Richard Haynes took off his sunglasses and set them on the hood of his white pickup, and for the first time all morning the developer looked uncomfortable. He was a lean man in a pressed blue shirt, standing in the shade of my porch, with the long rows of peach trees running away behind him in the heat. “Mrs. Carter, I am going to tell you something, and I want you to know I take no pleasure in it,” he said. “This is not the first time Danielle has done this.” My daughter in law, at the foot of the steps, with her sunglasses pushed up in her hair, folded her arms. Jason, my son, stood very still.
Haynes opened a leather folder and passed me a sheet of paper, a county record from Greenville. It showed a lawsuit, four years earlier, brought by an elderly farmer named Odell Pruitt against a woman named Danielle Rhea Carter, then Danielle Rhea Boyd. She had married his nephew, and within eighteen months she had talked the old man into signing a power of attorney, then a deed. A judge had set it aside. She had paid a fine and moved to South Carolina. “Danielle changed her name when she married Jason,” Haynes said. “I looked her up only because the numbers did not add up. I came to warn you.”
The sweet tea jug on the porch rail glittered in the sun, beaded with cold sweat, and the ice inside it clinked. I picked it up, and poured myself a glass, because my hand needed something to do. The developer scheme was fourteen hundred thousand dollars for the orchard, for a subdivision of fifty homes, with a signature of mine on the contract that I had never put there. Tomás Rivera, the foreman, came walking up the row with his cap in his hand. He had worked for me for nineteen years. “Mrs. Carter,” he said, “I saw her take the papers from the desk.”
A cold jug of tea on a porch rail gave one widow the afternoon to bring her son back to the peach orchard in Spartanburg.
Jason stepped forward and looked at his wife, and I saw the color go out of his face. He was a gentle boy of forty one, who loved a good story and a ball game and had never in his life suspected a person of anything. “Danielle, tell me it is not true,” he said. She lifted her chin. “Jason, your mother is old and stubborn and she will lose this orchard anyway,” she said coolly. “The bank will take it in two years. I was only trying to get something for us.” He stared at her, as if at a stranger on a bus. “You forged the name of my mother,” he said. “You forged it in my house.”
She ran for her car. She snatched her purse from the porch swing, and went down the steps in her heels and across the gravel, but Tomás Rivera was already standing in front of her silver sedan, tall and calm with his arms at his sides. “Mrs. Carter, I think you should wait for the sheriff,” he said. She tried to go around him, and he stepped sideways, gently. She swore, one short word. Then, with the stiff dignity of a woman who has lost, she sat down on the bumper of her own car and waited, and a deputy from Spartanburg County rolled in with the lights off.
Jason sat down on the porch step and cried. It was the cry of a man who has been fooled by the one he loved best, quietly and without shame. I sat down beside him, and put my hand on his back, and we said nothing for a long time. The peach trees stirred in the heat. The cicadas rose and fell. After a while, he said, “Mama, I defended her. I told you that you were being unfair.” I said, “Jason, you were being loyal. It is not the worst fault.” He leaned his head against my shoulder, as he had when he was seven.
The money consequences were plain. The contract was voided by the court as a forgery. The developer, to his credit, tore up his own offer and paid the legal fees of the farm. Danielle was charged with forgery and attempted fraud, and given a sentence of three years. Jason filed for divorce and moved back into the house at the orchard. I did not sell. Instead I signed a conservation easement with the county, so that no developer could ever buy the land, and Tomás Rivera became a partner in the Carter Orchard, with a share of every basket.
Richard Haynes stayed on the porch for an hour after the deputy had driven off, and I poured him a glass of tea. He told me that his own mother had lost a farm in North Carolina to a cousin with a smooth tongue, and that he had taken up development to build things honestly and not to take them. He had walked away from a million dollar commission that morning. “Mrs. Carter, I do not like to be used, either,” he said. He set the empty glass on the rail. I said that I had misjudged him. He smiled, tipped his head, and said that most people did, at first.
In the name of my husband, Hollis, who passed in 2012 and who planted the first tree on the day we were married, I started the Peach Basket Fund. It pays for legal help, easements and fair price loans for older farmers in Spartanburg, Cherokee and Union counties who are being pressured to sell. In the first year, we helped thirty one farms. A peach grower of eighty three, in a straw hat, held up a letter from a developer and said, “They keep sending these.” I poured him a glass of sweet tea and read it aloud.
On the first Saturday of July, we opened the orchard stand. Jason worked the register, and Tomás stacked baskets, and the whole county came out to buy peaches and pie. Richard Haynes drove up at noon, in his white pickup, and bought a bushel. I handed him a glass of tea. He tasted it, and closed his eyes. “Mrs. Carter, I have developed six hundred acres in this state,” he said. “I never drank anything like that.” I told him the secret was the trees. He laughed, and paid, and left a tip in the jar for the orchard fund.
