Espalier

Nyra took the girl to the south wall of the garden, where the old pear grew flat against the stone. It was not a tree the way the orchard trees were trees. Someone long ago had bent it young and tied it sideways, so that now it spread in level arms along a frame of wire, a shape the growers call an espalier. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

They counted the arms together, the girl walking the length of the wall with a finger held just below each tier. Four arms to the left of the trunk and four to the right, and above them a fifth that had been started only the year before and reached no further than the gate post. The girl wrote the number in the book, and beside it the count of the ties, which came to thirty and one, for some of the arms needed two and some needed three to hold their line.

Over the season the cloth ties had loosened, swollen in the rain and then gone slack in the dry, so the arms sagged a little from the wire. Nyra showed the girl how to take up the slack, looping the soft strip once more around the branch and the wire and drawing it closed, firm but never so tight that it bit the bark. They went along the wall together, cinching each tie in turn, until every arm lay true again along the frame.

The book could hold the number of the arms and the number of the ties and the date they had gone along the wall to set them right. It could not hold the give of the branch under the hand, the way a living arm pushed back a little before it settled, or the small sound the cloth made as it drew closed. Those things stayed in the fingers that had done the work, and in the afternoon that had held them to it.

When they had finished, the girl stood back and looked at the flat green shape against the warm stone, held to the frame by so many small knots. Nyra said that a thing could be free and bound at once, that the shape was the tree and the frame together, and neither one standing alone. The book keeps the espalier, and you keep the cinching of it.