Original AI-generated book

Scionwood

About this book

Halvor Trygstad hasn't been home to Dovre, Wisconsin in eleven years. He left as a promising bread baker with fast hands; he comes back at thirty-eight with a left hand ruined by a commercial mixer, a marriage in its last paperwork, and eighty-one days of sobriety he doesn't trust. The plan is to sleep in his brother's hayshed, keep his mouth shut, and figure out what a man does with the second half of a life he already spent. Then Margit Solheim, eighty-one years old and running out of breath, chooses him. For a hundred and thirty-five years, the Nine Ledges Orchard has been handed down not by blood but by naming: each keeper picks the next and writes the name in a ledger. Two hundred and six varieties of apple grow on its coulee slopes, most of them extinct everywhere else on earth — trees with names like Sheepnose and Bottle Greening and Hoary Morning, kept alive only by somebody willing to cut dormant wood in February and graft it onto new roots before the sap runs. Margit has waited thirty years for a successor. Now she has a lung disease with a schedule, forty-one thousand dollars in back taxes, and a neighbor who would like to turn the ridge into a frac-sand mine. Hal doesn't want it. He is spectacularly unqualified for it. He takes it anyway, one graft at a time, through a year of frost nights, county meetings, church-basement funerals, a complicated woman from the extension office, a fifteen-year-old with a skateboard and better hands than his, and the slow, unglamorous discovery of what it costs to be chosen for something small. A warm, unsentimental, foul-mouthed novel about patience, ruin, repair, and the peculiar dignity of tending something that will outlive you.