Which Pear Comes On First

Vesper at Dusk kept a tally of everything in the orchard: prunings, stakes, barrows of mulch, ladders out and ladders back, and how many times a day Miri said “Round the fresh row, please.” There was also one column that nobody had ever asked for. It was headed First light, and it ran back nine years without a single gap.

On the morning of Lamp Evening, Miri was teaching Vesper the walk.

“You start up here,” Miri said. She was on the top row with a mallet, knocking in stakes. She had been knocking in stakes before the lesson and saw no reason to stop for it. “By the old tree. You wait till the sun’s off the top row. Not before. Then you bring them down.”

Vesper wrote it down.

“You don’t need to write it down,” said Miri. “It’s the same every year.”

“That’s why it’s easy to write down,” said Vesper, and underlined it.

The walk had always been Miri’s. Every year, on one evening at the end of summer, the orchard opened its gate at dusk. People came along from the Wayside and up from the road to see the pears lit. Every year Miri walked them down from the top, row by row, telling them about the grafts. And every year, at the bottom, somebody turned round, looked back up the hill, and said, very politely, “Is that it?”

Vesper kept a count of those as well. Last year it was eleven.

This year the walk was to be Vesper’s, and Vesper wanted it more than was easy to say. The standing at the front had nothing to do with it. Vesper wanted the visitors, just once, to see what Vesper saw every evening from the gate.

“Then the grafts,” Miri said. “That one’s a cleft graft. That one I did the spring my knees still worked. People like the knees.”

Vesper wrote down the knees.

“Miri,” said Vesper. “They come on at the bottom first.”

“What do?”

“The pears.” Vesper turned the tally book round and held it out. “That’s first light. Every evening. The pear by the gate comes on first, then the bottom row, then the row above, all the way up. The top row is last. By the time the sun’s off the top row, the rest have been on for half an hour. We walk people down into pears that are already lit.”

Miri looked at the column. A time, and the word “gate.” A time, and “gate.” Nine years of it. She laughed. It was a fond laugh, the one she kept for a graft that had taken in spite of her.

“Gate,” she said. “Gate, gate, gate. You could have saved the pencil and used ditto marks.”

“Ditto marks aren’t a count.”

“Vesper,” said Miri, and handed the book back. “Figures aren’t pears. They’re on when the sun’s off. That’s the walk.” She knocked in another stake. “Round the fresh row on your way down, please. I’ve only just tamped it.”

Vesper went round the fresh row and wrote down that Miri had said so, which made four.

It should be said, in fairness to Miri, that she was not wrong about the sun. By the time it was off the top row, every pear in the orchard was on. It was only that at dusk Miri had always been at the top, waiting. And Vesper had always been at the bottom, leaning on the gate, because the gate was the best place to see the whole hill at once.

* * *

By four o’clock the lane below the gate was full of people. Every one of them, coming in, lifted the latch, and every one of them nudged the same pear with an elbow. It hung exactly at the height of the latch, and there was no lifting one without bumping the other. Nobody minded. Nobody picked it either. Nobody picks the pears.

That was why Mrs. Gorse’s cake stall, just inside the gate, had a card propped against the tin that said “Pear cake (contains no pears).”

“It’s apples,” Mrs. Gorse said to a boy called Ned, who had asked. She said it about forty times every Lamp Evening.

“Then why is it pear cake?”

“Because it’s Lamp Evening,” said Mrs. Gorse, and that settled it.

Vesper counted the slices. The cake sold out at twenty to six, sixty-two slices, and the last one went to Miri. She broke it in two without looking and gave Vesper the bigger half.

Vesper had not eaten it yet. Vesper was looking at a man in a brown hat over by the stall. He had come up three years running. Three years running he had stood at the gate at the end of the walk, looked up at the lit hill, and said, kindly, “Is that it?” He was not a rude man. This year he had brought a cushion to sit on. That was what made it hard.

“Miri,” said Vesper, quietly, so nobody else would hear. “Will you stand at the gate tonight? Just for this one dusk. Before we go up.”

Miri chewed her half and looked at the top row, which was still gold.

“They’ll want to be up there for sunset,” she said.

“The sun’s off the gate a good while before it’s off the top. If nothing happens, we take them up the cart track and do it your way. I’ll say every word about the grafts. Including the knees.”

Miri looked at the gate. Then she looked at Vesper, who was still holding half a slice of cake, because the asking had come first.

“Eat that,” said Miri. “One dusk.”

* * *

So that year, for the first time, the visitors waited at the bottom. Some of them were not sure about it.

“Is it starting?” said Ned.

“Not yet,” said Vesper.

The sun went off the orchard the way it goes off any hill, from the bottom up. The air at the gate turned blue. Up at the top, the old tree was still in sunlight. Miri folded her arms and looked at it, and then at her boots, and then at it again.

“We’ll miss it,” she said.

“The top row is last,” said Vesper.

Then, at the height of the latch, a pear came on.

It did not flash. The light came up in it slowly from nothing, the way a lamp is turned up, until a plain green pear was gold. It was the pear every one of them had elbowed on the way in.

The man in the brown hat was nearest. He looked at it for a long time.

“Is that it?” he said.

He said it in a whisper.

“That’s the first one,” said Vesper. “Now look up.”

Along the bottom row, one by one, the pears came on. Then the row above. Then the row above that. Miri unfolded her arms.

“Hm,” said Miri.

She looked at Vesper for a moment. Then she stood aside.

“Go on, then,” she said. “It’s your walk.”

Vesper led them up between the rows, not fast. The light went up the hill a row ahead of them, like a lamplighter who knew the way and did not need a ladder. Each time they reached a row it was already lit, and the row above was just coming on. The people at the front could watch every pear go from green to gold. Vesper knew the pace of it the way most people know their own stairs, from nine years of watching at the gate.

At the fourth row Vesper told them about the grafts, every word, including the knees. At the back, Miri said the part about the knees along with it, not quite under her breath.

Halfway up, one pear showed something else, as the pears in that orchard sometimes do. For a moment it was not a pear but a window, and through the window was a room. There was a yellow wall, a table, and a blue jug on the table with red flowers in it. Then it was a pear again.

Ned gasped.

“Can it do that again?” he said.

“Sometimes. I don’t know when,” said Miri. “Round the fresh row, please.”

Vesper counted that as five.

At the top they reached the old tree just as its pears came on, the last in the orchard, and everyone turned round. The whole hill was lit below them, row on row, all the way down to the gate, where one small gold pear hung at the height of the latch.

Everyone stood very still.

The man in the brown hat sat down on his cushion. A woman from the road said, “Oh,” and sat down on the grass beside him, cushion or no cushion. Ned said nothing at all, which his mother said afterward was a first.

Miri came and stood beside Vesper. For a while she only looked down the hill.

“Nine years,” she said. “You might have dragged me down to that gate in the second one.”

“You said figures weren’t pears.”

“They’re not,” said Miri. Then she said, “How many tonight?” and she was not laughing.

Vesper did not need to look. “One,” said Vesper. “And it was the other kind.”

Miri nodded. Then she took out the little book she kept for her grafts. It had a pencil tied to it on a string, and the pencil had been blunt since spring.

“Lend me yours,” she said.

Vesper lent it. Miri ruled a line down the edge of a clean page and wrote First light at the top. Underneath she wrote the time, and then, after a moment, the word “gate.”

“You could use ditto marks,” said Vesper.

“Ditto marks aren’t a count,” said Miri, and handed the pencil back.

The visitors went down the hill slowly in the blue evening, looking back over their shoulders, and not one of them asked if that was it. And from that evening on, the First light column was kept in two people’s handwriting, Vesper’s small and exact and Miri’s large and leaning. Every evening, the two of them wrote the same word under it.

Gate.

Vesper was very pleased, and wrote that down too.