“There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, · Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall”

The epigraph, “There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall,” supplies a governing image for the novel: abundance is inseparable from the care and effort required to gather it. Robert Frost’s lines resonate with the Givens family’s working orchards, Ben Givens’s memories of harvest, and the novel’s later attention to the people who pick fruit. The number suggests seemingly inexhaustible plenty; the careful verbs make each individual piece of fruit matter.

Epigraph and Opening Frame

The lines are attributed to Robert Frost’s After Apple Picking and appear before the first chapter. Their harvest imagery immediately meets a story opening on the night Ben has appointed as his last among the living. Unable to sleep in the Seattle rain, he is visited by memories of his dead wife, his daughter, hunting country, mountains, and fruit newly plucked from trees. Apples are part of this remembered world, alongside vineyards in the Apennines, rows of campanino apples near Monte Della Torraccia, and cherry and pear blossoms. The epigraph therefore establishes fruit not simply as scenery but as one of the forms through which the past returns to him.

Its wording holds two scales together. “Ten thousand thousand” evokes a vast crop, while “Cherish in hand” makes the act of gathering intimate and deliberate. “Lift down” and “not let fall” give that tenderness a physical task: fruit must be picked and carried without being damaged. The lines are not a description of effortless pastoral plenty. They point toward the attention, handling, and labor that abundance demands.

The Givens Orchards and Their Work

Ben’s parents planted their orchards on the east bank of the Columbia River. The holdings included thirteen acres of Golden Delicious apples, two of Winesaps, two of Rome Beauties, and eight acres of cherries and apricots. Irrigation ditches ran between the rows; props supported laden branches, and the family’s buildings included a shed for making boxes and packing apples. The orchard’s scale gives the epigraph’s immense count a material counterpart, but the novel also shows what that yield required.

Ben’s work followed the seasons. He made apple boxes from pine shook, tended the garden, split firewood, and milked cows. In spring he helped Wright Givens and Aidan Givens put out pollinating hives; when weeds clogged the sluice gates, Ben and Aidan cleared the ditches by hand. They planted and removed trees, disced between rows, tied back branches, thinned fruit, and propped limbs against the weight of apples. Picking came in August, while pruning and burning water sprouts filled fall and winter. The epigraph’s act of lifting fruit carefully belongs to this larger cycle of repeated, practical work.

Harvest as Labor and Encounter

The novel gives the poem’s harvest image a social setting as well as a family one. On June 11, when the cherries ripen early, Wright sets the beginning of the harvest. At first light, Ben, his father, and migrant pickers—including the Emery family and Rachel Lake, Mrs. Emery’s niece—are assigned rows, buckets, and ladders. Ben strips fruit from the branches in clusters, taking care to leave the stems intact. The work stretches ahead across thousands of trees and many days: a particular, bodily version of the abundance the epigraph names.

The scene also makes picking visible through its small details. Cherries strike the bottoms of buckets; Ben clears leaves from his own bucket; later, heat softens the fruit and his father calls off the day’s picking. The crews haul their ladders and buckets back to the siding, and the boxes are lined up for pickup. The harvest is generous, but perishable: timing and handling determine whether fruit arrives intact. In Rachel’s makeshift work clothes and her rise up the ladder to reach the branches, the labor appears not as an idealized tableau but as a task performed by particular people in the heat.

The Orchard Image in the Later Story

When Ben later drives along Joe Miller Road in October, he passes orchards crowded with bins, ladders, tractors, and workers. Pickers rest in small groups, while others stand among the branches and ease their full bags of apples into bins to avoid bruising them. The scene brings the epigraph’s careful handling into the present tense of the story: fruit is still being lifted down, and the risk of letting it fall has become the practical risk of damaging a crop. The narration describes the harvest’s persistence as a patient madness, balancing the poem’s language of cherishing against the relentless repetition of work.

This late-season orchard scene occurs as Ben approaches the Wolfhound Orchard, still searching for the man who took his shotgun. Its busy, living landscape contrasts with the private crisis that has carried him toward the orchard country. Earlier, among cherry trees in midautumn, Ben becomes aware that he wants to live and to possess ordinary things such as the orchard. The poem is not quoted again in that moment, but its central tension—an abundance that must be received and cared for—helps clarify the force of the orchard image. Across family memory, harvest labor, and Ben’s changed desire to remain in the world, fruit marks both what a life produces and what must not be casually lost.