Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Higher Combe ·
The Orchard of Counted Apples
The combe orchard yields exactly its counted fruit however heavy the trees look before the count, and the surplus between the two figures arrives nowhere.
- filed: "after the counting"
- reference: "HC/OA/11"
1. This file concerns the fruit books of the orchard at Higher Combe and the counting custom kept there before every pick. The orchard runs in close rows down the combe, sheltered from the sea wind by a turf bank, and it is held by O. Fairless, orchardist, third of the name to keep the books that are kept in the loft. The count books go back further than the family's copy holds, and the copies held by this office agree with them page for page.
2. The custom is short and is kept hard: nothing comes off a tree that did not first stand in the count. Before the pick the orchardist walks the rows with a slate strapped to the ladder hand, tree by tree, and the tally is chalked at the tree and inked fair into the count book at night. Whatever the slate carries is what the tree is held to. The pick comes in and is measured against the slate in the loft, and the number is found true. Not once in the whole of the loft books has the pick run over the count, and not once has it come in under by so much as a single apple.
3. The count is always set well under what the trees appear to hold. Anyone standing under the boughs before a count is taken can see fruit past the slate's reach and past any afternoon's numbering, and the orchardist does not dispute it and does not write it. He counts low because, as the books put it across three generations of hands, the trees pay what they are asked and keep the over, and the over is their own affair. The surplus is seen before the count is taken and is not seen at the pick. Between the two it has, in all the years of the books, arrived nowhere that anyone has been able to put on paper.
4. The counted fruit goes down to Murrow by the carrier, twice in the pick and once at Michaelmas for the late sorts. The carrier's way-bill and the loft book agree to the basket. The baskets come back each time stacked, empty, and dry, and the loft rafters hold nothing against the year, and no one at Higher Combe has ever been heard to call any of it lost.
5. The books record one hard season without raising their voice. In the gale year two rows went down whole, and the fruit lay out in the long grass for want of picking. The count was taken the week after the gale and it governed the standing trees only, as the books say plainly, the fallen rows passed over without ruling. The fallen fruit was not counted. It did not come to the loft. It was left where it lay, and no wasps came for it and no press was brought for it, and by the spring the grass carried no more trace of it than if the rows had been stripped in August and the windfall bundled down the hill. The rows were stood up, stayed, and bore the following season as though the year had not been mentioned between them.
6. No Writ arises on this file. The count books pass down the family, and in them one year's figures end in an old man's copperplate and the next year's begin in a young hand still learning its slopes. Between the two pages there is nothing: no date out of order, no line ruled to close the old book, no interval the books will admit to having contained. The orchard was counted that year as every year, and both hands set their tallies to the same slate.
7. This season's count stands in the book, taken last week in settled weather of the orchard's own noting, and the pick begins tomorrow. On the shed door hangs the slate with next season's row already ruled on it, empty above the line, room set out for a tally that is not yet in the world. Whether the count draws the crop up to its number, or the crop leaves the room for the count, neither book will say. It leaves the question the orchard keeps unasked, the one nobody at Higher Combe puts aloud under the boughs, and which the ruled empty slate asks every day it hangs there: what do the trees keep the over for?