The Orchard Keeps Count

Ruth Ann had counted the harvest every October since she was a girl, a habit her mother taught her as a way of knowing whether the winter would be lean.

The year her husband Elias walked into the orchard to check a fence line and did not walk back out, the count came to four hundred and twelve apples off the north row, same as always. She noted it in the ledger out of stubbornness more than anything, because keeping the ledger felt like keeping him.

The next October, the north row gave four hundred and thirteen. The year after, four hundred and fourteen. Ruth Ann told herself it was rainfall, or luck, or the new bees the Hendersons had brought in, and she might have gone on telling herself that if the numbers hadn't kept climbing in such an orderly way — one apple more, every year, without fail, whether the summer was wet or dry.

By the tenth October she had four hundred and twenty-two apples and a suspicion she did not want to look at directly. She walked the north row at dusk instead of morning, which she had never done, and found the trees standing unnaturally still, not a leaf stirring though the wind moved everything else in the yard.

At the center of the row, on the spot nearest the old fence line, one tree stood taller than the rest, its bark strangely pale, its lowest branch bent low as if in the shape of an arm reaching down to steady someone climbing.

She picked the single apple hanging from that branch, and it was warm in her hand the way skin is warm, and when she cut it open at the kitchen table there was, at the center, not a core of seeds but a small, dark, walnut-sized knot that looked, if she held it to the lamp just so, uncomfortably like a wedding ring.

She replanted that apple's seeds the following spring, all of them, in a neat row along the fence line, and told the neighbors only that she liked to keep something of Elias's growing. She never again let the count trouble her. She simply let the orchard keep its own kind of years, alongside hers.