The boundary hedge at Little Netherby ran in a straight line across two fields and bent for nobody. Ruben Halsey kept the west side, Wil Cobb the east, and between them was a ditch with one hatch in it. That hatch belonged to both farms and to neither. They had argued about it for two summers. Ruben's beans went short. Wil's barley went short. It was always the same four words: that is not fair.

The arguing had a place. Every Thursday they met in the gap where the blackbird nested, because they could both stand there and see the hatch. The bird left in June and did not come back. Pell Halsey was nine. He counted the Thursdays from the ditch bank. It was plain that the row would not stop while there was a flat place to stand in.

He wanted something in the gap that would not be trampled flat. At the corner of the wood there were blackthorns as thick as his wrist. He cut two lengths with the billhook and pushed them into the bare ground, one in each half of the gap, and tamped the earth down with his heel. Mabel Dunn cut that hedge every spring. She found him there in March, earth still on his hands. “What have you put in there, Pell Halsey?” “Thorn. Two of them.”

She squatted and looked at the stems. “You put them in the furrow where two people last quarrelled. A thorn set in that furrow grows out of the last words each of them said about the other. It will not fruit. Not this year, not next. It fruits only when both of them come back to that hedge and take back one true thing about the other, out loud, at the tree. Not an apology. Sorry is a word you can say without changing anything. A true thing, said out loud, taken back. And it must be both of them there together, or nothing comes of it.”

By June the two stems were one tree, six feet high and ugly, all thorn and no shape. The blackbird would not come near it. Ruben cut nettles out of the ditch bank four times that summer and said so every time he came in. “You can have the gap back,” he told Wil at the gate. “I’ll have that tree out by Sunday.” “You’ll not touch it,” Wil said. “It’s in the furrow.” “It’s a tree.” “It’s a tree about us.” Pell asked Mabel whether the tree was any use as it stood. “I’ve told you the one thing I know,” she said. “Ask them.”

It was four weeks before his father said anything. Pell listened in the yard to hear which. On the fifth week Ruben said, “You said I leave my gate standing open all night and my beasts in your barley.” “I said so.” “I did not. Not once, not that I can call to mind.” “I said it at the hatch in July and at the well in May. I take it back.”

He said it out loud at the gate, where anybody going to the well could hear, and again the next day to a man who asked what the noise was. That evening he came over the hedge to the thorn and said it there, to Wil Cobb, who looked at the tree a long time and went home. Pell told Wil at his gate what his father had done. Wil listened with his arms folded. “He’s said it so you’d let him keep the hatch.”

“He’s said it to everybody. He said it to your wife at the well this morning.” “That’s your father’s business.” “It’s yours too.” The bird was gone and the thorn had taken the gap. Wil Cobb stood there a long time, Ruben on the far side of the tree. Then he said, at the tree, “I said he drove his beasts into my stubble and stamped it flat. He does not. He shuts them in the yard at eight. I take it back.”

That night the tree fruited. The fruit was small and dark and came on fast, a hundred of them where there had been none that day. Pell ate one off the low branch. It tasted of flour and cold rain and the inside of a shut gate, which was not much of a taste at all, and it was sweet.

In the spring the blackbird came back to the gap and built low in the crook of the thorn. Ruben cut the hedge either side of her and never touched the thorn tree. “He’s been saying it about for months,” said Wil Cobb, standing in the gap with his arms folded. “A sorry is a word for going away. A true thing said out loud stays put. That’s all the tree was after, and it took two summers to get.”