Page 3 of Harvest Moon Mountain Man

Nobody looks at my trees like that. Buyers look at yield. My ex-wife looked at this place like it was the wall between her and Vancouver, and she wasn't wrong about that, not really, and it ended the way it had to — quiet, over one long winter, a signature on a form neither of us fought over.

Zara Okafor looks at thirty-eight acres of farmland as if it were built especially for her.

"You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Stopping to stare."

"They're worth staring at." Not embarrassed about it, which I like more than I want to admit out loud. "Doesn't that ever get old? Being out here every single day?"

"No." Faster than I mean to answer, more honest than I usually let anything out. "Gets harder. Doesn't get old."

"Harder how?"

I could give her the easy version: weather risk, the co-op's cut going up two points last spring, margins thinner every year the fuel and fertilizer bills come in. Instead I tell her about the wet September two years back that nearly cost the whole crop. Three nights, radar app open at three in the morning like staring at it could change what it said.

I tell her about the October my grandfather died mid-harvest. About how I picked the entire east block alone that week because I couldn't stand the thought of anyone else's hands on that particular wood that particular week, not even the crew who'd worked here longer than I'd been alive. His pruning shears are still hanging in the shed, his initials scratched into the handle with a pocketknife sometime in the seventies. I sharpen them every spring before the season starts. I've never once used them.

I don't know why I'm telling her this. The recorder's still in her jacket pocket, red light blinking, mostly forgotten by both of us at this point in the morning.

"That's not going in the article," I say. Too late to matter.

"Wasn't planning to use it." She looks at me level, notebook closed now, pen tucked behind her ear instead of moving across the page the way it's been moving all morning. "I just wanted to hear it."

We keep walking. I show her more, how to read stress in a tree before it ever shows up in the fruit, the particular way bark color shifts a full season before yield drops, why I've never sprayed a single thing out here I wouldn't put my own bare hand in without thinking twice about it. I tell myself it's for the article, that context makes better copy, that I'm only being this thorough because a good subject deserves it. It isn't, and by the time the light starts going gold again over the west rows, I've stopped pretending otherwise, at least to myself, even if I'm not ready to say so out loud to her.

"You give every reporter this much?" Near the end of the row, an apple in each hand, sun catching the side of her face.

"No," I say, and don't explain it any further.

Zara nods and falls back into step beside me, close enough that our shoulders nearly brush on the narrow path between the trees, and neither one of us moves to put the distance back.

By the time the trucks pull out that evening, I've told her more about this place, about my grandfather, about the two years I've spent stalling on a decision I already know the answer to, than I've told anyone in the better part of a decade.

I don't know what to do with that. I don't try very hard to figure it out either — not yet, not with her still walking beside me in the dying light like she's got nowhere else in the world she'd rather be standing.

three

Zara

The crew clears out around six. Trucks pulling off down the gravel in a loose line, taillights winking through their own dust. I expect Rourke to call it too. Instead he tips his head toward the barn at the edge of the near field and says, "Come see the rest of it," like it's nothing, like he hasn't spent all week acting like a man who genuinely forgot he agreed to any of this.

I follow without asking what the rest of it means. Something about the way Rourke goes quiet during work has stopped feeling like a wall over the last two days and started feeling like the opposite. A door I haven't earned yet. Except now, apparently, I have.

I worked it out somewhere on the walk over, the gravel crunching under both our boots. The quiet isn't shyness. It isn't rudeness either, whatever I assumed that first afternoon climbing down off the ladder. It's focus, and he gives it to the trees because that's the only kind of attention worth giving, the only kind he trusts. When he hands a piece of it to me instead, it means something. It means more than four hours of quotes ever could.

The barn smells like apples before I'm even through the door — sharp, sweet, rot-and-sugar, cider somewhere mid-process, wood gone dark with decades of soaking it in. A press sits in the middle of the floor, hand-cranked, older than either of us by a wide margin. Oak barrels line the back wall. Two dozen of them, maybe more, each chalked with a date in handwriting too neat to be his.

"This isn't in the press kit."

"Wasn't meant to be." He runs a hand along the nearest barrel — not inspecting it, just touching it, the way you'd touch something you've touched ten thousand times and still aren't tired of. "Small batch. Whatever's left over after the sale fruit's gone. Two hundred bottles most years, give or take. Mostly I drink it myself."

"Mostly?"

"Orrin's been at me to go commercial with it. Two years now." He shrugs. "Haven't decided."

Rourke talks more here than he has all day. Sentences that don't stop the second they've delivered whatever I asked for. He tells me about the press itself, about his grandfather's hands on the same crank forty years back, about the one disastrous year he tried adding pear to the blend and how fast, how completely, it went wrong. I stop taking notes without noticing I've stopped. It isn't for the piece anymore, hasn't been for a while now if I'm honest with myself. I just want the rest of it, whatever the rest of it turns out to be.