The Year Money Grew on Trees (16 page)

"Sure," I said, and followed her toward the middle of the room. My heart rate accelerated, and I tried to remember everything Amy had taught me. "Come on Eileen" was blaring from the speakers, and I did my best to move my arms and legs. I hardly dared look at Paige and mostly kept my head down. I caught a glimpse of Amy, and she mouthed to me, "Smile!" I faked a grin and held out to the end. I thanked Paige and fled back to a corner, hoping no one was watching too carefully.

Half an hour later, Amy sent over Stacy Tanner to repeat the experience. This time we got "Little Red Corvette" by Prince. I looked up more, and Stacy kept smiling back at me encouragingly.

Amy left me alone after that, and I was able to shrink into the shadows and just watch. I mostly watched her. She moved effortlessly around the room, dancing and
talking to everyone. She looked genuinely happy and not the least bit self-conscious. She seemed so much older than me. I felt a wave of guilt for convincing her to help me with the orchard. Weeds and mud and dead apple branches all seemed so beneath her.

The dance ended at ten, and I got dropped off at home before Amy and her friends drove off somewhere together.

***

I woke up on Friday morning at the time I usually would on a school day but lay in bed staring up at my ceiling. If a car had driven by dropping Amy off, I had slept through it, so I wondered when she made it home. I decided I deserved to sleep in a little, but right before I could fall back to sleep, my sisters barged into my room.

"Wake up, lazy," said Lisa derisively. She and Jennifer started bouncing on my bed.

"What do you want? Go away!" I grunted, and tried to roll over.

"Is this what you're going to do all summer?You think we're going to do all the work while you lay around?" Lisa teased.

"What are you talking about?"

"The orchard, dummy. Aren't you supposed to be in charge? We're not sure what to do."

Somehow it was strange that my sisters cared what
happened to the orchard. I had always thought of it as my project with them only grudgingly involved. I suddenly realized they looked at it as more than that.

"All right! Just give me a minute," I finally said. I slipped on some clothes and found the girls outside waiting for me near the tractor. A few seconds after I got there, Sam and Michael walked out of their house and joined us. It was almost as if they were headed for school, except they weren't carrying any books or bags. We had worked every day except Sundays since we had started in February, but it was still a strange scene.

When Sam and Michael reached us, we all looked around at each other until all four faces were looking at me expectantly. Sam was the first to break the silence.

"So what else needs to be done from here on out?"

It was a little overwhelming to think that they had put so much trust in me. His question caught me off-guard, and I struggled to sound like I knew what I was talking about. I thought back to the calendar I had created. There had been a big gap while waiting for apples to grow, but I didn't dare tell my workforce that and risk destroying our momentum. "Well, uh, we've got to keep up with the spraying and watering. We've also got the rest of those weeds to chop and that ditch to keep digging. Probably best to get the weeds out of the way first. You guys really ready to work all the time now?"

"Why wouldn't we be? I thought that was the idea," said Sam.

"Are we going to get pops every day now that we're working the whole day?" asked Michael.

"Umm, yeah," I replied, trying to think where all those cans were going to come from.

"Where's Amy?" Lisa asked Sam and Michael.

"Probably asleep," said Michael. "Mom was pretty mad this morning about how late she came back home."

Almost half of the rows still needed weeding, so we went to work with our normal method using the shovel, weed whackers, and hoes. My thinking about the weeds was that if they could steal water and nutrients from the trees, they had to go. Having them gone also made the orchard look a lot better and kept everyone busy. I watched carefully as everyone attacked weeds enthusiastically, wondering if they could keep it up all day, every day. And what was all this work really worth in dollars? How many thousands would we have to bring in so they got their fair share?

We didn't see Amy until after lunch. She came walking out to the orchard without any shoes on, still in her pajamas. She looked at us and the freshly cut weeds through tired eyes.

"Hey," she said to me.

"Hi," I responded, avoiding eye contact.

"How was the dance?" asked Lisa.

"It was fun. Really good music," Amy said while trying to shade her eyes from the sun.

"What time did you get home last night?" Michael asked.

"None of your business!" Amy snapped, looking at him angrily.

She kept staring at us and the weeds while we continued working.

"How long have you been out here?" she finally asked.

"Since this morning," Sam answered. "We're full-time now."

I watched her carefully, unsure how she would react. She glared at Sam, who was looking away to avoid her eyes. She shook her head and I thought she was going to walk away, but instead she grabbed the free hoe leaning against a nearby tree. She attacked the closest weeds vigorously in her pajamas and bare feet.

***

With everyone working full-time, it was amazing how much we could get done. Even with the watering and digging on the ditch, we were on a pace to finish all the weeding by early June. Just a month earlier, there didn't seem to be enough hours in the day. Once the weeds were cut, it didn't seem like there would be enough work to keep six people busy.

The trees themselves looked great, with lots of leaves and little apples on almost every branch. Still, it seemed
too good to be true. Were we missing something? I went through my copied apple book pages again. After reading what I had written down for the fourth or fifth time, I was pretty disgusted with my earlier effort. I should have drawn pictures. Nothing seemed to make sense now that the book itself was so far away in my memory. And since summer break had started, there was no chance to check it out again.

I found a few words I had written about apple sizes and not letting them grow too densely. I examined how our apples were growing. Three or four always seemed to be next to each other on adjoining stems. Was this too dense? I thought of trying to get Brother Brown to stop by and take a look. I decided that would be very unlikely, so I did the next best thing.

That Sunday I carried a brown paper grocery bag into our Sunday school class and stuffed it under my chair. Brother Brown eyed the sack suspiciously but didn't ask any questions. After class he waited for me, knowing I wanted to show him something.

"So what have you got?" he asked before I could open the bag.

I pulled out an apple branch I had bent to fit inside. Leaves scattered all over the floor. Brother Brown's eyes flashed with curiosity.

"Can you take a look at this and tell me what you think of the little apples?" I asked.

He grabbed the branch and handled the leaves and little shoots carefully. He held each part up close to his eyes. I held my breath during the examination. Finally he turned to me and spoke.

"Leaves look good. No disease. Lots of apples on here."

I grabbed the branch back eagerly. "So is that good?"

"Good if you like little apples."

"So they're too dense?"

"That's a good word for it. Better pull off two out of every three. Like right here you should just leave one." He pulled off two little apples from a group of three to show me.

"What if I don't pull them off?"

"Then they'll all be small. No one wants to buy a small apple, believe me."

I did believe him, but it seemed like a waste of a lot of good potential apples.

"Brother Brown, is there anything else I need to do? You know, until they're ready to pick?"

"You're sprayin' and waterin'? Keep it up and get 'em thinned out." He paused and added, "Summer's the easy part. Better rest up for what's comin'." His voice didn't sound as harsh as usual.

***

It was hard to convince my sisters and cousins about apple density. I took them out to a tree and repeated what Brother Brown had said.

"It just doesn't sound right," said Lisa. "Don't we want more apples, not less?"

"How do we know he's not tricking you into wasting all our apples?" asked Michael, acting like he had uncovered a conspiracy.

"He is kind of like our competition," said Amy.

"No, no, he wouldn't do something like that. Remember how he showed us how to water," I said, defending Brother Brown.

"And how do we know we're doing that right?" asked Michael.

"Well, it seems to be working so far. Look, I think the reason we have to do it is the same reason we did the pruning. We want the tree to concentrate its energy on growing fewer apples a lot bigger. Do you like eating small apples?"

"How small?" asked Michael.

At that point, I turned to Amy for help.

"I guess it makes sense," she finally said, and the others eventually went along.

Thinning reminded me a lot of pruning and, I imagined, what picking must be like. We had to use the ladders to reach every group of apples. Sam climbed all through the inside of each tree pulling off two little apples for each one he left. We sent Michael in there with him and assigned Lisa and Jennifer to the lowest-hanging branches.

I wasn't exactly sure what kept them coming back day after day. Michael always talked about the money he was going to make and the cans of pop. Sam just seemed happy to be outside and doing what everyone else was. My sisters had a competitiveness that wouldn't let them sit around while we were working. Besides all those things, though, I think they all had become a little attached to the trees. They would look at the tiny apples they were pulling off and say, "Do you really think these are going to be the size of regular apples someday?" Watching air and water turn into something they could hold and eat was like learning an ancient magic they wanted to be a part of.

My favorite times were when Amy and I were working by ourselves on a tree. I would mostly just listen to her ramble. She loved to tell me about all the people at school and who liked whom. I knew most of them only through Amy's stories, but I still liked the way she took all of their lives so seriously. She seemed to have no interest in the future beyond her next three years of high school. I tried to get her to tell me what she was going to do after that, but she would always change the subject. Even when we played our favorite game, "would you rather," she limited her opinions to things in the short term. When I asked, "Would you rather live in a trailer but drive a Ferrari or live in a mansion but drive a VW Bug?" she didn't seem to care. But when I asked about
Homecoming queen versus Prom queen, her opinions were very strong about Homecoming queen. I didn't understand it much and decided it must have something to do with being a girl.

It was amazing to see what we could accomplish working full-time. The thinning was done in only three weeks, and by the time July hit, there wasn't much for six people to do, really. The weeds in the orchard had completely surrendered and been wiped out. Sam even became obsessed with pulling the discing machine behind the tractor to churn and chop up weeds we'd missed.

Every other week I would take the tractor to General Supply and buy more Diazinon and cans of pop for full workdays. I probably could have bought enough for the whole summer in one trip, but I kind of liked driving to the store. In the furniture section, there was a huge air conditioner. It felt great on a hot day to sit on the couches and chairs and be drenched by the cool air and then wander around the store examining all the strange things for sale. When Michael figured out their charge system, he begged me to buy him all kinds of things, especially a BB gun and a baby chick.

Eventually, the girls only joined us on watering days. The hotter it got, the more we all looked forward to irrigating and would do it without shoes on and in rolled up pants. Sitting underneath the shade of the trees with
the water rolling over our feet was the coolest place we had.

The one activity we never seemed to finish was digging out the ditches by hand. With the hot July sun beating down, we didn't work very hard at that, though. Ditch digging was usually relegated to Sam, Michael, and me. If we did nothing else on a particular day, I always made sure we moved our shovels around a little. When my dad would ask me at night what I'd done during the day, I could always at least answer, "Dug a ditch." He would reply that was better than nothing but that I would be better off down at the scrap yard.

***

The deeper we got into the summer, the less I talked with or even saw Mrs. Nelson. Right after school let out, when we were thinning or weeding, she would occasionally watch from her window and walk out to talk sometimes as I passed by her house. As the temperatures rose, she stopped coming out as much. Finally, she stayed inside altogether. I took her branches and samples of the apples every few weeks so she could see how well they were growing. The bigger the apples got, the less interested she seemed. Sometimes she would even pretend not to be home, but I would leave my samples by the front door, anyway. The way she acted worried me more and more.

I had reread our contract enough times to memorize it during the first weeks of pruning. Since then I had mostly left it in its hiding place, almost afraid to think about it. I had pushed it into some future place in my head. Maybe Mrs. Nelson had too. But after five months of work, I couldn't just walk away empty-handed; not with my sisters and cousins involved. I had to get some money and in the best case scenario the orchard too. I had slowly come to realize the orchard was worth something. I didn't know how much for sure, but when my dad talked about owning land, it was always a big deal. From what I gathered, people saved their whole lives for a plot as big as the orchard. But maybe Mrs. Nelson had forgotten or changed her mind about giving it up. One particular conversation we had made me bite-my-lip nervous. She had let me in one hot July day, a day after Sam and I had sprayed. The Diazinon smell was still in my nose, and my head ached a little. As I was showing her how the apples were beginning to look fatter on the top than on the bottom, she looked at me and asked, "Are you having fun, then?"