—  CHAPTER ONE  —

The Cherry Tree by the Gate

The boy who carried the farm with him long after he left it.

I grew up on a farm just outside town, the youngest of four. The work started before the sun. My father would knock on our door at five, and you learned quickly that the animals did not care how tired you were. There were cows to milk and a stove to feed before any of us so much as thought about breakfast. I have woken at five every day of my life since.

We did not have much, but I never once felt the lack of it. There were chores enough to go around and always a brother to do them with. I was twelve, I think, before I understood that other families ate their dinner sitting down, all at once, at the same table. To us, a meal was something you caught between the things that needed doing.

There was a cherry tree by the gate, and it was mine, the way things are yours when you are small. I climbed it every spring until my hands smelled of sap and the bark left its pattern on my legs. I would sit up in it long after I had been called for supper, listening to my mother’s voice carry across the yard, in no hurry to come down.

My grandmother lived with us in those years, in the small room off the kitchen. She kept that kitchen warm with a woodstove that was never quite cool, and on the coldest mornings we ate our oatmeal standing up, because there were never quite enough chairs. I did not think we were poor. I thought we were lucky to have somewhere that warm to stand.

She told stories the whole time she cooked. About the old country, about a sea I had never seen, about people I would never meet but somehow felt I knew. I did not understand then that I was learning the thing I would spend the rest of my life doing. I only knew that I liked the sound of her voice moving over the pot, and that I did not want her to stop.

She had a way of ending every story the same way, with a small nod, as if to say: there, now you have it, keep it safe. I have thought about that nod more times than I can count. I think it was the first time anyone handed me something and trusted me to carry it.

Spring was planting and autumn was bringing it all in, and in between was a long green stretch of weeding and mending fence. I knew the smell of the barn in every season, the warm animal smell of winter and the dust of August. I could find my way across that whole farm in the dark, and some nights I did, just to stand in the field and listen to it being quiet.

School was three miles down a dirt road, and I walked it in every kind of weather. There was a teacher there, Mr. Hale, who started lending me books he thought I ought to read, and then asking me about them after. He was the first grown man who seemed to believe I might be something more than a farm boy. I did not know what to do with that, but I never forgot it.

The winter I was fifteen, a hard freeze took most of the herd. I remember coming out at dawn and finding my father already at the fence, not moving, not saying a word. I stood beside him and we looked at it together. That was the first time I understood that the grown-ups were frightened too, and that the thing they did about it was simply to keep going.

After that I began to feel the pull of somewhere else, though I could not have told you where. I think every young person who grows up on a piece of land feels it eventually. The fence line starts to look like a question. I loved that place with my whole heart, and I knew, even as I loved it, that I was going to leave.

I left for the city when I was nineteen, with forty dollars folded into my shoe and my mother standing at the gate the way she had stood there a thousand times. She did not cry. She only told me not to forget where I came from. I have kept a great many promises in my life, but that is the one I have kept best.

I taught history for thirty-five years after that, to children who had never milked a cow or climbed a cherry tree. I suppose I was always doing the same thing my grandmother did at her stove — keeping the stories warm, and handing them, with a small nod, to whoever was willing to listen.

For you, who asked the questions worth asking.