One
The sun is blistering on my bare shoulders. In the relentless heat of early afternoon, sweat drips from my brow, my neck, every pore of my body as it soaks through portions of my shirt. I pause for a furtive drink of all-too-warm water from my canteen before swiftly returning to my task.
A basket overflowing with juicy peaches sits at my feet while its brother, still half empty, hangs from my left shoulder. The tree before me is rich with fruit, bursting with a bounty of ripeness. Mopping my forehead with a rag from my pocket, I circle the tree. I can tell by sight which of the peaches are ready to come down, and my practiced fingers make seconds of testing, plucking, and depositing each one.
Peach season is my favorite of the harvests. Most everyone curses the peaches for the ungodly heat they bring, their fragility, and the consequences of bruising a single one. In apple season the fruit can be tossed carelessly from treetop to basket, but the peaches must be cradled down, babied a few at a time. I guess a bruised peach is poisonous to the palettes of the Capitol. For all its extra cares and considerations, though, I love peach season for one simple reason: its beauty. I love the trees, their slender, graceful limbs bowing to the weight of glowing orange fruit. I love the sun as it glints off the brilliant green leaves while we hunt for nonexistent shade during midday break. I love the peaches, their soft fuzz, their sweet smell, the way each one is always perfect, always flawless. "Nature's candy," my brother used to call them.
Not that he would know, of course. He'd never tasted a peach in his life—none of us have. All that we harvest, every last bit, slips through our fingertips and into the open gullets of the citizens in the Capitol. The only way to get fruit is to buy it, and lord knows we've never had enough money for silly frivolities like apples or oranges. Some try to steal it—and who hasn't been tempted to pocket a pear in the cloistered seclusion of the orchards? But the security is an illusion, and those who steal are always caught. Always caught, and always punished.
It seems like the cruelest of ironies, doesn't it? That a person or even a whole family can starve to death when every facet of their lives is controlled by the production of food? From the time we are born, food becomes life. During the day we plant it, we water it, we harvest it for those in far off places we will never see, while at night we sit around an empty kitchen table, deciding that we can go without dinner for one more day. In school they teach us of nothing but food and the merits of the Capitol, two things inexplicably but unavoidably intertwined. They tell us that only those in the Capitol have the right to the finer things in life, like the sweet taste of fresh fruit or the flavorful wonder of spices and herbs. They tell us how we lost that right during the Rebellion. They tell us of the processes that send our food to the Capitol's kitchens, its journey from our hands, grubby and sweaty, into stomachs that have never wanted for anything. Even the most delicate of fruits are washed, scrubbed, scoured, sterilized, and polished—in short, every possible, miniscule trace of District 11 is removed so that the Capitol never has to question, never has to be reminded that the food on which they so casually dine is the product of far off toil.
Of course, I stopped going to school four years ago, as we had all planned on. Really it was only the children of the merchants and the Capitol's pets who made it past the age of thirteen or fourteen. For the rest of us, an extra set of hands in the fields or the orchards, an extra source of income, an extra way to put food on the table is indispensable. The law states that all children must attend school until the age of eighteen with breaks for the most important weeks of the harvests, but it's the one rule that the Peacekeepers overlook. More people in the fields year-round means a better crop for the Capitol and a better bonus for the supervisors—neither of whom are going to lodge a complaint any time soon. When I turned thirteen and went to my family's supervisor for a job, I could almost hear my brother's voice in my ear: "Be happy, Iris. Now you ain't got to listen to the Capitol's lies anymore."
My brother was the eternal optimist. He was five years older, and, in my eyes at least, could do no wrong. All I wanted was to be like him. He would help older workers and younger kids struggling with the weight of two full fruit baskets; he could converse easily with anyone from the silliest giggling girl to the surliest of old men; he quite literally whistled while he worked, a high clear tune as sweet as I imagined the peaches must be. He was, in a word, beloved.
The worst moment of my life was when we lost him to the Games.
His smiling face his smiling face and the notes of his whistle had crept unbidden into my head as I finish off the lower branches of the tree. I push him from my mind, willing him away from me. I have hours of work left before me, first in the orchard and then by the waning light of the processing house fire. Hitching my basket securely over my shoulder and carefully balancing it so as not to tip the fruit—a peach on the ground is a peach wasted, and thereby justifies a punishment—I grasp the tree's tender limbs and pull myself up into its branches. Balancing my basket in the crook of the two sturdiest arms, I go to work on the middle layer of fruit. I'm not high in the air, never more than five or ten feet, but simply leaving the ground washes me in a feeling of weightlessness. In the trees the air is less stifling, the sun less intense, and the thought of chancing on a faint breeze brings relief in itself.
One time in school they showed us a picture of what peach trees used to look like years and years ago. I was shocked as the slide came up; it was so thin, so spindly, so weak, yet so beautiful. For all its sickly looking branches and mottled bark, it was covered in the most gorgeous pink blossoms I had ever laid eyes on. Several of my classmates piped up to ask what was wrong with it, warranting a long-winded explanation from the presenter about genetic modification that he gave in a weary voice, as though he'd said the words thousands of times. Our peach trees, the only ones I had ever known, had been made to bear more fruit, their branches rendered stronger and more numerous, and, most importantly, climbable. It was no longer a question of shaking the fruit from the top limbs or waiting for the peaches to drop. You were expected to go get them, and they were to be undamaged as always.
When I was younger I had been one of those assigned to traverse the treetops, but I've now grown too big for the task. Still, I'm slender and agile enough to navigate the middle range branches with ease, more than can be said for many of the pickers who have reached middle age. The limbs are familiar beneath my bare feet as I work my way through the rest of what I can reach. I wish I could say I was a natural-born tree climber, but my familiarity with the branches is little more than the result of years of practice born from my former fear of falling. But there was no work on the ground for the tiny child I had been, and, despite some nasty falls, I became as capable as any other Tree Rat, as the supervisors called us.
My second basket filled, I hop to the ground and sling my baskets over my shoulders. Of all the work that the orchards present, the trek back to Collection is by far the most arduous task. The groves of fruit trees stretch forever, and the nearest Collection from my sector is nearly a half a mile away. Again mopping my forehead, I take a section of braided rope from the bunch that hangs in loops at my belt and tie it around the trunk of the tree with a Savoy knot in the middle, signifying to the Tree Rat working the sector that the top branches are ready. Once the Tree Rat's work is done, a different knot will be tied as a code for the rest of the pickers that the tree is done for the day. Orchard workers have been communicating with knots as long as anyone can remember—it saves us all time, energy, and avoids the consequences of knocking down ripe fruit while climbing to the top branches.
By the time I near the Collection, my lower back is soaked in sweat and my left shoulder is beginning to ache under the weight of my basket. The only thing that keeps me trudging along is the promise of a break that waits at the end. Perhaps the most agonizing part of Collection is waiting as one by one your fruit is inspected by a supervisor, so as to ensure no damage of any kind has occurred. The bastard who runs my inspections is perhaps the most infuriating human I've ever laid eyes on. He's my age, the seventeen-year-old nephew of the District Orchard Council's lead supervisor and so pompous you would think he was the President's son. I watch as he picks through my basket, his sharp eyes running over my harvest before transferring it to the large wooden crate at his side.
"These baskets can be fuller, Whitaker," he snaps at me, marking tallies on his list under my name. "That's your ten. You have five minutes."
I shoulder my now empty baskets and make my way over to where an assortment of people are resting, trying to make the most of their short and shade-less repose. In the orchards, your breaks are doled out not by how long you work, but how well. Ten baskets to Collection earns you a five minute break—just enough time to refill canteens and attempt to ignore the sweltering afternoon sun. Luckily I work fast.
"Puppet Boy bein' a bitch?" Caro asks me as I plop into the grass beside him.
I give him a slight smile and shake my head. "Always," I reply, making sure the Collector's out of earshot. Caro christened him Puppet Boy his first day on the job, and the name has stuck among the pickers ever since. It was the result an incident during midday break, the twenty or so minutes we get at noon to eat the lunches we brought—not that any of us ever have any food to bring. Caro's little sister, a Tree Rat named Eliza, was hurrying in to Collection so as not to have her break cut short. Then disaster struck. We watched, helpless, as her foot caught on a stray root sending both her, and her freshly picked basket, sprawling to the ground. New to the orchard and unsure of what to do for so many ruined peaches, the Collector walked over to Eliza, struggling to save some of the fruit, and struck her across the face with the back of his hand.
Physical punishments are both the order and the norm for mistakes in the orchard, but I felt myself fill with rage on behalf of poor little Eliza. I must have inadvertently taken a step towards the Collector, because I felt a strong hand grasp my arm as if to hold me back. Caro's face betrayed no emotion, however, as he picked his sister up, wiped away her tears, and held the cool tin of his canteen against her the angry red skin of her cheek. "I ain't mad," Caro said in a measured voice as we walked home from the orchard with our friends. "I feel sorry for the bastard. He's just a puppet and his uncle is the one pulling the strings."
Thus Puppet Boy was born.
"So he's got a stick up his ass, who cares?" Neela asks from beside me where she lies on her back, arm draped over her eyes to block out the sun.
"I mean, he prob'ly does, sounds damn uncomfortable," Caro replies, lying back as well.
"Think of the splinters." Neela rolls over onto her stomach.
I give a nervous laugh, still unconvinced that we aren't being overheard in our mockery, and take a long swig from my canteen. Water is precious; it cools you down and fills you up at the same time. Nature's miracle cure.
"Timmons, Arroyo!" Puppet Boy barks at Caro and Neela. I give a slight jump, sure that this time he's overheard us. It wouldn't be the first time Neela's mouth has gotten her in trouble, and I can sense that devil-may-care attitude towards the supervisors is both growing stronger and wearing thinner on their tempters. I can't help but worry for the inevitable day her words tip the scales sorely out of her favor once and for all. "Get back to work," he orders them gruffly, and I feel a wave of relief rush over me that it's nothing more than the end of their break. I won't say I'm paranoid, but ever since the Capitol took my brother it's been harder than ever to laugh in the face of misfortune.
Caro and Neela have been my best friends for longer than I can remember. It was probable an inescapable inevitability—Caro's shack of a house stands next to my own in Orchard Village, which is far less pleasant than its name suggests, and Neela's dad is friend of my mother. We've always had other friends on the playground, in the orchard, on the long walk home. But after the rest of them had peeled away, headed for dim candlelight and a meager or nonexistent dinner, it was always Caro, Neela, and I. Caro, Neela, and I watched the sun set over the far off treetops at the end of a long day of picking. Caro, Neela, and I took the risk of lingering in the lane back from the orchard to lean against a Beech tree and wonder about both everything and nothing. Caro, Neela, and I lay on our backs in the grass, counting the twinkling stars in the inky night sky. And when Ash died, it was Caro and Neela who sat by my side.
After those Games, or even as quickly as the reaping, my other friends made themselves scarce. I can't say I blame them. After all, what would I say to someone whose brother had just been drawn as the next sacrifice to the bloodthirsty appetites of the Capitol? What would I do for someone who had just watched his murder on national television? How would I wipe the tears of someone who, at twelve years old, had overnight become too bitter to cry? Somehow they knew. All three of our families had crowded into Neela's little home—she was the only one who had a connection to the electricity, much less a television. As we watched the Games unfold, they never wavered from my side, their hands wrapped tightly around mine, silent, strong, and comforting.
With the two of them back into the orchards, I spend the rest of my break in silence, sipping water and trying to block out both the sun and the memories. That when I realize it; the silence is not just my own. Usually the murmur of quiet chatter ripples amongst the workers on break, discussions of families or homes or the rampant gossip of the orchards. But today, all are quiet, their eyes staring into space as though lost in introspective thought. Over the past week, it's grown quieter and quieter throughout the fields and the villages, boiling down to this moment of somber silence. And I know why. Everyone knows why.
Tomorrow is the reaping.