The Orchardist (55 page)

Tell him the truth, said Caroline Middey. What else is there to say?

But still they sat there and did not move. Their tea grew cold. Angelene spent the night there, and then they left together in the morning for the orchard.

D
ella had volunteered in a work project that involved, among other things, scaling buildings under construction—she was allowed to do this, they learned, because she had worked once as a topper in a lumber camp. The day before, she had fallen from a scaffolding and broken her neck. She had died immediately. There were harnesses and other safety devices she was supposed to be wearing, but she wasn’t wearing them.

T
he train bearing her body came from Walla Walla, and Talmadge, Angelene, and Caroline Middey were at the station in Wenatchee to meet it, dressed in their finest clothes. Talmadge wore a new hat, leaned on a cane. They watched the box that contained Della’s body be loaded onto a wagon, and then they all got up into the wagon and with the driver and another man headed north, in the direction of the orchard. They arrived in the afternoon. The driver and the other man hiked with the casket down the hillside and across the creek, through the field. Talmadge, Angelene, and Caroline Middey followed behind them.

She would be buried on the upland ridge next to Jane.

On the plateau the yellow grass waved in the wind and the air smelled of honeysuckle and duff. The hole had already been dug in the ground. Talmadge had hired other men to do that as well, because he was too weak to do it himself. But still he had insisted on helping. The men lowered the casket now into the ground, and then they walked away, to give the family their privacy.

Talmadge had refused to believe, at first, that she was dead. And then he refused to accept the circumstances of her death: someone had killed her, he insisted. Michaelson, or one of his associates, a guard. She had been murdered. He was sure of this; and after Angelene and Caroline Middey had arrived in the orchard and told him what had happened, he walked alone into the trees in the dusk, leaning heavily on his cane. It wasn’t until he had reached the outer orchard, the tree at the bend in the path standing still in the darkness—the tree, the inimitable trunk darker than the outer darkness—that he began to weep.

He had not seen Della or communicated with her these last few years. But the girl—Angelene—had gone to see her, and though he did not know the specifics of what had passed between them, he did know that the girl was planning to see her again, and so he liked to think that she, Della, had begun to accept her life, and calmed. He did not expect her to be happy—how that word lost meaning as the years progressed—but he only wished her to be unafraid, and able to experience small joys. He wished that she would get out of that place—prison—and find her home again in the orchard. Or wherever else she thought would welcome her.

He leaned down and grasped a handful of dirt, threw it into the grave. Caroline Middey did the same. Angelene broke away and returned with a shovel, staved the head into a pile of dirt. Began to move the earth in earnest. She was inexpert but steady. One of the men wandered back over, to say that she needn’t do his job; but he watched her and then turned away, left them alone again. When he reached the other man, he shrugged slightly.

Talmadge and Caroline Middey stood away and observed the girl work. When it was finished, none of them were able to speak. Angelene was shaking, her face mussed with sweat. As they turned and headed away—they had to, for the sun was setting, and they had neglected to bring lanterns—Angelene leaned against Talmadge. He put his arm around her. Caroline Middey placed her hand on the girl’s shoulder. They walked thus across the grass, incredibly slowly. Angelene cried tonelessly all the way back to the orchard.

W
here are her
things
? cried Angelene, coming into his bedroom in the middle of the night. Her
clothes
—her
things
. Where are they? Who has them?

He had sat up in the bed, trying to orient himself. What had happened? Where was he? The girl, Della, had died—

Angelene came around the side of the bed and got in beside him. He lifted the quilt, and drew her inside. She huddled against him, her head on his chest, weeping.

We’ll send for them, he said, putting his hand on her head. Don’t cry now. We’ll find them. We’ll bring them back. Hush. Hush.

VII

T
here came again, during that following spring and summer, the feeling that Angelene had almost forgotten, of being alone in the orchard, of being utterly herself. She was not really alone—Talmadge was always somewhere around, in the cabin or working elsewhere in the orchard—but she had begun, through working again on her own plot, the feeling of sinking into that solitude as she had before, when Talmadge was away in Chelan. The sun hovering in its zenith, the birds squawking in the high canopy, the earth giving off its tremendous deep odor. The sapling roots frail in her hands.

She did not know if she reflected at all upon the relationship between what she was feeling—the depth of her own privacy—and what Talmadge might have felt all those years living alone. She knew that there was a difference between their situations: where she had his company to steep herself in at intervals—she had that possibility of companionship—he had not. He might have had friends or acquaintances in town—Caroline Middey, for example—he could visit with every other week or so, or they could come visit him, but it was not the same as having somebody who lived with you. It was not the same as having family. Even if that family was very quiet, as Talmadge and Angelene were, at times, with each other.

When she was alone, when she was working, it was as if she forgot about herself. It seemed strange to state it this way, but it was as if she had no outline, no body, even though the work was very physical. Where did her mind go? Her mind was steeped in the task at hand. At such times she felt a depth of kinship with the earth, and also felt very grown up, unshakable, rife with compassion.

The knowledge was cultivated in her also that while Talmadge was her family, her deepest friend, his health was in a state of decline. And Caroline Middey, too, who was like her mother, was nearly eighty years old. The one who might have accompanied her through adulthood—maybe, maybe—was buried now. (And she admitted to herself that in light of this, Talmadge’s plan to free Della, that incredibly ill-advised plan, did not look so foolish to her now as it had before, when it was first presented to her. Talmadge had known what he was doing. She appreciated this now, she appreciated what he had attempted to do for her.)

She revered solitude, but only because there was the possibility of breaking it. Of communing at last with another. What would happen when Talmadge died? Caroline Middey? Their particular sensibilities would be gone; and with them they would take their knowledge of her. Then she would be truly alone. This was another solitude. It terrified her.

A
s he lay inert on his bed, which the girl had pulled out near the woodstove—the girl leaning over him, fixing his bedclothes—the past receded, diminished to a point.

He had never been a boy, afraid and hoping perpetually for his sister. He had never been seventeen years old, or twenty-five, thirty, dying of lust after supper. Never the happy man working alone, laughing to himself at some joke he had heard others tell in town. Never wanted to lay his head on Caroline Middey’s breast. Never sung hymns to himself, out of absence or loneliness. Never admitted to any person the fact of how his own image pleased him, though he knew he was considered ugly, even without the smallpox scars. Never was he kind, or cruel. Never fed the two girls who came to him, never pitied them. Never regretted not laying hands on Michaelson—the day on the Okanogan, or later, when he came into the orchard. He had never been awed by Della, puzzled by her—never was relieved when she left. Never missed her severe quirk, her tendernesses that cut him to the quick. Her strange hair, her eyes, her glances. Her
way
. Never witnessed her, a girl barely reaching his shoulder, on a horse as mean as any snake. Never sat with Clee in silence, smoking pipes on a summer evening. Never roamed with Clee as a boy through the tall grass, running after his sister: a game. Never was in prison. Never cried for his mother. Never sought to conjure his father’s face. Never tasted an apricot, or trout, or soil. Never slept under the slow-wheeling constellations, or bathed in a winter creek.

The wonderful as well as the terrible impressions receded, and the world when he opened his eyes each morning was altered; and then in the afternoon, and after that, every time he slept and woke. The same four cabin walls holding different shapes of light and shadows. The woodstove. The girl moving in the domestic sphere. He knew her name, and then it was no longer necessary, somehow, that he remember it. It was not his fault; he did not feel that it was his fault. She sat beside him and spoke to him and it wasn’t even necessary anymore that he understand what she was saying. She touched his head and wiped his brow with a wet cloth, and that was pleasant. He might have spoken too, but what he spoke did not matter. She came and went; he called her by different names.

Angelene, he said. I was here when you were born.

I know, she said.

I
n the far apple orchard Angelene climbed each tree expertly and picked the apples in the coming darkness—they glowed, the Rhode Island Greenings glowed; the Pippins were more difficult, she felt the scions with her fingertips. She had always been a slow picker, and this did not change according to circumstance—she was the one left to harvest the acres of trees—and so after a day of picking she rested only a short time, to eat and to nap, and then worked again until it became too dark to see. If the moon was not out, then she would have difficulty and would retire early to the cabin, where she slept badly and dreamed of picking and of following bodiless voices through the avenues; and in the morning again she rose raw-eyed and grasped her canvas sack and headed out into the cold. She must redouble her efforts that day, for as usual, she had failed to pick the requisite amount of fruit the day before. Even so, she did not rush. Talmadge said: Do not rush. Only a fool rushes. (But his toil was constant; his toil was normal. When she was a child he used to walk the orchards—slowly—from dawn until dusk; and then sometimes after supper, until the stars turned over in the sky.)