The Year Money Grew on Trees - Aaron Hawkins [57]
"Where have you been?" I demanded when Sam and Michael pulled up.
"We went as fast as we could," said Michael, although he didn't sound very convincing.
Piling up the next stack of boxes was exhausting. When we were done, we all made our way to the tractor.
"They'll probably be okay without us watching them," I said, tilting my head toward the remaining boxes.
Over two days we made eight trips and collected 820 boxes, which the girls stacked up pretty neatly considering that there were many different sizes. I kept telling Lisa it was like a pile of money.
My mom came out and looked at the large stack. Next to it were the tractor and wagon, the plow, disc, irrigation barrel, ladders, and all the other equipment we had taken from Mr. Nelson's shed. "This feels like I'm living next to a freight yard. Next thing I know there'll be an actual train running through here." She thought that sounded clever and so was continually telling me to clean up my "freight yard" after that.
***
Sam, Michael, and I made a trip to General Supply a few days later. We had to buy more Diazinon, and we also bought some rolls of plastic that we used to cover up our boxes in case of rain. "Oh, and, Jimmy," I said as he was adding the poison and plastic to our bill, "I brought back the form for the boxes." I unfolded it and handed it to him.
"Two hundred apple," he said as he looked over the form. "I thought you had like three hundred trees. Is this going to be enough?"
"That should do it. We got some others from another supplier," I replied.
He looked up from the paper. "How much were they?"
"A lot cheaper," I said. "So can we charge those two hundred? And throw in a case of pop." I saw Michael smile out the corner of my eye.
Chapter 13
Money Jars
With the boxes in place and the apples hanging fat on the trees, Lisa and Jennifer embraced the idea of selling them. They cut out red letters from some of my mom's sewing material to spell APPLES and glued them on a white background, making a kind of banner you could see from a hundred yards away. These type of projects usually produced crooked letters of random sizes, but this time the letters were shockingly straight, and the A was almost the same height as the S.
Amy convinced her dad to push the '68 Chrysler station wagon he had recently given up on out to the road. This was going to serve as our apple sales headquarters. We would keep the banner inside at night along with any unsold boxes of apples.
"How many thousand dollars are we going to make again?" Amy asked playfully.
I hesitated. "At least a couple thousand each," I replied cheerfully. I thought about Mrs. Nelson's $8,000 and how much we'd have to clear to be left with even $1,000 to divide between the rest of us. "Maybe that's just a best-case scenario, though," I added, not wanting to sound like a total liar.
I took Sam over to Mr. Nelson's shed to look for bags we could use for picking. I remembered seeing in the apple book pictures of people picking with sacks hanging at their sides. In one of the corners, we found two canvas bags that looked like what I was hoping for. They had long straps that fit over your neck so the bag hung at your side. There were metal frames at the tops to keep the bags open and at the bottom little clasps to either close the bags or allow apples to be poured out.
The only thing we needed was ripe apples. They looked the right size and were now more sweet than sour, but I needed an expert opinion as to whether anyone would buy one. The day after the boxes from the dump were stacked, we started watching Brother Brown's orchard to see when he would start picking. Once each day, one of the six of us would walk or ride a bike down to steal peeks through his rows of trees. We were all supposed to act very casual as we went by so he wouldn't suspect us of spying. August was almost over and we hadn't spotted any action.
It finally became too much for me, and I decided to ask Brother Brown directly. I wasn't going to ask him about prices or customers