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.
