The Year Money Grew on Trees - Aaron Hawkins [20]
At that moment Sam fell out of the tree he was working in and landed hard on the dirt. He got up without a word and took a cup of water.
"Well, it was mostly Sam," I said, turning to my mom and smiling.
We continued on until dinner. Cutting and moving the ladders, cutting and moving the ladders. By four we were too tired to talk, and the batteries in the radio had died. Michael was sent to collect every extension cord in both our houses, and he ran them from a wall plug outside my front door. For the rest of the year, we would be discovering things he had unplugged to provide those extension cords.
That Saturday we pruned twenty-two trees. We had almost three of the ten rows finished. In the middle of the rows were six huge piles of apple tree branches that Lisa and Jennifer had stacked up. As we walked home, I felt so proud of everyone that I wanted to hug them. I think they felt the same way, but no one said anything. We just kept looking back at the three rows that now looked so different from the rest.
When I said, "Thanks, everyone," before the two families separated, Michael replied, "Why are you thanking us? It's our money too."
Inside the house I took a good look at Lisa and Jennifer for the first time since that morning. Their hands and arms were covered in scratches and scrapes from the sharp branch ends. Even their faces and necks had scratches.
"Oh, Lisa, why didn't you say you were getting all scratched up like that?" I asked in a voice filled with guilt. "I could have given you my gloves."
"No complaining, remember?" she said in a defiant voice.
At that moment I regretted all the mean things I had ever said about the two of them. I avoided their eyes and went to find some lotion to help with the scratches. I tried to help rub it on Lisa's arms, but she pulled away and grabbed the bottle.
***
On Sunday morning I woke with my whole body aching. I felt glad to be restricted from working for a day and only wished I could stay in bed, but Mom forced everyone to get ready for church. My sisters and I moved very slowly as we got into our church clothes and dragged through the house.
Dad thought me being in pain was great. "About time you all did some real work," he crowed. "When I was your age, I hardly had the strength left to crawl into bed after working all day."
I saw Amy at church and asked, "Are you sore?"
"What do you think, genius?" she replied.
I was nervous about what would happen on Monday and whether everyone would quit. The project seemed to have gained its own momentum, though, and my cousins showed up despite their complaints. We continued with the same system, still unsure of whether we were doing anything right. And because I had to return the library book, we didn't even have pictures to compare our work to.
Sam was the only one who wasn't moving gingerly, and Amy and I would often stop to lean one arm against our ladders just to rest our muscles a little. Whether we had pruned them correctly or not, twenty more trees were done by Friday, and there was a tangled mess of branches waiting for my sisters to pick up the next day.
Friday night I took a dollar I had been saving and asked my mom to buy a six-pack of pop in town when she went Saturday morning. The next day when we stopped for our afternoon water break, I said to everyone, "Wait here! I'll be right back."
I returned with the six-pack of grape Shasta Mom had put in the refrigerator. Everyone agreed that it was the best thing we had ever tasted. We sat in the dirt and wished we had more. Sitting there, I noticed that I could smell the cut apple branches. They were sweet, like freshly mowed grass. The dirt below us also had a smell different from the dirt on the road or in our yard. Maybe I was imagining things, but I thought it smelled a little like flowers or rain.
***
The next week was my birthday. I was going to ask for a boom box with a cassette player—but instead asked for cases of pop. When I opened three cases of Shasta, there was a big grin on my dad's face, and I couldn't help feel that I wasn't getting