by K. M. WATSON
Cady didn’t know anything about Pawpaw Tree Hill when her son drove her to the entrance where Kendrick waited. And there was much to know.
It had been in Kendrick’s family for generations, long before the imposing, two-story Victorian house—bookended by towering sweetgum trees and bordered by generous porches—became a home for seniors. When unnamed and unsettled, it was a modest island hill surrounded by the usual Eastern Shore flatlands that stretched to the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Marshes and beaches skirted the island, and forests filled its interior. Loblolly pines, yellow poplars, sweetgums.
In later times, farmlands encroached on the wild country, pushing away what had lived there for thousands of years, with settlers planting endless acres of corn, tobacco, and wheat. By the late 1700s, the hill and adjacent property had changed hands several times and now belonged to Kendrick’s people, distant relatives freed from enslavement by Quaker farmers and given the land they had worked. Kendrick’s great-great-grandmother Gertie, with her famously ferocious will, drove the building of the Victorian that he called home.
Cady refused to call it that.
“I’m going back to my place as soon as I can,” she told Kendrick, as her son rolled her wheelchair through Pawpaw Tree Hill’s double doors. A fall in her kitchen and a broken hip had landed her here.
“I understand,” he said, in a soft, deep voice that most residents found soothing. “We’ll take good care of you as long as needed.”
That was over a year ago. Months of physical therapy to mend her 90-year-old body, together with hard-headed determination, wasn’t enough. Cady still sat in a wheelchair all day and mourned her old life, complaining bitterly that nothing was like her own place just a half hour away and describing at great length how badly she wanted to go back. Some residents wouldn’t sit with her at meals any longer because of her frequent rants.
But with a bad back, her son couldn’t help much, and her daughters lived out of state. Now, Pawpaw Hill was where she lived. No beloved flower beds organized the way she liked and filled with blazing stars, cardinal flowers, black-eyed Susans, cone flowers, columbines, and beardtongues. No kitchen to bake Smith Island cakes for tourists to buy at the local farm stand during the summer. And no beloved Auntie Z’s Ruby Reds.
Her prized tomatoes, the size of pool balls, ripened every summer on the dozens of plants Cady mothered in her backyard. Round with gentle ridging at the top, the deep red fruit sliced cleanly and had just the right combination of meat and juice. Slightly sweet with a little tang, Auntie Z’s had a reputation at the farm stand down the road.
“I had the best tomatoes in the county,” she would boast to anyone who would listen.
What few people knew, though, was that Auntie Z’s Ruby Red seeds had been passed down over generations in Cady’s family. The tomato’s namesake, Aunt Zora, began preserving the heirloom variety in the 1940s, and family members who grew them would pass seeds down to the generations that followed. Cady was the last to take family devotion to the fruit seriously.
“The secret is saving seeds and doing it right,” she told Kendrick one day, when they were talking about what she missed most about home.
Aside from eating the tomatoes and giving them to grateful friends and family, harvesting seeds gave her the most pleasure from her crops. He listened patiently as she described the way she did it every year for many decades, her voice weathered but her words precise. First, picking the best. As days began to shorten, she’d walk up and down the rows of plants in the cool of the morning in search of fully ripened fruit that looked promising—completely red, a little soft when squeezed, a rich tomatoey smell at the top, easily plucked from the vine with a twist. They dangled like Christmas ornaments awaiting her scrutiny. She grew silent as she relished the memory.
“That’s the fun part,” she picked up after a pause. “Next, it gets a little messy.” She explained how she would scoop out the insides and place them in a container of warm water to ferment for a few days and shed the surrounding gel. Then, separate the seeds, rinse, and dry them.
“You’ve got to make sure they dry completely or they go bad.” She was adamant. “Then you store them.”
Cady put hers in small envelopes labeled with the year and lined up in tidy, little boxes in her kitchen pantry. It wasn’t until she stumbled and slammed her hip against the kitchen tile floor that she had to leave her garden, reluctantly sharing the seeds and her methods with outsiders. Several boxes to each. The last one sat in Cady’s room on a shelf at the senior home. She would open it when feeling low and breathe in the mild earthy scent of the seeds, then touch their dried skins, and spread the tiny containers of life in her palm.
Kendrick once told her that he wondered what he would take from Pawpaw Tree Hill if he ever had to leave. He’d grown up there before it became a business, surrounded by extended family that filled the rooms just as his great-great-grandmother Gertie had hoped would happen. It had pained Gertie to think that enslaved families, hers among them, had been split apart and forced to live separately with different owners. The Victorian she ended up creating was a haven and place to keep family together.
As Kendrick grew up there decades later, though, times had changed and rooms emptied with deaths and moves. The place grew quiet while he and his mother nursed aging relatives. It made sense, eventually, for them to make changes to the house, get certified, and open their doors to seniors. The name the first settlers used for the hill—when pawpaw trees were plentiful—remained. As did Gertie’s vision.
“Have you ever tasted one?” Kendrick asked Cady one day as he wheeled her to the front porch to catch the morning sun. She lifted her face and took in the pungent smells of the marshes and beaches of the west.
“A pawpaw? Not that I remember. I’ve heard of ’em.” Cady’s brows pushed together as she concentrated on finding a memory. “Sang that pawpaw patch song when I was a kid.”
“Mama says there used to be a lot of them in the forests here. Even had a few on our hill,” he said, parking and locking her chair. “Harder to find them now the land has changed.”
“A shame,” said Cady. “I would have liked to have seen that.” She closed her eyes after Kendrick left. Her mind wandered as she began to doze in the sun’s rays, listing other things she’d like to see, such as the spring sprouting of her tomato seeds.
One day, after summer cooled into fall, Kendrick drove a covered golf cart to the entrance, where Cady waited. Her curled white hair held her favorite pink shell barrette, and a sea blue blanket she had crocheted some 30 years ago covered her lap and legs.
“Where are we going?” she demanded to know, her sharp voice edged with anxiety. Even though she still didn’t consider Pawpaw Hill her home, it now felt familiar and safe.
Kendrick gently helped her onto the cart’s seat. “Haven’t said yet.”
The cart hummed along the meandering driveway that led to Pawpaw Hill, past farmland rented to neighbors and meadows filled with the last wildflowers of the season—golden black-eyed Susans, pale blue asters, deep pink Joe Pye weeds, and goldenrods. Cady spotted a mockingbird perched on a nearby tree. Sparrows darted around the fields. The golf cart slowed and turned onto a dirt road headed to one of the few remaining forests on the property. Rising tidal waters over the decades had poisoned trees with salt all around the island, and now squat marsh plants surrounded stands of gray tree trunks. Ghost forests. But the road Kendrick and Cady followed took them along the edge of a stream lined with loblolly pines, maples, and red oaks.
“There’s one,” Kendrick said, slowing to a stop.
“One what?”
“A pawpaw tree, filled with fruit.”
Cady followed his gaze. To the right of the cart stood a modest tree easily dismissed as nothing special. She searched its ash-brown branches cloaked with large, floppy leaves. Up, down, sideways, probing the spaces. Then she spotted them. Clusters of palm-sized, oblong fruit. Dusty green with black mottling.
“Are they ripe? Can we taste one?” Her voice held excitement that Kendrick had never heard, with a hint of anticipation around the edges. She scooted to the side of her seat to watch.
Kendrick walked over to the tree, reached up easily with his long arms and height, and gently pulled. He collected five and handed them one at a time to an eager Cady, who cradled them in her lap as if carrying Auntie Z’s.
Gertie had felt the same—Kendrick had been told in stories handed down and now shared with Cady—asking family as the season neared to keep an eye out for ripe fruit. Once pawpaws began to collect on her kitchen table, she went to work slicing them in half and removing the brown, lima bean-sized seeds from the juicy, yellow pulp. All of it went into pies and sweet breads as quickly as possible before going bad. Sometimes she put a scoop in her mouth and savored the custardy texture and sweet flavor.
Her mother had told her as a little girl that enslaved people and indigenous tribes often planted pawpaws for their own use. Perhaps the trees on Pawpaw Hill came from them. For Kendrick, though, there were no pawpaw trees on the hill any longer. It held only a field, vegetable garden, flower beds, and a few red oaks and sweetgums. But pawpaw trees could still be found in the wild, and a neighbor had told Kendrick where some grew.
After returning to Pawpaw Hill and giving Kendrick a hug that surprised him, Cady went straight to the activity room. There, she carefully placed each pawpaw on the covered table next to a kitchen knife that had been left for her. Deep within, she felt a familiar and welcome anticipation.
She palmed one pawpaw, rotating it and eyeing its soft skin. Lifting the fruit to her nose, she inhaled. A hint of banana and mango with something tangy, perhaps pineapple. Slowly, she sliced it in half, exposing the juicy gold pulp and large seeds, the color of chocolate.
Beautiful, she thought. And began to plan.
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K. M. Watson writes from Maryland’s farm and horse country, where she lives with her husband and quirky rat terrier mix. A retired educator and journalist, she writes mostly about human encounters with the natural world and discoveries in aging. Her short fiction is published in the international anthology Best Climate Change Stories, Bay to Ocean Journal, Pen in Hand, and The Avenue Journal.
© K. M. Watson
Halfway Down the Stairs 