The Day Sixty Neighbors Picked Grandma’s Peaches

He came up the drive, and then he came around the corner of the house where the orchard opens up, and he stopped.

He sat there on the mower with the engine still going, looking.

I do not know what he expected. Maybe he thought a few of us cousins would be out there.

Instead there were cars along the whole fence line and ladders in every single tree, and sixty people on those ladders and under them.

He cut the engine. In that quiet, you could hear the leaves. One by one, people stopped picking and looked over at him.

Not hard looks. Just looks. The boys in the tops of the trees held still with peaches in their hands.

Most of those people knew who Dewayne was.

A good many of them had known Grandma long enough to guess why her grandbaby had to put a post on the church page to get her peaches picked. Nobody said that. Nobody had to.

Dewayne climbed off the mower slowly, the way he does now, one knee and then the other. He stood there by the end of the first row with his cap in his hand.

Grandma lifted her hand to him from her chair.

He walked down the row toward her. It was maybe forty yards, and it was the longest forty yards I ever saw a man walk.

He passed Delmar with his bucket. He passed the Methodist couple. He passed a teenage boy who used to play ball with Dewayne’s grandson.

Nobody said a word to him. Delmar nodded once. That was all.

When he got to Grandma’s chair, he stood there looking at the full baskets lined up in the shade, ninety of them, the trees he had said were not worth the trouble.

“Mama,” he said. His voice came out rough. “What is all this?”

“It’s my peaches, son,” she said. “Lorna put out a word, and folks came.”

He looked at me then. I was standing behind Grandma’s chair. I made myself look straight back at him and keep my face still.

I was not going to smile at him. This was not that kind of thing.

“You could have called me, Lorna,” he said.

“You were on the porch, Dewayne,” I said. “You told her let the deer have them.”

That was all I said. I did not say it loud. He heard it, and so did the people closest to us, and I watched it go into him.

He stood there for a long time. His jaw worked.

He looked up the rows at all those folks who had come out on a Saturday in July, some of them older than him, some of them with worse knees than his, all of them doing what he would not.

Then he squatted down beside Grandma’s chair, slow and careful, because of the knees, until he was eye to eye with her.