Marches ago, and he still walked his rows the summer before.

He planted those six Northern Spies in April of 1985, the same week my mother brought me home from Butterworth Hospital.

He told me once he wanted something on the farm that was exactly as old as me, so he would always know how I was growing.

Spys are an old Michigan apple, late and hard and tart. They keep in a cold cellar until March.

They make the best pie in the world, and if you argue with me about that, you have never eaten my grandmother’s.

They are also slow. A Spy can take seven, eight, ten years to bear a real crop. “Spys make you wait,” Grandpa used to say. “That is how you know they are worth it.”

When I was twelve, he sat me down on the tailgate of his old Ford with a grafting knife, a bundle of rootstock, and a coffee can full of pencil-thick sticks he had cut from those six trees.

“Last year’s growth, Celeste,” he said, holding one up. “Pencil-thick. Buds plump. Nothing older, nothing skinnier. That is your scion. This is your rootstock. You are going to make them one tree.”

He showed me the whip-and-tongue cut. A long slanting cut on each piece, as clean as you can make it, then a second cut down into each face so the two tongues lock together like fingers.

“You line up the green,” he said, and pointed to the thin green layer just under the bark. “That is the cambium. If the green touches the green, they grow together. If it does not, you just have two dead sticks and a piece of tape.”

I cut my thumb that first day. Not badly. He wrapped it in his handkerchief and handed the knife back to me.

He did not make a fuss. He just said, “Now you know where the knife goes,” and we kept going.

We grafted twelve that spring. Nine of them took. He planted them along the fence at my mother’s place, and two of them are still there, big and lopsided and loaded every other fall.

After that, grafting was our thing. Every March until I was in college, and then every March I could get home.

Later, when my daughter Maren was little, she sat on the tailgate between us and handed us tape.

Abe was always somewhere else on those days. Abe was on the sprayer or the mower or in the packing barn fixing the grader.

I did not think about that at the time. I think about it a great deal now.