The Apple Row Along My Uncle’s Lane

Planting Day

Curt ran the auger, and I came behind him with the whips and a bucket of water. Maren came behind me with the tags.

My mother came last with a box of wooden stakes and a mallet, sixty-six years old and pounding stakes like she was thirty.

The whips were barely taller than Maren, skinny sticks with the tape still on the unions.

You plant a graft with the union a couple of inches above the soil, never buried, or the scion grows its own roots and you lose the rootstock.

I set every one myself. I held each tree straight while Maren backfilled with her hands, and then I tamped the soil around it with my boot and poured in a gallon of water.

Maren had written new tags for the row. She had asked me what to write, and I had said whatever she thought was right.

So every tag in that row says the same thing, in a nine-year-old’s careful printing.

“Arthur’s Spy. Number 1.” Then “Arthur’s Spy. Number 2.” All the way down the fence to thirty.

Around the middle of the afternoon, Abe came down the lane in his truck, headed for the road. He slowed when he saw us.

I watched him read the first few tags. Then he looked straight ahead and drove on, and he did not slow down again.

Curt leaned on the auger handle and watched the truck go. “You all right?”

“I am fine,” I said. And I was, mostly. “I did not do this for him to stop. I did it so they would be here.”

Norbert came over at the end of the day to get his auger back.

He is eighty-four and still farms forty acres of tart cherries and apples with his grandson. He walked the whole row with his hands behind his back, reading the tags.

“Your grandpa would have liked this,” he said. “Arthur used to say the Spys were the best thing he ever grew.”

“He said that to me too.”

Norbert nodded slowly. “He said it to everybody. I am not so sure he ever thought about who else was listening.”

Spring

That was a strange spring. The row took hold, and every week the whips pushed out more leaves.

By June the tallest of them came up past my waist. Maren measured the best one against her own height every Sunday.

Abe drove past them twice a day. He did not stop. He did not say a word to me, or to my mother, or to Maren, who waved at his truck every single time anyway, because Maren waves at everybody.

The Ridge noticed. The Ridge notices everything. People driving 10 Mile Road slowed down to read the tags.

Folks at the farm store asked Abe about the little trees along his lane with Arthur’s name on them.

He told every one of them it was my business and not his.

That was the first consequence, and I did not have to lift a finger for it.

A man can cut six trees in an afternoon, but he cannot cut what his neighbors think. Everybody on the Ridge had known Arthur Hendricks, and everybody knew those Spys.

The second consequence was harder to watch. Abe’s son Alvin is thirty-four and works the orchard with him full time.

Alvin and I grew up picking cherries together. In May, he stopped at the row one evening when I was out hoeing.

“Dad does not know I am here,” he said.

“I figured.”

“I told him he should have called you before he cut,” Alvin said.

He was looking down the row, not at me. “Told him it was wrong. We did not talk for about a week after that.”

“I am sorry, Alvin. I did not want to come between you.”

“You did not,” he said. “He did.” Then he took the hoe out of my hands and did the last six trees himself, and he left without saying anything else.

I did not tell anybody about that for a long time. I am not telling it now to make Abe look small.

I am telling it because a son telling his father he was wrong is a heavy thing, and Abe carried it all spring.