by Larry Watson
Dr. Jim entered the room, his voice so loud Sonja flinched. “Can you tell me,” he asked Henry, “is there any place it doesn’t hurt?”
Dr. Jim was new to the county, but he had already developed a reputation that made Sonja wish that Dr. Van Voort were treating Henry, no matter how excellent were the stitches Dr. Jim sewed. It was said this young doctor was too sure of himself, that he scolded some patients and insulted others, that he took too little time with the elderly and too much time with pretty young women. Sonja’s sister-in-law, Phyllis, had visited Dr. Jim with an earache and walked angrily out of his office when the doctor tried to insist on an examination too thorough for her symptoms.
“My big toe,” Henry said. “On my left foot.”
“Wait until the anesthetic wears off completely. That toe will be driving you nuts.” The doctor had a crew cut that bristled like needles, his eyebrows seemed permanently arched, and the cigarette pinched between his lips angled toward the ceiling. Everything about him, it seemed to Sonja, directed your attention up, up, over his head.
“Then maybe you’ll give him a bullet to bite down on, huh, Doc?”
“We don’t use bullets,” the doctor said to Nils. “We give our patients razor straps to gnaw.”
“What—no shot of whiskey?” Henry asked.
The doctor expelled smoke from his nostrils. “We had to curtail the whiskey because Mildred Ryan kept checking into the hospital just to get herself liquored up.”
The three men laughed heartily. Sonja wondered if such a person as Mildred Ryan even existed, but then Sonja’s own existence at that moment might be in doubt as far as these men were concerned.
To Henry, the doctor said, “So, you were in a race. Did you win or lose?”
“I’m lying here, so I guess that means I lost.”
“Jimmy pulled up,” Nils said. “He never finished either. He feels terrible about what happened.”
Henry pointed to the doctor’s cigarette. “Can you spare one of those smokes, Doc?”
Dr. Jim shook out a Chesterfield from the pack in his shirt pocket, put the cigarette between his lips, lit it from his own, then deftly placed the new cigarette between Henry’s waiting lips. Nils waved away the offer of the doctor’s pack.
Henry inhaled deeply, then with a gentle sigh let the smoke drift slowly from his lungs. “And maybe I’ll have to check myself into the hospital just to get someone to light my cigarette.” Sonja was right; they didn’t see her.
“No lighter?” the doctor asked.
“I always lose ’em.”
“Here,” Dr. Jim said, “let me show you a little trick.”
He brought out a book of matches and, with one hand, opened the cover, tucked it back in, bent a match in half, and scratched it into flame. He held the burning match aloft for a second, then blew it out. “See? The poor man’s lighter.”
“Or you could use farmer’s matches,” suggested Nils.
“Little exercises like this,” Dr. Jim said, “keep the fingers nimble.” He held up both hands and wiggled his fingers. “And people don’t realize a doctor works by hand as much as an auto mechanic.”
But the mechanic, thought Sonja, does not have such long-fingered, delicate-looking hands. Dr. Jim’s hands did not appear to have the strength necessary to set broken bones or sew up split flesh. She remembered her mother’s old friend Astrid Hansa, more skilled with needle and thread than anyone in the village. Astrid had fingers so short and blunt they looked like oversize thimbles.
“I’m afraid,” Henry said, “an apple grower does most of his work by hand too.”
Earlier she had put her finger to his lips to keep her husband from joking about his situation, but she would have preferred jokes to self-pitying remarks like that one. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m going to wait in the hall.”
It was close to morning, yet the corridor still held on to the heat of the preceding day. That warmth, along with the odor common to every hospital Sonja had ever been in, made her reel. She rested her forehead against the wall, and fortunately those bricks, smooth rectangles the color of pale, pale flesh, felt soothingly cool.
“Which is it?” The doctor’s voice startled her again. “Are you holding up the wall or is it holding you up?”
She turned to face him and found the doctor standing so close she felt trapped, yet if she stepped to the side, he might take that movement as an affront.
“You can head back home,” he said. “He’ll sleep again soon. No reason for you to stay awake.”
“I’m all right.”
“Are you? You’re looking a little green around the gills.”
“The smell. What is that smell?”
The doctor glanced left and right as if the odor had a visual presence. “I think what you smell is ether. Sort of a cheesy aroma? Ether and probably antiseptic.”
Looking up at Dr. Jim, Sonja noticed that even the doctor’s long eyelashes curved upward. Was it possible he curled them like a woman? “How long,” she asked, “until he can go home?”
“Another day or two, I suppose.” The doctor leaned his hand on the wall close to Sonja’s head. She smelled coffee and tobacco on his breath. “But I must tell you,” he said in a lowered, confidential voice, “your husband is going to be out of commission for a while.”
“Commission?”
“I’m sure he thinks he’s a tough young fellow. But he really banged himself up.”
When Nils came to the house to tell her that Henry had been hurt, Sonja dressed hastily. She pulled on the skirt she had worn during the day, and, unable to find her blouse, she grabbed the garment closest at hand, Henry’s shirt.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” the doctor asked, and then, as if he thought she might comprehend action better than speech, he reached out and tugged on Sonja’s—Henry’s—shirt collar. She pressed herself harder against the wall.
From the time she first came to this country, from that first day standing in the great hall on Ellis Island, under that ceiling that seemed, even after days on the open sea, as high as the sky, Sonja had often been asked if she understood. “Do you need an interpreter? Do you need a translation?” She heard those questions over and over, and she always said no, though months sometimes passed before she knew exactly what people were asking. The odd thing about understanding was how often time alone seemed to bring it about. The meaning of a word she didn’t know on Monday was clear on Friday. Sometimes years were necessary for understanding and sometimes only minutes, as now, when she began to realize that when Dr. Jim had boasted of his strong and nimble fingers he may well have been speaking to her. And, just as new understandings often cleared away old misunderstandings, she knew now she had not been invisible in Henry’s room. Dr. Jim had been watching her all along, but in that sidelong way characteristic of so many men. Oh, men were supposed to be so bold, yet they would not look directly at you. Instead, they waited until you bent over, and then if you glanced up quickly you could see where their eyes had been! Truly, it would be better to be invisible.
“I understand,” she said softly.
At that moment, Nils came out of Henry’s room, and the doctor instantly stepped back. “He’s asleep,” Nils said, smiling as if he were responsible for Henry’s state.
“What do you want to do now?” he asked Sonja.
She looked directly at the doctor, but she spoke in Norwegian, the tongue native to her and to Nils. “Ta meg hjem.”
It was her hope that if she made her request to Nils in the language of their childhood he would take her directly home and not pull the car off the road somewhere and begin tugging at her collar.
Sonja was surprised at how willing Henry was to allow his sister, his friends, and hired men to take over the work of the orchards. Yes, yes, certainly his injuries prevented him from returning to his work routine, but she would have thought the forced inactivity would frustrate him, that he would become so impatient to get back to work that he would tear off his
bandages, pull out his stitches, throw away his sling, and crack open his plaster cast.
Instead, for much of the day, Henry gave himself over to invalidism. He slept late and did not dress until midday. He neglected not only the apple business but also the welfare of his animals. He threw no sticks for Sandy to retrieve, and Buck got no more exercise than what he provided himself in his small corral. The doctor advised Henry to raise and rotate his injured shoulder to prevent muscle atrophy, but Henry kept his arm pinched close to his side. He spent so many hours staring out the window that Sonja wondered if grief, unable to get a firm grip on Henry after John’s death, had now finally caught up to her husband and was pulling him down. Only late in the day did Henry come to life.
Then he would get into his truck, and, though it was difficult for him to maneuver the gearshift with his left hand, somehow he would manage and drive off. When Sonja listened for him to return at night, she could sometimes hear him approach because the transmission whined as Henry tried to avoid shifting down. When he came to bed, he smelled of beer and cigarettes.
On one of the evenings when she knew he was about to leave, she followed him out of the house. She didn’t say anything to him—she wanted him to want to stay home, not to be scolded into it—but when he climbed into the truck’s cab, she walked to the passenger’s side and stood there, waiting to be explained to, to be invited in, to be merely spoken to. But Henry simply drove away, with Sonja walking alongside the truck until she could not match its speed. Even then, she kept going. June was at a friend’s house, so if nothing was going to hold Henry at home, why should Sonja stay?
She walked without a destination in mind until she came to Denmark Road, and only then did she realize she was moving in the direction of the only door that something other than pity or good manners had invited her to enter.
When she arrived at the mailbox bearing the Weaver name, she stopped at the bottom of the long, rutted driveway and stared up at the grand house. She could start up the drive, but what would she say when he answered the door? You asked me to come, so I came? And if he didn’t remember his offer? She could hardly argue her way inside. Worse yet, what if he looked at her and, like Henry driving away with her beside the truck, simply didn’t see her? Twice in one day? That would be too much, too much. She turned and walked back the way she came.
A week later, Sonja repeated her experiment, but this time she did not follow Henry out of the house. She anticipated his departure, and she went out ahead of him. When he came out and climbed into the truck, she hurried to her position right at the point where the drive curved and sloped away from the house, and she did not stand in the weeds beside the gravel but just on the edge of the drive itself and on Henry’s side of the truck. He would have to see her and, one way or another, alter his path.
He did not honk his horn or lean out the window and yell at her to step back. Neither did he stop and ask her quietly why she was standing there. All the while staring straight ahead, Henry turned the steering wheel slightly and drove so close to Sonja she could have reached out and touched Henry on the arm. But she did not, and as the truck slowly passed, Sonja caught a glimpse of herself in the side-view mirror. She was sure Henry was not looking at the same reflection.
The following day, when June was in school, Sonja set out again for Denmark Road, and when she came to the Weaver house, she did not hesitate at the bottom of the hill. She walked right up the driveway, past the big house with its many windows, and on to the cabin.
She didn’t need to know the right words. She only had to watch the artist’s eyes. If his pupils widened at the sight of her, that would be enough.
20
Even when Henry finally shook off the lethargy he had been draped in following his accident, he still had trouble getting back to work. He set out to prune his trees, and with his first attempt to work a saw back and forth the pain in his shoulder became so severe he had to stop. He tried shifting the tool to his left hand, but if he kept working that way the job would take forever, so the saw was soon back in his right hand and he was trying to push and pull his way through the pain.
It wasn’t pain alone that hindered him. Whenever he extended his arm beyond a certain point, something in his shoulder seized, as though bone suddenly jammed against bone, and he had to turn his entire torso to free the joint. Then, for a minute or two, his whole arm hummed with an ache that felt like an electrical current.
Frustrated, he brought the saw down, and stepped back from the tree. He looked up and down the orchard’s snowy lanes and wondered when— or if—Max Sherry would appear.
Max Sherry was a sour, tough little man who had worked in the House family’s orchards for decades, though not in continuous service. At irregular intervals—just often enough so relying on him became impossible— Max would vanish without warning or explanation. Some said he was running from the family of a man he had come close to killing with a wrench when they worked together at a shipyard in Sturgeon Bay. Another rumor assigned to Max a wife and children somewhere whom he occasionally visited. Still another story, the most improbable of all, made Max a wealthy eccentric who worked only because he wanted to rub elbows with the common folk. Henry’s father had dismissed all these theories. “He’s a drunk, pure and simple,” Mr. House used to say. “And like all drunks, he goes off on a bender now and then. Either that or he’s holing up somewhere drying out.” But Henry’s father also spoke highly of Max Sherry as a worker. “He knows the apple business, and if he shows up, he ’ll give you full value for your dollar.” When Max wanted to work, the Houses were always willing to hire him.
Today, however, Henry was not at all confident he would see Max. That morning, the thermometer outside the kitchen window read only twelve degrees, and what little relief daylight brought was more than offset by the wind that rose with the sun. The cold, as if it had teeth, eyes, and a black heart, went unerringly for any exposed skin—Henry’s face or wrist when he lifted his arm to saw—and bit hard. Henry couldn’t blame Max if he chose to stay indoors and count his fortune, write to his wife, or see how much space he could free up in a fifth of whiskey. Henry wondered too if he had started the job too early. You didn’t want to do the dormant pruning until you could be sure the temperature wouldn’t drop below zero again. But since he was already out there, and alone, he might as well get on with it.
Just as he reached this moment of resignation, Henry saw someone coming his way. Max was on snowshoes, the only means to navigate the knee-high drifts that filled the pathless woods to the east of the orchard. Henry waved to him, and Max kept trudging forward, though he offered no sign in response.
Max finally stopped ten feet from Henry. Max’s dress varied little according to season. He wore the same pac boots and wool cap all year round and the same canvas chore coat September to May. In the coldest weather, the flaps came down on his cap, and he layered as many shirts and sweaters under his coat as he could.
“I thought you’d be coming from the other direction,” Henry said. His jaw had stiffened from the cold, and it felt as though words were stones he had to work his mouth around.
“I been staying over at Bertram’s lately,” Max said.
“How’s that boy of theirs?” If Henry remembered correctly, Harv and Mary Bertram had a son born within months of John House.
“They got him rigged up with some kind of special boot to fix his foot. Clumps around the house like a horse with one shod hoof.”
Henry nodded toward the few trees he had managed to prune so far. “You can see I haven’t made much progress. I don’t know how you want to proceed. I’ve got a lopper, shears, and another saw over there in the truck.”
Max took a long look at the tree Henry had been working on, and the expression on his face took Henry back to childhood and his first attempt to help out with the family business. Then, now, and in all the intervening years, Max’s coldly appraising eye seemed to find the efforts of the boss’s son wanting.
“I di
dn’t come out here to trim trees,” Max said.
If the cold had not made speech a special exertion, Henry might have blurted out what came instantly to mind—then what the hell did you come out here for?—but given Max’s prickly nature a remark like that would probably have done nothing but cause him to turn around and walk back in his own tracks. Henry waited, and Max soon continued.
“You ain’t going to like what I got to say. Unless you already know.”
Henry guessed that Max no longer wanted to work in the House orchards. Fine. Perhaps Henry couldn’t hire a man who knew the labor of apples as well as Max Sherry, but more dependable hands could certainly be found. And a damn sight less peevish. If Henry had to, he’d lean once again on friends and family.
Max said, “I seen your wife naked.”
Henry had been standing on that spot long enough to pack down the snow, and he had the sudden strange feeling that he had better remain exactly where he was, that if he stepped onto untrodden snow he might sink through and keep right on sinking, as if firm earth was nowhere but where he stood.
And yet shouldn’t he barrel into Max Sherry? Take a swing at him and knock him on his ass? Wasn’t that what a man was supposed to do after he heard the kind of remark that Max just made?
And yet Henry still couldn’t make himself move. The very idea of a fight out there in the cold seemed ridiculous. Their hands were gloved, and their bodies were padded with layers of clothing. And then there was the problem of Henry’s shoulder. If he experienced that much pain sawing a branch, what would throwing a punch feel like?
But if Henry were honest with himself he would admit that neither the temperature nor his shoulder was the real reason he didn’t try to hit Max Sherry. The truth was Henry felt immediately defeated, although this feeling was not the type associated with losing a contest or a match. This defeat came before the game even began. It was very similar to what he felt when he learned his son had died.
