I grew on a peach tree.
Other peaches drop when they ripen. When I ripened, I dropped, rolled over, and stood up. Mother Tree says that part isn't so strange: peachwood borders on spirit, and given enough years, one peach or another will have a scrap of soul asleep inside it. The strange part was the day I woke — I touched ground on the very morning the whole orchard was bowing to the First Peach.
What is the First Peach? The earliest peach to ripen on all of Flower-Fruit Mountain each year.
No one may touch it. No bird may peck it, no monkey may pick it; when the wind rises, the mother trees wall it round with their own leaves. It hangs on its branch from fully ripe, to soft, to wrinkled, until at last it dries into a little black shadow and drops back into the soil. Every year the same. I've counted: since I was born, eleven First Peaches have withered on the branch.
I asked Mother Tree: why? What a waste.
She said: the First Peach is saved for someone. Three hundred years ago, when he was here, the First Peach was his to pick, every year. He never used his hands — a curl of the tail, a toss high over the clouds, catch it in his open mouth, chew it core and all, then slap the trunk and shout: good peach! A tree he praised, she says, bore fruit three-tenths sweeter all that year.
Then he left. The first year, the First Peach ripened and no one picked it. The trees, at a loss, conferred through one whole night and decided to save it for him. The second year they saved it again. And the third. Saved and saved, until saving became the law.
I said: but he hasn't come back in three hundred years.
Mother Tree's leaves rustled a long time. Trees, she said, are not like you running creatures. A tree cannot move its home. There is only one kind of waiting a tree can do — to set its finest fruit, year after year, on the same branch it bore them the day he left.
I didn't fully understand. But I remembered.
Now I have my own postings: all the orchard's small matters are mine. A tree with borers — I scratch them out. A branch bowed with snow — I shake it free. When hungry children steal up from Aolai Town, I tip-toe and hand fruit down to them. The mother trees agreed long ago: any peach in this orchard may feed the hungry. Any but the First.
Only — this year something happened that I have told no one.
This year's First Peach ripened earlier than any before it. On my orchard rounds I passed the old branch, caught the fragrance, looked up —
and the branch was bare.
No fallen peach beneath. No pit. No litter of bird-pecked skin. The First Peach was gone — cleanly, completely gone. As if someone had picked it.
I sat down hard in the dirt. My first thought: disaster, a thief. And when the second thought rose, my heart hammered as if it would leap out of me —
what if he came back?
I kept watch beneath that tree three days and three nights, and no one came. Only, on the third night, I saw the old mother trees of the orchard — all of them, without a word passed between them — tilt every one of their branches, gently, toward the west.
Trees are the most patient things alive. When the trees themselves move, it means the trees know something.
I asked. The mother trees gave no answer. I asked again, and Mother Tree told me to go mind my own fruit.
Fine. Then I'll follow the herb-gathering boy west. A tree cannot move its home — so I will make this journey on the orchard's behalf:
to find where the First Peach went, and to find under which branch, now, sits the one it was saved for all these years.