The Day Sixty Neighbors Picked Grandma’s Peaches

“Mama, I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just tired. I’m so tired I can’t see straight. That’s no excuse. I shouldn’t have said that to you.”

Grandma put her hand on the side of his face, the way you would with a boy.

“I know you’re tired, son,” she said. “You’ve carried this place for eleven years. I know who mows my grass and who fixes my pump. Don’t you think I don’t know.”

He put his head down then, right there in front of all those people, and his shoulders went, just for a second. Grandma kept her hand on his face.

Sudie, sitting in the grass with the bucket in her lap, looked at him and then looked away politely, the way children sometimes know to do.

I walked off a little way to give them a minute. Jarvis came and stood by me with a basket on his hip.

“Hard thing for a man,” he said quietly.

“He earned it,” I said.

“He did,” Jarvis said. “And he’s standing in it. Give him that.”

I gave him that. I think that is the part I am proudest of now, more than the peaches. I let him stand in it without adding anything to it.

At ten-thirty the first load went out. Jarvis and two of the deacons loaded forty bushels into the back of a church member’s box truck, the one he uses for his flooring business, and drove them to Vada’s kitchen.

I rode along on the second run, to a small assisted living place out on the county road, the kind of low brick building with a covered porch and rocking chairs and a hummingbird feeder by the door.

The dietary manager met us at the kitchen door with two of her aides and a cart. We rolled in twelve bushels.

By the time we had the last basket inside, the activity director had already brought a dozen residents out on the porch.

She set out paper plates and a paring knife and a roll of paper towels, and one of the aides started slicing.

I stood at the end of that porch and watched people in their eighties and nineties eat Grandma’s peaches.

An old woman in a pink housecoat named Oleta held a slice up to the light before she put it in her mouth.

She closed her eyes when she bit it. The juice ran down her chin and she did not wipe it.

“That’s an Elberta,” she said with her eyes still closed. “That’s a real Elberta. I worked the grading line at the packing shed for thirty years. I’d know one blind.”

“It’s from my grandma’s trees,” I told her. “Velda Crabtree. She had a stand out by the road.”

Oleta opened her eyes. “Velda with the card table? Lord, honey, I bought from her every summer. Is she still living?”

“She’s 89,” I said. “She’s sitting in her orchard right now, bossing sixty people.”

Oleta laughed and held out her paper plate for another slice. “You tell her Oleta said she still grows the best peach in this county. You tell her that exactly.”