The girl could almost see his memory searching the land beneath the vines.
“There used to be an orchard family around here.”
“Where?”
“That's the thing.”
“I don't know.”
“My father mentioned them.”
“His father too.”
“Big operation for this county.”
“Packed fruit.”
“Shipped by truck.”
“Maybe rail before that.”
“What happened?”
“Bad freezes.”
“Disease.”
“Children moved away.”
“Road got rerouted.”
“Depends which old man told the story.”
The girl frowned.
“And everyone just forgot fifty acres?”
The older farmer looked at the kudzu towering around them.
“You're standing inside the reason.”
She turned.
Green swallowed everything.
The vines covered trunks, fence lines, old stonework, the remains of an access track, even the roof of what she had assumed was a collapsed shed.
From the county road, the property looked like one enormous living mound.
The older farmer continued.
“Kudzu doesn't need much time to make history look like a hill.”
A goat suddenly gave a short excited bleat.
The girl turned.
It had pushed its head through the newly opened vines and was reaching toward a branch.
Something hung from it.
Dark.
Shriveled.
Small.
She stepped closer.
An old fruit.
Last season's remnant, dried nearly to nothing.
She held it between her fingers.
It crumbled.
But the shape remained obvious.
The older farmer whispered:
“Apple.”
The young woman looked from the dead fruit to the rows disappearing beneath vines.
The same man who had spent three weeks telling her she owned fifty acres of useless green chaos finally looked at her.
His expression was no longer amused.
“Girl…”
She waited.
“You may have bought yourself an orchard.”
For three full seconds, she said nothing.
Then one of the goats sneezed directly against her sleeve.
The moment broke.
She wiped her arm.
The older farmer laughed.
So did she.
Then both looked back toward the trees.
The laughter ended almost immediately.
Because discovering an orchard was not the same thing as saving one.
By noon they had exposed twenty-seven trees.
Only nine looked obviously alive.
Six were clearly dead.
The rest existed in the uncertain territory between both.
Some trunks were hollow.
Others were split down the center.
Several had entire limbs torn away under the weight of kudzu.
Two leaned so badly that the older farmer refused to let her stand beneath them.
One still showed several live twigs near its crown.
Another had green cambium beneath the bark when scratched gently with a knife.
The girl began marking trunks with strips of cloth.
Blue for alive.
Yellow for uncertain.
Red for dead.
She ran out of blue before she expected.
That made her hopeful.
Then the older farmer pointed at the goats.
“You need them out.”