Chapter 11 #2
At noon Claire called a break. The heat was rising and we were all sweaty.
We gathered in the shade of the big cedar near the farmhouse.
Bessie Anne brought a pitcher of lemonade and a stack of cups.
Sandwiches appeared from somewhere. Wendell settled himself in the grass, his eyes alert for any dropped food.
DJ sat next to me. He had his bird guidebook with him, the field guide he mentioned earlier. He opened it to a page showing a red-tailed hawk in flight.
"That one's been circling the east field all morning."
"I got something that might interest you." I pulled out my phone and opened the Merlin app. "You ever used this? It listens to bird calls and tells you what they are."
His eyes locked onto the screen. "For real?"
"For real. Check this out."
I turned and held the phone toward the treeline. Within seconds the app picked up a call and displayed it. Black-capped chickadee. Then another, a spotted towhee. Then the distant scream of something larger.
"Red-tailed hawk," DJ read off the screen. "Cool."
He gripped the phone, tracking calls, cross-referencing with his book. I let him keep it. Across the shade, Claire watched us, her lemonade untouched in her hand.
"So many crates done," Bessie Anne marveled. "I didn't expect so many."
"Grace is real good at packing," DJ announced to the group, not looking up from my phone.
Grace put a hand to her chest. "That is the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me, dude."
"You're welcome."
Grace caught my eye and mouthed, "I love this kid" with exaggerated sincerity.
Claire set her cup down. She was looking out at the rows, at the crates stacked under the awning, at the work already done.
"I hope this is the last year we pack it like this."
"What do you mean?" Grace asked.
"Right now I sell the raw leaf to a buyer in Seattle.
He processes it, packages it, and sells it under his label.
I get paid by the pound and he keeps the margin on the finished product.
" She paused. "The money from this harvest gets me closer to buying my own equipment.
Withering racks, a rolling machine, a small dryer.
Next year I will process the leaf myself.
Cut out the middleman. Every pound I sell finished instead of raw triples what I make. "
Grace leaned forward.
"What about packaging? Like, have you thought about branding? Because Olympic Peninsula tea, that's a story. That's a whole marketing angle. Farm-to-cup, single origin, small batch. People pay a premium for that kind of thing."
"I've been thinking about doing that for a long time," Claire said quietly. "James Farm Tea. White tea, green tea, oolong, and black. Organic loose and in unbleached bags. That was Dad's whole plan. Everyone thought he was crazy."
She looked up at the field, at the rows her father had planted, at the green that proved him right.
"I just want to finish what he started."
"Well then we should get back to work," I said. "That tea won't harvest itself."
The afternoon went fast. We finished the year's second harvest by five o'clock.
Every crate was packed, weighed, labeled, and staged under the awning for the buyer's pickup in the morning.
Grace's station was immaculate. Scout's rows were cropped clean.
Claire walked the field once, checking quality, and came back satisfied.
We gathered on the porch as the daylight faded. Bessie Anne came out with a pitcher of iced tea and a tray of glasses, moving with the grace of a woman whose body had slowed but whose mind remained sharp. She looked at the group assembled on her porch, her gaze moving from face to face.
"This farm hasn't had this many people working on it since Mark was alive." She set the pitcher down and straightened up. "It's good to hear voices in the rows again. He would have liked that."
Bessie Anne returned to the kitchen. The smell of something rich and savory drifted from inside the house. A roast, maybe, or a stew. Something that had been cooking all day while we worked the rows.
Scout and Grace sat side by side on the porch steps, shoulders almost touching, the unlikely pair of them.
Scout's boots were caked with field soil.
Grace had tea-leaf fragments in her hair.
They were talking quietly, Grace describing something on her phone screen while Scout leaned in to look. Every few seconds one of them laughed.
Claire sat in the wooden chair near the door, her legs stretched out. Tired, but the good kind of tired, the kind that comes from a day of labor that accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish.
Her eyes were half closed and there was a stillness in her I hadn't seen before. The tension Claire usually carried in her shoulders, the vigilance, had loosened.
DJ leaned against the porch rail near me. He was watching a pair of swallows loop above the barn. Every few seconds he glanced down at my phone, scrolling through the birds on my life list.
Wendell slept at Claire's feet, paws twitching in some dream of trails and squirrels and good smells.
I sat there and realized this was the first time all of these people had been in the same place at the same time.
Work needed doing and these were the people who showed up to do it.
And now they were here together on a porch in the late light, drinking iced tea, and the thing I felt wasn't pride exactly, or satisfaction.
It was recognition. Something was forming here.
Something small and unspoken and real, the way the important things usually are.
Bessie Anne reappeared in the doorway. She looked out at all of us, this porch full of people and one sleeping dog.
"Dinner's ready," she said quietly. "Everyone come inside and eat."