The Apple Row Along My Uncle’s Lane

The Dry Summer

Then the rain quit.

The last real rain fell the second week of June. After that, we got a little sprinkle around the Fourth of July that barely darkened the dust, and then nothing. The hay on my mother’s ten acres went brown and crisp.

Young trees in their first summer have almost no root system. A whip like ours needs about five gallons of water a week when it is dry, more when it is hot, and it was in the nineties nine days that July.

Mom has a well with a hydrant at the house, but the house is two hundred feet from the far end of the row.

So every night after work, I filled buckets at the hydrant and carried them.

Curt hauled water in five-gallon jugs in the back of his pickup.

Maren carried what she could, which was about a gallon at a time, sloshing half of it on her shoes, and she never once complained.

It was not enough. Thirty trees at five gallons each is a hundred and fifty gallons a week, and carrying it by hand is slow.

I was working all day at the dental office in Sparta and watering until dark.

Number fourteen dropped its leaves first. Then number twenty-two started curling at the edges.

I went out with a flashlight one night and stood at fourteen with my hand on that bare stick, and for the first time in the whole thing, I wanted to quit.

I did not quit. I just stood there a while. Then I went and got another bucket.

The Night at Number One

The third week of July, I was late getting out of work.

A patient came in with a broken tooth at four forty-five, and I did not get home until after seven, and then I had to feed Maren and get the jugs loaded.

It was almost dark when I came up 10 Mile Road. As I turned toward Mom’s place, I saw headlights at the near end of the row, low ones, close to the ground, and I could not think what they were.

My mother was standing at the fence by the road, waiting for me. She came to my window before I had even turned the engine off, and she put her hand on my arm.

“Do not say anything yet,” she whispered. “Just look who is at number one.”

I got out and walked up along the fence in the dusk.

The headlights belonged to Abe’s old orchard tractor, pulled up on the lane side, and behind it was a flatbed trailer with a two-hundred-seventy-five-gallon water tote strapped down on it.

Abe was on my mother’s side of the fence. He must have climbed over it.

He was kneeling at number one with a garden hose off the tote, holding it at the base of the tree and counting under his breath.

He did not hear me at first. I stood there and watched him move the hose to the next tree, kneel down, and start counting again.

Ten seconds. Twenty. He was giving each one five gallons, measured by the second, the way Grandpa used to water.

When he got to number three, he looked up and saw me, and he did not stand up right away. He just stayed there on one knee in the grass, with the hose running.

“The tote is clean,” he said. “Before you ask. It has never had spray in it. I keep it for the cattle we used to run.”

“I was not going to ask,” I said. “I know you would not do that.”

He nodded and moved to number four. I walked alongside him. I did not know what else to do. Mom stayed back at the road. She has always known when to stay back.

We did the first ten trees without either of us saying anything. Somewhere in the hay field, a killdeer kept calling, and the tractor idled, and the hose ran.

At number eleven, he said, “Fourteen looks bad.”

“It dropped its leaves last week.”

“It is not dead,” he said. “Scratch it. If it is green under the bark, it will leaf out again with water. A tree that young will do that.”

“I know,” I said. “Grandpa taught me that too.”

He stopped with the hose in his hand. Then he said the thing I had been waiting nine months to hear, though I did not know it until he said it.

“He taught you all of it,” Abe said. “Didn’t he.”