“Up around the house the shadow of them was black and thick, and the smell of the new bloom that was coming here and there up among the yellowing fruit sickened you. There was a starlight that fell wet and glittery like knives on the leaf edges. The next day McDevitt went off somewhere to spite me because I wanted him to sell, and left me alone. I’d never let him guess how afraid I was to be alone. I guess that’s why I married him when he come along when Ma died. Or maybe he guessed and thought I’d beg him to take me away.
“He would have liked me to beg him to. But I never let on that my knees were like string to see him go. He turned at the gate and smiled at me over that orange-colored beard with his stone-white teeth and his eyes that were like wires boring into you, and I shut my mouth tight and let him look. So he stopped smiling and went, and I was there with the two children and four nigras living down a ways in a shack in the grove, and the days got hotter. I would of sold the crop, only I couldn’t find the man that made the offer. But everybody in Orlando, at the bank and everywhere, said to hold on, because prices were going up. Then one day it begun to get cold.
“It came on in the morning, and by afternoon it was so cold the children shivered, and I had to put two-three extra shirts on them. In all the groves up and down the road they began to light fire pots and start bonfires to keep the oranges from feeling it. You could smell the smoke and the blossoms in the chilly air. The sky was heavy and gray-looking and there wasn’t any wind, and the smoke drifted and hung between the long dark rows of trees. But still it kept getting colder. Late that afternoon I went out and stopped the nigras from lighting any more fire pots. I could see it wasn’t going to do any good. I told them to cut down a couple of old trees to keep themselves warm in their houses that night and had them bring me some of the wood too.
“Then it got dark sudden and I gave the children some bread and milk and put them to bed with all the bedclothes over them, and I put a shawl around my knees and one over my shoulders and sat close to the stove and fed it with orange wood. All night long I sat there and it kept getting colder. About midnight I could tell it was freezing outside, because the trees begun to crack and snap. Then pretty soon you could hear thumps on the ground where the oranges were freezing and falling off. I set there and heard them and knew that every cent I had in the world but two dollars was being frozen up. Then some more oranges would thump down.
‘’Next morning when I unbolted my front door and looked out the ground was all covered with frost that was melting in the sun, and everywhere you looked the edges of the leaves were blackened, and on the ground carloads and carloads of oranges were scattered. The crop was ruined. Every orange was hurt. And all the way into Orlando and all over Orange County and all the way up to Jacksonville it was the same way. It wasn’t just me that was ruined. The whole state was. I’ve often wondered why we had to get caught in the one big freeze Orange County ever had.
“Well, when McDevitt heard how things were, he told a man that was coming to Orlando to tell me that I could have the grove. He said he was tired of oranges anyway and thought he would go to Texas and I prob’ly wouldn’t see him anymore. So there I was. I was scared so when the crop went I didn’t hardly know what to do, but what McDevitt did, put the ginger in me I needed.
“Maybe he thought he’d find the weak place in me that way, but it made me mad enough to do anything. So then I found that the trees weren’t dead, only the fruit. There was maybe a chance to save next year’s bloom. So I went into the bank at Orlando and borrowed some money to keep going on, and almost everybody else that wasn’t too discouraged done the same thing. Things looked bad, but they weren’t too bad.
“Until along in February when the second freeze came. The sap had begun to come back with the heat that shut down again and the bloom was forced beyond its time. People were getting real cheerful, like people get in a fruit country, living on next year’s promise, and Orlando looked prosperous. And then the second freeze came. I sat up all night again and listened to the crackling of the boughs. There wasn’t any oranges to thump down, but somehow now it made it all the worse. You couldn’t hear anything but the crackling and snapping of wood, but you could feel the chill that meant that next year’s hopes were dying.
“My fire went out and I was chilled through, and yet even when it come daylight and the sun straggled in the window I kept sitting there by the stove, not daring to go and look. There wasn’t a sound outside, nobody going by in the road, and the nigras not making any noise at all. I just sat there all huddled up until little George woke up and ran and opened the door and told me to look.
“You never saw anything like it in your life. It was the abomination of desolation. It wasn’t only that the leaves were black and shriveled and fallen and the new bloom gone. The trees themselves were frozen stiff and the sap had frozen and then split the trees down to the roots; and there they lay, looking like an earthquake or a tornado had hit them. Every tree was killed, every one of them, down to the roots. And when the sun was hot and the warmth was coming back all the country smelled of rottenness. People went around with mouths that spoke but couldn’t smile, and they could look with their eyes, but it was like they weren’t looking at anything.
“It was like death. Business was stopped. All the banks were ruined. Then the people begun to go away. They could have stood it without money, but they couldn’t stand it without the hope of their trees that they’d worked so hard over and put their last cent in. They went away from the blackened rotting groves and they left their houses wide open and maybe food on the table and bread in the oven, and in a week it was like everybody had died. Some went back to places they’d come from in the North or the old South, and some went to Texas and Oklahoma.
“But some of the young men that didn’t have all the spirit taken out of them were talking about going farther south, way down in South Florida that nobody thought was fit to live in on account of swamps, down to this new place Miami on the coast where they were bringing the railroad. These men said that maybe down there they could start new orange groves, and there was gov’ment land you could homestead.
“If I hadn’t been so mad with McDevitt I don’t see how I could have done it, but I begun to think if a man could take up a homestead maybe I could, and then I’d put a grove in and show him I was a smarter man than he was, if I was a woman. So I wrote to his mother that lived in Vermont state and told her just how it was, and she wrote back she was sorry McDevitt had been so mean and she’d take the children for a while. She was a good, kind woman and I guess McDevitt took after his father. There was some people going back to Vermont state from Orlando that could take the children to her. So that’s how I took up the land. Perhaps I made a mistake. There’s plenty of people has made good money growing oranges in Orange County since then. Go slow here. We’re coming to my gate.”
There was a straggling grove of grapefruit at the left, which presently revealed a road more like a path. Up this, in answer to her hand, Larry turned. The weeds were long under the trees. Beyond that was unused cleared land that may have been used to grow vegetables. But beyond that still the pines began again, pressing down almost into the faint roadway, rising endlessly to each side and ahead, larger and more stately than any Larry had yet noticed. The palmetto around their roots was all untouched. Between their ranks the distance was smoky with crowding trunks. Superb trees, they seemed to be the very ancestors and originals of all the others they had passed. The house stood in a small clearing, perhaps the half acre prescribed by the government for homesteaders. It was made of pine logs and there was a well beside it and a small garden. When he stopped the car Larry found himself listening intently. It was as she had said. You could hear only little noises faint and far away. When she was walking from the car to the house steps, stiffly, with her black hat and veil trailing from her hand and her heavy black skirt bunched up as she had been sitting on it, Larry asked, “Where do you want me to put these canned goods, Mrs. McDevitt?”