The Orchardist (2 page)

H
e and his mother and sister had come into the valley in the summer of 1857, when he was nine years old. They had come from the north-central portion of the Oregon Territory, where his father had worked the silver mines. When the mines collapsed, their mother did not even wait for the body of their father to be dredged up with the rest, but gathered their few belongings and set off with Talmadge and his sister at once. They traveled north and then west, west and then north.

They walked, mostly, and rode in wagons when they came along. They crossed the Wallowas and the Blue Mountains, and then came across great baked plains, what looked to be a desert. And then when they reached the Columbia they took a steamboat upriver to its confluence with another river, where the steamboat did not go farther. They would have to walk, said the steamboat operator, uncertain; if they were thinking of going across the mountain pass, to the coast, they would have to find someone—a trapper, an Indian—to guide them. And still Talmadge’s mother was undeterred. From the confluence of the river they walked four days toward mountains that did not seem to get any closer. The elevation climbed; the Cascades rose before them like gods. It was May; it snowed. Talmadge’s sister, Elsbeth, who was a year younger than him, was cold; she was hungry. Talmadge rubbed her hands in his own and told her stories of the food they would eat when they set up house: cornbread and bacon gravy, turnip greens, stewed apples. Their mother said nothing to these stories. Why did she lead them north and then west, west and then north, as if drawing toward a destination already envisioned?

They had heard that many, many miles away, but not so many as before they started, on the other side of the mountains, was the ocean. Constant rain. Greenness. Maybe that’s where they were going, thought Talmadge. Sometimes—but how could he think this? how could a child think this of his mother?—he thought she was leading them to their deaths. Their mother was considered odd by the other women at the mining camp; he knew this, he knew how they talked about her. But there was nothing really wrong with her, he thought (forgetting the judgment of a moment before); it was just that she wanted different things than those women did. That was what set them and his mother apart. Where some women wanted mere privacy, she yearned for complete solitude that verged on the violent; solitude that forced you constantly back upon yourself, even when you did not want it anymore. But she wanted it nonetheless. From the time she was a small girl, she wanted to be alone. The sound of other people’s voices grated on her: to travel to town, to interact with others who were not Talmadge or Talmadge’s father or sister, was torture to her: it subtracted days from her life. And so they walked: to find a place that would absorb and annihilate her, a place to be her home, and the home for her children. A place to show her children: and you belong to the earth, and the earth is hard.

They climbed through cold-embittered forest and sought respite in bright meadows thick with wildflowers and insect thrumming. Maybe, thought Talmadge, they had already died, and this was heaven. It was easy, at moments, to believe. They came to a mining camp where five men sat inside an open hut, shivering, malnourished, warming their hands around a fire. It was lightly raining outside. When Talmadge and his mother and sister came and stood before them, the men looked at them as if they were ghosts. Their mother asked the men if they had any food to spare. The men just stared at her. They stared at the children. Where are you going? said one of the men finally. You shouldn’t be here. The men had some beans that they shared with them, ate them straight out of the can. And then—Talmadge would always remember this—a man took out a banjo and began to play, and eventually, to sing. His teeth were crooked and stained, as were his mustache and his beard. His eyes were light blue and watery. He sang songs about a place that sounded familiar to Talmadge: Tennessee. It was where his own father was from. Talmadge thought later that the man was crying. But why was he crying? He missed his home, said Talmadge’s mother.

The men told them that there was a post ten miles up the creek where they could trade for supplies. It was a good time to travel, since it was summer, but in the winter it would be impassable. Talmadge and his mother and sister set off from the miners and reached the trading post later that day. And then they kept walking. What are you doing? the people said. Turn around. You have young children. There were two days of rain, and cold. His sister developed a hacking cough. And then they came through dense forest, and stood on the rim of a valley illuminated as if it was the end or the beginning of the world. A valley of yellow grass. Still but for a ribbon of water moving at the bottom of it. His sister, beside him, caught her breath; and on the other side of him he could feel his mother’s silent, reluctant satisfaction.

They walked into the valley.

On a plateau stretching back from the creek was a filthy miner’s shack, and two diseased Gravenstein apple trees. On the opposite side of the creek was the outlying field, bordered on its far edges by forest. To the east was a dark maw of a canyon. Three weeks later they discovered, a mile away into the canyon and through more forest, along a portion of the upper creek, a cabin. And here, as well as down below, was a miner’s sluice box situated along a shallow portion of the creek. One of the first chores Talmadge’s mother assigned herself was to dismantle the sluice box and take this, as well as other tools she found pertaining to that trade, and bury them in the forest. I’ve had enough of mining for one lifetime, she said.

F
or a year he and his mother and sister tended the ailing Gravensteins and also planted vegetables from seeds his mother had sewn into the linings of their winter clothes. The summer of the next year they sold fruit to the miners at Peshastin Creek, and traded for supplies at the post in Icicle.

Late that first summer and then again in the spring, a band of native men came out of the forest with a herd of over two hundred horses. The men did not try to speak to Talmadge or his mother or sister; and neither did Talmadge or his mother or sister attempt to speak to the men. They remained in the field for three days.

When the men arrived again the following summer, Talmadge’s mother went down to the field where they camped and offered them fruit and vegetables, loaves of potato bread. The men accepted her gifts; and when they returned, four weeks later, they offered her a deer they had killed, strapped to the back of a horse.

They were horse wranglers—mostly Nez Perce at that time, but later there were also men from other tribes: Palouse, Yakama, Cayuse, Walla Walla, Umatilla. They hunted horses in the ranges to the southeast—the Blue Mountains, the Wallowas, the Steens, the Sawtooths—and trained them and sold them at auctions abroad. They had been stopping over in the valley for the last decade or so to feed and rest the horses, and to avoid the lawmen who scouted the countryside searching for rogue bands such as theirs.

On their trips south, after selling the horses at auction—when the men came into the orchard with their herd largely diminished, and many of them sporting handsome leather vests and saddlebags—they brought gifts for Talmadge and his sister: candy, or bits of milk glass in the shapes of animals. They let Talmadge and his sister explore their packs, and took them on easy rides around the field, the children sitting before the men in the saddles.

These trips south the men would stay just overnight, and would be gone by the time Talmadge woke in the morning. The ash of their firepits not yet cold, and the general odor of horses and tobacco hung in the air for hours afterward, provoking in the young Talmadge a particular melancholy, and emptiness.

A
mong the men there were sometimes boy children—sometimes two or three, but rarely more. Some of these children appeared only once; they came for a season and then were not seen again. The only child constant from the beginning was the nephew of the Nez Perce leader, a boy known to Talmadge and Elsbeth as Clee; he had another, private name used only among the men. He was dark-skinned, muscular, tall, with a wide, pensive forehead and a large, careful, expressive mouth, although he was not known to smile often, or make exaggerated facial expressions. Even as a child he was quietly, fiercely attentive. His hair came down to almost his elbows; at times it was fixed in two braids, with hair crowding his eyes.

But there was from the beginning something distinctly different about Clee. He did not speak. It was not just that he was shy, or particularly wary of Talmadge and his sister, or chose not to speak to white people; he did not speak at all, even to the men he rode with. He was not deaf, for he heard the noises Talmadge and his sister heard, turned his head, physically reacted when they did. He had the habit of cocking his head, slightly, to speakers who addressed him. But no words issued from him, ever.

What’s wrong with him? Elsbeth asked their mother once. Their mother, who was washing dishes at the time, crouching creekside, shrugged. There might be something wrong with his vocal cords, she said. Or—maybe he just doesn’t want to talk.

But why?

Their mother shrugged again. I don’t know, child, she said.

There was no exact moment Talmadge could recall when he and Elsbeth became friends with Clee; but when the men came into the field with the horses, Talmadge and Elsbeth sought Clee out, and in the privacy of the outer forest, or in the canyon, they would show him treasures they had acquired—rocks, candy, bits of animal hide—and also show him places, nooks and crannies, weird sunbathed basins of grass deep within a bramble hedge, they had discovered. And likewise Clee showed them objects he had accumulated that year from auctions—small toys and carvings, folded illustrations, carnival and sideshow posters, even swatches of fabric—velvet, satin, chamois—they rubbed between their fingers, against their lips and cheeks. It did not seem to matter, then, that Clee could not—or did not—speak. There was no deficit in their relationship, no lack.

T
almadge and Elsbeth’s mother died of a respiratory disease in the spring of 1860. Two years later they harvested two acres of apples and one acre of apricots, and with the money they earned from selling the fruit they razed the miner’s shack and built a two-room cabin. He was fifteen years old, and Elsbeth was fourteen. The next spring they planted three plum trees around the side of the cabin, and the first apple trees inside the canyon mouth.

In the fall of 1864 Talmadge contracted smallpox and nearly died. The sickness left him badly scarred on his face, chest, and arms, and partially deaf in his right ear. In the spring of the next year the canyon flooded, and they lost many apple trees. That summer, in 1865, Elsbeth went into the forest beyond the field to collect herbs and did not return. He enlisted the help of the miners at the Peshastin camp, and when they did not find her, he asked the men who came through with the horses if they would help him search. Clee found her bonnet, and another, her picking basket. That was all they ever found.

E
lsbeth Colleen Talmadge. She had black hair like him, like their mother, and a large bulbous nose. That nose will be the end of her, murmured his mother’s sisters. A deformity (but it was not that, only an exaggerated feature) one wore inside one’s clothes was one thing, but on a face—they pitied her. Talmadge’s mother did not comment; she did not talk about such things as a girl’s looks, because she did not think they were important. Her daughter was simple, but sturdy-bodied, large-footed. She would do well on a homestead. She had Talmadge, also, to guide and help her. It was Talmadge who was the brains of any operation the two of them—he and Elsbeth—undertook. Always thinking, always planning. A new way to plant, to harvest. Ideas for irrigation. Even at that age. This is what we will do, he would announce, quietly, seriously. What do you think? He always included her: every project he engineered that succeeded, he credited her as well, naturally. Once or twice, very rarely, she had her own opinion about how to do things—or a variation of his own idea—and if it was a poor idea, he corrected it, silently, in the doing. But she was not stupid—brain-addled—no matter what people said. He loved her, he loved her deliberation and her decisiveness in certain small domestic activities, her gentleness with animals; her heavy, serious inwardness. She was able to cross-stitch elaborate scenes without the aid of a model or picture—scenes that bewildered him, and her too, if he asked her about them. Where did such images come from? Groves, large lakes, lions, angels. And yet it was true she had trouble, at times, constructing sentences to speak into the air, the air that seemed to get thinner when she was speaking to someone who was not Talmadge or their mother, on the verge of tears. He protected her, he placed himself between her and the world. She did not have to go to town and interact with the people; he would do that, though he was shy, too.

And though she trusted him—had always seemed to trust him—and did not seem to begrudge him, or withdraw from him, she must have had aspirations that she did not tell him about, that she kept to herself. He remembered one day, as she entered a room, he suddenly seemed to recognize her—her physical being came into stark relief for him—but he did not know why. And then he realized: it was because she wore a new frock. It was not a new dress, but an apron. Sky blue and not like the other gray one she usually wore. What’s that? he said. Where did you get that? This was after their mother died, when, very rarely, his tone became careless. She touched the cloth but did not look down at it. I made it, she said. I got the fabric from—but he did not remember where now. He said, because he was suddenly angry, You can’t be spending money on things we haven’t discussed. We’re supposed to be saving up for—but again he could not recall what he had said. Some project or another. The whole time she did not move her head. Her eyes—an opaque light blue, the same color as his—did not alter, but her mouth hardened. A barely perceptible change. The fingers of her left hand hanging at her side twitched—a reflex, maybe, of the hurt or anger that did not show on her face. And all at once he was no longer angry. Moments passed in silence. When he was angry it was not serious, and it came out in little sideways bursts like this. He was quickly ashamed afterward. Now he said quietly, not looking at her: Your frock is nice. And: I can see you did a nice job with the—but he had no vocabulary for what she had done—the tailoring—and so gestured generally instead. She responded a moment later with a slight nod of her head. And then they broke out of the scene and continued as if it had never happened.