A. Tree's Arc

Chapter 8 of 10

The next morning A. Tree's line stretched long again, and the mud gap looked wider than it had the day before. He handed an apple to a bent old man and then straightened up to scan the far side. The far crowd was thick. Heads bobbed behind heads. Someone in a brown coat sat down hard and did not get up, but A. Tree could not tell if the person was tired or sick. His eyes were good for the orchard, not for fifty feet of gray air. He kept losing faces in the crush. A hunger he might have caught in a second up close became a guess across the gap. He passed out three more apples and missed a boy sitting behind a woman's skirt entirely. The boy only stood up when his mother pulled him forward. A. Tree felt the old stone settle in his roots. He could not keep working like this. Someone would fold onto the mud before he saw them. "You need to sit higher." The voice came from behind him. A. Tree turned. Jerome stood at the edge of the line with a folding chair under one arm and a wooden barrel braced against his hip. The barrel was heaped with apples from the last picking A. Tree had done before the slide. Jerome had walked it up from wherever he had been keeping it. His flannel was dark at the shoulders from the weight. "Higher," Jerome said again. He set the barrel down. He shook the chair open and locked its wooden arms. The canvas was worn soft. "Stand on this. You'll see over the ones in front." A. Tree looked at the chair. "It won't hold my roots." "It'll hold long enough to look." Jerome pressed a boot on the seat to show it. "You look. I hand out. You point, I pick who's next." A. Tree understood. He stepped onto the canvas. The wood creaked but held. His head rose above the line, above the cart, above the crowd on his side. Across the gap the far crowd opened up like a map. He saw the person in the brown coat clearly now — a woman, gray-faced, holding her stomach. He saw a child with cracked lips near the log. He saw an old man behind two taller men, waiting without complaint. "Woman in brown," A. Tree said. "Then the child by the log. Then the old man in back." Jerome already had an apple in his hand. He walked to the barrel, chose the reddest, and held it up for A. Tree to throw. A. Tree pulled a branch from his shoulder, shaped it, and drove the apple across. It landed a foot from the woman's boot. "Next," Jerome said. A. Tree scanned. He did not miss anyone now. His shoulder bled sap onto the canvas, and he kept looking.