That was two years ago this fall. Hollis Breck is still out there farming his four thousand acres, but he does his own combining now, mostly, because one by one the small operators took their custom work somewhere else, quiet, the way he used to do everything to them. He is not on the co-op board anymore. His own son Cody came to me that next spring, hat in his hand, and helped me set the two cherry trees, and never said his father’s name once, and I did not make him. The orchard is in. Six apples, two cherries, a stand of plums, up in the black ground in the corner by the stone. They are small yet. I will be an old man under them, if I am lucky, and I mean to be.
Orval Teare passed last winter, at eighty-seven, in his little white house with the geraniums. I was one of the ones who carried him. Before he went I drove him out one last time in October and we sat at the dinner stone and looked at the new hedge coming up green along the line his father marked, little thorny whips knee high now, one every ten steps, and he put his old hand flat on the rock the way he had the first day I met him.
“You took care of it,” he said.
“The town took care of it,” I said.
He shook his head, slow. “No,” he said. “The town just remembered. You’re the one made them say it.” He patted the stone. “Your corner, son. Dead straight from here. Anybody tells you different.”
He did not finish it. He did not have to. I know how it ends.
I came out here to be left alone with my grief, and a cold man looked at me and saw something easy to take, a widower who would not last the winter. He was wrong about the winter, and he was wrong about me, and he was wrong about the one thing men like him are always wrong about. He thought the line was wherever he was willing to stand. But a line that one scared person at a time is too afraid to defend is still a line, all the same, held in a whole township of old folks who sat on the same rock as children and never forgot where it was. All it needed was a room. All it needed was somebody to stand up first.
Carol never saw this place. But I set her blue tin on the kitchen windowsill now, where it looks out at the hedge coming up along the west line, and in the mornings the light comes across the field and lands on it, and I tell her about the apples. I am not alone out here anymore. I never really was. I just had not met them yet.
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