Orchard

by Larry Watson

  Each of the cabin’s windows framed a fiery dance so perfectly that it looked, just for an instant, as though someone had hung the cabin’s drab exterior walls with paintings of orange flames.

  31

  Weaver kicked slowly through the wet, charred remains of his studio, looking for signs of color. The fire’s ability to turn everything to a shade of gray to black fascinated him. In some instances—the red Folgers coffee can for example—the fire covered the object with black, and in others, the blaze found a way—the iron bed frame, most conspicuously— to bring out the blackness waiting in the material. Fire had the talents of an artist, an alchemist, and a conjurer, and Weaver was quite willing to pay obeisance where it was due.

  Fire, however, did not have the power of a god. Yes, it could devour every drawing or painting Weaver had stored in the cabin, it could destroy his brushes and pencils, it could reduce to ash every book and sketch pad in the bookcase—but every time Weaver found a streak, smear, blotch, or shadow of color, he felt it was a victory of sorts. There, for example, was a crimped, blackened paint tube, its label burned off, but when Weaver stepped on it, cadmium red squirted out, its oil separating immediately from the water of the sooty puddle it lay in. That little ooze of color—as without form as a child’s toy might be if its plastic melted in the blaze— was enough to reassure Weaver and make him feel as though the forces of composition and selection would find a way to triumph over the anarchy of fire, water, and air.

  Even as the cabin burned, Weaver had watched for changes in the flames’ colors. He thought, for instance, when the fire found his cache of canvases in the rafters or when the heat melted the lock on the old steamer trunk and the paintings hidden there curled up and then disintegrated, he might see a tiny flare of the flesh tone or lake blue he had worked so hard to mix just right.

  He saw none, of course, but then nothing about this entire experience proceeded according to expectation. Weaver would not have thought that he could watch his cabin and all his equipment, along with a lifetime of souvenirs, burn to the ground and feel nothing but a mild consternation over the time it would take to replace his materials and find new studio space. He would not have thought he could contemplate the loss of so much of his work, including all the Sonja pictures, and feel—was this possible?—something akin to relief. The quick pencil sketches and rapid watercolors, the cross-hatched pen-and-ink drawings and the large oils, some of which took months to finish—all, all blazing into ash. Yet Weaver thought, there, now no evidence would survive to prove that once he was so deeply in thrall to a woman that he was reduced to eyes and hands in her presence and neither pair could come as close to her as she had come to his heart. Weaver was free—nothing bound him to a technique or subject of the past. If he wanted, he could start anew. Maybe he’d show his critics a thing or two and become an Abstract Impressionist. Maybe he’d do nothing but watercolors of the sand and the sky for the rest of his life.

  And when the sheriff phoned Weaver with word of an arrest made in a Sturgeon Bay tavern, Weaver would not have thought the news could bring him so little satisfaction. Certainly he wanted Henry House behind bars, yet learning that he was there gave Weaver no special pleasure, another surprise since he was usually delighted when misfortune came to anyone who dared oppose, offend, or displease him. And no critic’s pen had ever threatened him the way Henry House’s gun and match had.

  For a moment, Weaver gave up on his search for color amid the ashes and picked up a piece of charred wood that the fire had shaved and sharpened to pencil size. He squeezed one end, and when it did not crumble in his fingers, he began to plan his first post-fire drawing. On paper as white as he could find, he’d sketch the remains of his studio, and he’d use this bit of char to make every line, even if the final result looked like nothing more than a sheet of smudges.

  While his hand was fairly trembling to start drawing, Harriet called out to him from halfway up the walk. “Ned, can you come inside for a moment? I’d like to show you something.”

  He stuck his pencil substitute into the pocket of his peacoat, dropped his cigarette butt into one of the few fire hose puddles that didn’t have a skin of ice on it, and, walking through what had once been a wall, followed his wife down to the house.

  Once he was inside, Harriet Weaver took her husband’s hand and led him up both flights of stairs until they stood outside the door to the attic. “Now close your eyes,” Harriet said, “and don’t open them until you’re inside.”

  She opened the door, and Weaver breathed in that musty, woody odor that always brought back his childhood—the attic in his parent’s house had served as his first studio. And perhaps in the days since the fire Harriet had already begun converting their attic into a workspace for Weaver. The area was heated, airy, and natural light came through the windows at each end. Additional construction would be required before it was an entirely satisfactory studio, but in the interim Weaver could work in the basement. No, he’d be better off buying or renting a small house somewhere in the county, a place where Harriet would have to do more than climb a few steps to see what he was up to. And once he found a suitable place he’d reveal its location to no one.

  He heard her pull the chain that turned on the light. “You can open them now,” she said.

  Harriet had been busy, all right. In a semicircle she had arranged boxes, trunks, an old rocking chair, its back and seat in need of recaning, a small dresser, even the girls’ rusty wagon; and leaning against or resting upon these objects were many of the drawings and paintings that Weaver thought had gone up in flames. The bulb still swayed on its cord, and in and out of the light appeared the painting of Sonja huddled in the dunes near Whitefish Bay, Sonja lying on the studio bed looking as though she were in her coffin, Sonja with her arms draped over the tree branch, Sonja braiding her hair, Sonja in the snow, on the beach, among the wildflowers . . . Sonja, Sonja, Sonja. They were not all there—that would have been impossible, but enough, enough. . . .

  Weaver turned to his wife. When she lay in the hospital bed with their firstborn child in her arms, Harriet had not looked any prouder than she did at this moment.

  Of all the questions he wanted to ask, Weaver could only stammer out the simplest: “How . . . ?”

  Harriet shrugged as if to minimize her accomplishment. “I didn’t do it all at once, if that’s what you’re wondering. Never more than one or two at a time. I tried to keep track of the finished works, and once you’d set them aside for a month or two, I thought it was safe to bring them up here. I’ve numbered and dated them, though I know those are only approximations—”

  “You thought it was safe?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. I could take a work out of the studio without your missing it.”

  “No, you’re right. I didn’t miss them.”

  “You haven’t seen them all. Look on the other side.”

  Dutifully, Weaver walked around Harriet’s display. Sonja with her arms in a pile of fallen leaves. Sonja gazing out at the whitecaps, her hair blown back. Sonja on the office chair. “I guess we’re lucky the crazy bastard didn’t torch the house too.”

  “I don’t know that lucky is a word I’d use to describe any part of this.”

  Sonja’s long neck, her strong jaw, Sonja’s hips and thighs, her breasts squeezed between her crossed arms . . . Weaver had to walk away before Harriet noticed his eyes welling up.

  From the south window, he couldn’t see any of the rubble, but the effects of the fire were plain. Extending a good twenty yards from the cabin, the snow-covered lawn was blackened by soot and ash.

  She would almost certainly think these tears had their source in gratitude, and why shouldn’t she? Hadn’t she saved from the flames the work that meant the most to him, the work that had consumed him—as though he himself had been burning? Wouldn’t Harriet, wouldn’t anyone, believe that Weaver would have gladly tossed into the fire every other work—the watercolors of the lake, the pen-and-ink drawings of the h
awk that hunted the grassy field north of the cabin, the oil painting of the old Ford pickup abandoned at the edge of Blay’s woods—that survived from that period if he could only save the Sonja pictures?

  How could Weaver make anyone understand that when he looked at a work as quick, simple, and understated as that chalk drawing of Sonja’s naked back that what he felt was not gratitude or relief or exultation but pain—pain was in every brushstroke, every palette-knife scrape, every pencil line, and when he walked through Harriet’s crude little gallery, he had to think, it’s not over, it’s not over, it’s not over, it’s not over.

  Once he was certain he wore an expression that would not be misinterpreted, Weaver turned back to his wife.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he blithely said. “Since you went to all that trouble over these pictures, I’m going to make a present of them to you. They’re yours, and you can do anything you like with them. You can sell them, you can let them sit up here and gather dust. You can build your own goddamn bonfire and chuck them in if you like. I don’t care. I have only one stipulation: If you decide to keep any or all of them, don’t hang one where I can see it. Because if you do, I swear to God, I’ll destroy it myself.”

  Harriet’s speechlessness could not have been more profound if Weaver had struck her. While she was searching for her tongue, Weaver pushed past his wife, and as he did he swatted at the electric cord, setting the bare bulb swinging wildly. As he descended from the attic, the steps themselves seemed to appear and disappear with the swaying light.

  He looked back only once. At the top of the stairs, shadows flickered across Harriet’s face and all the faces of Sonja arrayed under the rafters. As far as Weaver was concerned, darkness could take them all.

  Harriet Weaver could no doubt have made more money by selling the Sonja pictures one at a time, thus allowing each sale to generate suspense and interest in the next. However, once she decided to release the pictures, she entertained only one offer. Through Ed Lear, Harriet learned of a prospective buyer, the Texas oil millionaire Francis Taub, and she invited him to Wisconsin to see the works.

  Harriet had led her husband up the stairs, but this time she waited below while Lear and Taub went up to the attic. The two men saw the pictures arranged exactly as Ned Weaver had. Within an hour, they descended, and Taub was prepared to make an offer for the entire series. The amount he paid has never been made public, but James McCord, Ned and Harriet’s grandson, in a 1998 Atlantic essay in which he attempted to assess his grandfather’s place in twentieth-century American art, estimated that one year after Ned Weaver’s death his grandmother received $4 million for twenty-seven pictures of Sonja House.

  32

  Two days after his release from the state penitentiary in Waupun, Henry signed the papers to turn the last of his Door County property over to a man from Illinois who planned to build a miniature golf course on the small parcel of land that had been the site of the House family’s roadside fruit-and-cider stand. Once that transaction was completed, Henry could leave the state with nothing to compel him to return.

  Henry also walked out of prison a single man. Sonja had filed for divorce during his first year behind bars, and though not a court in the land would have refused her anything she asked for by way of a settlement, Sonja wanted nothing but the termination of the marriage. Through his sister and Nils Singstad, Henry heard that Sonja vacated their house soon after his arrest and that she and June moved to Minneapolis.

  And Minneapolis was where Henry intended to spend his first night out of Wisconsin. He checked into a motel on the city’s western edge, and once he was in his room he opened the telephone directory to the H’s. There were seven Houses listed but only one Sonja. She lived on Kenilworth Avenue and obviously in an apartment, since the number 3 followed the address. Finding her was so much easier than Henry expected that he was forced to the early realization that he didn’t know what he could say to her. It was a pattern familiar to Henry’s entire life, and prison had not rid him of the faith that he had only to plan step one and then the subsequent steps would take care of themselves. But just as he had once walked through a door with a gun in his hand and no sure notion of what would follow, so he sat in front of the telephone in the Tip-Top Motel with no idea of how he might represent himself to his ex-wife.

  He had not yet unpacked his suitcase, so he grabbed it from the bed and went back out to his truck. Within an hour of stopping in Minneapolis, Henry was on the road again. He drove through the night and into the following day, and he did not stop for more than gas and coffee until he arrived at the dusty western town where he would live out his remaining years. Henry chose Gladstone, Montana—or did it choose him?—because it seemed a place as unlike his native land as he could find. Whereas the verdant hills of Door County were narrowly straddled by the waters of Lake Michigan, Gladstone was surrounded by miles and miles of windflattened prairie, dry, gritty country in which no color existed that could not be found in a sparrow’s plumage.

  Henry found work with the Gladstone Parks and Recreation Department. He raked and limed the base paths at the baseball and softball diamonds and chalked the yard lines at the football field. He waxed the floor of the basketball court at the World War Memorial Building, and he pushed a broom across it at halftime. He flooded the rectangle that was the town’s skating rink and swept the ice. He mowed the block-long city park and weeded the flower beds along its margin. For these duties and others, Henry House was paid minimum wage, and he accepted it without complaint.

  Henry took at least one meal a day, usually supper, at Teed’s Frontier Café, and he soon began to keep company with Ann Teed, a pretty, plump widow four years older than Henry. Henry did not keep secret the fact that he was a divorced man who had once been imprisoned for arson, but Henry’s explanation of the circumstances of the crime—that he burned down the cabin of a man who had been sleeping with his wife—satisfied Ann. No one in the community was surprised when Henry House and Ann Teed were married.

  True to his vow, Henry did not return to Wisconsin, but a part of his past life, in the form of a recurring dream, followed him to Montana. On those troubled nights, it was apple harvest again, and Henry had to fill odd-size containers with fruit, the problem being that those dream apples were already on the ground, skittering and rolling in every direction like marbles on an uneven sidewalk. When Henry was able to get his hands on one, he found it had shrunk to the size of a pea. No matter how many of those apples he dropped into a bag, box, or basket, he knew he would never be finished with this harvest.

  But though this dream stayed with Henry until the end of his days, many of the details of his life in Door County gradually retreated to a country whose borders his memory could not cross. He could no longer remember which of his orchards were devoted to Jonathans and which to Cortlands. He couldn’t recall the name of the nursing home where his mother lived to the age of ninety or the price he paid for his first house. He couldn’t find his way to the Grouse River where he hunted ducks in the fall or to little Elm Lake where he fished for crappies and bluegills as a boy. He couldn’t bring back the faces of his children, and that he knew Sonja’s image from those paintings that had worked their way into the country’s cultural consciousness Henry did not count as testimony to his own powers of memory because that was not his Sonja but Ned Weaver’s.

  At Henry House’s death at the age of seventy-eight, his wife had his body cremated, and she scattered his ashes on the Montana prairie outside of Gladstone. After all, he seldom talked about his life in Wisconsin, and he answered so many questions about that time and place by saying “I don’t remember” that Ann Teed House had no reason to believe there was any other place on the planet where his remains belonged. And she certainly could not have known, given the many ways his memory failed him in his final years, that right up to his last hour he still remembered, indeed sometimes chanted to himself like the prayer to a god only he served, a telephone number that he never dialed: Fremont 5-22
32, Fremont 5-2232, Fremont 5-2232 . . .

  33

  The controversy that to this day swirls around Ned Weaver’s death began with the conflicting reports of the three eyewitnesses.

  Roger Spragg and Calvin Patent were having lunch at King’s Café, and their table was right by the west window, giving them a perfect view of the little egg-shaped bay that shared a name with the town of Fox Harbor. They first noticed Ned Weaver on the concrete pier and figured he must have walked down there from his gallery up the hill.

  While the two men watched, Ned Weaver climbed off the end of the pier and began to walk out onto the frozen bay. The month was March, and the county had enjoyed a spell of unseasonably warm weather. Spragg and Patent, lifelong ice fishermen, knew that once the ice became mushy and honeycombed with air pockets, it was no longer safe to walk on. Moreover, they were certain that Ned Weaver shared their knowledge of the conditions. Spragg did yard work for the Weavers, and he knew Ned Weaver to be an observant man who was conversant with the lake’s behavior no matter what the season. And certainly from the windows of his gallery Ned Weaver would have been able to note that for at least a week no fisherman had drilled a hole and dropped a line through the ice of Fox Harbor.

  For these reasons, Spragg and Patent were certain that Ned Weaver had stepped out on the ice knowing full well that at some point it would give way beneath him and he would drown.

  Which is exactly what happened. Well before Weaver reached the midpoint of the bay, he began to stumble as first one foot and then, a few yards farther on, the other went through the ice. He pulled himself upright each time, however, and kept moving awkwardly forward. But then he teetered as though he were trying to balance on a narrow curbstone, and when he toppled over onto his side, water surged up on each side of him with such suddenness it seemed as if the lake had been waiting to receive Ned Weaver. The lake gave him back eight days later, when his body washed up on the rocks at Cooley’s Landing, almost two miles north of Fox Harbor.