*I*

She waited for a morning above freezing, which that February meant waiting until noon. The wood had to come off while the tree was still dormant and before the buds moved, and those two conditions overlapped by about four days that year, and one of the four was a Sunday when the ground would be too soft to stand on.

At noon she took the shears, a bread bag, and a fistful of wet moss out to the east row.

The tree had eleven feet of new growth on it, which was the problem. A dying tree will sometimes put out a last year of extravagant wood, straight and pencil-thick and clean, more scion than she had cut off it in the four good years together. It was exactly what she needed and it was the only thing keeping it alive.

In October she had gone around the base with the tip of her knife, four cuts, the way you check for a girdle. Three of the four came up brown. Collar rot works at the crown from underneath, in the wet ground where nobody is looking, and by the time the leaves tell you anything the tree has already spent a season trying to bridge it. Nothing to spray, nothing to cut out. A tree that far along will empty its pockets in one season and put the whole balance into new wood, and what stood in front of her was not vigor. It was the last of the account, drawn down and laid out in the open where she could reach it.

The variety was Coldbrook Russet and this was the last one. A graduate student had matched it four years ago against a nursery catalogue from 1911, working off a leaf and forty dollars of lab time, and since then Rennie had been the woman who happened to own the only one.

She counted before she cut, because after the first cut she would not count honestly. Eleven feet of one-year wood, taken in sticks of four buds, came to fourteen. Fourteen sticks was ten trees if the week went well and six if it did not. Dana had liners waiting in a cellar in Ohio and had been checking the mail since the thaw, and Bo Sattler had been asking three years for enough of it to press and would keep asking, because a russet with that much tannin is worth waiting eight years for, and Bo was fifty-one and knew exactly how long eight years was.

The same eleven feet, left where it stood, was every leaf the tree would make in May.

She stood there long enough that her fingers went cold inside the glove.

Then she started at the top, because the top wood was the straightest.

The shears went through the first sprout with the small dry sound dormant wood makes, more snap than cut. She laid it in the crook of her arm and took the second and third off the same leader. She worked down the tree taking whole sprouts, not tipping them yet, and every so often she stopped and turned one in the light to look at the buds. Flat, tight, brown. Four days of asleep left in them. Then she went on.

She had waited as late in the window as she dared. Wood cut in December sits in a refrigerator ten weeks and comes out with the life dried out of it, and the later cut is the stronger cut and the narrower week, and she had chosen the narrow week.

By half past noon the snow under the tree was scattered with the tops she had thrown down, and the bread bag was full.

II

She did the sorting at the bench in the back of the barn, under a clip light with the door shut and the heater off, because the barn at forty degrees was better for the wood than her hands were.

Fourteen sticks came out of the bag, and then fifteen, because one sprout she had written off had a fat straight middle in it. She tipped each one to four buds and squared the butt, and set them in three piles by caliper: pencil, thicker than pencil, thinner. The thin pile was two sticks and she nearly binned them. Thin scion is a way of wasting good rootstock. She kept them, on the grounds that fifteen sticks of the last tree of anything do not get thrown away for being thin.

She wrote COLDBROOK RUSSET on flagging tape in pencil, and the date under it, and wound the tape twice around the bundle. Ink goes to nothing in a refrigerator by April.

The moss went into the sink and came out soaked and wrung, damp and not wet, which is a judgment nobody can teach and everybody describes the same way. She packed it around the sticks, worked the bundle into the bread bag, and folded the top over without knotting it. Sealed wood molds.

The bag went on the second shelf of the refrigerator, behind three foil pans of the rice and chicken Teo took to work, because he was four nights into a stretch of nights and had stopped being able to decide about food.

Dana called at two, which meant Dana had been waiting since noon not to call.

"How much?"

"Fifteen sticks. Four buds."

"Send me five."

"I was going to offer you four."

"Send me five," Dana said. "I don't want it all in one refrigerator in one county. If your power goes out for three days in March we have a nice story about a graduate student and no apples."

Rennie said she would send five in the morning with a gel pack, and Dana said the cellar was at thirty-eight and holding, and then asked how the tree was, in the flat way of somebody who wants the actual answer.

"It's got another year of standing in it," Rennie said. "And no year after that."

Teo came down at four-thirty with his hair wet, ate standing at the counter out of one of the pans, and asked which shelf, because he needed room for the cooler bag. She told him second shelf, in the bread bag, don't move it and don't eat it. He said he had never in his life eaten a stick. Then he told her the scheduling grievance had gone to the third step and that the union rep had used the word unprecedented six times in nine minutes, and that if it went the way he thought, he was on nights through April. He put his boots on in the doorway the way he did when he was too tired to sit down for it, and he left at ten of five, and the house went quiet in the particular way it went quiet those weeks.

III

Thursday came in at forty-nine degrees, which was the weather that had been coming all week and which she had cut ahead of on purpose.

She drove the five sticks to town in a cooler with a gel pack and a wet paper towel, and the girl at the counter asked if it was perishable and Rennie said not exactly, and paid the overnight rate without arguing about it, which she had never once done for anything else.

Then she walked out to the east row in the warm and stood in front of the two sprouts she had left on the north side.

They were good wood. She had known that when she left them. They were the two straightest on the tree after the three she took off the leader, and their buds had come up in the heat, swelled and softened at the tip, four days further along than the sticks in her refrigerator.

She had told Dana she left the north side for the tree.

That was a decent-sounding sentence and it was not true. She had left the north side because if the union failed on all ten, or if the cellar in Ohio flooded again the way it did two springs ago, she would need wood next February, and to have wood next February she needed the tree alive next February. The two sprouts were not mercy. They were a second attempt, stored where the mice could not reach it and the freezer could not fail on it, on the only shelf in the world that grew more of itself.

She would not have said any of that out loud to Bo, who had a romantic streak about old fruit, or to Dana, who did not need to hear it because Dana had done the same arithmetic on other trees and had a barn full of the results.

The warm held through Friday. Saturday it went back down to twenty-six, and she was glad of it, and knew exactly what she was glad about.

IV

She grafted on Sunday at the kitchen table with the woodstove down to coals, because sixty-eight degrees is a working temperature for hands and a bad one for dormant wood, and the compromise was to bring out four sticks at a time and leave the rest cold.

The liners had come in November, twelve M.111, ordered in a week when the tree still looked like it had two years in it. They had spent the winter heeled in damp sawdust in the cellar and they came up clean, white at the root tips, the calipers running a little heavier than she wanted.

She matched by eye first and then with the calipers, because eyes lie about diameter at that scale. Everything else in the operation is in service of a strip of cambium on one side of the join lying against a strip of cambium on the other, and if the two pieces are not the same thickness they meet on a slant and the strips miss each other and the graft is a decoration.

She made the long cut first, on the stock, one pull of the blade an inch and a half up the slope, flat and unhesitating, because a cut you saw at comes out dished and a dished face has air in it. Then the tongue: a third of the way down from the tip of the sloping face, the blade set in and driven down parallel with the grain, half the length of the slope, no further. The scion got the same two cuts mirrored.

Then the part her hands did without her. The two slopes went together and the tongues slid past each other and locked, and she pushed until the faces sat down flush and the scion was a hair to one side, so that at least one edge of cambium ran true even if the diameters were off. She wound the rubber strip from below the join upward, overlapping by half, snugged and not strangled, and tied it off, and touched the top bud cut to the wax pot so the stick would not dry out through its own end.

Ten of them. She cut her thumb on the fourth, not badly, and taped it and went on, because the wood was out of the refrigerator and warming while she bled.

Two liners were left over at the end, bare, with nothing to put on them. She heeled them back into the sawdust. There is no use for a rootstock without a top, and no throwing one out either.

*V*

The ten went upright into a plastic tote in damp moss, packed to the union and no higher, and the tote went into the back bedroom, which held sixty-eight degrees without the stove and had a door that shut.

Seven to ten days at room temperature is what the callus wants. Colder and nothing knits. Warmer, or longer, and the buds break before the union has anything to feed them with, and a stick will push a beautiful set of leaves off its own stored sugar and then die in the third week of doing it, which is the failure that fools people, because it looks exactly like success for eighteen days.

She wrote the date on masking tape and stuck it to the lid.

Then there was nothing to do about it for a week and a half, and no way to check. Callus is soft. It bridges the cut and it has no strength for a month, and to see whether a union has taken you have to unwrap the strip, and unwrapping the strip on day five tears the tissue you are unwrapping it to look at. She had known people to sacrifice a graft for the information and had never once heard the information be worth it.

Teo came off nights on the Wednesday and slept fourteen hours and woke up at nine at night, and they sat in the kitchen and he talked about the third step and whether to take it further, and she said what she thought, which was that he should, and he said he knew what she thought, and they let it sit there unfinished, because it was his and it was going to take months.

On the seventh day she walked out to the east row. The two sprouts on the north side had their buds swelling out of the tight brown, doing in March what the tree had done every March. She stood there for a minute and did not do anything about it and went back in.

On the tenth day she took the lid off in the daylight and lifted the first one out by the rootstock, not by the union, and turned it until the light came across the join. At the shoulder of the long cut, where the wrap ended, there was a rim of white, the color of a cut potato, no thicker than a thread.

She put it back in the moss. She did not look at the other nine.

They would go into the refrigerator now until the ground opened, and then into the nursery row in April, and stand there a year and probably two before any of them went anywhere permanent.

She wrote the date on the masking tape, and under it the name, and under that the number ten. Then she took the crisper drawer out of the refrigerator to make the tote fit, and shut the door on it, and went to make Teo something he could eat at three in the morning.