deputy turned from ant to life-size struggling man, clutching his side and red in the face.
“Rudy Gibbs, we’ve had complaints,” he said, wiping his forehead. He flung the sweat from his hand.
“Complaints?” Rudy said.
“Well, not complaints exactly. But we’ve been getting calls where people say things,” the sheriff’s deputy said.
“What things?” Rudy asked.
“They say that they don’t want to take care of an apple tree, let alone two.”
“But they’ve got to have two or they won’t get apples. The trees need to cross-pollinate,” Rudy said.
“You’ll have to stop this, Rudy,” the deputy said. “There’s a slew of things I could charge you with.”
“Like what?” asked Rudy.
“For one thing, trespassing,” the deputy said.
“Don’t you think people sort of like it?” I asked.
“Who are you?” the deputy asked.
“I’m Helen,” I said. “This is my place. I work for Rudy.”
“Careful now, you’re telling me you’re his accomplice,” the deputy said.
“Accomplice,” Rudy said. “I like the sound of that. Way better than employee.”
“All right, you two. You’ve been warned. I’ve given folks my direct line to call at any time if there’s a problem,” the deputy said.
“Sad day when the sheriff’s deputy arrests a man for planting trees,” Rudy said. “Not that I’m admitting anything.”
“Why do you have to make my life hard?” asked the deputy.
“Okay, we’ve been warned, I hear you,” said Rudy.
When the sheriff’s deputy had packed himself into his car again, I turned to Rudy, who had never paused in his shoveling. “What now?” I asked.
“You heard the man. No one’s even complained.”
“We could get in trouble. We could go to jail,” I said.
“Oh yes,” said Rudy, throwing his shovel aside. “You and your delicate sensibilities. Talk so much shit about questioning authority, private property is an oppressive construct, as long as you can safely observe us assholes from the sidelines. You fucking landowner. Typical college loudmouth. Don’t think I don’t notice how fast you shut up and stand back when the real shit’s about to go down. Can’t even shoot a gun in the air when it counts.”
Sometimes I would swear that Rudy didn’t notice me at all, that I was only his foil, setting them up so he could knock them down. Yet he had been watching me. I thought of the people I knew back where I came from, people like my aunt and her friends, people with strict divisions between commentary and conduct. I had left that behind, hadn’t I? Where they talked, I acted. I worked so hard every day that I had to explain myself. I had to say, I did wash my hands they are just permanently that color. I labored with shovel, wheelbarrow, snare, and knife, I worked until I was an empty vessel, all spilled out, nothing left to give. I was helpful even when Karen and Lily refused to be helped. Still, what Rudy said knuckled itself into me. I had no way to reply.
Rudy saw this and softened. “Don’t take it so hard,” he said. “Those folks just called the sheriff to chat. They wanted to talk about their feelings. You said it best. People like the trees, but they’re confused. It’s like a new shirt. It’s hard to spend money on one, but hell, if it just shows up you kind of take to it.”
So we kept right on.
* * *
Three weeks after we had begun, Rudy shifted the truck to neutral and turned off his headlights, and we coasted to a stop in front of the principal’s house. It was three in the morning. “I want to shake this guy’s hand,” whispered Rudy. “This is the guy who started it all. Let’s give him four trees. No, six. He said he didn’t want apples, so let’s give him three Kieffer pears and three Fellenberg plums.”
It took us nearly an hour just to dig all the holes, which was more time than we usually spent at one house without at least circling around the block. I was getting jittery, felt my bowels drop, had to squat behind the hedge. The principal’s porch light came on.
I crouched with my pants around my ankles. Rudy hit the ground and lay flat, the slope of the lawn swallowing him up. When the principal stepped out in his bathrobe, green-faced in the porch bulb’s unfriendly light, he blinked into the empty night. With one mind, Rudy and I waited him out. The night was with us. The shadows were with us. The sloped lawn was with us. The principal’s gaze didn’t linger on