The Day the Water Came Home to Grandma’s Orchard

The Trees

The leaves on Grandma’s apple trees came back up in two days. In a week, you could not tell they had ever been sick, except for a few brown edges on the old Jonathan that never did green up.

We kept watering through July and August on the rotation, Grandma’s six shares on her days, Trace’s six on his. Ward learned to set the furrows himself. By August he could do the whole orchard in an hour.

My husband came home from Wyoming at the end of the month, and the boys told him the whole story at supper. He listened all the way through without saying anything. Then he looked at me. “You didn’t say a word,” he said.

“I said six words.”

“Which six?”

“Then you know now,” I said. “And yes.”

He laughed and put his hand over mine on the table. “That’s my girl,” he said.

The First Bushel

The apples came in that fall, the first week of October. It was a good year. Not the best year, but a good one. Grandma said the trees always bear well after a hard summer, like they want to prove something.

Cash and Ward and I picked for two Saturdays straight. Grandma sat at the sorting table under the old Jonathan and graded every apple herself, the way she always had. Seconds for cider. Firsts for the cellar and for church.

On the first morning of picking, she had me set aside the very first bushel off the Winesap. The best tree. The one her husband’s father grafted by hand. “Those go up the ditch,” she said.

“To Trace?”

“Who else is up the ditch?”

Ward and I carried the bushel up the ditch bank on a sunny cold October morning with the cottonwoods gone yellow along the lateral and the mesa white with the first snow on top.

The water had been shut off for the season by then. The lateral was dry again, the clean kind of dry that means the year is done.

Trace’s turnout gate was shut tight. The two-by-twelve was still laid across the top of the box like a bench. Somebody had painted it.

Trace was out in his field checking the last cutting when he saw us coming. He walked over and met us at the turnout. He had a sunburn on the back of his neck that he hadn’t had in July. “Grandma sent these,” Ward said. “They’re the first ones. Off the Winesap.”

Trace looked at the bushel. He didn’t say anything for a minute. “The first ones,” he said.

“She always sends the first bushel to somebody,” I said. “Last year it was the pastor. The year before that, Amos.”

“Why me?”

I thought about what to tell him. Then I just told him what she told me when I asked the same thing. “She said a man ought to taste his water come home,” I said.

Trace took the bushel from Ward. He held it the way Cash had held her headgate board in July. Like something that might break. “Tell her thank you,” he said. “Tell her I’ll bring the basket back.”

“She’ll want it full of something,” Ward said. “That’s the rule.”

Trace laughed, a real one this time. “What does she like?”

“Peas,” I said. “Shelled.”

Grandma lived three more years after that summer. Every October, the first bushel off the Winesap went up the ditch to Trace Holloway, and every October the basket came back full of something. One year it was honey from his own bees. One year it was elk steaks. The last year, it was shelled peas, a whole quart of them, every one split right along the seam.