All the Way Home (16 page)

T
hey were up early the next morning. Brick waited for Mariel; then they took out a few of the sacks that Julia had laid out. “Last year I raced with my father to see who’d fill the first sack,” he told her. “He won, but just, and I would have beaten him this year, I think.”

The trees were broad and low with branches pruned so each one had its space in the sun. He set one of the ladders against a tree for her. How pretty she was, even when her face was sad. He wondered if she knew that. He wondered how much she minded about her legs.

Julia came out of the barn, waving, with Claude in back of her, his old straw hat jammed down on his head. They dumped piles of bushel baskets into the back of the pickup truck, Claude using his wrists to balance
them, then drove as close to the trees as they could get. By the time Brick filled his first sack, the baskets were in place under the trees along the rows.

He had dreamed about this harvest all winter, the smell of the apples, and the sound of the bees, and the blue September sky. But this was all wrong. Last year there had been enough of them with Claude, Pop and Mom, and Julia filling the baskets with Joseph. But this year the long rows of trees seemed endless.

“I’m going to earn my keep,” he told Claude as Claude came down the row toward him.

Claude nodded, smiling. “I know that,” he said. “I always knew it. And when you’re finished, there’s something else I must ask you to do.”

“Anything,” Brick said.

“The fence needs fixing. I’ve thought about it since the fire. But first the apples, yes?”

Brick nodded. As he talked with Claude, he watched Mariel uneasily. He didn’t want to tell her to be careful. When she climbed, she’d have to hold on to the ladder or a branch with one hand to steady herself and reach for apples with the other. It would be awkward for her, slow. Could she do it? Claude and Julia wondered, too, he knew that. Julia pretended to be busy, unloading apples from the sack he held down to her, and Claude watched from in back of the ladder.

Mariel took the first step up, holding on with both hands, and then the second very slowly. Claude glanced at him, raising one shoulder the slightest bit. Mariel
watched the ladder instead of the tree, and then the ground beneath her, and he wasn’t sure she’d be able to reach for the apples.

But then she did reach out, her head still bent, groping. Her fingers closed around an apple, she pulled, and it was in her hand.

“Hey,” Brick said. “The first one.”

“That’s good,” Claude said in his gruff voice, and Julia clapped her hands. “Careful,” she said.

Mariel glanced across at them, holding the apple like a trophy before she slid it into the bag that hung from her shoulder.

Her head went back then, and she looked up into the tree slowly, one foot on the third step, almost frozen there. She didn’t move, she didn’t reach out. He thought he heard her say something, but he could see only her back and her hands clenched on the rung above her, as she stared up at the branches.

He took another sack from Julia, feeling the coarse fabric under his arm, and heard the sound of her ladder falling.

He was down in a moment, his own ladder tipping as he went toward her. She was on the ground, her elbow and her knees skinned, rocking back and forth.

Julia and Claude reached her first, Julia patting her face, and Claude reaching out clumsily. “Are you all right, Mariel?” he asked.

Brick crouched down next to her, and she smiled at him, pointing up at the tree, holding her elbow with one
hand. “It wasn’t a green lace curtain. Never a curtain. It was always the leaves above me. Look, aren’t they beautiful?”

He nodded, looking up, too, at the green against the blue sky. It was something he had seen often, the small leaves quiet on a cloudy day, or trembling in a storm. And in winter, he’d watch the bare branches, anxious for the first bit of color that would appear in May.

Mariel scrambled up, her eyes still on the branches over her head. “And all the time I thought it was a room with a curtain.”

“Come into the kitchen,” Julia said. “You need a bandage, maybe a glass of cool water.”

“It’s nothing.” She brushed at her dress. “I would have been too young to climb by myself,” she said slowly. “Someone must have carried me up into the trees.” She stopped, her knuckles up to her mouth. “My mother? Could it have been my mother …”

Brick finished for her. “… picking apples?”

They nodded at each other, as Julia rubbed one of her hands against the other. “We should never have let you go up on the ladder. I thought it was too much …”

“I can do it. Really I can.” Mariel stopped, thinking, staring at the leaves, a few of them tipped with the yellow of fall. “A green lace curtain,” she said, reaching out to touch the trunk of the tree. “I want to talk with Joseph again.”

28

I
nside Joseph’s little house everything was quiet. Mariel knocked, then pounded at the door. When he pulled it open suddenly, she stepped back, startled. “Sorry,” she said.

“You’re the one making all that noise? You don’t look big enough for that.”

“Will you tell me …,” she said, not knowing how to begin.

“I’ll tell you to sit on the porch there,” he said, “and I’ll fix you a lemonade.”

She shook her head. “You don’t have to.”

“I need it myself,” he said.

She sat on the edge of the old chair waiting for him. Cobwebs were everywhere; a furry brown spider swung
from one porch railing to another. She wasn’t afraid of it; she had other things to think about.

She had been there, in one of the orchards in the valley, she was sure of it: her mother picking apples with baby Mariel slung over her shoulder.
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock, and down will come …

Mary.

 … down will come Mary, cradle and all
.

Not Mariel? Mary?

Her heart began to pound against her ribs. The sound of it was so loud, she thought even Joseph might hear her in his kitchen.

Joseph, who might know something that might help her.

He came out, handing her a glass of lemonade. “Warm,” he said. “No ice today.”

She nodded.
I was here. I was Mary
. “Why don’t the apple pickers come?”

He sipped at the warm drink, making a face. “I don’t talk about that,” he said at last.

She was so close to him, inches away. If she could just see into his head. Her hands fluttered, and her knees trembled under Julia’s dress. “I had polio,” she said. “I was in Good Samaritan Hospital.”

He chewed at his lip. “Were you?”

“I think I was with the apple pickers.”

He rocked back in his chair, raising the drink to his mouth, not speaking for so long that Mariel thought he wouldn’t tell her.

And then he held up four fingers as if it were an effort. “I knew four of the pickers.” He raised his shoulder. “At night they camped in tents along the river, and then all of a sudden they were sick, really sick, all in one night. Polio. First a teenager, then one of the men, and then a young woman named Mary …”

“And her little girl,” Mariel guessed.

He sighed. “Everyone was terrified. How had it come? Who would be next? Mary died here. She never even got to the hospital.”

Died
. Her fingers went to her mouth.
But hadn’t she really known that? Hadn’t she always known that?

He nodded. “They didn’t want to touch the little girl. She was only four. They knew she was dying. Someone went for the telephone in town to call an ambulance. Someone else took a scrap of paper, pinned it to her so they’d know her name: Mary Elliot …”

Mariel …

“They heard the sirens and scattered. They never came back.”

She had a name. She had a mother.

“I was with them,” he said in a voice so low she could hardly hear him.

“You knew them,” Mariel said. “Knew the mother, knew the little girl.”

“I knew them all,” he said. “I was too old to go with them afterward, too beaten down. There had been so much laughter and singing, and the little girl, always
clinging to her mother, such a happy little girl. And then in a few hours it was over.”

He took a sip of his drink. “Sometimes I see a few of them in the next valley.” His face was wet with tears. “It was the beginning of bad luck. Polio, then the orchards going under, people leaving. The pickers never came back.” He sighed. “I buried the mother myself in the corner of the field. No one ever knew. I stayed on here. The house was empty, not belonging to anyone.”

In the corner of the field, the flowers were a patch of soft pink against the long grass. The glass of lemonade in Mariel’s hand seemed too heavy to hold. She reached out and rested it on the railing near the little brown spider.

“You were that little girl then,” Joseph said. “I can see it now, the eyes, the sandy hair.” His eyes were old, faded blue, bloodshot. He blinked, looking at her. “Maybe you’ll bring back our luck.”

“She picked with me on her shoulder, recited nursery rhymes …,” Mariel began, and broke off. “Could you tell me anything else? Even what she looked like?”

He chewed at his lip, trying to remember for her, she knew that. She listened to the sound of the crickets in the field, a tiny part of it her mother’s. She waited for him to tell her something, wanting to see the pictures of her mother that were in her head.

“She wore a blue kerchief and had a sweet face like yours,” he said. “She wore old shoes with the laces knotted.” He leaned forward and touched her arm, a
feather of a touch. “She had no family. You were all she had. And I can tell you the only thing that really mattered …”

She knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“She loved you,” he said. “She really loved you.”

Mariel reached out to the railing and pulled herself up. She leaned over to kiss Joseph’s whiskery cheek, then went down the steps and across the field. The grass was high and she could feel it brushing against her legs. It felt scratchy and strange, and there was a buzzing from hundreds of insects, crickets maybe, she thought, as she watched something small and green sail in a wide arc from one lacy wildflower to another.

She came close to the stalks of pink flowers. They stood like soldiers in front of her, and it wasn’t until she was almost on top of them that she saw the masses of small yellow buds that covered the circle they surrounded.

She bent down and gently ran her hands over the tiny petals. “I had a mother,” she said, her voice sounding strange in her ears. “I had a mother who loved me, and her name was Mary. And that is my name, too.”

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