Wenatchee is both a practical center for the Givens family’s orchard life and a threshold in Ben Givens’s departure from home. The town gathers the ordinary business of farming—banking, provisions, market prices, and transport—while the orchards beyond it make visible the seasonal work and transient labor on which that rural economy depends.

The Market Town and Its Errands

Once a month, Lenora Givens took Ben Givens and Aidan Givens with her on a market trip to Wenatchee. The boys accompanied her to the bank, courthouse, post office, and utility office, then helped with the family’s shopping: bacon, salt, flour, rice, beans, pepper, corn syrup, and sugar. They visited an apothecary, a fabric shop on Miller Street, and a nickel-and-dime store. At a fountain shop on Kittitas Avenue, they sat on either side of their mother for hamburgers and ice cream; after the errands, the three went to the city library to look through magazines and newspapers from Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco.

The town’s built environment was tangible to the family on these trips. Its avenues were paved with large fir blocks that froze and buckled in winter, making travel difficult for horses. Wenatchee was not merely a place to buy supplies: it was where the Givenses dealt with civic institutions and utilities, followed news from distant cities, and encountered people interested in the state of the fruit business.

Orchard Country and Its Economy

The family’s orchard lay on the east bank of the Columbia River, in the agricultural country associated with Wenatchee. The Givens acreage included thirteen acres of Golden Delicious, two of Winesaps, two of Rome Beauties, and eight acres of cherries and apricots. A farmhouse stood on a knoll among elms and willows; around it were the practical structures of a working farm, including a packing shed, barn, stable, chicken house, outhouse, icehouse, and pump house. Poplars sheltered the orchard, whose rows descended toward the river through irrigation ditches and fruit trees propped against the weight of their branches.

The orchard’s output tied family decisions to wider market conditions. In town, people asked Lenora Givens about the progress of an irrigation pipeline on the east side of the river and her estimates for Rome Beauties and Stayman Winesaps. She answered confidently, drawing on her responsibility for the orchard’s books and her role in advising Wright Givens on when to plow new land and plant new trees. Wenatchee thus appears as a place where local agricultural knowledge circulated, and where the Givenses’ work was understood in relation to irrigation, prices, shipping, and the future of orchards.

That economic expertise rested on close, year-round labor. Ben Givens made apple boxes from pine shook, weeded the kitchen garden, split cordwood, and milked cows twice daily. In spring, he helped Wright Givens and Aidan Givens put out pollinating hives; when rain clogged the sluice gates with weeds, the brothers cleared the ditches by hand. Across the seasons came planting and removing trees, discing between rows, tying back branches, thinning fruit, propping limbs, picking, pruning, and burning water sprouts. Wenatchee’s shops and markets were one side of this life; its agricultural foundation was the repeated work that kept the orchard producing.

Harvest, Labor, and Family Memory

The harvest brought migrant workers into the orchard country around the Givens farm. On June 11, when the cherries ripened early, the pickers included Ben Givens, his father, nine migrant workers, the Emery family and its four children, and Rachel Lake, the niece of Mrs. Emery, who had come from Waterville, Maine, for the season. Wright Givens assigned each worker trees, a picking bucket, and a ladder. Ben worked among the branches, removing leaves from his bucket and taking cherries with their stems intact. The scale of the work stretched beyond a single day: thousands of trees and successive crops made harvest a season of fruit, movement, and labor.

The day’s work was governed by the fruit as well as the clock. As the afternoon heat softened the cherries and loosened them from their stems, Wright Givens called off picking. The workers loaded the harvest onto a flatbed truck, returned ladders and buckets to the siding, and arranged the boxes for pickup by the Consolidated Cherry Packing Company. Later, when the apples were ready, the family wrapped them in oiled tissue and packed them into boxes. The recurring harvest gave the surrounding country its own changing soundscape: the orchards could fall quiet when picking ended, then fill again with workers’ voices, ladders among the leaves, and bins carried toward the sidings.

Departure and Return to the Harvest Landscape

When the picking was finished and the bins, ladders, and canvas bags had been put away, Ben Givens left the apple country. His father drove him to the bus station in Wenatchee. They waited together in silence, hats in their laps, before Wright Givens gave his son six five-dollar bills and a new pocketknife. The station marks the separation in practical terms—a bus, fare, and a parting gift—but also in emotional ones: his father worried about Ben as he did about Aidan and pleaded with him not to go. Ben boarded, beginning a journey that took him through Cashmere and Peshastin toward Seattle.

Wenatchee’s significance is not limited to this departure. Later, while seeking the Wolfhound Orchard, Ben drove slowly along Joe Miller Road past sidings crowded with apples and workers. The scene gathers the elements that had shaped his earlier life—fruit-laden trees, ladders, bins, tractors, and pickers—into a busy landscape of labor. The orchards are no longer simply the setting of family routine: Ben approaches them while searching for the man he believes took his shotgun. In this return to the harvest country, the region’s beauty and agricultural abundance coexist with conflict and uncertainty. Wenatchee stands at the crossing of those meanings: a town of errands and transport beside an orchard world that sustains, separates, and draws Ben back.