The Year Money Grew on Trees - Aaron Hawkins [12]
At first I copied whole paragraphs word for word, but then moved on to writing down titles and important sentences. I woke up the next morning with my face pressed on top of the book and my written pages scattered all over the floor. By the next night, I forced myself to stop copying. There was so much to actually do that I didn't think I should spend any more time just reading about it. I tried to organize all the necessary work into categories and even drew out a calendar of what needed to be done and when. It was a mess of chicken-scratch writing and crooked lines, but phenomenal compared to what I would usually turn in for homework.
According to the book, the first thing you needed to do was prune, and you were supposed to start during the winter. It involved cutting off part of the branches on a tree. This didn't make a lot of sense, but by then I completely trusted Mr. Jeffrey Haslam and everything he had written about apples. My calendar allowed for six weeks of pruning starting right then.
Three hundred trees in six weeks would mean fifty trees every week. I could probably only work three hours after school before it started to get dark and then maybe twelve hours on Saturday. There was no way my mom would let me work on Sunday, since it was against the Ten Commandments, so I knew that day was completely out. That meant twenty-seven hours per week or about two trees an hour! Thinking back on how big and wild the trees looked, and how many branches I'd have to remove, I knew it would be impossible for one person. And there were a ton of things to do after pruning too! Maybe my friends were right to laugh at me without even knowing why. At some point during the summer, my dad would figure out how hopeless it all was and drag me down to be Slim's slave.
***
The next afternoon I saw Mrs. Nelson waving at me from her house. A feeling of humiliation oozed through me. Was she just making fun of me too? She must know all this was impossible. I decided to go talk to her and find out exactly what she was thinking.
"Come in, come in, Jackson," she said happily as she opened the door.
"Hi," I said as I walked in, not bothering to wipe my feet very carefully. I sat in the nearest chair and launched into my first question. "Mrs. Nelson, when your husband was running the orchard, did he have another job too?"
"Oh, of course."
"So how many hours a week would he spend working out there?"
"Well, that was always different for different times of the year. At the busiest, he would be out there every night after work and on the weekends."
"And he did all the work by himself?" I asked with a hint of sarcasm.
"He always wanted Tommy to be out there with him, but"—she paused for a moment—"that didn't always work out. Some days I think he would go hire people to help him."
"Hire people? What people?"
"Oh, I don't know. Just people looking for some temporary work."
I imagined Mr. Nelson bringing home twenty people to boss around in the orchard. If he wasn't doing the work, no wonder he thought it was so wonderful.
"So how am I supposed to run the whole thing by myself when he had help? I'm just a kid!" I blurted out with some resentment in my voice. I watched her face. I was waiting for it to break into laughter, proving that this was all just a little joke. Her expression didn't change, however. She just sat there looking concerned but hopeful.
"I guess I never really considered all of that. There's nothing to stop you from getting some help too."
"How am I supposed to hire anyone? I don't have any money to pay them. I wouldn't even know where to find anyone."
She just smiled at me and said, "I'm sure you'll find a way." Then she patted my shoulder. I had heard expressions like that from adults many