Rootstock

Obed Lammers keeps a bucket by the door of his press, and every load he cannot name, he throws one apple in it. In February the bucket should be empty. There are five, out of a cellar on the Netherton road, and they are firm — not holding up well, not sound-ish. Firm, the way a good winter apple is firm in December.

The tree they came off is in a fencerow with a graft union a hand's width off the ground, which means somebody carried a stick out there once, on purpose, knowing what it was. Three people have told the niece it is a Lamont Pippin. The ground closes on the thirty-first of March.

The village of Netherton has a mown lot where the pavement quits, six old apple trees along the north fence, and a hand-painted sign on two posts. The sign carries the name of an apple raised in this village and says this is the last tree of it standing. It has been repainted twice and nobody has ever changed a word on it.

Nola Marden is out there in the first week of May on nobody's business but her own. The row was set by one hand, one age, one planting — and the fourth tree stands a foot and a half proud of the line, and the bark changes partway up the trunk at a mark that goes all the way around, a good deal higher off the grass than it has any call to be.

A nursery on the flat has already made thirty-six trees off it. The tags are printed. The fair day is the twenty-third of May.

Nola goes along in front of the crew and takes out of the trees the fruit that has no business going into a bin. Limb rub, which is the gray scuff a fruit wears where it has spent the summer lying against a branch in the wind. Bird peck. The ones that split at the stem when the rain came and healed over brown and hard. The whole of the low tier on the north side of every tree in the fifth row, because deer were through there in August.

She drops them as she goes and the grass takes them the way the grass takes everything in October, and by the end of a row you cannot tell she has been down it.

Thirty-one acres in four blocks, and not one of the four has paid for itself in any year she can put a finger on. What comes in comes in through the shop at the bottom of the hill, where other people's trees go out grafted, to order, for money that feels real in February and does not amount to much by June.

The Rennard ground sits inside a fieldstone wall on the Tarbell road. Something under sixty stones, in rows that stop being rows about two thirds of the way to the back wall. Tyrus Ruckle mows it, and nobody has come out there on a Sunday in longer than anybody can say.

Thirty feet inside the wall there is an apple tree, wide and low-headed and carried on three scaffolds, which is not a shape a tree arrives at by itself. Somebody carried it out there on purpose, put it in a burying ground, and went home. Nola Marden has been nearly certain what it is for better than twenty years and has never written the name down for anybody.

In April a stone came down out of the north run and it is lying in the grass in its own dent. The roots are under the footing, thick as her wrist, going in from the tree in three directions and out the far side into the road bank. The association is three people in a township with a checkbook, and a paper that says the wall comes first.

The tree in the grass at Isby Chapel comes out two weeks ahead of the county and has done it every spring anybody can remember. Six apples went off it into a box in October, and the letter that came back in November had a name in it nobody in Pendry County had ever heard. A Jeffcoat. A Southern apple.

So Nola Marden reads the ground. The tree stands on the one flat piece of the lot, a long step off the corner, where a man could see it from his own step of an evening. A family gave that ground in the eighteen-sixties and the man of it came up out of the South with what a man brings. It is a reasonable answer, everybody out there has always had it, and she believes it the whole way back down the lane.

Then she backs the truck in for the shade and gets up on the tailgate, level with the crotch of that tree for the first time. Three limbs come out of the head. They come out of one place, at one height, and there is a line all the way around each of them.