A. Tree's Arc

Chapter 9 of 10

By midday A. Tree's balance began to slip on the folding chair. His roots had gone soft where they gripped the canvas. Every apple he tore from his chest left a wet gouge that did not close. Sap ran down his trunk and darkened his bark below the ribs. He had grown thirty apples since sunrise. His leaves were falling in slow spirals around Jerome's boots. Jerome noticed before A. Tree did. He caught the barrel just as A. Tree swayed and grabbed the chair arm to steady himself. "You're gray," Jerome said. "Around the mouth. You've gone gray." "There's still the far side." A. Tree pointed across the mud. A woman was holding up a thin child. Two more people sat on the ground behind her. "Four more. Maybe five." "You grow one more apple, you go down." Jerome set the barrel on the ground. He looked into it. There were still apples inside from the last orchard picking — real ones, red and heavy, forty or so left. "We use these. Not you. Not for the next hour." "They're for the ones I miss later. When the barrel's empty I have nothing to fall back on." "You'll have nothing to fall back on if you fall." Jerome picked out an apple and weighed it in his palm. "Sit down. Off the chair. On the boulder." A. Tree looked where Jerome pointed. A flat-topped rock sat six feet off the path, half sunk in the grass. He had not noticed it before. It was low enough to climb and wide enough to hold him. "I can still see from there?" "You can see. You just can't grow. Hour of rest. I throw from the barrel. You point." A. Tree stepped down. His bark scraped the canvas and left a smear. He walked to the boulder and lowered himself onto it. The stone was cool through his roots. He felt the pull in his chest ease for the first time since sunrise. Jerome came over with the barrel and set it beside the rock. He pulled a branch A. Tree had shaped earlier from the grass and held it up. "Woman with the child," A. Tree said. "Then the two sitting. Then the man in the brown coat came back — behind the log." Jerome nodded. He fitted an apple to the branch and threw. The apple crossed the gap and landed in the woman's hands. She sat down hard and pressed it to the child's mouth. "Next," Jerome said. A. Tree pointed. The sap on his chest began to thicken and crust. A small green leaf pushed out of the bark near his collarbone. He watched it unfurl and understood he would keep going tomorrow. The barrel would empty by evening. After that his body was all he had. But not this hour. This hour he could sit.