Delia nods, her clipboard held tight against her chest as she checks the next crate. She’s been policing the quality with rigor, and I’m happy to say she hasn’t rejected a single bin in five hours.
By four in the afternoon, my neck is stiff and my knuckles are stained a deep brown from handling the pomace. The festival doughnut woman bolts for the cold store, hollering that there’s one more basket back there and to hold the line. The yard laughs.
Twelve.
Ten.
I cap and I cap. Delia’s filling faster than she has all day, and her hands are shaking.
Eight. Five.
Nobody’s working anymore except the people who absolutely have to. Everybody else has just gathered. They’ve drifted up the line until there’s a loose ring of them around Delia and the bottling end, forty people gone quiet, watching the juice run into the glass.
Three.
Reed brings the last of the pomace up himself, cradling the last bundle of crushed apples in both arms, tips it into the press, andBram leans on the handle. The screw bites, the gold runs, and Delia fills two more.
One.
The last bottle, identical to the hundred and fifty-nine we capped. Delia sets it under the spout, lets it fill to the neck, lifts it away. Ash takes it from her and caps it, one slow press of his thumb on the lever.
Click.
For one second the whole barnyard just looks at the gold-full bottle in Ash’s hand.
“A hundred and sixty!” Ash shouts after a beat, and Hal Brody throws both fists over his head and bellows. The whole yard comes apart, forty people who’ve been holding their breath for three days letting it out at once, whooping, banging on crates and the sides of the presses and each other. The Carhartt man is crying. Somebody starts a chant of the orchard’s name and it catches and rolls around the yard.
“That’s the order!” Reed shouts over it, holding the bottle up where Ash handed it off. “All thousand!”
Bram laughs, wet and startled, and hauls Reed into a hug that lifts him clean off his heels.
Then Hal Brody and three of the warehouse guys are there, getting their hands under Reed’s thighs and Bram’s waist. They heave them up onto their shoulders, whooping. Somebody else grabs Ash from behind, hoisting him up.
Then, the crowd moves in a wave toward the cottage deck, and the festival doughnut woman is jogging up the steps, her cheeks bright red. She grabs my hands, laughing, and pulls me down into the yard. And suddenly I’m being lifted too, sitting on Hal’s shoulder, my hands flying out to find Bram’s sleeve. Ash laughs and dumps his cap onto my head, and we are all held up above the yard, forty people shouting our names.
Maggie’s already moving. She comes down the line splitting out a stack of waxy paper cups into every hand, and the Carhartt man follows with a jug of the day’s fresh-pressed, sweet and cloudy and not a full day old—not the Hollow Gold of course, but delicious apple juice.
“To the orchard,” Hal says, lifting his cup.
“To the orchard,” forty voices say back.
But Bram shakes his head, one arm slung around Reed’s neck. He lifts his own cup and turns slow, taking in the whole yard.
“We never would’ve done it without every single one of you,” he says. “I’ll spend the rest of my life not knowing how to give this back.”
The Carhartt man wipes his eyes. “Then don’t,” he says. “Just keep makin’ the cider, son.”
And we drink.
***
By eight, the string lights are on.
They stretch in long, glowing loops between the apple trees, throwing a warm, yellow haze over the lawn where we’ve set up three long tables. The air is cold enough that my breath plumes, but the three bonfire pits are roaring, sending heat and sparks up into the dark.
The tables are loaded with three kinds of potato salad, warm sourdough, roasted pork, and a mountain of apple pies.
Bram stands at the end of the center table, a bottle of local rye in his hand. He’s cleaned up, his hair damp from the shower, wearing a clean green flannel.
