Читать книгу Thrifty Stock, and Other Stories - Ben Ames Williams - Страница 11

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They were married in March; and as though upon a signal, winter drew back from the land, taking with it the snow; and in due time the grass burst up through the sod, and the buds swelled more swiftly, it seemed to these two, than they had ever swelled before. Yet it was not too warm; the blossoms in the orchards came in their season, and not before. And the air was full of the hum of the bees as they went to and fro upon their mysterious mating of the trees. The color of the blossoms, faintly glowing, was in Lucy’s cheeks; the wonder of the springtime in her eyes while she walked here and there with Johnny about his tasks. When the petals fluttered down, it became at once apparent that the apples had set in great profusion; and through the summer they watched the fruit swell and take form and color, and now and then they pared the skin away from an apple to see the white, sweet meat inside.

Johnny began to pick Wolf Rivers early, choosing the largest and reddest fruit; yet it seemed he had no sooner picked one apple than another swelled to take the place of two. Toward the summer’s end, they knew that the crop would be enormous. And this was one of those years when elsewhere the orchards had failed, so that prices were enhanced and buyers were eager.

One day in early October, one Sunday afternoon, when Johnny and Lucy had gone up the hill to have dinner with the older folk, Johnny and Walter Moore walked into the orchard and surveyed the trees.

“A big year,” Johnny said. “The biggest I ever saw. Your apples will bring you close to seven hundred dollars.”

Moore nodded. “It makes me—kind of humble,” he said. “It doesn’t seem possible. And—it’s so different from what my life has been. So great a change, these last two years....”

Johnny looked up at him. “You’ve told me,” he assented. And he smiled a little. “You know, I’ve said to Lucy some times, you can learn a lot from an apple tree. If it’s got grass and weeds around its roots, they starve it for water; and the scale and the aphis and the borer hurt it; and the suckers waste its strength. You were kind of like that, when you came up here. You’d been crowded in with a lot of other folks—grass and weeds around you, cutting off the air and the good things you needed. And the way you lived, there were all sorts of things hurting you; no exercise, and no time to yourself, and Lucy’s dancing all night, and smoking, and your inside work and all, the way the bugs hurt a tree.” He smiled apologetically. “And things like that automobile stock of yours, sucking your money the way suckers drain a tree....”

“That’s right,” Moore agreed. “I couldn’t see it then; but I felt it, even then. And I couldn’t believe these trees would come back, any more than I expected to be so different, myself, up here. I feel new, and strong, now. Like the trees. The suckers and the bugs and all the wasteful things trimmed out of our lives. Mrs. Moore was never so well. And Lucy ... I have to thank you for Lucy, Dree. She used to worry me. She doesn’t, now.”

Johnny, looking off across the orchard, saw his wife and her mother coming toward them. Mrs. Moore erect where she had drooped, laughing where she had been sad; and Lucy, full with the promise of the greatest fruition of all. “Aye,” he said, with the reverent honesty of a man who sees beauty in all the growth of life. “Aye, Lucy’s like the trees. She’s come to bearing now.”