Orchard

by Larry Watson

  “I know you didn’t even want to hear that,” Max said, “so maybe you don’t want the rest.”

  “I’m listening. Go ahead.”

  “Your wife’s been posing for that artist.”

  Henry feared he knew the answer, but he asked the question anyway. “Who?”

  “He’s got that big place off Denmark Road. Right below those orchards that used to belong to the Pepperdells.”

  Max’s identification wasn’t necessary. Two autumns ago, when Sonja’s precarious mental condition made a gun in the house too great a temptation and danger, Henry had sold his Winchester, and that artist was the buyer. And now, so Henry’s thinking went, the man had in his possession something else of Henry’s.

  “All right,” Henry said. “I know where the Pepperdell orchard is. Go ahead.”

  “I guess you didn’t know about her, eh? This artist’s got a cabin toward the back of his property, and that’s where your wife’s posing.”

  It occurred to Henry that Max had not yet spoken her name. “Sonja.”

  “I know your wife. We ain’t been introduced, but I know who she is.” Max looked into the distance the way some men glance at their watches. “Maybe you don’t want to hear any more until you talk to her.”

  “I’m still listening.”

  “If that painter’s got shades in that cabin, he don’t bother pulling them. Not even on the days your wife’s there in her birthday suit.”

  By monitoring the steam of his breath, Henry could gauge the modulation of his response. As long as the little clouds came out at the same rate, as long as each was the same size as the one preceding it, he was fine.

  “Ernie Glaser was the one first discovered her. He was back in those trees for one reason or other—”

  “When was this?”

  Max looked exasperated at the interruption. “Late summer? Early fall? I ain’t sure. There was still plenty of leaves on the trees, I know that. Anyway, Ernie found out there’s a spot on that hill where you can see right down into the cabin. And there’s enough cover so they ain’t likely to spot you from inside.”

  “And it didn’t take Ernie long to spread the word.”

  Max shrugged. “He didn’t tell too many. Ernie didn’t want a big crowd back there.”

  “No, that might close down the show.”

  “What the hell do you suppose I’m doing now? I tell you about what your wife’s been up to, and you’re going to bring down the curtain. Ernie won’t like it. A few others won’t be too happy either. They find out I’m the one told you, they’ll kick my ass here to Sunday.”

  “And what makes you think I’m not going to do the same? A man hears something like this about his wife, it’s not like he wants to say thank you to the one who brings the news.”

  Max simply stared darkly at Henry, and for a long moment, neither man spoke. The boughs of the apple tree creaked with cold, and a knee-high gust of snow blew through the orchard as if it had been swept by a broom. Finally, without taking his eyes from Henry, Max Sherry brought his hand out from his coat pocket. He did not hold the pistol by its grip or trigger guard. Instead, he held it in his palm as if he were proffering an object for inspection.

  Henry guessed the revolver to be a .38, and hard-used at that. The plating was worn and chipped in so many places the gun showed as much black as nickel. The bottom half of the grip was wrapped with electrician’s tape.

  “Looks like you came prepared for anything,” Henry said.

  “Everything but pruning trees.”

  “So if I took this message wrong,” said Henry, “what were you going to do—kill me?”

  Apparently satisfied that Henry was not about to mount a charge, Max slipped the pistol back in his pocket. “Maybe shoot you in the foot.”

  Henry stared up into the gnarled branches of the tree next to him. And to think that only moments ago the most daunting element in his life was the pruning of apple trees.

  Max must have interpreted Henry’s long gaze as that of a man whose greatest concern was still his orchard. Max lifted his knees high and walked a few steps closer to the tree. “You let your leader get too tall here.”

  His father’s words came back to Henry: Watch Max when it comes to pruning—he’s got a good eye. Mr. House said he himself expected to be a good pruner someday—if he lived to be a hundred.

  “I could still use a hand,” Henry said.

  “Too damn cold. For me and the trees. This wind keeps up and we lose our cloud cover, it’ll get down below zero tonight.”

  Max Sherry’s word had been enough for Henry to believe that Sonja was taking her clothes off for another man, yet now Henry needed evidence to confirm the truth of Max’s statement about the weather. Henry looked off to the western sky. Sure enough. The clouds were fraying, and patches of pale, icy blue were freezing their way through.

  “I’m not sure what to do,” Henry said.

  “Well, if you can put this pruning business off for another week, I can help you out,” Max said. “For now, maybe you ought to get on home and straighten out that wife of yours. Because I have to tell you: If she keeps putting on a show, I ain’t going to look the other way.”

  Henry was twelve the first time his father took him grouse hunting. They had been walking through heavy woods when a bird fewer than ten feet from Henry burst from the leaves and whirred into flight. Not only did Henry fail to raise his shotgun to his shoulder in time to fire, he had jumped back, startled.

  “Hey,” his father said, laughing, “we’re hunting them—remember?”

  His heart still racing, Henry confessed, “It happened so fast—I didn’t know what to do!”

  The incident stayed with Henry because, typical of remembered moments, it bore little resemblance to most of his life’s events. He almost always knew what to do, and it was not reason or planning that showed him the way but instinct, exactly the faculty that failed him that day in the woods. For the most part, Henry moved through his days trusting that when action was required something inside him would automatically bring forth the right one. He no more had to devise in advance what he would say or do in a situation than he had to plan to set a hook or stiff-arm a tackler.

  Yet now, as he turned off the road at his own home and saw Sonja— she was shoveling the section of the driveway that always drifted over when the wind blew—he felt just as he had on that day when a ruffed grouse exploded from the dry leaves and frightened Henry into inaction. And if he could not trust that the right response would be ready now when he confronted his wife, perhaps Henry should never have put his faith in that power.

  She put up the shovel, and Henry rolled down his window as he drove the truck abreast of her. He stopped, but he did not keep his foot on the brake. He shifted to first and kept the truck in place by giving it just a little gas and holding the clutch just so.

  Smiling, Sonja stepped toward him. She wore an old felt hat of his and tied it down with a wool scarf knotted under her chin. The wind and cold had reddened her cheeks. If she didn’t put lotion on tonight her face would be chapped and dry for days.

  “Are you finished already?” she asked.

  “Finished? Jesus. I’ll be at that job for weeks. No. I quit. It’s too goddamn cold.”

  She winced at his language.

  “For the trees,” he added. “If you make any cuts now and the temperature drops, you can damage the tree. And it’s going to be cold tonight.”

  She tilted her head away from the stiffening wind. “The cold gets inside the tree?”

  “Something like that. I’ve explained it to you before.” He pointed to the mound of snow she had piled up in her shoveling. “I told you I was going to do this.”

  “I wanted to help. You said you’d be busy all day—”

  “I’m not a goddamn cripple, you know. I can lift a shovel. Or I could if you weren’t in such a hurry to beat me to every job around this place.”

  “I’m helping—”

  “Helping? You
think you’re helping? You’re making me feel helpless is what you’re doing. A man needs—”

  Sonja flicked the shovel up so the flat back of the blade clanged against the truck’s door. “A man needs! Don’t say to me what a man needs! I’m trying to take care of this family, to see that we are all fed and dressed and warm and that we have electricity and gasoline. . . . I should care about your man’s pride? You would have us freezing and wearing rags so you can walk around with your pride!”

  Both the suddenness and the intensity of her anger surprised him. It must have been there all along, waiting to be detonated. Her anger? What about his? All right—if all it took was his presence to set her off, then he wouldn’t even give her that. He leaned out the window to look behind him, then pushed the clutch in all the way and let the truck roll slowly back down the drive.

  “Yes, go. Go!” Sonja shouted. “Go drink your beers and feel sorry for yourself!”

  He hesitated only once and that was to roll up his window. Sonja had charged after him, flinging shovelful after shovelful of snow at the truck. Once the flakes were in the air, however, they turned and flew back at her, as if the wind knew that on this day right was on Henry’s side. Where, after all, was the harm in drinking a few beers, especially set alongside the sin of a wife taking off her clothes for another man?

  Henry returned at an hour when he could be reasonably certain Sonja would be asleep. He plugged in the truck’s head-bolt heater and turned toward the house. From horizon to horizon stars sprinkled the sky. Since the wind had given up its howl hours earlier, nothing competed with the sound of the snow squeaking underfoot. He checked the thermometer nailed to the porch post, but Henry had no doubt Max’s prediction had proved out. Yes, there it was: four below.

  Sonja was taking advantage of the cold. She had set the folding clothes rack outside the back door and hung a few items out to dry. The towels and washcloths and pillowcases would freeze stiff and then could be brought inside. They had first used this drying method with diapers. June’s? John’s? To know for certain Henry would have had to recall their birth dates and then work back toward the winter months. But he didn’t know for certain how long each child had been in diapers. The hell with it.

  He felt like kicking over the rack. She was so goddamn eager to do every job around here, she could do this one twice. But then he noticed: Those were his socks and T-shirts bent over the middle dowel, so it would be his own clothing he would be knocking onto the porch’s dirt and packed snow. A similar thought had occurred to him earlier when he was staring into one of the many brandy old-fashioneds he drank at the Lakeside Tavern. Then, he had been contemplating ways he could punish Sonja for posing for that artist. When his anger dropped him into the colder, darker zones, he considered beating her, pummeling her until purple rosettes of bruises bloomed all over her pale body. Or maybe there’d be no beating, just a single punch. He’d break her nose. How would that artist like her then, her beauty smudged by Henry’s fist? But wait a minute—exactly whom would Henry be punishing? My God, no one loved Sonja’s body more than he did, and after all these years he still found her as exciting to his sight as to his touch. That body, he thought, wasn’t it as much his as the socks he wore? If he broke or blemished her body it would be like damaging one of his own possessions. Yet if she was his, how could she have slipped so far from his control?

  21

  Usually when she entered the studio he was busy with something— mixing paint, moving a chair or a table or a prop so it caught the light just so, or, if they would be working en plein air—and what if she dusted her speech with Norwegian the way he dusted his with French?—he might be packing the old toolbox that contained all the supplies he would need for their hours outside. But when Sonja came in today, she saw him nowhere. And yet he had called out for her to come in.

  “I’m right here,” he said softly. Startled, Sonja turned in the direction of his voice.

  He had rolled that old office chair into the darkest corner of the room, and there he sat, one foot up on the seat just as he had once posed her. The smoke from his cigarette rose into a shaft of sunlight, and Sonja found it unsettling that she could see that drifting cloud so clearly when Weaver’s face was not visible at all.

  “Am I early?” she asked.

  “Have you ever been anything but right on time?” He exhaled a great plume of smoke. “No, the workers of the world should all be as punctual and obedient as you.”

  She wasn’t sure—something in his posture or his speech made her think he had been drinking. Although Weaver was never drunk in her presence, this going off to a dark corner to brood and smoke—Henry did that when he had too much to drink.

  “Should I make tea?” she asked. On a table by the door was an electric kettle with which Weaver or Sonja made tea when they took a break from the day’s work. Really, she only wanted a reason to move closer to the door, so strong was her foreboding.

  And he, as if he knew of her fear, pushed the chair out of the corner and rolled himself across the room. The casters rattling over the floorboards reminded Sonja of chattering teeth.

  How could she have had such difficulty seeing him? He was dressed in a white shirt and trousers and his pale little feet were bare.

  “We need,” he said, “to discuss our arrangement.”

  Here it came. He would no longer need her to pose for him. No more of those white envelopes into which he carelessly folded the bills that mattered so much to her and so little to him. When he held out her pay, it was all she could do not to grab the envelope from him and run for home and there hide the money in the place where she was sure Henry would never find it—tucked inside the pages of her Norwegian Bible, a book she never opened but to make a deposit or a withdrawal.

  “How long have we been working together?” Weaver asked.

  Sonja knew, but she kept quiet. If he heard spoken the duration of time, he might have exactly the evidence he needed to confirm their partnership had gone on too long.

  He waved away his own question. “Doesn’t matter. Long enough. We’ve gone on like this long enough.”

  Yes, long enough for her to know what he truly wanted of her. Could she decide, in advance of his offer, what she would accede to in order to keep being paid? This, but not this . . . that, but not that . . .

  He rose from the chair, went to the door, opened it, and dropped his cigarette into the soft dirt. When he closed the screen he locked it. He coughed, and when he put his hand to his chest, he discovered that his shirt was halfway undone. He buttoned two of the buttons before he began to speak.

  “When our session is over today, I propose”—he coughed again—“I propose that you remain here.”

  “Here?”

  Weaver stood behind his chair and, leaning down on its arms, swiveled back and forth like a boy who could not stand still. “Well, not here literally. On the grounds. In the house. Or here—why not, if that’s what you prefer.”

  She glanced at the hook-and-eye latch on the screen door. “I would not go home?”

  “Don’t put it that way. Certainly you’d go home if you needed to. I’m not talking about imprisoning you. I’m asking you to stay.”

  “To live . . . forever?”

  He came out from behind his chair and walked toward Sonja. She had been barefoot on these floors, and she knew how uneven the boards were, how you had to be careful of the nails that had raised their heads over the years, but she didn’t warn him. This building, after all, was his.

  “Forever? Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean. Look, I know I’m not doing a very good job of this. I decided I’d ask you today, but I didn’t decide how I’d phrase it. And now I’m not sure if I should present it as an argument or a business proposition or as . . . or if I should simply say how important is it to me that you say yes.”

  “Tell me,” Sonja said, keeping herself between Weaver and the door, “about business.”

  He backed up and then lowered himself into the chair aga
in. When she posed she could stand tirelessly in one place for more than an hour, yet now she was envious that he could sit while she had to remain on her feet.

  “That’s not the inducement that I would have hoped you’d most want to hear, but very well.” He lit another cigarette, and when he exhaled Sonja was sure she detected the smell of whiskey mingled with tobacco smoke. “I’d continue to pay you for the actual modeling sessions, whether the rate should change—we can discuss that. Living here, you would have no expenses. I’d see to your needs. Your wishes, for that matter. You’ve never asked me about my finances, but you must know I’m a wealthy man. Modestly wealthy, but still. You would be well provided for. Better than at any other time in your life, I’m guessing.”

  “I have a daughter,” Sonja said. “And a husband.”

  “And I have a wife. Did you think I proposed this in ignorance of the relevant facts? If you feel you can’t live without having your daughter with you, bring her along. I’ve had children under my roof before; I might find it a salutary experience to repeat.”

  “But my husband—he would not be welcome?”

  Weaver looked up at her as if he were trying to gauge her seriousness. “He would not.”

  “So he and your wife—they would be out in the cold, as they say?”

  “They’re old enough to know how to keep themselves warm.”

  “Just—the hell with those two, eh?”

  “The hell with them—exactly. If there was a way to do this without anyone being hurt, I’d be all for it. But that’s not possible, so let’s limit our losses as best we can. The most important consideration here—and I think all parties would agree, no matter how grudgingly—is my art. You, my dear, are essential to that. And that moves you and me to the top rung. If you say it’s not fair that the happiness of a few relatively innocent people be sacrificed, I would agree with you. But there you have it.”

  Sonja turned her back to Weaver and walked to a window. The chair’s squeak told her he was swiveling around to watch her.

  It was early enough in spring—the trees had not yet fully leafed out—that she could see clear through to the orchard at the top of the hill behind the cabin. Did those apple trees once belong to Henry’s family? She wasn’t sure; she only knew how scornful Henry was of the people who owned them now, how they neither pruned nor picked properly. Worst of all, Henry suspected they didn’t care about or need the apples at all; they wanted the orchard for nothing more than decoration and deer feed.