The Apple Row Along My Uncle’s Lane

The Brush Pile

I did not cut the wood that day. The leaves were still hanging on, and good scion wood should be dormant.

So I waited, and for nine days I drove past the brush pile on the way to work and prayed nobody lit it.

My husband Curt thought I had lost my mind a little. He did not say so.

Curt is a diesel mechanic, and he believes in doing a job right once, and he could see that I had decided to do this one right.

“You want me to talk to Abe?” he asked one night, sitting with me on my mother’s back steps after supper. “I can. Man to man.”

“And say what? That he cannot cut his own trees?”

Curt thought about it. “No. I guess I would just be telling him he hurt you. He knows that.”

“He knows,” I said. “Leave him be. I want the wood, not the fight.”

The first Saturday in November, the leaves were down, the ground was white with frost in the morning, and Maren and I walked out to the brush pile with two pairs of pruners, a roll of masking tape and a cooler.

Abe had cut the limbs into pieces and pushed them into a heap with the loader, so we had to climb into it. Maren is nine.

She treated the whole pile like a jungle gym, and I let her, because it was the first time in a week anything on that farm had felt like fun.

“How do I know which ones?” she asked, holding up a branch as thick as her arm.

“Too big,” I said. “Look for skinny ones. About as big around as a pencil. Smooth bark, and little fat buds along it. Those grew this summer.”

She found the first good one herself. She held it up and checked it against a pencil from my coat pocket, very serious about it, and then she grinned at me like she had found a dollar on the sidewalk.

We cut forty sticks, each one about ten inches long with four or five buds.

I wrote the tree on each bundle with a marker, one through six, because I wanted to know which tree every graft came from.

My mother came out while we were working. Her name is Joy, she is sixty-six, and she lives in Grandpa’s old house across the fence from Abe’s lane.

Grandpa left her the house and ten acres and left Abe the orchard. That was always the plan, and nobody fought about it.

She stood at the edge of the pile in her old canvas coat with her arms crossed, and she watched Maren for a while before she said anything.

“He did not tell me either,” she said finally. “I heard the saw from the kitchen.”

“I know, Mom.”

“Abe has been fighting Dad his whole life,” she said. “And now Dad is not here to fight back, so he is fighting the trees.”

I did not know what she meant then. I thought it was just something a sister says about a brother.

I wrapped the sticks in damp paper towels, sealed them in bread bags, and put them in the cooler.