Part 2
Eleanor hit the charger switch and ran with the grain bucket.
Kate pulled three piglets away from the trunk while Eleanor rattled feed and called them uphill. Most followed at once. The notched one resisted until Kate scooped him under the chest and carried him out, his muddy legs bicycling against her slacks.
Beneath the tree, a web of fine roots lay exposed. Fresh tuskless scrapes marked the bark at ground level. The damage was limited, but another hour would not have been.
Kate set the piglet down inside the sacrifice lot. “All forty-two?”
“They were settling in.”
“They found shade and roots.”
“They’re babies.”
“They’re pigs.”
Eleanor began counting as they passed through the gate. Thirty-nine, forty, forty-one—
The notched piglet was already under the stock trailer, his white eyebrow visible in the shadow. Kate lured him out with a handful of grain.
Forty-two.
Back in the orchard, Kate picked up Tom’s composition book. Two pages had stuck together near the binding. She separated them with her thumbnail and held the book out.
Under the sketch Tom had written additional instructions: SIX OR SEVEN PER CELL. TRUNK GUARDS. 24–48 HOURS. NEVER WHEN SATURATED.
Eleanor had read that page. She had decided his caution applied to full-grown hogs, not animals she could still lift.
“I thought they were too small to reach the roots,” she said.
“You thought that, or you needed it to be true this morning?”
Eleanor crouched and pressed loose soil back over the pale strands. “Help me cover these.”
Kate did, but her movements were sharp. They carried mulch from the barn and rebuilt the soil around the tree without packing it hard. When they finished, mud had dried in gray fans across Kate’s knees.
“Show me the bank letter,” she said.
“This has nothing to do with the tree.”
“It has everything to do with why you couldn’t wait two days for fence.”
Eleanor looked toward the sacrifice lot. The piglets had begun rooting there too, though the packed surface offered little reward.
“The operating note is due March first,” she said. “Eighteen thousand seven hundred.”
“How much is left from the equipment sale?”
“Just under eleven.”
Kate closed her eyes briefly. “And feed for forty-two growing hogs?”
“I can sell most of them in the fall.”
“To whom?”
“I’m working on it.”
“No. You’re hoping on it.”
The split tree moved slightly in the wind. It was the largest in the orchard and the ugliest, with a trunk divided down the middle and one heavy scaffold limb held by an old cable Tom had installed years ago.
Kate brushed dirt from her hands. “Cal asked me last month if you’d consider selling the south slope.”
Eleanor stood. “You asked him what it was worth.”
“I asked what options you had.”
“Without telling me.”
“You weren’t opening the bank mail.”
“I opened it.”
“After I found three envelopes in the flour drawer.”
The words landed because they were true. During Tom’s illness, Kate had taken over the farm books while Eleanor managed appointments, medication, livestock, and the quiet humiliations of helping a man who hated assistance button his shirt. After the funeral, Eleanor had reclaimed the ledger but not the discipline that went with it.
She had hidden nothing from Kate, she told herself. She had merely delayed several conversations until she could bring better answers.
The piglets had been meant to become one.
Three days later, Dana Webb from the county Extension office walked the orchard with a soil probe and a pocketknife. She refused to call any tree dead until she had checked its bark, branch tips, and root flare.
“Some are gone,” Dana said at the end of the first row. “Some are alive but declining. A few may surprise you.”
“How many?” Eleanor asked.
“We’ll mark them when I finish.”
Dana scraped a thumbnail-sized patch from a low branch. Green showed beneath the gray.
Kate touched the exposed color with one finger.
“The pigs can be useful,” Dana said. “They can also strip bark, expose roots, and turn this slope into a runoff channel. They’re one tool. They aren’t the treatment.”
The surviving trees needed more light, gradual pruning, amendments based on the soil test, and protection from further root damage. Any blossoms for the following spring would depend on buds formed during the coming summer. No one could promise that the trees still had enough strength.
They marked twenty-seven trunks with white tape and fourteen with orange.
Eleanor tested every orange-marked tree with her own knife. Each cut revealed brown wood.
Tom had drawn forty-one circles. He had never crossed out a single one.
Cal arrived that afternoon with used hog panels stacked in his truck. He showed them how to brace the panels, protect the trunks, and position water and feed away from the roots.
“You’ll need six groups,” he said. “Seven pigs each.”
“You did that arithmetic quickly,” Kate said.
“I’ve been worrying about the number since the auction.”
Cal offered to contact a cooperative of pasture farms that sometimes bought healthy growers. He warned Eleanor not to count on a sale until the pigs gained weight and passed inspection.
“I laughed because I thought you’d lost track between four and forty-two,” he said. “Wasn’t especially neighborly.”
“No,” Eleanor said. “It wasn’t.”
He nodded, accepting the answer.
By evening, the orchard held six small cells connected by a fenced lane. The piglets would enter one group at a time, stay no longer than two days on firm ground, then move out while the section rested.
Kate taped a rotation calendar beside the shed door.
“One month,” she said. “I’ll help for one month. You show me every bill. We follow Dana’s plan. If you change something, you tell me before you do it.”
“You’ve already arranged the whole farm.”
“I arranged the pigs you bought before sunrise.”
Eleanor removed the brass key to the farm office from her pocket and placed it in Kate’s muddy palm.
“Then you’d better make a copy…”
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