Sometimes I would swear that Rudy didn’t notice me at all, that I was only his foil, setting them up so he could knock them down. Yet he had been watching me. I thought of the people I knew back where I came from, people like my aunt and her friends, people with strict divisions between commentary and conduct. I had left that behind, hadn’t I? Where they talked, I acted. I worked so hard every day that I had to explain myself. I had to say, I did wash my hands they are just permanently that color. I labored with shovel, wheelbarrow, snare, and knife, I worked until I was an empty vessel, all spilled out, nothing left to give. I was helpful even when Karen and Lily refused to be helped. Still, what Rudy said knuckled itself into me. I had no way to reply.

Rudy saw this and softened. “Don’t take it so hard,” he said. “Those folks just called the sheriff to chat. They wanted to talk about their feelings. You said it best. People like the trees, but they’re confused. It’s like a new shirt. It’s hard to spend money on one, but hell, if it just shows up you kind of take to it.”

So we kept right on.

Three weeks after we had begun, Rudy shifted the truck to neutral and turned off his headlights, and we coasted to a stop in front of the principal’s house. It was three in the morning. “I want to shake this guy’s hand,” whispered Rudy. “This is the guy who started it all. Let’s give him four trees. No, six. He said he didn’t want apples, so let’s give him three Kieffer pears and three Fellenberg plums.”

It took us nearly an hour just to dig all the holes, which was more time than we usually spent at one house without at least circling around the block. I was getting jittery, felt my bowels drop, had to squat behind the hedge. The principal’s porch light came on.

I crouched with my pants around my ankles. Rudy hit the ground and lay flat, the slope of the lawn swallowing him up. When the principal stepped out in his bathrobe, green-faced in the porch bulb’s unfriendly light, he blinked into the empty night. With one mind, Rudy and I waited him out. The night was with us. The shadows were with us. The sloped lawn was with us. The principal’s gaze didn’t linger on the six dark holes along the edge of his lawn. He didn’t turn his head to see the truck in the shadow of the tulip poplar. He tracked neither Rudy’s figure nor mine. He withdrew, closed his front door. A moment later the porch light went off.

I fastened my belt and crawled across the lawn to Rudy, who knelt on the grass, grinning like a fool.