The Orchard of Lost Hours

Chapter One: The Keeper's House

Marren Voss walked the orchard the way other men said their prayers, which is to say badly, out of habit, and without much hope that it changed anything. He went at first light, before the coffee had finished its last rattling gasp on the stove, down through the dew-heavy grass between the rows, counting trees he had no need to count. He had planted some of them himself. Others had been old before his wife was born. He knew each one by the particular slouch of its trunk, the scar where a branch had come down in the ice storm of '81, the way the bark peeled in grey curls on the north side where the wind came hardest off the ridge.

The orchard did not behave the way an orchard was supposed to behave, though Marren had stopped finding this remarkable sometime around his fortieth year of tending it. A tree might go six seasons without setting a single fruit and then, on some ordinary Tuesday in October, produce one apple, low on a branch, red as a held breath. Another might hang heavy with a whole crop that browned and dropped before anyone thought to pick it, every apple on it gone soft and useless, because, Marren understood, whatever the tree had been waiting for had simply stopped mattering to the person it was waiting for.

He was seventy-eight years old. His knees announced the weather a full day before the radio did. He drank his coffee black because Ruth had always doctored hers with cream and sugar until the cup was more dessert than drink, and somewhere in the thirty-one years since she'd died he'd let himself have the bitterness instead, as if it were a form of company.