“I have been using it, Beth,” Curtis answered, and his voice on the phone was calm, almost kind. “Somebody has to keep the north block alive. You know that. The trees need to be sprayed.” I looked at the tractor, with its full tank and its warm engine, and at my daughter Kayla standing frozen beside it, one hand on the fender. A faint smell hung in the barn, oily and sweet. Daddy had sprayed that block for fifty years. But he had never done it at night, and he had never done it with a tank mixed to the order of a man who did not belong on the tractor. “Curtis,” I said, “what is in that tank?”
He did not answer the question. He said instead, in the soft voice I had known for nineteen years, that he was driving home early and that he would explain everything over supper. Then he hung up. I stood with the dead phone in my hand and the spray log in the other. Kayla took my arm. “Mom,” she whispered, “he is not at the packing house. Look.” She pointed to the dusty window above the cider press. A pair of headlights was turning slowly in at the far end of the lane, a quarter of a mile away, coming without hurry up the dark row of Gala trees.
I made the decision in the space of two breaths. I handed Kayla the log and the key and the new filter in its box, and I told her to climb the ladder to the hayloft, to lie flat behind the old bales, and to film what she saw with her phone. I told her to call 911 and keep the line open. She protested. I kissed her hard on the forehead, a kiss I had not given her since she was small. Then I went to the barn door, and I stood in the square of lamplight with my hands at my sides, like my father at the end of a long day, waiting for his dog.
A recipe box tucked away on a high shelf kept the truth fresher than any orchard could.
Curtis parked beside the tractor and got out slowly. He was a handsome man, still, in a clean canvas jacket, with the first silver in his dark hair, and I had loved the way he walked. He stopped ten feet away and looked at the open lid of the cider press. “You found the log of Daddy,” he said, not unkindly. “Beth, I wish you had come to me.” I asked him what he was spraying on the north block. He sighed. “A little herbicide. Something to thin the trees. In a month they will look blighted, and the state will declare the block unproductive.”
I understood in a flash. Daddy had placed the orchard in a land trust ten years before, a protective easement that barred any buyer from tearing out the trees. It was the one decision he had never discussed with Curtis. A developer from Portland had been circling the orchard for years, offering three million dollars for the acreage. But the easement held only as long as the land remained in working orchard. “You are killing the trees,” I said, “so the trust will release it.” Curtis did not deny it. “Fruit does not pay for a thing,” he said. “Neither does sentiment.”
“And my father?” I asked. The word came out cracked. “The morning he died, you mixed the tank.” Curtis looked at his hands, and then, to my astonishment, he began to cry. “He found the offer letter,” he said. “He said he would sooner burn the orchard than sell it. I only meant to scare him, Beth. I added a second chemical to the spray, something that would make him ill, so he would stay in bed for a few days while I got you to sign the papers. I did not know that his mask could not stop it. I did not know.”
Above us, the hay creaked. Curtis lifted his head sharply, and in that moment I saw the red dot of a phone peering over the edge of the loft, steady as a small star. He took one step toward the ladder. Then the lane filled with blue light. Two cars from the county sheriff came up through the Gala rows with no sirens, and the deputies who stepped out were the same men who had once sat in the kitchen of Daddy and eaten his apple butter. One of them, a heavy gray haired sergeant named Hollis, took off his hat before he spoke.
“Curtis,” he said, “I am going to ask you to put your hands on the tractor.” Curtis turned and laid both palms on the hood, slowly, with the stiff dignity of a man who has lost a long game. He looked back at me once, over his shoulder. “I loved you,” he said, and I answered, “I know. That is the worst of it.” They read him his rights beside the old cider press. Kayla climbed down from the loft, shaking, and I held her so hard that neither of us could breathe, and the sergeant gave us his handkerchief.
Curtis pleaded guilty to manslaughter and attempted fraud, and was sentenced to twenty two years. The state toxicology report matched the second chemical in the log to the tissue samples held in storage. The land trust was strengthened, and the developer withdrew. It took three seasons and a crew of neighbors to bring the north block back. Some of the trees did not return. We planted new ones, row by row, fourteen hundred saplings, and Kayla wrote each name in a notebook the way Daddy wrote the dates on his filters.
Last October, on the harvest sale at the church, Kayla stood behind a long folding table with a hundred jars of her grandfather apple butter. She had found the full recipe in the tin box, on the back of the card, in his careful hand. The line at the table ran down the church steps. When the last jar was gone, she turned to me with a flushed face and a wooden spoon in her hand. “Mom,” she said, “Grandpa would have been prouder of the sauce than the sale.” I tasted a spoonful. It was just right, tart and warm, the taste of a good man.