The Day Sixty Neighbors Picked Grandma’s Peaches

A man in a wheelchair at the end of the porch had a slice in each hand. A nurse’s aide was helping a woman with a stroke hold hers.

Nobody was talking much. They were just eating peaches in the shade, the way you eat them when you are young, with juice on your wrists.

I stood there and thought about the deer coming out of the pines last summer to eat these same peaches off the ground.

I had to go out to the truck and sit in it for a minute before I could ride back.

When we got back to the orchard a little after noon, the first thing I saw was Dewayne.

He had not gone home. He had not gone back to his mower.

He was at the end of the third row with his shirt soaked through, lifting full baskets from under the trees and carrying them up to the shade, two at a time.

He did not stop to talk to anybody. He just carried. Every time a basket filled, he was there to take it.

Delmar’s bucket filled and he emptied it for him. A young mother set a basket down and he lifted it before she could straighten up.

Grandma was watching him from her chair. Sudie was back in the grass beside her, sorting, with the bucket at her side.

“He’s been at it since you left,” Grandma told me. “He hasn’t said ten words. He’s just working.”

“His knees are going to be awful tonight,” I said.

“I expect so,” Grandma said. “Some things a man has to carry out of his own self, Lorna. Let him.”

We ate dinner at the folding table under the big oak by the shed: the church ladies had brought pimento cheese sandwiches and deviled eggs and a cooler of tea. Somebody said the blessing. Somebody else started humming “Shall We Gather at the River,” and a few of the older ones picked it up and sang a verse.

Dewayne ate his sandwich standing up by the baskets. He did not come to the table. I did not push him.

Grandma had a deviled egg and half a sandwich and declared she had not been this hungry since 1990.

By three in the afternoon, the trees were mostly picked. We lined the baskets up and counted them twice, out loud, with half the crowd counting along.

Two hundred bushels, even. Forty trees, five bushels to the tree. It was the heaviest crop Grandma could remember.

“That’s the frost we didn’t get,” Delmar said. “Didn’t get a late frost this spring, first year in five. These trees have been saving it up.”

The trucks went out all afternoon. Every one of the seven homes in the county got peaches that day.

Vada called me at four to say her kitchen smelled like a cobbler factory and the residents were already asking if we would do it again next year.