Hazel’s yellow head pops up in the tall grass. She’s come back to wait for Maisie but when she sees me she decides I am enough. Together we take the dirt road past the wall of hemlocks and white pines to the barn. The cherry trees are so burdened that I don’t know how we’ll get the fruit picked before it rots. Most of the crew trailers are empty, three families down from the usual ten or twelve. Joe has divided the acres and given everyone their parcel to work. We wave to each other at a great distance. I leave a tray of sandwiches at the sorting table in the morning and pick up the empty platter at night. Emily’s ever--helpful boyfriend, Benny Holzapfel, is no help at all since he is working sixteen--hour days on his own family’s farm. Holzapfel—-meaning crab apple, or the crabby people who hang out near sour little apples—-is a selling name but does not suit our warm and generous friends. You could spend years in a New York apartment never knowing the people who live two feet away from you, but live on an orchard in Michigan and you will use the word neighbor to refer to every person for miles. You will rely on them and know their children and their harvest and their machinery and their dogs. The Whitings have an old German shepherd named Duchess, though she could have just as easily been Princess or Queenie. Despite her wolfish appearance, she is a sweet girl. Duchess has been known to walk all the way to our back door in the summer. I give her a bowl of water and some biscuits, and after a nap on the warm flagstones, she heads off again.
Past the pond there is a place where the two farms touch, ours and the Holzapfels. My husband used to joke that someday one of our girls would marry a Holzapfel, but when Benny started showing up in our kitchen his senior year of high school, Joe dropped the joke for fear of scaring the boy away. Since then my husband has whispered his dreams to me alone, in the winter, in our bed late at night: Emily and Benny would marry and join the farms. We would fix up the little house, put on a proper porch, a new kitchen, a real master bedroom, everything on one floor. Joe and I would move to the little house and give our house to Emily and Benny so they could have children here, children who may one day marry the children of the Otts or the Whitings nearby, weaving together an ever greater parcel, because even if a person can’t work the land they have, they will still want more. It has been years since Emily was bewitched by Duke, and years since the enchantment was broken and our daughter returned, and while we love her and rely on her, we’ve never completely gotten over being afraid of her. She says that the farm is her life, and of course she’s going to stay here. She says it with Benny standing beside her in the kitchen, both of them barefoot, shucking corn for dinner.
Benny has been riding his bike down the path that links our farms since he was a child, and by the time he was in high school he was showing up in our kitchen to talk to Joe about his 4-H projects. We called Benny the Man with the Plan—-heirloom apples, high--density apples, club apples—-he made a dinner presentation out of every pamphlet the Michigan Farm Bureau sent. The constant chatter about apples was mostly cover for his nerves because clearly it was Emily he had come to see. Even before he left for college he made it clear he was coming back to work with his parents. Benny hadn’t missed the fact that other lives were available to him, it was just that the choice he liked best was the one that sprang to life beneath the tires of his bike, the one that might include Emily if she were interested.
But Emily had always been interested in the farm, and she had always been interested in Benny, and over time those two interests slowly pushed Duke aside. Or maybe it didn’t have anything to do with the farm, maybe she just outgrew him. She came home from East Lansing to work the harvest every summer. She said we needed to think about building our own cold storage so that we wouldn’t have to outsource refrigeration, and that maybe we could build a big one and split the cost with our neighbors. The investment would pay for itself when we started selling more sweets for the fresh market.
Where was Duke in all these plans?
He was nowhere.
Hazel heads up the hill to the cemetery where generations of my husband’s people are buried behind a low iron fence, and for whatever reason I follow the dog. A plush vegetation is knitted over all the graves, and I think of how meticulously Joe’s aunt had kept things here, but this is not the summer for weeding. The cemetery is the highest point on the property and would have been the logical site for a house, the way it overlooks the trees and the barn and all the way to the edge of the lake, but those first settlers gave the best land to their dead, the very first a two--year--old named Mary. One by one they followed her up the hill until twenty--nine of them were resting beneath the mossy slabs, and there they wait for us to join them. That’s what life was like back in the day, you buried your children, your husband, your parents right there on the farm. They had never been anywhere else. They had never wanted to be anywhere else.