Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [37]
The place is locally famous, it turns out. Sanford Webb was a visionary and a tinkerer who worked as a civil engineer for the railroad but also was the first in the neighborhood—or even this end of the state—to innovate such things as household electricity, a grain mill turned by an internal combustion engine, and indoor food refrigeration. The latter he fashioned by allowing a portion of the farm’s cold, rushing creek to run through a metal trough inside the house. (We still use a version of this in our kitchen for no-electricity refrigeration.) Creativity ran in the family. In the upstairs bedroom the older Webb boys once surprised their mother by smuggling up, one part at a time, everything necessary to build, crank up, and start a Model-T Ford. These inventive brothers later founded a regional commercial airline, Piedmont Air, and paid their kid sister Neta a dime a day to come down and sweep off the runway before each landing.
Sanford was also forward-thinking in the ways of horticulture. He worked on the side as a salesman for Stark’s Nursery at a time when the normal way to acquire fruit trees was to borrow a scion from a friend. Mr. Webb proposed to his neighbors the idea of buying named varieties of fruit trees, already grafted onto root stock, that would bear predictably and true. Stayman’s Winesaps, Gravensteins, and Yellow Transparents began to bloom and bear in our region. For every sixteen trees Mr. Webb sold, he received one to plant himself. The lilacs, mock oranges, and roses of Sharon he brought home for Lizzie still bloom around our house. So does a small, frost-hardy citrus tree called a trifoliate orange, a curiosity that has nearly gone extinct in the era of grocery-store oranges. (We know of only one nursery that still sells them.)
The man was passionate about fruit trees. Throughout our hollow, great old pear trees now stand a hundred feet tall, mostly swallowed by a forest so deep they don’t get enough sun to bear fruit. But occasionally when I’m walking up the road I’ll be startled by the drop (and smash) of a ripe pear fallen from a great height. The old apple orchard we’ve cleared and pruned, and it bears for us. We keep the grass mowed between the symmetrically spaced trunks, and on warm April days when the trees are in bloom, it’s an almost unbearably romantic place for a picnic. As the white petals rain down like weightless, balmy snow, Lily dances in circles and says things like, “Quick, somebody needs to have a wedding!” I recently called the Stark’s Nursery company in Missouri to let them know an orchard of their seventy-five-year-old antique apple varieties still stood and bore in Virginia. They were fairly enthused to hear it.
Nearly every corner of this farm, in Webb family lore, has a name attached to it, or a story, or both. There is Pear Orchard Hill, Dewberry Hill, the Milk Gap, where the cows used to cross the road coming home to the barn. We still call it the Milk Gap, though no cows use it now. A farm has its practical geography; when you tell someone to go close the gate, she needs to know whether you mean the Milk Gap gate or the barn lot gate. We have the Garden Road, the Woods Road, the Paw-Paw Cemetery, and the New Orchard. And once a year, for a few days, we have a spot that rises from obscurity to prominence: Old Charley’s Lot.
Old Charley was a billy goat that belonged to the Webbs some seventy years ago. In the customary manner of billy goats, he stank. For that reason they kept him