The Last Cherry Orchard

The truck was a 1998 Ford, the color of dried blood, with a canopy over the bed that had been patched with tarp so many times it looked like a quilt designed by someone who hated quilts. Caleb McCullough had owned it for three years and it had broken down on exactly fourteen roads in fourteen counties. Beauregard County was number fifteen.

He was standing beside the truck with the hood open and a wrench in his hand when Delphine Beauregard drove past in a Cadillac that looked like it had escaped from a different decade -- chrome bumper, whitewall tires, a body that was longer than it was wide and smelled, Caleb could tell from thirty feet away, of old perfume and old money.

The Cadillac stopped. It did not stop gracefully. It stopped the way a ship stops when the captain has given up and the iceberg has not yet decided.

You need help? Delphine called through the open window.

I need a spark plug and a miracle, Caleb said. Both of which I don't seem to have.

She got out of the car. She was wearing jeans and a sweater and a look that Caleb recognized immediately -- it was the look of someone who had spent too many years in rooms where she was not supposed to say what she was thinking.

What are you selling?

Cherries. He gestured to the canopy, where rows of cherry trees in burlap sacks stretched from side to side. Sweet Cherries, Bing, Rainier. They are all good. I picked them this morning.

She walked to the back of the truck and picked up a cherry from a cardboard box. She held it between two fingers, inspected it, and put it in her mouth without removing the stem.

How do you know they are good? Caleb asked.

Taste, she said, and then, surprised at her own bluntness, added, Sorry. That was rude.

No, Caleb said. That was honest. In this county, honesty is a novelty. People usually tell you the cherry is good and then charge you twice what it is worth.

She laughed. It was a real laugh, not the polite sound she had probably used her entire adult life in rooms where laughter was something you did when someone else made a joke and you wanted them to know you were listening.

I'm Delphine.

Caleb. Caleb McCullough.

Caleb McCullough, Delphine repeated, as if testing the weight of it. That sounds like a man who has never been afraid of hard work.

Caleb looked at the cherry tree canopy, at the rusted Ford, at the cracked asphalt of the roadside where he stood, and said, You'd be wrong about that.

But she did not seem to hear the self-deprecation. She was already opening the cardboard box and pulling out another cherry, and another, and eating them with the kind of focused enjoyment that Caleb had only seen in children and people who had forgotten how to pretend.

By the time he fixed the truck -- which took two hours, a bent paperclip, and a prayer -- Delphine was still there, sitting on the guardrail, eating cherries and asking him questions about cherry varieties that she apparently knew more about than she let on.

You know your cherries, Caleb said.

I know my family's orchard used to have a variety called Beauregard's Pride, she said. It was sweet, late-season, and it grew only in Beauregard County. Nobody has seen it in twenty years.

Well, he said, closing the hood of the truck, maybe you should come to Tennessee next spring. I'll show you something that tastes like Beauregard's Pride.

She looked at him, and something passed between them -- not attraction, not exactly, but recognition, the kind that happens when you meet someone who has also learned to find pleasure in small things because large things have proven unreliable.

Maybe I will, she said. And then, before he could respond, she got back into her Cadillac and drove away, leaving behind the smell of old perfume and the faint taste of cherries on the air.

He did not expect to see her again. But three days later, she was back, and the day after that, and every Saturday for the next two months. She would drive out to the side road where Caleb parked his truck, buy a box of cherries, and sit on the guardrail while he sorted them by size and ripeness.

They talked about everything and nothing. He told her about the strip mines of eastern Tennessee, about his mother's cough that never went away, about the way the mountains look in winter when the fog sits in the valleys like a sleeping animal. She told him about the Beauregard house -- the peeling paint, the rooms that were too large for one person, the way Aunt Harriet sat in the parlor every afternoon knitting the same scarf and unknitting it every night because "something has to fill the time."

Judge Galt came to see her once, Caleb noticed. A large man in a large car, with a smile that took up his whole face like a mask that did not fit. He stood on the porch of the Beauregard house -- Caleb could see it from the road, a structure of faded white columns and sagging steps -- and talked to Delphine for twenty minutes. When he left, Delphine did not wave. She stood in the doorway and watched him go with an expression that Caleb could not read but would have described, if pressed, as exhaustion.

On his last Saturday before winter, Caleb packed the truck and was about to leave when Delphine appeared at the side road in the Cadillac. She was wearing a coat that looked too thin for the weather, and she had a box in her arms.

I brought you something, she said, handing him the box. Inside was a jar of cherry preserves, homemade, with a label that read Beauregard's Pride in a handwriting that was both elegant and defiant.

It is not much, she said.

Caleb held the jar up to the light. The preserves were the color of amber. They smelled like summer.

It is exactly enough, he said. And then, before he could think better of it, he added, Come to Tennessee next spring. I will show you the real thing.

She smiled, and it was the first time Caleb had seen her smile without any iron in it. We will see, she said.

He did not see her that spring. He did not see her that summer or that fall. He heard, through the grapevine of roadside traders and county gossip, that the Beauregard house had burned down -- some wiring fault, they said, or perhaps arson, though nobody could say who would want to burn a house that was already falling apart. He heard that Delphine was alive. He heard that Judge Galt had disappeared. He heard that the land developer who had been circling the Beauregards for years had bought the property at auction for a price that was an insult to anyone who remembered when the Beauregard name meant something.

Caleb did not go to Mississippi. He stayed in Tennessee. He tended his cherries. And every spring, when the trees were heavy with fruit and the air smelled like sugar and soil, he would hold up a jar of preserves -- made by someone else, bought from a jar in his kitchen -- and he would think about a woman on a guardrail eating cherries from a cardboard box, and he would wonder if she ever thought of him, the way he thought of her.

In the yard of the burnt Beauregard house, seven miles from the side road where they first met, Delphine planted seventeen cherry pits in flower pots she had salvaged from the ruins. One of them sprouted. She did not know this. She was not looking. But it sprouted anyway, in the dark, in the soil that had been fire and was now earth again, reaching toward a sun that neither of them could see.

Author Note & Copyright: