Orchard

by Larry Watson

  Now, however, the easel held new work, and Harriet made her way toward it as surely as if it were lit by a spotlight and hanging in a gallery.

  It was an oil, and it was larger than most of Ned’s works, maybe three feet high and four feet wide. On the canvas was a reclining nude, the young woman lying on the cot under the studio’s east window.

  Ned liked to pose his subjects next to a window—to take advantage of natural light, he said—and Harriet didn’t doubt that was so, although he had another motivation as well. He liked to expose his models, as this woman’s backside was exposed to anyone in a position to look through the window, as unlikely as that might be considering how close the cabin was to the wooded hillside. Nevertheless . . .

  Years ago, the Weavers lived briefly in Manhattan while Ned taught at the New York School of Art, his only brush with academia, such as it was. They lived on the eighteenth floor of a Midtown apartment building, and it was there that Ned painted “Solstice,” which featured Harriet lying naked on the bed while the afternoon sun bathed her in its dying light. Harriet asked Ned to close the curtains—if she could see people in the surrounding office and apartment buildings then certainly they could see her. Ned refused. The light, he said, the city sunlight glancing off glass and stone before finding her, could not be duplicated.

  Ned posed her with her head hanging over the foot of the bed staring up at the sky—and at the banks of windows where she was sure innumerable eyes were trained on her. At least they didn’t know who she was, she told herself; at least her body looked good.

  “You’re blushing,” Ned said. “Perfect!” He loved the way her embarrassment pinked her pale flesh and contrasted with the sun’s efforts to leach all the color from her and the rest of the room. What he called her blush, she thought, might have been blood rushing to her head.

  The next day Ned put his brushes aside early, but before he undressed to join Harriet on the bed, he drew the curtains.

  “So,” she said, “people can see me, but they can’t see you.”

  “That’s right,” Ned said. “They can see you, but they can’t see me.”

  She knew too that this statement was not only a literal fact but also had something to do with his desire for his work to be seen while he remained invisible. What she didn’t know was whether she, as she lay revealed on that bed, counted as one of his works. She could not brood on the question for long; during those years, Ned’s sexual needs had an urgency that took her breath away and left her feeling as though she should search herself for bruises in the aftermath of love.

  Back then, Harriet had both posed and offered suggestions on the painting. It had been years now since Ned had wanted to draw or paint her, but thank God he still valued her opinions. She didn’t know what she’d do if the day came when he no longer needed her on either side of the easel.

  The nude woman in the new painting lay on her side, stretched out with one hand tucked under her cheek, the other hand extended off the bed. She lay as unselfconsciously exposed as a sleeper.

  Ned had done something in this painting that Harriet had never seen before. The portrait was filled with his signature photographic details— the veins standing out in her long, bony feet, the scuffs of dirt on her knees as if she had recently been kneeling on the earth, the rust-colored pubic patch so sharply rendered the coils of individual hairs were visible, the tracks where childbearing had stretched her skin beyond its ability to spring back, and her breasts, her breasts, detailed down to the tiny milk slit in each nipple, painted so that—my God, how did Ned do it!—it seemed as though the viewer could know the weight and feel of each one in hand. But for all the exactitude of this woman’s interior lines, Ned had blurred her outline in places so it seemed as though she were losing herself to the world outside her body. The fingers of her outstretched arm were losing their individuation. The curve of her hip seemed to vanish in the colors of the wall behind her. Her shoulder was losing its definition of muscularity. The pillow bunched under her head was draining the ruddy color from her cheek.

  Harriet had seen Ned do something like this with watercolors, but this was different. And the painting did not seem unfinished. No, Ned saw that this woman was in danger of dissolving, whether from her own sense of self or from Ned’s sight, Harriet couldn’t be sure.

  She looked away from the blurred borders and returned her attention to the woman’s wide-eyed gaze. Ned had done her eyes with such care that Harriet could see the striations of the iris, the glint of light in the pupil. The woman stared straight ahead, as if she could see into the future, and nothing there promised any end to her sorrow.

  Harriet stepped forward and tentatively touched a spot on the canvas that seemed to glisten. She hoped the surface would be tacky, the paint still wet. That would mean the portrait was definitely not finished; Ned might decide yet to alter her expression. And if Harriet’s finger came back dotted with ocher that would mean Ned had worked on the painting that afternoon. Harriet was sure no model had entered today—perhaps Ned was working not from life but from memory. Perhaps, as he put brush to canvas, he was thinking of no one but Harriet. God knew, Ned could have seen that look often enough in her eyes.

  The paint was dry.

  15

  Nearly two years before, Henry, Nils Singstad, and Reuben Rosicky were fishing the early ice down on the Oxbow, a kink in the back-waters of the Grouse River, when they realized they had the wrong bait. Henry volunteered to drive back into town to pick up some wax worms, and since they had all ridden down in Reuben’s truck, it was Reuben’s truck Henry drove back up the hill.

  There was fresh snow that day too; it had fallen all night, and when it finally ended, more than six inches of heavy, wet snow covered the ground. Henry had to gear down and gun it hard to make it up the steep, twisting trail. Halfway up, the narrow path veered sharply to the right, but the truck slid to the left, heading for the trunk of a massive oak. No matter how hard Henry turned the wheel, he couldn’t do anything to alter the course of what seemed the certain collision of truck and tree. Strangely, Henry did not think at all of his own safety or survival at this moment, but only about what would be his shame over wrecking Reuben’s truck.

  But the next thing Henry knew, he fishtailed past the tree and slipped back on course up the hill. He had not asked for the aid of providence, yet it seemed as though nothing less than the hand of God could have kept him from crashing into that oak tree.

  Similarly, Henry could think of nothing—no impediment, force, or spirit—that might have halted his feetfirst slide toward the cabin’s chinked walls, but halt he did and once again a collision that seemed fated was averted.

  Nevertheless, even though his fall was stopped, Henry did not get back on his feet, not right away. He scooted forward on his backside until he was up against the cabin. If anyone had seen him stumbling, scraping, and sliding down the hill, they would certainly appear soon, so Henry stood slowly, kept his back pressed to the log wall, and listened for a window to raise or a door to slam. While he waited, Henry did inventory. He did not have to feel for the pistol; its weight in his pocket was so unfamiliar its presence unbalanced him. He patted his other pocket to make sure the box of kitchen matches was there. If no one came out in the next minute or two, Henry would proceed with his plan.

  He was on the east side of the cabin, and he thought Max had said it was through an east window he had seen her. But that hill Henry came down was so steep and overgrown—could Max have looked in through a window on the north or south? Henry would simply have to peer in each one until he saw her for himself.

  16

  The children were lined up at the back of the school gymnasium, waiting for the piano chord that signaled they were to begin marching up the aisles. Sonja was twisted around in her folding chair, trying to find June, and that was the very moment Henry chose to tell her that the previous Saturday he’d almost wrecked Reuben Rosicky’s truck driving up from the Oxbow.

  Sonja spun quickly bac
k to face her husband.

  “That’s right,” Henry said. “I thought for sure I was going to pile into a tree.” He shook his head and chuckled at the memory. “I looked up and there it was, like it had been planted smack-dab in my path. Of course, it was there first, so there wasn’t much I could do but try to go around it.”

  Sonja leaned forward to try to determine if he had been drinking, but that made no sense—it was not now she wanted to know about, but then.

  “And you know what I was thinking when I was headed for that tree?”

  That within a year’s time I would have lost both my son and my husband, Sonja thought to say, but instead she shook her head. Perhaps he wasn’t really talking to her. She could hardly be the right audience for Henry’s little story, because he plainly considered it humorous, yet while she listened she felt her stomach tighten and go cold while her scalp hotly prickled.

  Mrs. Manserus, the music teacher, began to play “Joy to the World,” and the children started to sing and march forward. Their voices wobbled and teetered at first, but by the time they reached “The Lord is come,” they found their balance. Similarly, their initial steps up the aisle were bunched and halting, but that rhythm soon returned to them as well. The angels, of which June was one, came last, and because of their wings, they had to keep a greater distance between each other than Joseph and Mary, the shepherds, the wise men, or the children without costume.

  “I thought,” Henry said, “Reuben’s going to kill me when he sees what I did to his truck. But just as sudden it came to me—what the hell does it matter? I’ll likely be dead myself.”

  Sonja placed her hand gently over her husband’s mouth, but she did not stop his speech for the sake of their daughter, who was coming closer, or for the rest of the children or for their parents seated nearby or for the holiday itself or for any reason except that she could not hear any more of accidents or death.

  When June marched past, she did not look in her parents’ direction, but that was all right; Sonja knew June was concentrating on remembering the words to the carol and on keeping the proper spacing between herself and the angel in front of her. June looked so lovely that no real angel could equal her beauty, but then Sonja had to banish that thought. If there were angels in heaven such as these, they could only be the souls of dead children, like her son, and therefore, to keep from thinking of June and death in such proximity, Sonja had to tell herself that these were merely earth’s children, the sons and daughters of the mothers and fathers who helped build those wings of wire, cardboard, and aluminum foil.

  Snow had been falling when they entered the school for the program, but it was coming down much harder now, a heavy, wet snow that resisted the rising wind’s efforts to blow the flakes off their fast, vertical descent. Henry and Sonja sat in the truck waiting for June. The heater ran full strength, but so far it wheezed out only cold air. Henry turned on the windshield wipers, but they could not keep up with the snow that seemed to splat against the glass in clumps. They had only a thirteen-mile drive home, but Henry knew the road would be slick and he’d be lucky if he could see a hundred yards.

  He began to bounce his legs impatiently.

  “Are you cold?” Sonja asked.

  “Not especially, but I’d like to start before it gets worse.”

  “The teacher has gifts for them. Do you want me to go in and hurry her along?”

  Henry could have said, yes, we have to get going. He could have pointed out that they didn’t have any weight in the back of the truck for traction, and he hadn’t gotten around to putting on the snow tires. He was worried they might not get out of the parking lot, or, worse, start for home and slide off the road. But although he was still angry with Sonja for shushing him when he tried to tell her about driving up from the Oxbow, he kept all his concerns about the weather and the roads to himself.

  “Let her get her present,” he said.

  In another moment, June came running toward the truck, her knees lifting high to help her clear the ridges of snow made by the tires of the cars that had already left the lot. Once June was inside the truck, both her father and mother edged closer to her so their bodies might help warm their daughter.

  Outside town, conditions were worse. The wind was having its way now, hurling snow at the truck as if its motion were an affront to the storm. Henry gripped the steering wheel and tried to keep the truck aimed toward the double track that vanished and appeared at the wind’s caprice.

  Henry wished he would have gone ahead and told Sonja about what happened with Reuben’s truck. He hadn’t meant to alarm her with the story. Just the opposite—it had a theme that he thought might hearten her. When he was heading for that oak tree, he had no doubt: He was going to hit the tree head-on, and all his efforts to avoid it would come to naught. And then he was past, safe, not so much as a scrape of fender and bark.

  And that was what he wanted to convey to Sonja, that perhaps a measure of power and control was edging back into their lives. The lesson of John’s death was wrong. They didn’t have to lie down and submit. What looked to be inevitable might not be, and if Sonja could have been with him in Reuben’s truck, if she could have felt what he felt when he arrived intact at the top of the hill—the exhilaration!—she’d understand.

  The episode had been so seductive that Henry couldn’t help but flirt with its counterpart out here on the snow-packed hills, curves, and straightaways of Highway 42. He drove a little too fast for the reach of his headlights, and when the truck’s tires began to slide he waited just an instant longer than he should have, letting the danger rise into his throat before he steered them back on track.

  From the corner of his eye he could see Sonja lean forward and cast a questioning look his way. He didn’t say anything, but he wanted to tell her to sit back and relax. If something happens, at least it will happen to all three of us.

  No one spoke from the time they left the school parking lot until they pulled up in front of their home, and then it was Henry who broke the long silence. “Well, I got us here,” he said. “Safe and sound.”

  He half-expected to hear an expression of gratitude or admiration for his driving skill, but none was forthcoming.

  Later, when June lay in bed with her unopened peppermint stick on the nightstand, her mother crept quietly into the room. She sat on the bed and gently stroked her daughter’s hair. “I could hear you,” Sonja said. “Out of all those children, I could still hear my baby’s voice. You sang so beautifully.”

  June could think of nothing to say in response to her mother’s compliment. At more than one rehearsal, Mrs. Manserus had corrected June for singing off-key. June did not understand what it meant to be either on-or off-key, so after she was chastised a third time, June rectified the problem the only way she knew how. She sang softer and softer until tonight at the actual performance, she was no longer singing at all but only mouthing the words to every song.

  17

  Ned Weaver lifted his cup to propose a toast. “What is it—two o’clock? We’re barely half a day into the new year and we’ve already had a taste of failure.”

  The only patrons in the Top Deck Tavern were Weaver and his friend Jake Bram. They sat in barrel-backed chairs in front of a fire so low it did not blaze but glow. Both men were smoking and drinking brandy and coffee.

  Two hours earlier, they had parked their cars behind the Moravian church and set out on what had become for them a New Year’s Day ritual—snowshoeing a four-mile trail that took them through a small forest, along a high ridge that looked out over the frozen harbor, and back through a golf course. Today, however, the weather got the better of them. They had been dressed for the cold—the temperature never rose above ten below that day—but once they left the shelter of the trees and stood on the high bluff above the lake, the north wind had unobstructed access to the two men, and within minutes they felt as if they had been lacerated with whips of ice. They altered their course and made for the Top Deck, the nearest establis
hment they could be sure would be open on the holiday.

  Jake Bram raised his own glass. “To 1954. May failure not be its theme.”

  “Yes,” Weaver said, “I don’t need another year like the last one.”

  “The work doesn’t go well?”

  “It does not.”

  “Have you ever thought the problem might be your standards? Now me, I’ll accept any kind of crap that rolls out of my typewriter.” Under his own name, Jake Bram wrote paperback Westerns; under the name J. B. Fall he wrote hard-boiled detective novels.

  “And it all sells,” Weaver said.

  Jake shrugged and put a match to his pipe. “It does. But I keep my standards low in that regard as well.”

  Weaver scraped his chair closer to the fire. “I don’t give a good goddamn if I never sell another work. If I’m not making something new— and making the discoveries that go with it—life isn’t worth shit. Making art—that’s all there is. The rest is just killing time and keeping myself amused.”

  “Maybe having become a successful merchant is obscuring your artistic vision.”

  Weaver waved away the suggestion. “I could do that shit with one hand behind my back and one eye closed.”

  “Paint it or sell it?”

  “Either one.” He tossed his cigarette butt into the fire. “No, I need something to shake me up. Something to scare the hell out of me. To mystify me. Something to help me get someplace I haven’t been before.”

  “Try painting with your left hand.”

  “I take that remark to mean I should try a new technique. This has nothing to do with technique. I’m talking about vision.”

  “Well, hell. Why didn’t you say so?” Jake rolled the brandy around his glass. “Drink up. Vision guaranteed. Followed by blindness.”

  “Come on, goddammit. I’m putting myself at your mercy here. What works for you?”