Orchard (12 page)

No, there he was, standing at the water’s edge where the waves lapped no higher than his fetlocks. He was looking away from Henry, out toward the horizon where, although the sun had long since set, a smudge of lavender lingered. In spite of Buck’s unconcern, Henry felt a flood of feeling for the animal. Oh, Jesus, Buck, you poor son of a bitch—now she’ll blame you for this too.

His eyelids began
to flutter, and Sonja said a silent prayer, directed not to God but to her husband propped in the hospital bed:
Don’t make a joke.
Please don’t make your first words to me a joke.

Henry’s head lolled to the side, which meant that when his eyes finally opened he would not see his wife but a heat lamp drying the plaster encasing his arm from wrist to shoulder. In another moment, he turned back toward her and blinked slowly. He worked his jaw back and forth. To ensure that her prayer was answered, at least temporarily, Sonja pressed her finger to his lips.

He twisted away and spit dryly as if he thought some of the gauze that swathed his head had gotten into his mouth. His eyes flit wildly to as many corners of the room as he could see without moving his head.

“You’re in the hospital,” Sonja said.

He swallowed with difficulty. “The hospital. Sure, sure.”

“Your friends brought you here.”

“And called you?”

“Nils came for me.”

Henry looked around again, wincing at even this slight movement. “Is it late?”

“Yes, it’s very late.”

“June’s not here?”

Sonja shook her head. She had a sudden fear that this was now her life with Henry, that something in his brain had been jarred loose and now he could do nothing but ask simple little questions. “She’s at home.”

His eyes widened with concern. “Alone?”

“Dagny is staying with her,” Sonja said wearily.

Henry touched his face lightly all over like a blind man trying to see with his fingertips. When he reached the bandages swaddling the top of his head he stopped. He closed his eyes as though he needed to work at remembering his injuries. When recognition came, he looked again at Sonja. “I guess I’m no longer your handsome man.”

She was about to tell him there were matters more important than his looks, but perhaps to him that was not so. “Nurse said you were lucky to have Dr. Jim sew you up. She said he does the best stitches because he once wanted to be a . . . a . . .”

Nils, sliding into the room as if he were on skates, finished her sentence. “Plastic surgeon. Yah, that’s so. Dr. Jim pulls the stitches so tight you probably won’t even see the seam where he sewed your face back on. I saw him when he was about to go to work on you. I think he used four-pound test line.”

Henry glanced down at his injured arm and then looked questioningly back to Nils as though he were the best authority on Henry’s condition. Sonja caught this silent exchange and stepped back to make room for Nils at the bedside.

“What—they didn’t tell you where all your arm was busted?”

“They told me,” Henry said. “I’m just not sure I heard right.”

Nils tapped his own forearm. “Both bones here, I know. And something in your shoulder. But maybe that’s not broken?” He looked to Sonja for confirmation.

“It ’s . . . separated. Is that the right word? Separated?”

Henry reached across and touched his cast so gingerly it seemed as though he feared he might have feeling in the plaster.

“Come harvest time,” Nils said, “you’ll have to pick all the low apples. You damn sure won’t be reaching.”

“I’ve got two arms.”

“And you got friends aplenty who’ll lend a hand.”

All during the ride to the hospital, right up to the moment when Henry’s eyes opened, Sonja had been so brim-full of fear for her husband’s life that she hadn’t room for any other concern. Then, once she knew that Henry would live, new worries rushed into the open space—he would not be able to work, and there wouldn’t be enough money for them to live. At almost the same instant, Sonja made three resolutions, two of them coming from experiences in her own past. She would not ask a minister for help, and she would not, in order to have one less mouth to feed, send her child away to live with another family. Sonja would beg in the streets, she would go back to waiting on tables, before she would leave her door open to the kinds of humiliation and hurt her own mother and father had invited into their home.

“I know I asked this before,” Henry said, “but is Buck okay?”

Niles nodded. “Bob took him up to your place and put him back in his stall.”

At the mention of the horse’s name, Sonja grabbed three fingers on her left hand and squeezed them hard with her right. She thought she had gotten past the trembling, but now here it was, starting up again, this time in her hands. During the previous hours she had been clenching herself so tightly she knew tomorrow her muscles would ache, but she also knew that if she allowed the shaking to start it would not stop until her tendons tore loose from her bones.

Dr. Jim entered the room, his voice so loud Sonja flinched. “Can you tell me,” he asked Henry, “is there any place it doesn’t hurt?”

Dr. Jim was new to the county, but he had already developed a reputation that made Sonja wish that Dr. Van Voort were treating Henry, no matter how excellent were the stitches Dr. Jim sewed. It was said this young doctor was too sure of himself, that he scolded some patients and insulted others, that he took too little time with the elderly and too much time with pretty young women. Sonja’s sister-in-law, Phyllis, had visited Dr. Jim with an earache and walked angrily out of his office when the doctor tried to insist on an examination too thorough for her symptoms.

“My big toe,” Henry said. “On my left foot.”

“Wait until the anesthetic wears off completely. That toe will be driving you nuts.” The doctor had a crew cut that bristled like needles, his eyebrows seemed permanently arched, and the cigarette pinched between his lips angled toward the ceiling. Everything about him, it seemed to Sonja, directed your attention up, up, over his head.

“Then maybe you’ll give him a bullet to bite down on, huh, Doc?”

“We don’t use bullets,” the doctor said to Nils. “We give our patients razor straps to gnaw.”

“What—no shot of whiskey?” Henry asked.

The doctor expelled smoke from his nostrils. “We had to curtail the whiskey because Mildred Ryan kept checking into the hospital just to get herself liquored up.”

The three men laughed heartily. Sonja wondered if such a person as Mildred Ryan even existed, but then Sonja’s own existence at that moment might be in doubt as far as these men were concerned.

To Henry, the doctor said, “So, you were in a race. Did you win or lose?”

“I’m lying here, so I guess that means I lost.”

“Jimmy pulled up,” Nils said. “He never finished either. He feels terrible about what happened.”

Henry pointed to the doctor’s cigarette. “Can you spare one of those smokes, Doc?”

Dr. Jim shook out a Chesterfield from the pack in his shirt pocket, put the cigarette between his lips, lit it from his own, then deftly placed the new cigarette between Henry’s waiting lips. Nils waved away the offer of the doctor’s pack.

Henry inhaled deeply, then with a gentle sigh let the smoke drift slowly from his lungs. “And maybe I’ll have to check myself into the hospital just to get someone to light my cigarette.” Sonja was right; they didn’t see her.

“No lighter?” the doctor asked.

“I always lose ’em.”

“Here,” Dr. Jim said, “let me show you a little trick.”

He brought out a book of matches and, with one hand, opened the cover, tucked it back in, bent a match in half, and scratched it into flame. He held the burning match aloft for a second, then blew it out. “See? The poor man’s lighter.”

“Or you could use farmer’s matches,” suggested Nils.

“Little exercises like this,” Dr. Jim said, “keep the fingers nimble.” He held up both hands and wiggled his fingers. “And people don’t realize a doctor works by hand as much as an auto mechanic.”

But the mechanic, thought Sonja, does not have such long-fingered, delicate-looking hands. Dr. Jim’s hands did not appear to have the strength necessary to set broken bones or sew up split flesh. She remembered her mother’s old friend Astrid Hansa, more skilled with needle and thread than anyone in the village. Astrid had fingers so short and blunt they looked like oversize thimbles.

“I’m afraid,” Henry said, “an apple grower does most of his work by hand too.”

Earlier she had put her finger to his lips to keep her husband from joking about his situation, but she would have preferred jokes to self-pitying remarks like that one. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m going to wait in the hall.”

It was close to morning, yet the corridor still held on to the heat of the preceding day. That warmth, along with the odor common to every hospital Sonja had ever been in, made her reel. She rested her forehead against the wall, and fortunately those bricks, smooth rectangles the color of pale, pale flesh, felt soothingly cool.

“Which is it?” The doctor’s voice startled her again. “Are you holding up the wall or is it holding you up?”

She turned to face him and found the doctor standing so close she felt trapped, yet if she stepped to the side, he might take that movement as an affront.

“You can head back home,” he said. “He’ll sleep again soon. No reason for you to stay awake.”

“I’m all right.”

“Are you? You’re looking a little green around the gills.”

“The smell. What is that smell?”

The doctor glanced left and right as if the odor had a visual presence. “I think what you smell is ether. Sort of a cheesy aroma? Ether and probably antiseptic.”

Looking up at Dr. Jim, Sonja noticed that even the doctor’s long eyelashes curved upward. Was it possible he curled them like a woman? “How long,” she asked, “until he can go home?”

“Another day or two, I suppose.” The doctor leaned his hand on the wall close to Sonja’s head. She smelled coffee and tobacco on his breath. “But I must tell you,” he said in a lowered, confidential voice, “your husband is going to be out of commission for a while.”

“Commission?”

“I’m sure he thinks he’s a tough young fellow. But he really banged himself up.”

When Nils came to the house to tell her that Henry had been hurt, Sonja dressed hastily. She pulled on the skirt she had worn during the day, and, unable to find her blouse, she grabbed the garment closest at hand, Henry’s shirt.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” the doctor asked, and then, as if he thought she might comprehend action better than speech, he reached out and tugged on Sonja’s—Henry’s—shirt collar. She pressed herself harder against the wall.

From the time she first came to this country, from that first day standing in the great hall on Ellis Island, under that ceiling that seemed, even after days on the open sea, as high as the sky, Sonja had often been asked if she understood. “Do you need an interpreter? Do you need a translation?” She heard those questions over and over, and she always said no, though months sometimes passed before she knew exactly what people were asking. The odd thing about understanding was how often time alone seemed to bring it about. The meaning of a word she didn’t know on Monday was clear on Friday. Sometimes years were necessary for understanding and sometimes only minutes, as now, when she began to realize that when Dr. Jim had boasted of his strong and nimble fingers he may well have been speaking to her. And, just as new understandings often cleared away old misunderstandings, she knew now she had not been invisible in Henry’s room. Dr. Jim had been watching her all along, but in that sidelong way characteristic of so many men. Oh, men were supposed to be so bold, yet they would not look directly at you. Instead, they waited until you bent over, and then if you glanced up quickly you could see where their eyes had been! Truly, it would be better to be invisible.

“I understand,” she said softly.

At that moment, Nils came out of Henry’s room, and the doctor instantly stepped back. “He’s asleep,” Nils said, smiling as if he were responsible for Henry’s state.

“What do you want to do now?” he asked Sonja.

She looked directly at the doctor, but she spoke in Norwegian, the tongue native to her and to Nils.
“Ta meg hjem.”

It was her hope that if she made her request to Nils in the language of their childhood he would take her directly home and not pull the car off the road somewhere and begin tugging at her collar.

Sonja was surprised
at how willing Henry was to allow his sister, his friends, and hired men to take over the work of the orchards. Yes, yes, certainly his injuries prevented him from returning to his work routine, but she would have thought the forced inactivity would frustrate him, that he would become so impatient to get back to work that he would tear off his bandages, pull out his stitches, throw away his sling, and crack open his plaster cast.

Instead, for much of the day, Henry gave himself over to invalidism. He slept late and did not dress until midday. He neglected not only the apple business but also the welfare of his animals. He threw no sticks for Sandy to retrieve, and Buck got no more exercise than what he provided himself in his small corral. The doctor advised Henry to raise and rotate his injured shoulder to prevent muscle atrophy, but Henry kept his arm pinched close to his side. He spent so many hours staring out the window that Sonja wondered if grief, unable to get a firm grip on Henry after John’s death, had now finally caught up to her husband and was pulling him down. Only late in the day did Henry come to life.

Then he would get into his truck, and, though it was difficult for him to maneuver the gearshift with his left hand, somehow he would manage and drive off. When Sonja listened for him to return at night, she could sometimes hear him approach because the transmission whined as Henry tried to avoid shifting down. When he came to bed, he smelled of beer and cigarettes.

On one of the evenings when she knew he was about to leave, she followed him out of the house. She didn’t say anything to him—she wanted him to
want
to stay home, not to be scolded into it—but when he climbed into the truck’s cab, she walked to the passenger’s side and stood there, waiting to be explained to, to be invited in, to be merely spoken to. But Henry simply drove away, with Sonja walking alongside the truck until she could not match its speed. Even then, she kept going. June was at a friend’s house, so if nothing was going to hold Henry at home, why should Sonja stay?