The Year Money Grew on Trees (9 page)

"I was afraid of this," he said in disgust.

"What?" Amy and I said at the same time with worried voices.

"This thing has a weird problem that we've never been able to figure out." He looked in the gas tank. "Yep. She's got plenty of gas," he said, shaking his head. He looked at me, then at Amy, then back at me. "Okay, Jackson, watch carefully. I'm going to show you what you have to do if this happens." He went to the side of the tractor where the engine was exposed and loosened a screw that was holding a flexible hose line in place. He pulled the end of the hose out from where it was connected and turned back to me.

"I don't know why, but the gas line gets clogged every so often. There must be dirt or something in it. You have
to suck on this end until the line gets clear and the gas comes out." He held the line out to me. I backed up and shook my head.

"If you're going to use the tractor, you have to be able to keep it running."

I looked around. My cousins were staring at me with their eyes bugging out, watching to see if I would take the hose. I really wanted to say no, but I knew I couldn't ask anyone else to do it.

"All right," I said weakly.

I put the hose in my mouth. It tasted like a terrible combination of rubber, oil, and dirt. I closed my eyes and sucked. Suddenly my mouth filled up with a burning, awful-tasting liquid. I dropped the hose and spit. Bending over, I kept spitting to try and get the taste out of my mouth. I wanted to throw up.

When I looked up again, my uncle was putting the hose back into position.

"Very good," he said, "now just stick it back in and screw it tight."

"Is swallowing gas bad for you?" I gasped between spits.

"Oh, probably. It hasn't killed me yet," he said without much concern. Amy, Sam, and Michael looked down on me with sympathetic eyes. Amy tried the tractor again, and it started right up.

"Thanks, Daddy," she called.

***

My mouth tasted like gas for the next two days. We made good progress on the branches, though, especially on Saturday when Lisa and Jennifer joined us. Sam kept pestering Amy and me to teach him to drive the tractor, and finally during our afternoon Shasta break we agreed. The other kids all wanted lessons too, but we said the cutoff age was eleven, mostly because we didn't want Michael driving.

After his run-in with the Barracuda, Sam proved to be a very careful driver. He was always a little nervous and would drive so slowly, the rest of us would become impatient. Amy pulled him out of the seat before any long trips to the drop-off area.

Sam was driving the tractor into the orchard's last row with a few hours of sunlight left. Before he could pull up close to a pile of branches, the tractor sputtered a little and then the engine cut out. Instantly my stomach hurt. Amy turned to me and put her hand on my shoulder. I moved reluctantly toward the engine.

"What's he going to do?" asked Jennifer, who hadn't been around for the first gas line episode.

"You don't want to know," Michael answered solemnly.

I unscrewed the hose and pulled it out. When I put the hose in my mouth, the taste of gas came flooding back. I tried sucking very quickly then pulling the tube away
so the gas wouldn't have a chance to fill up my mouth. Nothing happened. I tried sucking a little longer. Still nothing. I sucked until my cheek muscles hurt and still nothing happened.

"Amy, can you go get your dad?" I said in a defeated voice.

Ten minutes later she was back with Uncle David.

"I tried sucking really hard, but I just can't get anything to come out," I explained, holding up the tube.

Uncle David pulled off the gas cap and looked inside the tank. "That's because you don't have any gas." He stood back and looked at all of us, shook his head, and laughed. "You look like a bunch of war orphans living in the forest or something. If I had some gas, I would give you some just because you look so pitiful." We did look ragged. Almost everyone had a runny nose and scratched-up skin. Sam and Michael both had on "Hang Loose—Hawaii" T-shirts that were almost shredded. My sisters had tiny apple branches stuck in their blond hair.

My uncle thought for a moment. "Jackson, follow me. I'm going to teach you a little trick your grandpa taught me."

I followed him alone out of the orchard. He found a two-gallon gas can sitting near one of his cars and then a four-foot length of garden hose. We walked over to my house.

"I don't think your daddy would mind you borrowing a little of his gas, do you?"

We ducked behind the car my dad drove to work, and he unscrewed the gas cap. He slid the hose down the pipe that led to the gas tank.

"This is what we call siphoning. You've got to suck on the hose to start the gas flowing and then put the sucking end of the hose as low to the ground as possible. The gas will start flowing, and then you can fill up the can. Now, I know you have experience with this sort of thing"—he looked at me with a grin—"so I'm sure you can do it. Try to be as fast as you can so you swallow as little gas as possible."

I wasn't exactly sure whether he was joking or not, but I took the hose, anyway. I gave it a quick suck and then pushed it to the ground.

"You're going to have to do it a little longer than that," he said with an encouraging voice.

On the second try, my hands felt the cool gas filling the hose, but I lost my nerve and stopped sucking too soon again. On the third try, the gas poured freely. I spit and coughed as I moved the hose to the gas can.

"Get any in your mouth?" my uncle asked.

"A little. Not as much as with the tractor."

We both giggled as the can filled up, and then we pulled the hose out of the car's gas pipe. He even carried
the can out to the tractor for me and helped pour it into the fuel tank.

We finished with the branches and parked the tractor back in its spot between our two houses. "So what was it my dad showed you?" asked Amy when we were alone.

"I'll teach you the next time the tractor runs out of gas," I told her. And I did. For the next six months, my dad and uncle unknowingly provided gas for the tractor. We would alternate taking it from both of their cars. We tried not to take more than two gallons at a time so they wouldn't be suspicious. I'm not sure they didn't know, however. On more than one occasion, my uncle asked my dad, in a voice that he was sure I could hear, "How's the gas gauge in your car? Mine seems to be broken since the weather's been getting hotter."

I figured we could make it up to them in free apples.

Before going to sleep on the night we finished hauling branches out of the orchard, I checked the things I had copied out of the apple book. I couldn't help feeling proud of myself for getting the pruning done. To be honest, I never thought we would get this far.

The apple book had not given dates for when things should be done, but I had made a list of what should follow what. After pruning came "preparing the soil," which included fertilizing. The book had talked about a few different fertilizers. Some of them had chemical
names that sounded like they came from a secret government lab. The other kind of fertilizer was manure. I had never thought about it before, but the book said different kinds of animals made different kinds of manure. Cow manure seemed like the popular choice for apple trees.

Choosing the right fertilizer, and then getting my hands on it, was probably going to be difficult. It was something I would like to have skipped altogether, especially if manure was involved. But those trees had been ignored for five years and probably needed all the help they could get. Maybe I could use some of that clean, man-made chemical stuff if it worked. And after all that pruning work, it would be a shame if apples didn't grow.

My dad had said that there were plenty of apple farmers around, but it didn't occur to me until we started pruning that I actually knew one of them. My Sunday school teacher, Brother Brown, had a place with at least three thousand trees. I didn't think of him right away because I had never actually talked to him. He wasn't one of those teachers who bought into ideas like class discussions or nurturing learning environments. Our class was full of a dozen seventh- and eighth-graders, but after two years together I'd bet he didn't know any of our names. He was short and wrinkled with only bits of hair left on his head, and we were terrified of
him. For some unspoken reason, we were sure that if we made any noise, he wouldn't be afraid to cane us, even if we were in a church class.

I watched Brother Brown carefully during our next Sunday school class, wondering if I could ask him something without getting beaten. All the other kids were looking out the window, watching a couple of dogs in the distance. Yolanda Stock's head kept bobbing up and down as she fell in and out of sleep. Brother Brown had a croaky voice that sounded like a far-off motor sputtering and choking. He started by talking about Daniel in the lion's den and then meandered lifelessly into his favorite topic, the Sermon on the Mount.

When class ended, all the other kids fled. I waited around in front of the door, blocking Brother Brown's exit. He had his head down and almost walked into me.

"Brother Brown, I just wanted to say that I liked your lesson about Daniel ... and the Sermon on the Mount too."

He kept his head down, looking on either side of my feet for an escape route.

"I hate to bother you here at church, but you're the only person who can help me."

He raised his head a little. His face and hands were not only wrinkled; they looked like they had been baked in an oven until there was a tough, brown shell around them.

"I was hoping you could give me some advice on fertilizer."

He leveled his head and looked right at me. "Like what?"

"Like do you ever use any of those chemical types?"

"Nah, I can't keep track of all of 'em. Stick with the natural stuff when I need it."

"Like manure?"

"Yep."

"Well, where can I get some?"

"Just follow your nose, son."

And with that he squeezed his way around me and was gone. I would have liked to have asked him more questions, like how many cows it took to fertilize one tree. I assumed three hundred trees meant something like three hundred cows.

There were a few places up and down the main road that looked like they had those kinds of cow numbers, including a couple of dairies. The smelliest of the dairies was about a mile from our house. On a hot summer day, if the wind was blowing just right, you could catch a whiff of it even inside. My mom would scrunch up her nose and say, "I wish they would clean up that place! It's not right that we should have to smell it too."

The dairy happened to be on our bus route, so I got to see it every school day. Five or six kids would get off
the bus near there. On Monday after school, I held my breath and followed them.

Amy looked at me with an almost frightened expression as I walked past her.

"I'll see you in half an hour or so," I said to her quickly before my exit.

Looking around, it was hard to tell where humans would actually work at the dairy. There were a few wooden buildings with holes in the sides that looked like they were about to collapse. Mostly there were cows inside weak-looking wooden fences. They were standing very close together. Most of them were black and white, but halfway up their bodies they were covered in manure that was a disgusting brown-green. I wondered why they didn't all just push against those fences and get out. They all just stood there, though, chewing with blank expressions on their faces. Maybe cows liked being together like this. And when it came to making lots of manure, these were definitely the right kind of cows.

I wandered cautiously over to the biggest of the buildings. I didn't see any movement and was afraid to go inside, so I started shouting.

"Hello! Is anybody there? I need to talk to someone about manure. Hello!"

A short man with a buzzed haircut came walking out. He was wearing a filthy brown jumpsuit. Like the cows,
he had a coating of manure almost halfway up his body.

"You the one callin' out?" he asked, with a big toothy smile. His teeth were perfectly straight and very white against the brown jumpsuit and surroundings.

"Uh, yeah, it was me. I live down the road about a mile." I pointed toward my house. "I need to talk with someone about manure."

He put his hand out to shake. "Jerry Wheeler. If there's anything I'm an expert on, it's manure." His hand was just as dirty as his jumpsuit. I hesitated, then swallowed hard and shook it.

"So whatcha wanna know?"

"I've got this orchard I'm trying to take care of. Used to be Mr. Nelson's—Jack Nelson's."

"Oh yeah, I know the place."

"So, anyway, I got a bunch of trees I need to fertilize, and Brother Brown, you know the man with the big orchard, he says manure's the best thing for 'em."

"You're takin' care of that Nelson place all by yourself?"

"Well, me and my cousins and sisters. But I'm kinda in charge."

He gave a whistle. "That's a pretty big job at your age. Aren't you supposed to be havin' fun and worrying about school and what girls you like?"

I blushed a little. "I guess. But now we've been work
ing on it for a couple months so we want to make sure the trees make apples."

"Only sounds fair." He nodded. "Wish I had some hard-workin' boys like you around here." He gave me another big smile.

"So is there any way I could have some of your manure for the trees?"

"Okay with me, but I better check with my pop first. Hey, Pop!" he yelled loudly. "Hey, Pop, come on out here!"

Another short man walked out of the building. He wore the same brown coveralls and had the same buzzed haircut. He had a pot belly and looked about thirty years older than Jerry. Jerry told him what I wanted, and then he put his hand out to me. "Hoppy Wheeler. Glad to meet you."

I shook his hand and said, "Hoppy?" without thinking.

"Funny name, isn't it? You can blame my brothers for it," he said with a laugh. "As you can see, we make two things around here, milk and manure. Probably better known for the manure, though."