I remember summers of paper cartons.
Two of them could hold enough apples to make a pie, but sometimes the peaches came off the tree so big and ripe that only four would fit in a carton and they’d bruise.
The cartons made good boats, too — we would write our names on them with a marker and race them in the brook after the rain. If your boat sank, you were disqualified. It turned it into a game of chicken: the others liked to push their luck in the rapids and I always pulled my carton early. Many a good ship vanished downstream or capsized in undercurrents. I imagine they melted to pulp and collected on shoals somewhere downstream like Mississippi or Louisiana.
The girl who sold paper cartons of fruit by the roadside was named Molly Malone. She was some relation of the Tillens, a niece or maybe a cousin. Never found out which. All I knew was that she went to college and spent her summers at the white and yellow farm stand growing tiny brown freckles on her shoulders and across the bridge of her nose.
Molly knew how to sell. Parked by the roadside I would see all manner of things: pickup trucks, mini vans, muscle cars, even a bicycle, looking small and crooked at the end of the line whenever I stopped by.
I was too young. Too shy to work up the courage to buy a paper carton of the fruit that I had picked.
“I work at your family’s farm,” I might say, flipping a thumb over my shoulder.
“How’s the fruit this season?” I might ask, casually producing my wallet.
I even entertained the bold approach: sauntering up to drawl, “Pardon my asking, but what’s an angel doing down here on earth?”
Scenarios like these played on a loop in my head as I watched from a distance the procession of men who brought on her laughter with offhand jokes. Between customers, or as one fumbled in a pocket for change, Molly occasionally looked my way and I avoided her gaze as though she were Medusa.
But then I would glance back to see whether her eyes were lingering on me.
They rarely were.
The time I spent gawking was dictated by the line of cars. When they thinned, I had to be prepared to pedal away lest I catch her full attention. If there was lots of business, I might come by two or three times, going aimlessly through neighborhoods in the meantime to let the line build up.
When the orchard began to wind down and fewer fields were sown, kids raced dirt bikes along the rows of trees. I graduated, got a better job, earned my freedom from the sunburns and back aches of picking. In my mind the fields were still lush and green between the hills that hid them from the road. When I drove by in the summer, I knew there were still the same orderly rows of fragrant trees with fruit pulling heavy on their boughs.
Molly Malone drew in as many people as ever, but sold fewer cartons of fruit. Dwindling numbers of highschool kids were taken on to work the fields. Years went past and the peaches never got as big and heavy as before.
Some college kids home for the summer began to race dune buggies through the orchard and the Tillens never bothered putting up gates to stop them; didn’t so much as leave a log across the trail. It was then that I realized I had witnessed the end months before.
I had visited the orchard the winter before that, with a sled and some friends. I remember being shocked by all the negative space. It was bare, like a scarecrow with the clothes taken off. Just a cross planted in a field.
And now, as I was driving to my downtown job, I saw a big farm truck laden with tall stacks of paper cartons. Ten of them had been upturned and placed on the wooden posts that fenced in the bed. The truck lurched out of a long green strawberry field and limped along the road past the Tillens’ farm. The farm stand was long gone, survived by a worn divot in the grass. The truck lumbered over this and disappeared into a tunnel of greenery, down the dirt road that ran alongside the brook. I sat far too long at the stop sign watching after it.
The Ford F250 idling behind me blew its horn. My foot left the brake for a second and then it returned and pressed harder. I wasn’t even watching the traffic.
Instead I entertained a scenario where I pulled over to the curb and became first in line. I accepted a heavy paper carton of peaches and told the girl at the farm stand that she was beautiful, that the fruit was worth any price so long as I could buy it from her. I had the requisite dollar in my wallet but I jingled in my pocket for change simply because it was a ritual, and because it brought us to look in unison at a young man standing far off who looked both interested and not, like he’d been searching for something he’d lost and was near to giving up looking for it.
And when I had paid for the fruit I entered my truck and pulled up behind another driver at the stop sign who had no intention of driving anywhere. Blowing my horn had no effect and I was forced to maneuver around him, and as I pulled away I glimpsed his face, which was blank, and I saw that he was staring fixedly at nothing, hypnotized by an empty field where some memory used to live.
