The Orchard Year

The letter came on the twentieth of December, in a long cream envelope from a law office in Sparta, Michigan, and Mara read it standing in the hallway of an apartment building in a city a long way from any apple tree, with her coat still on and the snow melting off her shoulders onto the mat.

Re: Estate of Marguerite A. Velde. Margo Velde, it said, had died on the second of December, at the age of eighty-four, at her home on Ten Mile Road. Under the terms of her will, her real property, consisting of forty acres of orchard land, a farmhouse, outbuildings and equipment, known as Velde Orchards, together with its operating accounts and liabilities, passed to her great-niece. There followed Mara's full name, spelled correctly, which almost nobody managed.

Mara read it three times, and then sat down on the stairs.

Great-aunt Margo. Mara had seen her perhaps six times in her whole life: a tall, weathered, white-haired woman in a barn coat, with enormous hands and a voice that could carry across a forty-acre block, who had come to two family weddings and a funeral and stood at the edge of each of them looking as if she would rather be outdoors. And once, when Mara was nine, a whole week in the orchard in September, sent there by her parents during a bad year at home. Mara remembered almost nothing of that week except the smell. Apples on the ground, sweet and winey and brown. Woodsmoke. Diesel. Wet grass in the early mornings. And Margo, handing down a red apple from a ladder, saying, "That's a Spy. Best apple in Michigan. Don't let anybody tell you different."

After that there had been a card every Christmas, in a big square hand, with a five-dollar bill in it until Mara was twenty and nothing but a line or two after that. Hard frost in May. Good crop of Spies anyway. Lost the old Jonathans to fire blight. Planting Honeycrisp, God help me. Still here. Mara had kept them all, without quite knowing why, in a shoebox.

At the bottom of the letter there was a paragraph in a different tone, as if the lawyer had written it himself and not his clerk.

I should tell you plainly that the orchard has not been profitable for several years, and that there is an operating loan of $180,000 with the farm credit office, secured on the land, due in full on December 15, 2023. Mrs. Velde was aware of this when she made her will. She asked me to give you the enclosed, and to tell you that she did not expect you to keep the place, only to give it one honest year before you decided.

The enclosed was a key on a loop of baling twine, and a note card in the big square hand.

Mara. The book is on the kitchen table. Start in January. M.

The lawyer's name was Piet Bakker, and he answered his own phone, and he sounded about eighty.

"I wondered when you'd call," he said. "I knew Margo sixty years. I drew up that will in October, at her kitchen table, and argued with her for two hours about it." He was quiet a moment. "Her son Bram wanted the farm sold. Everybody expected she'd leave it to him, or to nobody, or to the Arreolas. She left it to you. I asked her why, and she said, because the child stood in the Spy block at nine years old and asked me what all the trees were thinking. Nobody else ever asked me that."

Mara had no memory of saying any such thing.

"You don't have to come," said Piet Bakker. "You can sell it from wherever you are. There's a neighbor who'd buy it tomorrow." He paused. "But she asked for a year. And I'll tell you, as her lawyer and her friend, I'd come and look, if I were you, before I signed anything."

Mara drove up on the twenty-ninth of December, eleven hours in a car with a bad heater, through Indiana and into Michigan in a light steady snow, and turned off Ten Mile Road at dusk between two white posts with a hand-painted sign hanging from a crossbar: VELDE ORCHARDS. APPLES · CIDER · SINCE 1961.

The farmhouse sat back from the road at the end of a long gravel drive, white clapboard, two stories, with a deep porch across the front and a big maple in the yard. Behind it stood the red pole barn, and a low white block building with a sign over its door that said CIDER, and a little wooden market stand by the road, closed up for the winter with plywood over its windows. And behind them all, in the blue snow-light, the orchard: row after row of bare dark trees, running away up the gentle slope to the east, every one of them pruned to the same low spreading shape, like a crowd of people with their arms raised, standing perfectly still in the snow, waiting.

The key on its loop of twine opened the kitchen door.

The kitchen was cold and clean and smelled faintly of apples, as though it had soaked up sixty years of them. There was a woodstove, and a long scrubbed table, and a calendar from a farm-supply store still turned to December, with the second circled in pencil. And on the table, square in the middle, where no one could miss it, lay a thick, battered, clothbound ledger, its spine mended twice with black tape, its cover stained with something that might once have been cider.

On the cover, in the big square hand: THE ORCHARD BOOK.

Mara sat down at the cold table, still in her coat, and opened it.

It was not a ledger, or not only. It was sixty years of an orchard, written down month by month. Each month had its own section, tabbed with a strip of masking tape, January to December, and each section was crowded with notes in pencil and ink and ballpoint, in the same square hand getting gradually shakier down the years: dates of bloom and frost and harvest, spray schedules, prices, the names of pickers, weather, and here and there, squeezed into margins, other things. 1974. Bram's first harvest, age 3. Ate more than he picked. 1992. New crew. Teofilo Arreola, 27, from Michoacán. Best ladder man I ever saw. 2009. Hail May 30. Lost half. Cried in the truck. Then got out and thinned what was left.

On the inside of the front cover, newer than the rest, in a hand that had grown very shaky indeed, there was a note.

For Mara. Everything I know is in here, and half of it is wrong, and the trees will tell you which half. Ask Teo. Watch the weather. Don't sell to Brouwer just because he's the first one who asks. One year. Then do what you think is right, and don't let anybody, including me, tell you different. M.

Mara lit the woodstove, eventually, after three tries and most of a newspaper, and found a can of soup in the pantry and a pan to heat it in, and ate it at the table with the book open, turning pages. The pantry shelves were lined with jars: applesauce, apple butter, spiced apple rings, each labeled in the square hand with a year. There was a gallon jug of cider in the refrigerator, unopened, dated November. On a hook by the door hung a barn coat, canvas, gone soft and pale at the elbows, with a pair of leather gloves stuffed in its pocket, still holding the shape of the hands that had worn them.

Mara did not touch the coat. Not yet.

Outside, the snow kept falling on the rows, soft and steady, and the house ticked as it began to warm.

Mara turned to the tab that said JANUARY.