The Year Money Grew on Trees Page 5

  "I'm not sure that's really the idea, Sam. We probably want to leave most of the big branches," I said, gaping at the branch on the ground.

  "Yeah, okay. But at least we know this saw works pretty well," he replied with enthusiasm.

  It was decided that Sam would climb each tree and cut the thicker branches near the trunk using his saw. Amy and I would use the ladders and pruning scissors and attack the outer branches. Michael was given the clippers and told to work on the smaller branches near the ground or those he could reach standing on the first few steps of our ladders. He of course wanted one of the larger pruning tools, but after putting it to a vote, he had to settle for the clippers.

  We swarmed the first tree. I made my first few cuts nervously. Every few minutes Amy and I would call to each other, "How does that look?" or, "Does this look right?" We climbed up and down the ladders consulting the book's illustrations.

  Sam and Michael never questioned their own work. From the middle of the tree and over our heads, large branches were continually dropping under Sam's saw. I was beginning to worry if there would be anything left to the tree if he kept it up. The bottom branches were also suffering, although the clippers really limited the size of branches Michael could destroy.

  After what seemed like an hour, Amy and I had worked our way around the outside of the tree moving our ladders four or five times. I was just about to say, "Okay, let's all get down and have a look," when there was a crashing of branches to my left followed by a thud.

  Sam had fallen out of the tree and lay face-down on the cold dirt. The rest of us stared at him, stunned. He got to his feet slowly, panting, and said, "Well, the middle's all done."

  We stood back and examined the tree while looking at the book for comparison.

  "It looks terrible!" Michael blurted out. "And it's freezing."

  "Who asked you?" said Amy turning on him angrily. "Look, it's supposed to look bad when it's just bare branches. And you two boys have to stop cutting off so much. It's almost like the whole middle and bottom are gone."

  I agreed with her but was glad that she was the one saying it.

  "Now, let's try again on the next one and be more careful," she demanded.

  As she spoke, I noticed that I could see her breath because it was so cold. I also realized that my ears were freezing. I looked down at my hands, and they were bright red. I really wanted to stick them in my pockets but instead grabbed my ladder and moved it to the next tree. Out of the four of us, Amy was the only one wearing a hat and gloves. We kept working for probably another half hour. Although we seemed to be getting faster, it was also becoming much colder and darker. No one said anything, except for Michael, who complained under his breath about frostbite and losing his fingers and toes.

  Amy finally said, "Why don't we go in, because I can't see anything."

  I wanted to throw down the pruning scissors and run for the house, but I said, as calmly as I could, "Amy's right. Good work, guys! Let's just leave the ladders here and take the tools with us."

  We walked quietly home, the boys blowing on their hands. I said goodbye as we reached my house. I left my pair of pruning scissors outside by the front door and then went in and headed straight for the heater. It took half an hour before I felt like none of my body parts were going to fall off.

  "You cold out there?" Mom asked as we sat around the table.

  "Not really. The work keeps you warm," I replied as cheerily as I could, looking at both of my sisters.

  After dinner I went to my room and drew a map of the orchard on a piece of paper with all three hundred trees. I put an X through the tree in the farthest corner we had finished. Given how long it had taken us to prune one tree, we were going to have to get a lot faster to finish by spring. I wasn't exactly sure when that was

  from an apple tree's perspective, but I figured we better be done by the end of March. It was already the middle of February.

  ***

  The next day after school, I put on a knit hat, an extra coat, and the warmest gloves I could find. I grabbed my pruning tool from beside the front door and headed toward my cousins' house. Before I could knock, Amy came out leading Sam and Michael, who were dressed in as many layers as I was.

  We picked up where we left off, and I noticed the apple book had been left on the ground overnight. I cringed, imagining what the librarian would say if she knew. There was a steady sound of click, click and the buzzing of Sam's saw against the tree. I kept saying encouraging things like "This really looks like the pictures in the book" and "I think we're moving a lot faster than yesterday." I also thought it was a good idea to keep everyone's minds off the cold by talking about shows like The A-Team. This made Sam and Michael wish they were watching TV while Amy ignored me completely. She kept snipping away at branches, but her face looked bored and almost angry. My mind kept imagining her throwing down the pruning scissors and just walking wordlessly away. I frantically tried to think of something to say that would keep her there.

  "You know what this reminds me of?" I said. "That time last year when Bobby Cluff was running for student council and we were hanging up signs."

  "What?" Amy called back sharply.

  "You know, when you were his campaign manager and I helped you hang up signs in the middle of the night so the whole school would be surprised the next day."

  "Yeah, I know. I was there. But why would that remind you of anything?"

  "It's just that my fingers were really cold then, too, and it got pretty dark. And there was a lot of reaching up to try and hang the signs so no one could pull them down. You know, kind of like reaching up for these branches."

  Amy gave me a dismissive look that let me know she could see right through my weak attempt at psychology. She shook her head silently for a minute and then said, "I think we need a radio out here. Michael, go get the radio that Dad keeps in the washroom."

  Michael trudged off and returned with the radio and began flipping through the stations. Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" came on.

  "Oh, I love this song! Leave it right there!" Amy yelled. We didn't dare argue, and she began to sing along softly to most of the songs on the station.

  Counting the tree we had started on the night before, we finished three trees that Friday—and I really did think we were getting better with each one. As we were walking back home in the twilight, I asked very timidly, "So when do you want to get started tomorrow?"

  "When is all this pruning supposed to be finished?" Amy asked in a frustrated voice.

  "The end of March, I figure," I replied weakly.

  "Oh man," she moaned, and paused while thinking. "Probably should start by eight, then," she said bitterly.

  Michael whimpered, but Sam said, "I'd much rather do this than go to school."

  "Great! And I'll have my sisters out here, too, so we can go really fast," I said as we separated.

  I told Lisa and Jennifer about the eight o'clock start time. Before Lisa could speak, I added, "No complaining, remember?" Her mouth closed and she nodded reluctantly.

  ***

  The next morning was very bright, and the orchard looked different than it did in the evenings. It seemed more alive. We all got to the ladders right around eight. Michael said sarcastically to my sisters, "Nice of you to join us." We decided that it would be best for them to haul the cut branches that were scattered below the finished trees into big piles in the middle of the rows. What we would do with the piles we would worry about later. For now we just had to get them out from underneath the trees. We could barely walk around because of the tangle of branches at our feet.

  The two girls began dragging and pulling and forming huge spindly masses while the rest of us continued pruning. By ten it began to get so warm that I removed my top layer of coats and was beginning to feel thirsty.

  "Jennifer, can you go get us some water from the house?" I called out to her.

  "Why do I have to do it?" she yelled back.

  "Because you're the only one
we can trust."

  She came back with a half-gallon pitcher and some cups. We drank quickly and didn't stop again until lunch. We all went home to eat something and then returned to the trees, the whole time eyeing one another, wondering who would quit first.

  Soon I removed everything but my long-sleeved shirt, although it couldn't have been more than fifty degrees. My mom showed up with more water in the afternoon. She looked down the row of trees we had finished.

  "Wow! Did you really do all of this?" she asked, staring in amazement.

  At that moment Sam fell out of the tree he was working in and landed hard on the dirt. He got up without a word and took a cup of water.

  "Well, it was mostly Sam," I said, turning to my mom and smiling.

  We continued on until dinner. Cutting and moving the ladders, cutting and moving the ladders. By four we were too tired to talk, and the batteries in the radio had died. Michael was sent to collect every extension cord in both our houses, and he ran them from a wall plug outside my front door. For the rest of the year, we would be discovering things he had unplugged to provide those extension cords.

  That Saturday we pruned twenty-two trees. We had almost three of the ten rows finished. In the middle of the rows were six huge piles of apple tree branches that Lisa and Jennifer had stacked up. As we walked home, I felt so proud of everyone that I wanted to hug them. I think they felt the same way, but no one said anything. We just kept looking back at the three rows that now looked so different from the rest.

  When I said, "Thanks, everyone," before the two families separated, Michael replied, "Why are you thanking us? It's our money too."

  Inside the house I took a good look at Lisa and Jennifer for the first time since that morning. Their hands and arms were covered in scratches and scrapes from the sharp branch ends. Even their faces and necks had scratches.

  "Oh, Lisa, why didn't you say you were getting all scratched up like that?" I asked in a voice filled with guilt. "I could have given you my gloves."

  "No complaining, remember?" she said in a defiant voice.

  At that moment I regretted all the mean things I had ever said about the two of them. I avoided their eyes and went to find some lotion to help with the scratches. I tried to help rub it on Lisa's arms, but she pulled away and grabbed the bottle.

  ***

  On Sunday morning I woke with my whole body aching. I felt glad to be restricted from working for a day and only wished I could stay in bed, but Mom forced everyone to get ready for church. My sisters and I moved very slowly as we got into our church clothes and dragged through the house.

  Dad thought me being in pain was great. "About time you all did some real work," he crowed. "When I was your age, I hardly had the strength left to crawl into bed after working all day."

  I saw Amy at church and asked, "Are you sore?"

  "What do you think, genius?" she replied.

  I was nervous about what would happen on Monday and whether everyone would quit. The project seemed to have gained its own momentum, though, and my cousins showed up despite their complaints. We continued with the same system, still unsure of whether we were doing anything right. And because I had to return the library book, we didn't even have pictures to compare our work to.

  Sam was the only one who wasn't moving gingerly, and Amy and I would often stop to lean one arm against our ladders just to rest our muscles a little. Whether we had pruned them correctly or not, twenty more trees were done by Friday, and there was a tangled mess of branches waiting for my sisters to pick up the next day.

  Friday night I took a dollar I had been saving and asked my mom to buy a six-pack of pop in town when she went Saturday morning. The next day when we stopped for our afternoon water break, I said to everyone, "Wait here! I'll be right back."

  I returned with the six-pack of grape Shasta Mom had put in the refrigerator. Everyone agreed that it was the best thing we had ever tasted. We sat in the dirt and wished we had more. Sitting there, I noticed that I could smell the cut apple branches. They were sweet, like freshly mowed grass. The dirt below us also had a smell different from the dirt on the road or in our yard. Maybe I was imagining things, but I thought it smelled a little like flowers or rain.

  ***

  The next week was my birthday. I was going to ask for a boom box with a cassette player—but instead asked for cases of pop. When I opened three cases of Shasta, there was a big grin on my dad's face, and I couldn't help feel that I wasn't getting the equivalent value of a boom box. Those Shastas became the high point of our Saturdays, though.

  Every week we got a little faster, or maybe just more careless. The march out to the orchard after school and on Saturdays became a ritual. Sometimes I would even forget what we were doing and why we were doing it. Moving the pruning handles became as automatic as pedaling a bike. We went over the same conversation topics too—the TV show Diff'rent Strokes, cars, the new Farmington Mall, and Shasta flavors. By the middle of March, we were up to finishing fifty trees a week. The last week in March we did sixty. It helped that the days had gotten longer and the temperature had warmed up. Sam had also learned to hang on better in the trees.

  Mrs. Nelson caught me several times on the way out to or coming back from the orchard, and she loved to talk about my "little gang of workers," as she called them. She kept telling me how beautiful the spring blossoming would be.

  ***

  One afternoon in late March, Tommy showed up in the orchard. He wandered out to where we were pruning, clumsily dodging the branches lying on the ground. I reluctantly climbed off my ladder to greet him. I wasn't sure what to say or if I should call him Tommy or Mr. Nelson. I studied his face for signs of anger or resentment. He mostly looked uncomfortable and was dressed in slacks and brown leather shoes. His body was soft and bulging in all the wrong places. He stopped about ten feet from me and pretended to be interested in one of the pruned trees.

  "Hi," I called out in the friendliest voice I could muster.

  "Hey. Thought I'd come check out the big reclamation project. My mom says you're going to be the new apple baron around here," Tommy replied dryly.

  I couldn't tell if he was taunting me. "Yeah, she really wants to see some apples out here," I said a little defensively.

  "I've been hearing that for years."

  "I'm sorry to hear your mom has cancer," I said, trying to sound sincere and thoughtful.

  "Shoot. She's had cancer so many times I've lost count. Any little pain she gets, she's always blaming it on cancer. I wish she'd at least think up some new disease to blame."

  Tommy stared at one of the piles of branches in the middle of a row. He gave an admiring whistle. "So how many trees go into each pile?" he asked.

  "Oh, about three or four," I answered proudly.

  He said it reminded him of the pile of wood he had seen at a bonfire. "Be pretty amazing if you lit all of 'em up at once."

  I agreed with a little laugh, and then he waved good-bye and strolled off. All and all, it was a strange conversation. Instead of being mad about what was going on in the orchard, he didn't even seem to care.

  ***

  We finished the last tree on March's final Saturday as the sky changed from blue into a pale pink sunset. I told everyone to wait while I ran back to my room to get my map of the orchard. We crossed off the few remaining trees and gave a little cheer.

  "We're right on schedule. Can you believe it?" I asked giddily.

  "So do we get paid now?" asked Michael.

  Sometimes I couldn't tell whether he was serious.

  "No, but I'm pretty sure the hardest part is over." Five pairs of eyes looked at me hopefully.

  Chapter 6

  Learning to Drive

  The relief of finishing the pruning was short-lived. After church on Sunday, all six of us went outside to the orchard to think about how to get rid of all the branches piled next to the trees. We had to assure my mom that we wouldn't be working, only thinking.

  The orchar
d formed most of the view from the front door of my house. Out the back door was what my dad called "desolate land." It had some tumbleweeds, sagebrush, and wild grasses, but mostly it was rocks and dirt. If I went walking out there, my socks would always come back full of stickers and my mom would make me sit outside and pull them out before I was allowed into the house. The desolate land must have been owned by Mr. Nelson, because when he was alive he would pile branches in random places on it. I had never realized where he was getting the branches until we started pruning.

  "Let's just take the branches out there and leave them with the older ones. I wouldn't even ask Mrs. Nelson either," Amy said forcefully as we walked through the orchard inspecting piles.

  Amy seemed so determined to avoid a conversation with Mrs. Nelson that I was afraid to question her. "Yeah, she probably isn't going to care, anyway," I said, "as long as we don't drag them through her yard."

  "Drag them? I'm tired of dragging them!" Lisa yelled. "Plus, it's probably half a mile from here to where we could leave them. Dragging them could take the rest of the year!"

  "That's not even close to half a mile," Sam said thoughtfully.

  "More like a whole mile," said Michael.

  We ended up walking off the distance to end the argument. The closest possible drop zone turned out to be about a hundred yards away.

  Dragging a few branches at a time did seem like a very bad idea. I told everyone that we had no choice but to turn to our "secret weapon." I knew that we would have to use it at some point, I just didn't realize it would be that soon.

  Parked between my house and my cousins' house was a 1946 Ford tractor. Our families had never used it for anything agricultural. Mostly it was driven once or twice a year on what Uncle David called "hayrides." Everyone was forced to ride on a flat, rickety wagon attached to the tractor while it was pulled along the highway. No actual hay was involved. These trips usually took place around Christmas so we could look at and judge our neighbors' Christmas lights. Hayrides also took place around the Fourth of July, which seemed to be the only other time my dad or uncle remembered the tractor. Amy hated those rides and would duck her head when cars would drive by and complain about the splinters inflicted by the wagon.