"Send whatever you have. If there is more the week after, send that too." Walt shook her hand. He drove away frowning the way a man frowns when he has closed a deal he does not quite trust yet.
The trucks started coming the following week, then the week after. In the thick of harvest season, they came fast and heavy, more fruit some mornings than Clara could have processed in a week of nights. So much that in the early going half of it piled up in a rough heap behind the shed while she scrambled to keep pace with the rest. And that was the part that made the whole town start talking. Word traveled through the county the way it always does in a place where everyone still waves at the cars that pass.
Within days most people in the township had formed an opinion about the Whitfield girl and the pile of rotting grapes growing behind her shed. Clara's uncle called it playing house. A classmate from her graduating class, a girl who had gone on to study environmental science at a school upstate, stopped by in late September on her way back from visiting family. She stood in the driveway and looked at the steaming pile with an expression that she probably did not know was visible on her face. She said kindly that Clara could still apply for the spring semester, that it was not too late.
Then she took out her phone and photographed the grape heap and she posted it to her social media account with a caption that she thought was affectionate. It drew more laughing reactions than she had intended. A neighbor, an older man who ran beef cattle on the property south of the Whitfield land, pulled his truck up to the fence one evening and leaned out the window. He was grinning the grin of a man who thinks he is making an observation rather than a judgment.
"You planning to bury something back there, Clara? Because it sure smells like it." He drove off before she could answer, which was fine because she had not been going to answer. She stood at the edge of that steaming heap in the failing light and let them think whatever they wanted.
Because she was not looking at garbage. She was looking at something her grandmother had spent 60 years trying to teach her, sitting right there in a pile and waiting.
The following evening a truck she did not recognize parked at the north fence line. It was an old half-ton truck faded to the color of old bark and the man who got out of it was not young. He was 71 years old, though he stood like a man who had not consulted his age in some time. Roy Hamlin had farmed the property adjacent to the Whitfields for four decades, and in all those years Clara could not recall ever exchanging more than a few words with him. He was the kind of neighbor who existed as geography rather than relationship, a name attached to a boundary line.
He stood at the fence and looked at the pile of rotting grapes for a while. Not with the amusement of the neighbor who had joked about burial. Not with the concern of someone who had opinions about property values. He looked at it the way an old farmer looks at soil factually, as if he is assessing what it might be capable of. "You know what those are good for, girl?" he asked.
Clara looked at him across the fence. "I am figuring it out." Roy nodded slowly. He looked at the pile a moment longer.
Then he said something she had not expected. "Helene Brauer used to live down Mallet Road. Had barrels in her shed for 40 years. Agnes ever mention that to you?"