I bought eleven acres outside Dunmore, Nebraska, for one reason. I wanted to be left alone with my grief where nobody would watch me do it.
Carol had been gone four months when I signed the papers. We had talked for thirty years about getting a little place in the country, a garden, some bees, a porch where you could watch weather come across the flat. We had talked about it the way people talk about heaven, like it was real but always one more winter away. Then she got sick in the spring, and by August she was ashes in a blue tin on my dresser, and all our talking turned into a thing I owed her.
So I did it alone. I was fifty-nine, newly retired after thirty-four years climbing poles and splicing line for the power district, and I had a pension, a pickup, and no more reason to stay in the house where she died. I found the old Teare acreage in a thin little real estate flyer at a gas station. Eleven acres. A square frame house that needed paint. A hay field in back, a windbreak of cedars, and along the whole west side a row of the biggest, gnarliest Osage orange trees I had ever seen, planted so tight and old they had grown into a green wall.
The man selling it was named Orval Teare. He was eighty-six and had moved to a little house in town when his knees quit, but he drove out to walk the place with me the day I came to look. He had a cane and a feed cap and a way of standing in a field like he was part of it.
“My dad planted that hedge,” he said, when he caught me looking at the Osage orange. “Nineteen and fifty-one. One tree every ten steps, the whole west line. Hedge apple, we called it. Thorns like roofing nails. Used to be every quarter in this county had a hedge row like that before folks took to wire. That there is your property line, son. Dead straight from that big stone at the corner.”
He walked me up to the northwest corner and put his hand flat on a boulder. It was a gray glacial rock, flat on top, half sunk in the sod, big as a kitchen table. Smooth in the middle where a hundred years of weather and rear ends had worn it.
“The dinner stone,” Orval said, and he smiled for the first time all morning. “Threshing crews ate off this rock when I was a boy. My ma would carry dinner out in a basket and the whole crew would set right here. Sweet corn, fried chicken, pie. Every kid in this township has sat on this rock. That’s your corner. Hedge runs south from it. Anybody tells you different is lying to your face.”
I did not know then how much those two sentences would come to mean. I only knew I liked the old man, and I liked the stone, and I liked that the line between my land and the next was a living wall of trees his father had planted with his hands. I bought the place that week. Orval shook my hand and held it an extra beat and said, “You take care of it. It took care of us.” Then he got in his car and drove back to town, and I was alone with eleven acres and a blue tin.
I will tell you the truth. Those first weeks saved my life. I did not know a soul. I woke up when it got light, and I worked until I could not, and I slept hard, and that was better than anything I had managed in the city. I patched the porch. I painted the house a soft gray. I turned over a garden plot in the southeast corner where the morning sun hit first. I set two beehives at the edge of the cedars, the way Carol and I had always said we would, and I talked to the bees like a crazy old man, which I suppose I was becoming.
I planned the whole thing around that northwest corner, up by the dinner stone. The soil there was the best on the place, black and deep, where the old cattle pens had been. I was going to put the orchard there. Six apple trees, two cherries, a little stand of plums. I had already ordered the whips. I used to lie in bed and see it finished, Carol’s orchard, fifteen years down the road, me an old man under my own apples. It gave me something to point the days at.
Then I met Hollis Breck.
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