It was a problem shaped like an orchard.
Two years earlier, fever had taken my parents within ten days of each other, quick as a thief who didn’t care what he left behind. They left me our cabin, a handful of worn tools, and the hundred apple trees my father had planted in neat rows on a slope nobody else wanted.
He’d come west with his head full of Eastern stories: rolling green hills, orchard profits that paid for houses and schoolbooks, a life sweetened by harvest instead of hardened by drought.
But we weren’t in some gentle postcard valley. We were in the high plains of northern Wyoming, where the wind scraped the ground like a file and rain treated us like a stranger.
The trees grew anyway. Stubbornly. As if they shared my father’s faith.
The problem was never the growing.
It was the keeping.
The main crop ripened all at once, late September, in a frantic rush like the orchard was trying to make up for every dry day. Deep red Winesaps. Rough-skinned russets. Apples meant for winter, meant to last.
But our town, Maple Creek, was small, and the nearest city with a real market sat almost a hundred miles away over roads that turned to ruts with the first bad storm. I didn’t have a wagon strong enough. I didn’t have a team of horses. I didn’t have time to disappear for days and return to find my cabin vandalized by loneliness.
So each year I watched a fortune ripen, drop, and rot.
