The bell of my wife Ada was still ringing when the sheriff pulled up at the chained gate of my orchard, and I could not hear one note of it. That is what it is to be eighty six years old without your hearing aids. I saw the lights on top of the cruiser go around and around in the peach trees. I saw Amos Yoder and his seven sons come across the field from the Mennonite farm next door, in suspenders and straw hats, walking as if to a barn raising. And I saw the man from Macon step out of a white sedan, holding up my hearing aids in the palm of his hand.
His name was Curtis Bell, and he was the agent for the company that had offered three million, six hundred thousand dollars for my land. I learned all this later, from a notepad, because Sheriff Ray Tolbert wrote it down for me in capital letters and held it up. My grandson Hunter had put the hearing aids in the hands of Mr. Bell on Monday, as proof that his grandfather could no longer understand a contract. Mr. Bell had looked at that tiny pair of devices for three days, and then he had driven to Fort Valley to give them back.
The sheriff wrote on his pad, “Mr. Bell says he will not buy from a man who cannot hear the price.” Then he wrote, “He also says your grandson told him you wanted to sell.” I looked across the gate at Hunter, who stood in the cut rows with a pair of bolt cutters hanging from one hand and the chain looped in the other. He was twenty nine years old and had my wife in his jaw. He did not look at me. He looked at the bell, which swung in the hands of Amos Yoder, and which Ada had hung there in 1961.
A brass bell rung at a gate gave one farmer the morning to bring his grandson back to the orchard in Fort Valley.
I gave my terms with the tiny hearing aids already in my ears, and the world coming in through them like a river through a broken dam. “Hunter,” I said, and my own voice boomed, “you will put down that chain. You will go with the sheriff to answer for what you did to the lock and the gate, and then you will go to the doctor that Pastor Mayfield found for you in Macon, and you will stay until she says you are well. I am not selling this orchard. I am going to prune it myself in January. And when you are well, you may hold the ladder.”
Hunter let the chain fall into the grass. “Papa Woody,” he said, and I heard every syllable. “I took your hearing aids because I knew you would hear me lying on the telephone. I owe money to people in Atlanta, and I thought if you sold the land, I could pay and nobody would be hurt. I told myself you were too old to care about peaches.” His voice broke. “Then I stood in the orchard at night and I heard the leaves, and I knew Grandma would have thrown me off the place with a broom.”
It was then that Hunter, in a last flash of panic, lunged across the gate and snatched the hearing aids out of my ears, and made a run for the road. He got twenty feet. Amos Yoder, who stood six feet four and had spent sixty years lifting hay bales, took one step into the middle of the row, stretched out an arm as broad as a fence rail, and caught my grandson by the collar the way he would catch a calf. He lifted him half off the ground. “Young man,” said Amos, very mildly, “that belongs to your grandfather.”
Sheriff Tolbert took the hearing aids from the fingers of Hunter and carried them back to me on his open palm. I fitted them in one at a time. The sounds came back all at once: the bell, the wind in the leaves, the creak of the cruiser door, the low voices of the Yoder boys praying in German under their breath. I stood in my orchard and wept like a boy. Amos stopped swinging the bell, set it carefully on the ground, and put his big hand on my shoulder.
The money consequences were small, for such a large fright. Hunter was charged with theft and trespass, and the judge, hearing the whole matter, gave him treatment and probation. The company of Mr. Bell withdrew the offer of three million, six hundred thousand dollars, and Mr. Bell sent me a basket of peaches from the Macon farmer market with a handwritten card. The debt of Hunter in Atlanta was paid by his own labor over two years, in installments, with the sheriff keeping the receipts. The orchard stayed with me and with Ada.
In the name of Ada, who passed in 2018, I started the Ada Lipscomb Fund. It pays for hearing aids, fittings and batteries for seniors in Peach, Houston and Crawford counties who cannot afford them. In the first year we fitted eighty three people. One was a widow of ninety from Byron who had not heard her own front door bell for six years. When the audiologist switched the devices on, she sat very still and then said, “Is that the mockingbird? I thought he had gone.”
Hunter came home from the clinic in Macon in February, in time for pruning. He stood at the foot of the tallest ladder with his hands on the rails, and I climbed up with the loppers, grumbling the whole way. “Papa Woody,” he said, “can you hear me?” I could. I heard every word. I snipped a bare limb from a Georgia Belle, dropped it into his arms, and said, “Hold that ladder steady, boy. Your grandmother is watching.” Down in the yard, the brass bell rang once in the wind.
