Cherry Picked

My hands burned for no reason I could name, at the end of a row of cherry trees, with my seasonal manager dead in the grass.

I opened my first cherry harvest as an owner in the dark, which my aunt Marit would have said was the only proper way to open anything.

I had woken some time after three, the way I had most nights that year, and lain there listening to a truck come up the drive and stop somewhere near the sheds. I took it for Kyle, come up early to fuss with the shaker, and I must have dropped off again, because the next thing I knew the sky was gray. The kitchen clock said a quarter to five when I put my coffee down and went out. I had dressed for it the night before, the way I used to lay out my clothes for the first day of school. Dark jeans that fit me properly, a canvas field jacket belted at the waist, and my hair, a dark honey blonde and still my own color, up in a low twist so it would not catch on a branch. I put on lipstick too. Nobody on the ridge would see it before sunrise, but I knew it was there, and at fifty-one that counts for something.

There was a cat on the porch rail. He was a big orange-and-white tom with a white bib and white feet, and he watched me come out of my own front door as if I had been keeping him waiting. I had never fed him. I told him so, and he did not seem to think it mattered.

The air smelled of wet grass and the bay. Lund Orchard sits on the limestone ridge behind Ephraim Harbor, and in July the mornings come up off Green Bay gray and damp and very quiet, so that a car door closing down on the shore road carries all the way up the hill. I walked down past the packing shed toward the scale house with my flashlight off, because the sky over the water had already gone pale enough to see by.

The crew was there before me. Roy Salinas had brought his people up from the Rio Grande Valley to this orchard for nineteen summers, and he had never once been late for Marit. They stood around the scale house in work gloves and hooded sweatshirts, drinking from thermoses and not talking much. Roy came over when he saw me. He is a compact, strong man in his forties, with brown skin and black hair cut short, a neat mustache, and a pair of reading glasses that hang on a cord against his chest. He took his gloves off to shake my hand, which nobody had to tell him to do.

"Morning, Mrs. Verhaegen," he said.

"Annelies," I said. "Please."

He nodded as if he would think about it. "Kyle's not here."

"His truck is," I said. I had passed it by the packing shed. It was a red pickup with a crack across the windshield, and I had parked beside it the afternoon I signed the papers.

"Truck's been there since I came up," Roy said. "I knocked on the window. I called him twice." He looked out toward the rows. "He ran the shaker down there last night, after the crew went. Said he'd start in the south block."

Kyle Wautier was my seasonal manager, or rather he had been Marit's, and I had inherited him along with the house, the trees, the machinery and a recipe box I had not yet had the heart to open. He was a big, easygoing man in his thirties who called me ma'am and forgot what I told him. I had been back on the ridge since the end of April, when my divorce was final and I took back the name I was born with, and in that time I had learned that Kyle was late for everything except getting paid.

"I'll walk down," I said.

"I'll come."

"No," I said. "Keep them warm. If he's asleep in the cab, I would rather be the one to wake him."

Roy looked at me for a moment and then put his gloves back on. I thought he had already begun to be afraid, and that he was too polite to make me afraid with him.

The south block is the oldest planting on the farm. The trees are low and wide, the way tart cherries are kept for the shaker, and the grass between the rows had been mowed that week and still smelled of it. I could see the shaker from the end of the first row. It is a squat yellow machine with a long arm that clamps a trunk and shakes it, and a fabric catching frame that opens around the tree like an umbrella turned inside out. It was parked at the head of a row with its frame folded and its engine silent.

Kyle was on the ground beside it.

I said his name. I said it again, louder, in the voice I used to use on the shop floor when a salesman left a forklift running. He did not get up.

I did not go closer than I had to. I have never been a woman who faints, and I did not faint then, but I stood very still in the wet grass with my hand over my mouth, and that was when the heat came.

At first I thought it was a hot flash. I had been having them since the winter, at the sink and in the car and once in the middle of the closing at the bank, and I knew the shape of them. This was the wrong shape. It did not climb from my chest the way the others had. It started in my palms, both of them at once, as if I had just lifted a pan out of the oven without a towel. It stayed there. I held my hands out in front of me in the gray light and looked at them, and they looked like my hands, and they burned.

Then it faded, and my hands were only my hands, and Kyle had still not gotten up.

I called the sheriff's office from my phone. I gave our road and the name of the farm and said that a man was down beside the tree shaker in the south block and was not breathing, and I said it in good order, because a person who kept the books for a farm-equipment dealership in Green Bay for twenty-six years learns to say a bad number out loud without dressing it. Then I walked back to the end of the row and waved to Roy, and he came at a run with half the crew behind him.

He stopped beside me and looked for a long moment, and then turned and spoke to his people in Spanish, quietly, and they stopped where they were and stayed there. Nobody went down the row. Nobody touched anything. I have watched grown men at a dealership open-house walk straight through a roped-off display, and I was grateful to every one of that crew.

"He was going to start it," Roy said. "He must have been checking the clamp."

"In the dark," I said.

"He came up early sometimes."

"Did he?"

Roy did not answer that. He took his glasses off the cord, looked at them and put them back.

Deputy Rosa Delgado came up the drive not long after that with her lights on and no siren. She is the deputy who covers the north end of the county, a woman in her thirties from Green Bay, broad-shouldered and not tall, with brown skin, dark hair pulled back in a low bun and a face that had settled into calm before she ever got out of the car. She looked at Kyle from where we stood, and then she went down the row alone and knelt beside him for a long minute with her hands on her knees. When she came back she asked for my name, and Roy's, and who had been in the south block that morning, and who had keys to the shaker, and she wrote each answer down in a small notebook before she asked the next one.

"Nobody started it," Roy told her. "The engine's cold. I could hear that much from here."

"I'll take your word on the engine," Delgado said. "I'd rather not put my hand on it."

The sun was not up yet, but the sky over the bay had gone the color of skim milk, and the birds were starting in the trees. A cherry orchard at harvest makes its own small noise in the morning. The fruit hangs so thick that the branches tick against each other when there is any wind at all. I listened to that and to the crew talking low by the scale house and to my own heart, and I tried to think what Marit would have done first, and the only answer I had was coffee.

Coffee came anyway. A gray pickup came up the drive behind the deputy's car and pulled in by the scale house, and Curtis Brinks got out with a big steel thermos under his arm. He bought tart cherries on the ridge every July, paid the growers out of his own checkbook and sold the fruit on to a processor in Traverse City. He was a heavy, ruddy, friendly man near sixty, with sandy hair cut close and a line across his forehead where his fishing cap sat. He had come by the house twice in May to tell me how much he had thought of Marit. He had brought a pie the second time, a store pie, and apologized for it.

He saw the deputy and the crew and me, and he set the thermos down on the hood of his truck very carefully.

"Oh, no," he said. "Oh, Annelies. Not Kyle."

"I'm afraid so," I said.

"Those machines." He shook his head slowly. "I've seen it before, down in Michigan. A man gets in a hurry first day out, he leans in to check the clamp. Lord. Is there anything I can do? I brought coffee for the crew. I always bring coffee."

"That's kind," I said.

He poured cups for anyone who would take them. Most of the crew did, because it was cold and he was offering and there was nothing else to do with their hands. Roy did not. He stood beside me with his arms folded and watched Curtis Brinks go along the line with the thermos.

"First morning in years he wasn't first at Marit's scale," Roy said.

He said it flatly, to nobody, and he did not explain it. I looked at the scale house, where the lights were on and the door was open and the big platform sat waiting for a first load that was not coming today.

Fifty-one years have taught me that when a terrible thing happens in a small place, everyone wants to have known how it happened before the sun is up. They are not being callous. They want it settled, so they can be sorry in the right way. By the time the light reached the tops of the trees, I had heard it called an accident by the coffee line, by two of the crew in English, and by Curtis Brinks more than once, kindly, as though he were helping me carry something.

I could not make myself agree. I tried. I stood there and told myself that Kyle Wautier was careless, that the shaker was a dangerous machine, that a man could slip in wet grass in the dark. All of that was true. None of it explained why he would walk out to a cold machine in the dark with no light, when his truck was parked by the shed with a flashlight on the dash. I could see the flashlight from where I stood.

Delgado went to the truck. She tried the driver's door, and then the passenger door, and then she shaded the window with her hand and looked in.

"It's locked," she said. "Did he usually lock it?"

"Every time," Roy said. "Even here."

She went back down the row and knelt by Kyle again, and when she came back up she was writing.

"No keys on him," she said.

She said it to her notebook, the way a cashier reads a total back to be sure of it. I heard it all the same. Kyle's truck was locked, and Kyle had no keys on him.

I put my hands in my jacket pockets. They had gone cold now, both of them, though the morning was warming.

The sun came over the bluff at last and laid a long yellow light down the rows, and in it a dark blue car with the county seal on the door came slowly up the drive and parked behind the deputy's cruiser. A tall man got out of it and stood a moment with one hand on the roof, looking down the rows toward the south block.

He was solid through the chest and broad at the shoulder, in a pressed blue shirt with the sleeves turned back over his forearms, and he had shaved. His hair was thick and dark brown, cut short and combed back from his face. He had a nose that had been broken once and set a little crooked, and I knew exactly when it had happened, because I had been in the bleachers. He would be fifty-two now. I had not laid eyes on him since the spring night he took me to his junior prom.

Pete Sundby had been a Norwegian boy from St. Olaf's, confirmed in the same white robe as half the ridge, and I had been the Verhaegen girl, my father's Belgian name on the front of me and my mother's Lund family behind it, the girl whose aunt grew cherries up the hill. He looked at the deputy, then at the crew, then at me, and I saw him find my face and know it.

He came across the grass to us without hurrying.

"Annelies," he said. "I'm sorry it's this."

"So am I," I said. "His keys are missing."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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