The orchard kept its own gospel, and you learned to read it by going down between the rows in the early mornings, when the leaves were still wet and the apples bore the weight of the night. My grandfather had taught my father to read it, and my father had taught me, and none of us had ever spoken of it as teaching.

There were ninety-two trees in the lower field and forty-one in the upper, and each had a name, though the names were not written down anywhere but in the back of my grandfather's mind, and later, when his mind began to thin, in the back of mine. Bishop. Old Widow. The Twins. Lazarus, who had been struck by lightning the year before I was born and had come back the following spring as if nothing had happened.

We were not a sentimental family. My grandfather had fought in one war and buried two children, and he held to a faith that was as plain and undecorated as the wooden chairs in our kitchen. But he loved the trees the way some men love their dogs — without explanation, and without apology, and with the kind of attention that only ever passes between living things that have agreed to keep one another company.

The orchard had been planted in 1911 by my great-grandfather, who had come down out of the hollows with a sack of seedlings and a wife who would die three winters later of a fever no one in our family ever named aloud. He set the first row along the ridge so that the morning light would find it first, and he set the last row down by the creek, where the soil was darkest and the frost came latest.

By the time I was old enough to follow my grandfather between the rows, the trees were already older than he was. They had outlasted the war, and the influenza, and the year the bank came and went, and the long dry summer of 1954 that finished off most of the orchards on our side of the county. They had outlasted my grandmother, and they would outlast my grandfather, and they would outlast my father, and one day, if I was lucky, they would outlast me.

In the spring we pruned. In the summer we watched the sky. In the autumn we picked, and we sorted, and we hauled the bushels down to the road in the bed of the old truck, and my mother sold them from a folding table with a hand-lettered sign that had been hand-lettered, originally, by her own mother. In the winter the trees slept, and we slept too, in our way, and the snow came down between the rows and made of the whole orchard a single white congregation.

My grandfather used to say that an orchard was a covenant. You did not own it; you tended it. You were given it by the dead, and you would give it to the living, and in the years between you were responsible for it the way a man is responsible for a promise he did not make but cannot refuse.

He died on a Tuesday in October, in the chair by the window that looked out over the lower field. The doctor had come and gone. The pastor had come and gone. My grandmother — his second wife, who had loved him for thirty years and had never quite gotten used to him — sat on the edge of the bed and held his hand, and when he was gone she did not weep but she went out into the orchard alone, and she walked the rows for an hour, and she came back in and made supper.

My father took up the work as if he had been waiting for it all his life, which perhaps he had. He was a quieter man than my grandfather, and a sadder one, though I did not know then what his sadness was about. He pruned in the same patterns. He spoke to the trees in the same low voice. He named them by the names he had been taught, and he taught me to name them too, though he never explained why the names mattered.

I am writing this in the spring of my forty-third year, in the house where I was born, at the kitchen table where my mother sold apples to strangers for thirty-one autumns. The orchard is out the window. There are eighty-six trees in the lower field now, and thirty-nine in the upper. We have lost some, and we have planted some, and the gospel they keep is the same gospel, and I am still, after all these years, only beginning to learn how to read it.