“What do you see?” he asks, his voice at my neck, my ear, and I shiver slightly at the feeling of his breath against my skin.
“I’m not sure,” I say truthfully.
“The trees haven’t bloomed yet,” he explains. “But they will soon, so we have to take out all the branches that are crowding the older limbs—the old wood, it’s called.”
“This small one,” I say, tapping it with my finger. “It’s growing straight up from a thicker branch, and it still looks a little green.”
“Exactly,” he praises. And I lift the saw, holding it to the limb. On my first stroke across the branch, the saw slips out, and I lurch forward to keep from dropping it. Bo tightens his arms around me, and the ladder teeters beneath us. My heartbeat spikes upward. “The saw takes some getting used to,” Bo adds.
I nod, gripping the top of the ladder. And then I feel the sharp stinging in my left index finger. I turn my palm up so I can examine it, and blood beads to the surface along the outer edge of my finger. When the blade slipped, it must have cut into my skin where my hand was holding the branch. Bo notices it at the same time, and he leans closer into me, reaching around to grab my finger.
“You’re cut,” he says. The blood drips down the tip of my finger and plummets all the way to the ground, six feet below. I notice Otis and Olga sitting in the swath of sun between rows, orange-and-white heads titled upward, watching us.
“It’s okay,” I say. But he yanks out a white handkerchief from his back pocket and presses it to the cut, staunching the bleeding. “It’s not that deep,” I add, even though it stings pretty good. The white fabric turns red almost instantly.
“We should clean it out,” he says.
“No. Really, I’m fine.”
This close, with his face directly beside mine, I can feel each breath as it rises in his chest, see his lips move as he exhales. His heart is racing faster than it should. Like he was worried I might have just cut my entire hand off, and it would have been his fault for allowing me to wield a saw.
He lifts the handkerchief away to inspect the cut, leaning into me.
“Do we need to amputate?” I ask lightheartedly.
“Most likely.” His eyes slide to mine, the corner of his mouth lifting. He tears off a small strip of the handkerchief, holding my hand in his, then ties the narrow piece of fabric around my finger like a makeshift tourniquet. “This should keep the finger from falling off until we operate.”
“Thanks,” I say, smiling even though it still burns. My lips so close to his I can almost taste the saltiness of his skin.
He slides what’s left of his handkerchief into his back pocket and straightens up behind me so that his chest is no longer against my back. “It’s probably safer with just one person on the ladder,” he amends.
I nod, agreeing, and he climbs down, jumping the last couple feet to the ground and leaving me weightless atop the ladder without him.
He scales back up his ladder, and we work side by side, sawing away the unwanted limbs on each tree. I’m careful to keep my fingers out of the way, and soon I feel confident with the saw. It’s a tedious, slow process, but gradually we work our way down the first row.
This becomes our routine.
Each morning we meet in the orchard, moving our ladders to a new row. Bringing the fruit trees back to life. I don’t mind the work. It feels purposeful. And by the end of the week my hands have a roughness like I’ve never felt before. My skin has browned, and my eyes taper away from the midday sun. It hasn’t rained once all week, and the summer air feels light and buoyant and sweet.
On Saturday we collect all the sawn limbs and pile them at the north end of the orchard. And just after sunset we set them ablaze.
The sooty night sky sparks and shivers, the stars dulled by the inferno we’ve created on land.
“Tomorrow we’ll cut down the dead trees,” Bo says, arms crossed and staring into the fire.
“How?” I ask.
“We’ll saw them down to stumps then burn them out from the ground.”
“How long will that take?”
“A couple days.”
I feel like I’ve been suspended in time this last week, protected from a season that comes each year like a violent squall. In moments, I’ve even forgotten entirely about the world outside this little island. But I know it will find a way in. It always does.
* * *
It takes three days to trim the two dead apple trees and one pear tree down to only stumps. And by the end of the third day, my arms can barely move. They ache just lifting them through my T-shirt in the morning.
We walk through the orchard, examining our hard work—today we will torch the three tree stumps—when Bo stops beside the single oak tree at the center of the grove, the one with the heart cut into the trunk. It looks like a ghost tree, white moss dripping from the limbs, two hundred years of history hidden in its trunk. “Maybe we should burn this one down too,” he comments, surveying the limbs. “It’s pretty old and not that healthy. We could plant an apple tree in its place.”
I press my palm against the trunk, over the etched heart. “No. I want to leave it.”
He lifts a hand to block the sun.
“It feels wrong to cut it down,” I add. “This tree meant something to someone.” A gentle wind blows my ponytail across my shoulder.
“I doubt whoever carved that heart is still alive to care,” he points out.
“Maybe not, but I still want to keep it.”
He pats the trunk of the tree. “All right. It’s your orchard.”
Bo is careful and precise before he lights the three dead trees on fire, making sure we have several buckets of water and a shovel at each tree in case we need to dampen the flames. He strikes a match and instantly the first stump ignites. He does the same to the next two trees, and we watch the flames slowly work their way through the wood.
The sun fades, and the flames lick upward from the tall stumps like arms reaching for the stars.
I make two mugs of hot black tea with cardamom then carry them down to the orchard, and we stay up to watch the fires burn through the night. The air is smoky and sweet with apples that will never bloom because these trees have reached their end.
We sit on a stack of cut logs watching the fires burn for nearly an hour.
“I heard your mom used to read tea leaves,” Bo says, blowing on his tea to cool it.
“Where did you hear that?”
“In town, when I was looking for work and found the flyer. I had asked someone how to get to the island, and they thought I was looking to have my fortune read.”
“She doesn’t do it anymore, not since my dad left.” I lean forward and pull up a clump of brittle beach grass at my feet then roll it between my palms to crush it, feeling the broken fibers before I scatter the fragments back across the ground. I have a memory of my dad walking across the island, kneeling down occasionally to pull up a gathering of dandelions or clover or moss, then rubbing them between his worn hands. He liked the way the world felt. Loam and green. The earth giving up things we often ignored. I wipe the memory away with a quick closing of my eyes. It hurts to think of him. Pain skipping through my chest.
“Do you read tea leaves?” He asks with a quirk of an eyebrow.