Orchard (25 page)
33
The controversy that to this day swirls around Ned Weaver’s death began with the conflicting reports of the three eyewitnesses.
Roger Spragg and Calvin Patent were having lunch at King’s Café, and their table was right by the west window, giving them a perfect view of the little egg-shaped bay that shared a name with the town of Fox Harbor. They first noticed Ned Weaver on the concrete pier and figured he must have walked down there from his gallery up the hill.
While the two men watched, Ned Weaver climbed off the end of the pier and began to walk out onto the frozen bay. The month was March, and the county had enjoyed a spell of unseasonably warm weather. Spragg and Patent, lifelong ice fishermen, knew that once the ice became mushy and honeycombed with air pockets, it was no longer safe to walk on. Moreover, they were certain that Ned Weaver shared their knowledge of the conditions. Spragg did yard work for the Weavers, and he knew Ned Weaver to be an observant man who was conversant with the lake’s behavior no matter what the season. And certainly from the windows of his gallery Ned Weaver would have been able to note that for at least a week no fisherman had drilled a hole and dropped a line through the ice of Fox Harbor.
For these reasons, Spragg and Patent were certain that Ned Weaver had stepped out on the ice knowing full well that at some point it would give way beneath him and he would drown.
Which is exactly what happened. Well before Weaver reached the midpoint of the bay, he began to stumble as first one foot and then, a few yards farther on, the other went through the ice. He pulled himself upright each time, however, and kept moving awkwardly forward. But then he teetered as though he were trying to balance on a narrow curbstone, and when he toppled over onto his side, water surged up on each side of him with such suddenness it seemed as if the lake had been waiting to receive Ned Weaver. The lake gave him back eight days later, when his body washed up on the rocks at Cooley’s Landing, almost two miles north of Fox Harbor.
No testimony regarding Ned Weaver’s mood or character—his wife swore he had not been despondent, and she, his daughters, and his friends all said he was the least suicidal of men—could move Patent and Spragg from their certain judgment of what had happened. The man who walked out on that ice wished to die.
No suicide note was found, but many people took as additional evidence that Ned Weaver took his own life the fact that a mere four months earlier a fire had destroyed his studio, along with many of his drawings and paintings. And yes, Harriet Weaver was forced to admit, he had not been able to resume working since that catastrophe.
On the day of Ned Weaver’s death, Margaret Carnahan was shaking rugs outside the main lodge at Loch Lomond Resort, directly across the bay from the pier. Mrs. Carnahan and her husband lived rent-free at the lodge during the off-season, and in return they worked to ready the resort for the tourists. Because of the warm weather, Mrs. Carnahan had been doing chores outside throughout the morning. Her observations of Ned Weaver did not jibe with those of Patent and Spragg; to her, Weaver did not appear to be a man searching for the right spot to end his life. On the contrary, he seemed to be walking purposefully across the ice, intent on reaching the other side of the bay. Margaret not only thought he was headed in her direction, she also believed he waved to her as he made his determined way across the slush.
At the time she witnessed Ned Weaver’s death, Margaret Carnahan was thirty-two years old. A tall, slender, wide-shouldered woman, she was, on that warm day, working outside without a hat or scarf, and her oaky-blond hair blew free in the freshening breeze. If one were sitting across the table from Margaret Carnahan one would never confuse her with Sonja House. Margaret’s close-set eyes, her small mouth, her delicate jaw—really, there is no facial resemblance at all. But from a distance, from, say, across a frozen bay on a day when the sun slants toward springtime yet the light still has a glacial shimmer, why yes, yes, one might mistake one woman for the other.
34
Sonja House’s cancer began in her right breast. Whether this was the breast that Ned Weaver once saw as slightly smaller than the other, or whether he ever represented this difference in his art, is unknowable. One would need access not only to every work in the Sonja series but also to every pose—and then to see how they might have distorted her body’s actual proportions. Even that may not have been enough. The truth, finally, resided in the artist’s eye and mind.
Sonja was fifty-five years old—still a lovely woman—and living in Minneapolis at the time of the initial diagnosis. She and June moved to the Twin Cities in January 1956, and they shared an apartment on Kenilworth Avenue until June married Daniel Chen and accompanied him to Keene, Minnesota. Shortly after mother and daughter arrived in Minneapolis, Sonja, with the help of her uncle, found work in a gift shop specializing in products imported from Scandinavia— everything from Icelandic sweaters to Swedish lingonberry jam. One day, two tall square-headed gentlemen came into the store and asked in Norwegian for a brand of vodka bottled in Finland. Sonja tried to tell them that the store did not sell liquor of any kind, but the men became belligerent, insisting they would not leave until they received their vodka. Only when Sonja, alone in the shop that day, was about to tell the men they would have to leave or she would call the police, did they break into laughter and reveal their identities—they were Anders and Viktor Skordahl, the brothers she had not seen since she left Norway as a child.
The men were partners in a prosperous farm implement business and in the country for an agricultural convention, and when Sonja said good-bye to them two days later, it was with the promise that she would visit her brothers and their families in Norway. Even after Sonja discovered the lump in her breast, she carried on with her plans for the journey, believing she might never have another opportunity to visit her homeland.
But the closest she came to traveling across the Atlantic was in a dream in which she floated on the sea in a boat no larger than a child’s rubber raft. The ocean was calm, so when small waves set her craft gently bobbing she knew it was not from a rising wind but from someone in another boat paddling toward her. She believed it was Henry, but since she could see nothing but sun-struck sea and sky in any direction, she could not be sure. When she woke from her morphine sleep, she was lying on a bed that June and Daniel had moved into their living room. The cancer had spread so rapidly after its discovery that Sonja was soon unable to care for herself, and her daughter and son-in-law took her into their home to live out her final days.
Although June was a practicing artist and a part-time art teacher at her husband’s university, she had never asked her mother to pose. Nor had June ever revealed that Sonja was the woman in Ned Weaver’s paintings. Since Sonja herself had never made a public announcement of it, June felt she had to respect her mother’s wish for privacy.
Yet after all those years of restraint, as June sat by the bedside while her mother drifted inexorably toward death, June was moved to pick up her sketch pad.
She had not drawn in months, but despite the period of inactivity, her pencil soon moved in the practiced ways, reproducing the hollow cheek and the sunken eye of Sonja House in her drugged sleep. June had been sketching for almost an hour—trying especially to capture the way approaching death was erasing the tension from her mother’s face—when Sonja woke and looked questioningly at her daughter.
“I’m drawing you, Mom,” June said. “Could you move your head this way just a bit?”
Sonja smiled faintly and did as her daughter asked.
Forever after, June regretted making that request because it meant that the last sounds her mother had to hear in life were the words of someone asking something of her.
And it was so unnecessary, since at that point June was no longer sketching her mother as she really was but as she needed to be for the artist to make a satisfactory composition of line and shadow.
Orchard
LARRY WATSON
A Reader’s Guide
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Questions for Discussion
1. The author compares the novel’s form to an Impressionist painting. Where do you think this idea comes from? Does the form work?
2. How might
Orchard
’s nonchronological form be justified? How would the novel change if it were structured differently?
3. Much is made of possession and ownership in this novel; we see shifts in power among almost all of the characters. Discuss some of the manifestations or variations of this theme.
4. Why do you think Harriet Weaver stays with her husband? Do you understand her motivations? What would you do in her position?
5. Throughout
Orchard,
paintings are portrayed in vivid detail. How do these descriptions function in the novel?
6. It is clear that several of Watson’s characters undergo emotionally draining experiences. How do these characters change over the course of the novel?
7. What does
Orchard
say about the responsibility of the artist? Ned Weaver has a very definite view on the matter. Are readers likely to share his opinion?
8. What inspires Sonja to pose for Weaver? Do you think her reasons change? Does she harbor any regrets about her decision?
9. Is it enough to say that Henry House is jealous that his wife is posing for Ned Weaver, or are his feelings more complex?
10. What are some of the different attitudes toward art in the novel? Toward artists?
11. Would you pose for an artist?
12. How is a muse different from a model?
LARRY WATSON is the author of In a Dark Time,
Montana 1948, Justice, White Crosses,
and
Laura.
He has won the Milkweed Fiction Prize, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association Regional Award, and many other literary prizes. Watson is a visiting professor at Marquette University. He and his wife, Susan, live in Milwaukee.
Also by Larry Watson
IN A DARK TIME
MONTANA 1948
JUSTICE
WHITE CROSSES
LAURA
Orchard
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2004 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2003 by Larry Watson
Reader’s guide copyright © 2004 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint
of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Watson, Larry.
Orchard: a novel / Larry Watson.
p. cm.
1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. Women immigrants—Fiction.
3. Artists’ models—Fiction. 4. Married women—Fiction. 5. Farm life—Fiction.
6. Wisconsin—Fiction. 7. Artists—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.A
813’.54—dc21 2002035654
Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43156-1
v3.0
