Packing materials.
Insurance.
Buyers became stricter about appearance while paying prices Daniel considered absurdly disconnected from what it cost to produce clean fruit.
Then the previous summer brought the insects.
At first, the damage looked manageable.
Small scars.
A few punctures.
Fruit dropping early.
Daniel increased monitoring.
Used the treatment program recommended through the regional supplier.
Adjusted timing.
Then August turned warm and humid.
The pressure intensified.
By harvest, too many apples carried damage.
Some were distorted.
Others had larvae inside.
More fruit than Daniel could remember was downgraded or rejected.
One wholesale buyer refused an entire lot.
The orchard still produced apples.
That was almost worse.
Daniel paid to pick fruit that brought half what he had budgeted.
The numbers at the end of the season were brutal.
The orchard had not technically lost everything.
It had simply failed in enough small categories at once to make profitability disappear.
Then winter arrived.
Daniel spent most evenings at the kitchen table with a calculator.
Toby noticed.
He noticed because Daniel had always done farm accounting in the office.
Now the papers followed him home.
Invoices.
Bank statements.
Supplier estimates.
He stacked them beside his dinner plate.
Sometimes he stared at them long after the numbers had stopped changing.
The worst number was twelve thousand dollars.
That was the estimated cost of the coming season’s expanded chemical pest-management program.
Harland Pike had recommended it.
Additional dormant treatment.
More monitoring.
Broader application schedule.
Targeted sprays timed around anticipated pest emergence.
Twelve thousand dollars was not outrageous for what Harland proposed.
Daniel knew that.
That was the problem.
The recommendation made sense.
The farm simply did not have twelve thousand dollars.
The bank would lend it.
Probably.
But the orchard already carried an equipment note from a sprayer Daniel had purchased four years earlier and a line of credit used to cover the previous harvest shortfall.
Another loan meant another obligation against a future crop nobody could guarantee.
One bad year could be survived.
Two became dangerous.
Three ended family farms.
Toby heard his father say that once when he thought the boy was upstairs.
Daniel had been speaking to Toby’s uncle on the telephone.
“We can survive one more year like last year,” Daniel said.
A pause.
“Maybe.”
Another.
“No, I don’t know what we do after that.”
Toby stood on the staircase in the dark.
He never mentioned hearing it.
The next morning, he went to school.
Then came home and started looking under leaves.
The first clue had been so ordinary he almost ignored it.
A warm afternoon in March.
Snow gone from the orchard floor.
The ground still partly frozen in shaded areas.
Toby had been repairing a section of fencing near the old chicken yard.
Their own flock was small then.
Twenty-three laying hens.
Nothing commercial.
Eggs for the family and neighbors.
The chickens had escaped through a gap near the barn.
Toby followed them.
Instead of wandering toward the feed bins, several headed to a strip of ground where old leaves and grass had collected against a fence.
They scratched aggressively.
Toby watched.
Within minutes, the birds had exposed beetles, worms, larvae, and other small creatures Toby could not identify.
Anything that moved became food.
That night, Toby remembered the orchard.
After harvest, wind carried leaves into uneven drifts.
Some fallen fruit remained no matter how carefully they cleaned.
His father mowed.
Raked.
Removed drops.
Sprayed.
Yet every spring life emerged from the orchard floor.
Some useful.
Some harmful.
Toby began wondering how much of the previous year’s pest problem had begun underneath the trees rather than in them.
The next afternoon, he checked.
He started in Block Four.
That had suffered the worst damage.
He moved leaves aside with a stick.
Nothing.
Another spot.
Nothing.
Then another.
He found a small pale larva.
He put it in a jar.
Later he found two pupae he could not identify.
Then another larva inside a rotten piece of fruit beneath the litter.
Toby did not know whether any belonged to the insects that had damaged the crop.
So he began reading.
The Mercer farmhouse contained three generations of agricultural material.
Old extension bulletins.
Books.
Farm magazines.
Orchard manuals.
Some useful.
Some obsolete.