Orchard

by Larry Watson

  Harriet supposed she could make another wager—would the woman return?—but what was the point? That, as Ned liked to say, was a sucker’s bet.

  6

  The first time Henry House walked Sonja Skordahl home, he led her through one of his family’s orchards. It was a warm evening in late summer, and the trees were heavy with fully grown apples.

  She reached up and touched an apple lightly as if she were testing its weight upon the bough. She had just finished a day of work and was wearing the dirndl and apron that all the women at Axel’s Norske Inn were required to wear. Henry thought she looked, dressed that way and cupping an apple in her hand, like an illustration from a book of fairy tales.

  “These must all come down?” she asked.

  “Beg pardon?” Henry had spent most of the war years as an artillery range instructor in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and an accident with a defective 105-millimeter howitzer shell left him with a perforated eardrum and the loss of hearing in one ear. He bent closer to her and turned his head slightly.

  “They must all come off the tree?” she repeated.

  “Every last one of them.”

  “And you will pick them?”

  “Well, not all. But I’ll pick a hell of a lot of them.”

  “They are for eating?”

  “Eating. Baking. Sauce. Cider. That’s a good all-purpose apple.”

  She touched it again, tapping it as if she were testing the strength of the stem’s hold. “They will come down easy?”

  “See for yourself. Go ahead. Give it a pull.”

  At the first feel of resistance, Sonja turned her head as if she feared with a harder tug the tree would release a torrent of apples. Then, when the apple popped free, she laughed in surprise. She brought it to her nose and inhaled deeply. “Christmas,” she said with her eyes closed. “The smell of apples is Christmas to me. In Norway, Uncle Karl—my mother’s brother—would come to our home for Christmas, and he would bring a small sack of apples for my brothers and me.”

  “Did he grow them? Your uncle Karl—was he an apple grower?”

  She laughed again. “I believe he stole them!”

  She brought the apple to her mouth and pretended she was about to take a bite. Her eyes widened in mock apprehension as if she feared Henry would scold her.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Help yourself.”

  Sonja first rubbed the apple on her apron, then took a small, side-of-the-mouth bite. Immediately her face puckered.

  “Too tart?”

  She nodded.

  Henry pulled another apple from the tree. When the branch whipped back into place, he heard the crackle and muffled thump of another apple falling to the ground. “Here,” he said. “Try this one. Give us another chance.”

  This time she made no attempt to clean the apple before biting into it. Once again she winced at the taste.

  “That one too?”

  “It’s better, I think.”

  He brushed that apple from her hand. “Come on. Let’s try another tree.”

  They were losing light, but Henry still took the time to select a tree slightly taller than those on either side of it. Although he had never thoroughly tested his theory, he believed that a tree’s larger share of sunlight resulted in sweeter fruit. He pulled a branch down so close to Sonja’s face, she asked merrily, “Shall I bite it on the bough?”

  “Pick one of the darkest,” he said. “And one of the roundest.”

  She reached for an apple, hesitated, then moved her hand toward another. Henry shook the branch, hoping that an apple would fall off in her hand and make the decision for her.

  “They all look like the best,” she said.

  “That one there. I guarantee that one.”

  As soon as she picked it, Henry had his doubts. She had to work too hard to pull it free, and the ripest apples always seemed to jump into your hand.

  After a small, tentative bite, she meekly declared, “It’s very good.”

  Henry took it from her. Her teeth had not sunk far beneath the skin. He turned the apple around, opened his mouth as wide as his jaws would allow, and snapped off an oval of apple flesh. It made a sound like cracking wood. The texture was just what it should have been, crisp and distinct, but the taste was so sour it seemed to bite back. He let the apple fall.

  “Here. I’m going to find you one, goddammit.”

  He led her farther down the row to a tree so thick with apples that every branch sagged under the weight. He pulled off one that was as large as a softball and thrust it close to her face. She bent down to bite it while it was still in his hand. Droplets of apple juice sprayed onto Henry’s fingers.

  “Well?”

  “The best,” she said, but Henry suspected she was only being polite.

  He tossed it aside and picked another. “Is this one better still?”

  She opened her mouth, but Henry pulled the apple back. “Make sure the taste of the other is gone.”

  She exaggerated both her chewing and swallowing motions before closing her eyes, leaning forward, and opening her mouth wide. She trusted him to put an apple in her mouth, even if she was behaving as though she had to take a dose of bitter medicine.

  Once again the bite she took was so small he wondered if something might be wrong with her teeth. Henry had an uncle who, because of his bridgework, always bit into an apple from the side.

  “Also very good,” she said.

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  “Your family grows very good apples.”

  “Come on. We’ll try some more.” Henry had, for the moment, set aside his notions of romance. The reputation of his family’s apples was more important.

  They walked down the darkening corridor of trees, sampling apple after apple as they went and then casting the bitten fruit aside. Sonja continued to compliment each apple’s excellence, and although Henry did not mistrust her exactly, he wished he could see in her expression a sign that the fruit gave her the pleasure she said it did. But since they were nearing the end of the orchard, Henry supposed he had no choice but to believe her.

  The trees gave out, and Henry and Sonja stood by a dirt road across which the lights of the Singstad farm shone. Since her husband had died a few years earlier, Dagny Singstad rented rooms to young women who came to Door County to work but had difficulty finding a place to live, much less one they could afford. As it was, Sonja shared a room with a woman who clerked at Mast’s Pharmacy.

  As they stepped onto the road, the smell of wood smoke replaced the aroma of apples. From Mrs. Singstad’s chimney smoke rose as straight as a plumb line in the windless evening air.

  Henry nodded in the direction of the house. “A little warm for a fire, isn’t it?”

  “Probably she has the furnace on too. She says she is cold in her bones. She keeps it so hot it is suffocating in that house. We must have our window open always just to have air to breathe.”

  “Where’s your room?”

  “You can’t see it from here. It’s in the back above the kitchen. Do you see that tree? Its branches are right outside our window.”

  “Maybe I’ll climb up that tree some night. Sneak in through your window and surprise you while you’re sleeping.”

  Sonja laughed. “You might have a very bad surprise if you do. Dottie keeps a hammer by her bed.”

  “Dottie expecting trouble, is she?”

  “Dagny’s boys. When they come to the house, they look at you like . . . like I don’t know what.”

  “You tell Dottie she doesn’t have to worry about Nils. But she better keep her hammer handy when Bjorn’s around.”

  In the distance, a car’s headlights appeared. Henry and Sonja both turned to watch, wondering if they would have to move from the middle of the road. When the car was a good quarter of a mile away, however, it turned off at the Lonsdorf place.

  “I must go in,” she said. “Dagny waits up.” Sonja took a step back and bowed slightly. “So I will thank you now for the
. . . for the wonderful apple feast.”

  She had barely finished her little speech when Henry moved to close the distance between them. He tried to kiss her, but Sonja had time to lift her fingers into the space between their lips.

  “No, I think tonight—just apples.”

  Before Henry could form a response, either argument or apology, she was gone, hastening toward her little room under Dagny Singstad’s roof. For another moment, Henry remained in the road, analyzing the language of her rebuff. Tonight—just apples. Was any other meaning possible—on another night, there would be more than apples?

  Henry walked back the way they came. Even in the dark, he could tell when he reached the place in the orchard where he was as far from any path leading in as any leading out. Here he stepped into the space between two trees that grew so close their upper branches tangled and made it impossible to tell which apples belonged on which tree. Henry unbuckled his trousers. He spit twice into his hand to oil its motion up and down his cock. He had had women before, but now he scarcely went further in his mind than the thought of coming up behind Sonja Skordahl, pulling her dress from her shoulders, and baring her bosom. Just when he imagined reaching around her to cup her breasts, ripe and heavy in his hands as fruit about to fall, his semen burst from him with such force that he was staggered on his feet.

  The following morning, Sonja left the house at first light. She entered once again the House family orchard, and she gathered up in her apron as many of the apples as she could find that she and Henry had scattered the night before. She worried that someone from Henry’s family might be able to follow the trail of once- or twice-bitten fruit and see that it led toward Dagny’s. Eventually they would learn that Sonja herself was responsible for such thievery and worse, such waste. They would never approve of such a woman.

  She found a mound of soft dirt between two apple trees, and with her fingers she scraped out a depression deep enough to bury the apples. Each apple bore either a small or large scar, depending on whether the teeth that sunk into it had been hers or Henry’s. The last apple she pushed into the hole was his, and before she covered it, she ran her finger around the rim of the bite mark where the peel, like human skin, puckered around its wound and tried to heal itself.

  When Sonja reported to work, Axel banished her to the kitchen to wash dishes for the remainder of her shift. He had noticed her hands, and he would not allow someone with dirt under her fingernails to serve food to his paying customers.

  7

  Mrs. House could have taken her prospective daughter-in-law aside almost any time in the weeks before the wedding. She could still have spoken to Sonja at the church, in the hour before the ceremony, when the two of them were alone together in the women’s rest room. But Mrs. House adjusted Sonja’s veil in silence. She might have talked to Sonja moments after Sonja became Henry’s wife, when they all gathered in the basement of the church for the reception. Instead, Mrs. House waited until the wedding party and guests had driven in a caravan to Sturgeon Bay, to the Knights of Columbus Hall, where the wedding dance was to take place. She waited until everyone had eaten and drunk their fill, until they had all stepped and twirled around the hot second-story dance floor with such intensity that coats were tossed aside, ties loosened, buttons unbuttoned, until sweat glistened on the flushed cheeks of both women and men. Mrs. House waited until she herself was drunk. . . .

  Sonja sat alone in a row of folding chairs near an open window, where she had gone with the vain hope of finding a little moving air. She watched Mrs. House approach, a tall, raw-boned woman in a navy-blue dress that Sonja was sure the woman would have worn had she attended a funeral that afternoon. Nor would Mrs. House’s expression likely have been more dour at a funeral, though what Dagny Singstad said was true: It would be a cold day in hell when you saw Lucille House smile, but it would be an even colder one when you saw her cry.

  Holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Mrs. House loomed over her daughter-in-law. “Mind if I sit?”

  Sonja moved closer to the edge of her own chair. “Please.” Mrs. House left an empty chair between them.

  “Looks like we fastened that veil down good and tight.”

  Sonja raised her hand and gently touched the netting to confirm that it was still in place.

  “I have to ask you,” Mrs. House said. “Are there any old country names you have to give that child of yours?”

  Sonja looked frantically for her husband. The cigar and cigarette smoke, the steam coming off the dancers, the early darkness from the approaching storm—it seemed to Sonja as though she had to squint through a fog to see across the room. Was that Henry’s back in the group by the makeshift bar? The white-shirted men circling there reminded Sonja of ships with their sails full, but she could not be certain her husband was among them.

  Sonja knew she didn’t show, and Henry had assured her he’d told no one of her condition. Had Mrs. House guessed? Or was Sonja mistaken— perhaps the little gesture that Mrs. House made in the direction of Sonja’s stomach was not intended to accompany the question. Or maybe Mrs. House simply knew that someday Sonja and Henry would have children.

  “My father’s name,” Sonja softly said, “is Hans. My mother is Ulrikka.”

  “Hansy House. Jesus. The boy’d never live that down. And Ulrikka, you say? You wouldn’t saddle a child with that one, would you?”

  Sonja shook her head.

  Lucille House drew deeply on her cigarette and then exhaled, creating one more cloud for Sonja to try to see through. “It was Henry’s father’s wish,” Mrs. House said, “that one day a child would be named after him.”

  “He was John?”

  “That he was. John House. A boy could go through the world with worse.”

  Sonja nodded.

  “That’s that, then. If it’s a girl, you’re on your own. Though I’d be real surprised if your firstborn turns out to be a girl. Now, as long as I’ve got your ear,” Mrs. House continued, “do you mind if I give you some advice about living the married life with that son of mine?”

  The language still harbored mysteries for Sonja. She knew, for instance, that the drink Mrs. House favored, and was likely drinking now, was a brandy old-fashioned. But wasn’t that the wrong order— shouldn’t it be old-fashioned brandy? And the way Mrs. House phrased her question—it sounded as though she had once been married to her own son!

  “Make him get rid of that horse of his.”

  “Buck?” Sonja asked.

  “Hell yes, Buck. Tell Henry he can keep his fishing rods and his rifle, but he’s got to sell his horse.” Mrs. House shook her head at a memory that bobbed to the surface. “John took the boy’s gun from him one year. Damn near broke his heart . . . But it’s up to you: Henry’s heart or yours. A civilized husband or a wild horseman.”

  Sonja should have been able to shrug off Mrs. House’s advice as nothing more than a drunk’s windy false wisdom, but after her mother-in-law’s prescience regarding Sonja’s pregnancy, Mrs. House’s words seemed to carry the force of prophecy.

  Mrs. House finished her drink, cracking between her back teeth the ice that had slid into her mouth with the last of the liquor. She stood, and when she was looking down once again at Sonja, Mrs. House said, “But you won’t be saying anything to him, will you?”

  Sonja shook her head.

  “I didn’t think so,” Mrs. House said, and walked unsteadily away.

  Mr. and Mrs. Henry House spent their wedding night at the Crittendon Inn at the far northern tip of the county. The old hotel was situated high on a bluff overlooking the narrow strait between the peninsula and Washington Island, right where the battle between lake currents and prevailing winds made the waters so treacherous—and the site of so many shipwrecks—that the early sailors named the passage Porte des Morts.

  But that night the lake was calm. The thunderstorm that had raced through earlier did nothing more than wash away the heat and haze that had been lingering for days. Moonli
ght entered the third-floor room where Sonja House lay on the four-poster bed next to a window, and her husband of only a few hours sat in a chair next to the bed. The night breeze cooled her body, naked and still sweaty from lovemaking, and she pulled the sheet up to her shoulders.

  “Could I ask a favor?”

  Henry laughed. “I guess you know I’m not about to say no. Not tonight! But be ready: Those that ask for favors have to be willing to grant them.”

  “Would you sell Buck? Please—I’m not asking you to. But would you if I asked.”

  “If this doesn’t sound like a trap . . . If I say yes, then you’ll go ahead and ask for real.”

  “No, no. Please. I don’t mean it like that.”

  “Then what? Are you trying to find out if I’d obey you?” He picked up his cigarettes from the window ledge, lit one, and blew smoke out toward the strait. “Or is this some kind of test to see which one I’d choose? Jesus!”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said this.”

  “You’ve been around Buck. You know he’s gentle. He’s not going to cost us much in feed. We’ve got the barn and room for him to run. I don’t know what the hell this is about. Are you afraid of him?”

  “It was just something your mother said, and I . . . Never mind.”

  Henry slapped his bare thigh. “Mom! I should have known! She was against my having a horse in the first place. It was Dad’s and my idea all the way, and she never wanted to have a damn thing to do with Buck. She resented having to take care of him when I was in the Army. She tried to get me to sell him before I went in, but I told her I’d just as soon take Buck out and shoot him as see someone else own him.”

  She didn’t know what to say but to repeat her apology. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No, Mom shouldn’t have said anything. Was she drunk? I bet she was drunk.”

  Sonja nodded.

  “A lot of men around here have boats. Boats never much interested me. I’ve got a horse. It’s nothing to make a fuss about.”

  She could tell he was trying now to rid his voice of anger, but he had not entirely succeeded. Beneath this new cheerful note she heard another, unyielding as stone. Sonja had grown up in the home of a fisherman—she knew more about men and boats than about men and horses—and early in life she learned the lesson the seaside teaches: Water can avoid being broken on rocks only by finding a way to flow around them.