“One Nelson or another has been here for five generations.
Either they hate it—-my father hated it—-or they were like Ken and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. All Ken ever wanted out of life was Maisie and the farm.”
“So who’s up next? Do they have kids?”
Joe walked over and pulled an errant weed near the base of a tree then dropped it in the road. “That’s the question. Their daughter Alice lives in Phoenix. Alice is out. She’s got a husband and kids. They’re settled there, they like the heat. I don’t think she even eats cherries. My cousin Kenny is a forester in the U.P. Everybody’s looking to Kenny to save the day but nobody knows for sure if he’s going to do it, including Kenny. There might not be anything to save anyway.”
Pallace was walking ahead of us in her little yellow shorts. She turned around to face us and started walking backwards. “Are they broke?”
“Pretty much,” Joe said. “This business runs on a very small margin. The crop is bad one year and you’re broke, or the crop is good, which means that everybody’s crop is good, and so the prices drop and you’re broke. Gerber tells you to put in twenty acres of plum trees so you sink all your capital into plum trees—-”
“—-and Gerber doesn’t want the plums,” Sebastian said.
“And you’re broke.”
“That’s so depressing.” I sounded like a petulant schoolgirl but the day was too beautiful to think that anything could change. Five generations of Nelsons had lived on this farm. Surely the sixth generation would live here as well.
“Farming is depressing,” Joe said. “But once it gets in you, you can’t put it down.”
“Farming is the new acting,” Duke said.
“Couldn’t they sell off part of the land to pay the debts?” I said this as if it were an original thought.
Joe laughed. “I’m glad you didn’t float that over lunch. Maisie would have handed you your napkins back.”
“So no one sells land.”
“Land gets sold when people die and the kids refuse to come home and take it over. Otherwise you keep the land.”
Duke put his arm around my shoulder. “As you know,” he said in a voice both animated and conspiratorial, “your cherry orchard is to be sold for your debts; the auction is set for August twenty--second, but don’t you worry, my dear, you just sleep in peace, there’s a way out of it. Here’s my plan. Please listen to me.”
Then Joe Nelson was walking on my other side and slipped his arm around my waist. The director’s arm around my waist! Nothing but me in between him and Duke. “Your estate is thirteen miles from town,” he said. “They’ve run the railroad by it. Now if the cherry orchard and the land along the river were cut up into building lots and leased for summer cottages, you’d have at the very lowest twenty--five thousand rubles per year income.”
Pallace was laughing her head off. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Where were you people raised?”
“I understand why I know The Cherry Orchard,” Joe said to Duke. “But I don’t understand why you know it.”
For the record, neither man removed his arm from me.
“I like Chekhov,” Duke said. “All the boys from East Detroit like Chekhov.”
“It’s true,” Sebastian said.
“And I always wanted to play Lopakhin.”
Lopakhin was the rich son of a peasant who was looking to install himself in Lyubov Andreevna’s cherry orchard, in her family—-new money legitimized by shabby aristocracy. Joe shook his head, letting me go so that he could take a step back to look at Duke. “You’re too handsome for Lopakhin.”
Duke disagreed. “It’s all in the performance,” he said. Suddenly I wondered if the afternoon had been one long audition. I wondered if Joe might take Duke with him come the fall, cast him in a bigger play.
Small orange butterflies tossed themselves through the air in front of us, one of them lighting on my wrist. “That means big change is coming,” Pallace said. Even when I held up my arm it stayed. I’d forgotten how many butterflies there were back then, how many bees.
“What’s up there?” Sebastian asked, staring at the hill ahead of us. From where we were we could just make out the pretty iron fence. Joe didn’t answer, he just started walking in that direction and we followed him, exactly as we had all summer.
It was the first time I had seen the farm, had seen the Nelsons’ house, had called Joe by his given name. The first time I had seen the cemetery and stood in its benevolent shade. The hill and the breeze and the shade always made it feel ten degrees cooler up there. “The Whitings are north,” Joe said, pointing to a farm a mile away. “And on the other side are the Holzapfels. And here we have all the Nelsons.” He opened up his hands to include the generations of his family.
“You don’t even have to leave when you die,” Duke said. Maybe it was part of the life he had imagined as a child: everlasting inclusion.
We looked at the pond and the rows upon rows of trees. We looked at the house and the garden, which was just a stamp of color from where we stood.
“What’s that little house?” Pallace asked.
“It’s an extra. Workers stay there sometimes. I stay there.”
“An extra house,” Pallace said in wonder, because none of us could imagine having one house.
“It’s very small,” Joe said, as if he were embarrassed.
Duke lay down on one of the graves and closed his eyes. “Does this bother you?” he asked. I didn’t know if he was talking to Joe or the residents.
“Be my guest.”
“I’d like to come back here. Could I? Do you have any vacancies?”
“I think you’d have to marry a Nelson,” Joe said. “Alice would be too old for you.”
“Your cousin is already married,” Duke said. “And she doesn’t want to leave Phoenix. I wouldn’t want to break up her marriage and then find myself buried in Phoenix.” He shook a cigarette out of the pack and put it between his lips.
“Hey.” Sebastian nudged his brother with his shoe. Sebastian wore canvas tennis shoes all the time, the way a tennis player would. “Get up.”
Duke shook his head, fishing his lighter out of his pocket. “I like it here.”
“Peedee,” Sebastian said. His voice wasn’t stern but we all understood his seriousness. Duke got to his feet and put the cigarette behind his ear. Pallace brushed some pine needles off his back.
“There’s one more thing to show you,” Joe said. “You can stay all afternoon if you want but after this I need to get back to work.”
We followed him down the hill, Duke coming last and closing the gate. “Wasn’t that something?” he whispered, leaning close.
“Beautiful.” It was the word I used for the entire day.
We walked back a different way, past a long stretch of apple trees and a smaller stand of pears, Joe telling us the names of every variety and which ones were for eating and which were for processing and which trees were past their usefulness and needed to be pushed out. That was another thing he was planning to do if he found time. We were back on the main road that ran alongside the woods, and when he reached a break in the trees that he alone had seen, he stepped inside.