Bough

The bough hung low over the garden wall, bent nearly to the grass by the last apples of the season. Nyra and the girl came out to it in the grey autumn light, their breath hanging white in the cold, and for a while they only stood beneath it and looked.

It was a heavy thing to carry, that weight of fruit, and yet the wood did not break. It bent and held, bent and held, as it had bent and held through every autumn before this one. The whole long curve of it was a kind of patience that no winter had ever managed to teach the girl.

Nyra reached up and drew the bough down, slow and even, until the nearest apples hung within the reach of small hands. The girl gathered them one by one into the fold of her apron, each one cold and firm and spotted with the weather, and when the apron was full the bough rose again of its own accord and settled back into the air.

Later the ledger would hold the count of them, and the date, and the weight upon the kitchen scale. It would hold the plain fact that the apples had come in before the first hard frost. But it could not hold the give of the living wood, nor the cold shock of the fruit against bare fingers, nor the way the whole bough had seemed to breathe when it was let go.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, Nyra knew, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The bough would keep its own account in rings no reader would ever open, and the girl would carry the morning in her hands long after the ink had told its smaller, truer, insufficient truth.