Page 15 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

The laugh comes off the field in one wave.

"To the fruit. It was a hard spring and a good fall, and both of those are the same weather, which is the only lesson farming has ever taught anybody."

"To the valley… the people who grew things this year and the people who bought them, which is the entire economy of this place and always has been."

He lifts the glass. And then he turns his head and finds me at the edge of the firelight, and he doesn't look away for the rest of it, in front of two hundred people, entirely un-embarrassed.

"And to the things worth keeping past the season that grew them."

The field says it back. Two hundred people, ragged and loud and out of time with each other.

I stand there with my glass up and the fire on the side of my face and the cold coming through my coat from behind, and I finally understand what I said in his tasting room on Monday afternoon with my rental car still ticking in the gravel.

He asked me what I tasted. I said autumn.

I thought I meant the fruit. Something clever about acidity and cold nights — the kind of answer you give to seem observant.

What I meant was this. A season with an end date on it. Nineteen rows in the ground. A woman who sat in a car on a road and refused for ten years from inside a will. A man on a tailgate who has been waiting two years for somebody to stand on the ground before they let it go. All of it pressed into one word that came out of my mouth before I could stop it, because I have never in my adult life been able to lie about what something tastes like.

The firewood girl appears at my elbow with soot on her chin.

"Are you the one who's not selling the land to the box people?"

"That's me."

"Verna Lasko says you counted the rows out loud."

"I did."

"That's a weird thing to do." She considers me with total seriousness. "I do it with firewood."

"Then we're both weird."

"Good," Rue says. "My dad bought our land off Faye and now she lives at our house. That's what happens."

Then she's gone, back to her woodpile, where a man is being told about punky birch.

Orrin comes down off the tailgate and through the crowd, stopped twice, three times, four — everybody wants a minute, and he gives every one of them a real one — and when he finally reaches me he doesn't say anything at all.

He goes quiet. Right there, with the fire cracking and the whole valley behind him.

I put my hand flat on his chest.

"I know," I say. "I heard you."

Epilogue

Juneau

The rows go in on the contour, which is the only argument I lost and the only one I was wrong about.

Three hundred and forty trees on the first four acres — bittersweets, the tannic ones nobody in this valley grows, on rootstock that won't fruit properly until I'm thirty-two. From the new deck off the back of the tasting room you can see all of them, waist-high and staked, running down the long shallow fall toward the creek in nineteen rows on my grandfather's original spacing. When I put the plan on the table, Orrin looked at it for a long time and said, keep his eighteen feet. I did.

The water licence hearing was in June. We won it in August. The creek's been in the drip line since the first week of September — the first time water has legally run out of Cole Creek onto this ground since 1977.

There's a sign at the head of the block. Marsh Sawmill fir, planed and routed by a man who wouldn't take money for it. MARGIT'S ROW.

The varieties board came out of cold storage and went up behind the bar, faded columns and all, under glass. People ask about it four times a day. Orrin tells them the whole thing every time, at length — the seven-person council, the water, the two dry summers, the woman who said no for ten years from inside a will. I've never once heard him shorten it. I stand at the end of the bar sometimes just to watch him get to the part about her.