The guard patted down Talmadge.
Do you have any gun on you? Any knife?
No, said Talmadge, and then remembered his pocketknife, took it from his pocket, and handed it to the guard, who placed it on a shelf beneath the counter.
Pick it up on your way out.
The guard asked Talmadge to disassemble the canvas sack and laid the contents on the counter. Talmadge pulled out the magazines, the packages from Caroline Middey—I’ll have to unwrap these, sir—and then the loose apples, the sleeve of lemon drops tied with twine. Candy, said Talmadge, and the guard eyed him warily, and then turned to weigh the apples on a scale at his back. As he did so, Talmadge felt within the bag at the last item in there, Angelene’s gift. He did not want to hand it over to the man, did not want him to cut into the carefully tied twine. Did not want that small tag “For Della” in the impressive script to be damaged or, for that case, seen by another person. He wanted to give Della one gift untouched by the guard, and unseen even by him, Talmadge. And so before the man turned around again, Talmadge slipped the box into his jacket pocket without even so much as a tremor of his hand or of his voice when he answered the guard when asked if that was all.
You have to leave some of these apples, said the guard. You’re over limit here.
Can you save them for her? Talmadge said, just as the warden came out of the open door and beckoned to him. Talmadge repacked the sack, only taking two apples—I’ll get the others when I come out—and the guard placed the apples on the shelf under the counter without comment.
Talmadge followed the warden into the jail. His ears felt immediately stuffed with cotton wool. It was dim, quiet. The air smelled of cigarette smoke and humidity.
He coughed.
We usually have you go to another room—we have a room for when visitors come—but unfortunately it was flooded last week. . . . Did you get rains down there? No? And we have men still in there working on it. Damaged some of the floor, which is a shame. It’s the original floor, pine boards— The warden paused. But she’s the only one here right now, and it doesn’t hurt, I suppose, to leave you here. Twenty minutes, no more. And I’m keeping the door open. You call the guard if you need anything—
But Talmadge did not hear these last words, or witness the warden leave, because he had seen Della.
She sat on the edge of the bed. Only after a minute did she turn her head to him. It was a brief glance, not scared so much as alert and disbelieving—as one looks at a ghost—and then she looked ahead of her again. All this while hardly moving her body.
Several minutes passed in silence.
Hello, he said. Then, in a voice that belied its message: You look well.
Again she turned her face to him, briefly.
He removed his hat.
Was she scared? Was that it? He did not anticipate this, that she would not speak to him.
He stood there awkwardly.
We found out where you were. I came the last time. You got my letter? I was here before—
Down the hallway, outside the door, the guard cleared his throat. Somewhere in the jail a faucet dripped.
Then Della wiped her nose with her forearm. When she cleared her throat, he strained to listen, to hear what her voice might sound like now. But she did not speak.
They told me what happened—
But he should not speak of that. Her features tightened. It was a very slight change, and he could sense it more than see it. She put her hands on the mattress, moved slightly.
I’ve been talking to the Judge about when you get out. When you get out, we’ll—
It was not the time to speak of it. Why was he speaking of it?
He lifted the canvas sack after a moment.
These are for you. From—all of us. From me, and Caroline Middey, and Angelene.
She glanced at him.
He reached inside the bag.
Come over here, I’ll hand these things to you. I have to take the sack back with me.
It seemed she would not move, but then she got up and came over to the bars. He had the impression when she rose from the bed that she was larger—she had grown—but as she came closer he thought she had shrunken. It wasn’t a normal shrunkenness. What was left of her body was her eyes, and her torso—muscular but also tough-poor in the mean way of those without a home, who live in the weather. Her face—her expression—was faraway and strange. It lied that she knew nobody on the earth. There was the hardness to her mouth: he wanted to touch it, suddenly, wanted to change it, to when she was a child and was characterized by dumb passion. He had not liked that expression then, but it was preferable to this distance, this resignation. He wanted to bring back her former pain. But this mouth was beyond pain. If he were to slap it, it would not change. Her eyes were both beautiful—black-dark as always—and empty. He wanted to touch her through the bars, he wanted to reach inside and grab hold of her arms, not so much as to shake her but to squeeze her. As she reached toward him—he was offering her a magazine now—he glimpsed a tattoo on the inside of her small, hard wrist.
One by one he handed her the gifts, her arms becoming uncomfortably full. At his prompting, she deposited the magazines and candy, the fruit, on the bed and stood in the center of the room and unwrapped the packages from Caroline Middey—he had rewrapped and tied them messily after the guard inspected them; held up, awkwardly, the leather pants and the lilac-colored shirt. On her face utter blankness. The pants might be all right, she might wear those, he thought; but the shirt was something else. It was ridiculous, he thought—she would never wear it—but it was something she would have worn when she was younger, it was something she would have worn to supper, once in a great while, after washing her face in the creek and brushing her hair and letting it fall thick over her shoulders. That was the other thing; her hair was cut short, curved close to her skull. It made her eyes look large, owlish.
This is from Angelene, he said, and reached inside his pocket and withdrew the box. After a moment she came forward and took it from him through the bars. She did not open it, but stood holding it.
He looked into the corner of the cell.
If there’s anything you need, you should tell the warden. Tell the warden and—
I don’t need anything from you.
He looked at her.
She went to the bed and sat down in the position he had first observed her, and stared ahead. The gifts were scattered around her, some of the butcher paper on the floor.
He would remember how she had looked at him then—once, slowly, with blankness—before he moved down the hallway, toward the opening of the jail. And also he would remember those words, that phrase—I don’t need anything from you—the only phrase she had said to him that day, in her measured voice that was without emotion, without animosity even. It played in his mind, and he checked for emotion but constantly found none—I don’t need anything from you—and it was not her, he thought, but it was her, he had gone to see her and this is what she had said to him, and he thought about this as he made his way down the hallway and then out past the guard, on the way to the boardinghouse, and then as he was sleeping and failed to sleep—she turned her face to him, slowly, with hatred now—and the next day, on the train. I don’t need anything from you. But you do, he wanted to tell her—you do need something from me. But he did not know what it was. Like her, he did not know what it was.
Della recalled the day she had first seen him, that day in town when she and Jane stood on the street platform, waiting for him to fall asleep so they could steal his fruit. She had been amazed that day, through her hunger, at how slowly he had moved, how alone he seemed. Or maybe this was something she thought later. He was quite large, and tall, but he did not scare them in the least. And in the beginning, when they were all together, Jane kept aloof from him, and Della knew that she should too, but there were those weeks in the orchard when she followed him, and he was kind to her. His kindness was there—it had not changed—as he reached thr
ough the bars, his hands clutching the top of the bag.
He was speaking, but she had not been paying attention. He reached forward and gripped one of the bars. She stared at his knuckles. She realized, when she stole a glance at his face under the brim of his hat—the world of his face—that he was utterly familiar to her.
What did she say to him? I don’t need anything from you. But that wasn’t important. What one said wasn’t important.
When he was gone, she went to the window and looked out, but couldn’t see him.
He slept little on the train to Cashmere. The motion and the constantly changing landscape outside the window gnawed at him and kept him awake. He was dismayed by the thought—his mind kept coming back to it—that he could board a train in Chelan and be delivered to Cashmere the same day. This was the reason for the confusion that kept welling in him, that his mind would not fully accept. And each time he had to reassure himself that such a thing was possible, that he lived in a time when it was possible; and wasn’t that grand? His body did not understand; he had been upset the other time as well, taking Angelene to the ocean. His stomach gripped, he was distracted, kept drawing his face to the window to verify that it was true: he was in Chelan before, but he had left that place, and soon he would be in Cashmere; but that morning he had been at the boardinghouse in the city in which he had seen her. It seemed impossible that he could hold those two places—Chelan, where she was imprisoned, and the orchard, where she was not—in his body at once, that his body could access both places in the realm of one day. It did not seem right. It was the rapidity that overwhelmed him and bothered his sensibility. He had moved slowly all of his life. He was used to seeing things drawn out of themselves by temperature and light, not by harsh action.
But this was something different. This was how people lived, now.
But what did she do? said Angelene. She and Caroline Middey sat on the porch, peeling potatoes. What had preceded this question—this outburst—was a timid line of inquiry, begun by the girl, and paced out slowly so as not to jar Caroline Middey, not to upset her. But when Angelene received vague answers—She’s led a different life than you or I, poor dear; or, She just came to her senses, bless her, she’s taking responsibility for her actions; and that from someone who had always been honest with her and avoided simple answers, told her straight what she thought, what the facts were—finally she lost patience and asked the question, the answer to which Caroline Middey kept stepping around—
What did she do?
Caroline Middey paused in her work, and then wiped her brow with the back of her hand. It was as if she hadn’t heard Angelene, but Angelene knew she was thinking, and would speak when she was ready.
Well, I’m going to tell you, said Caroline Middey. And it’s going to be something to take in, all right, but I’m warning you—she lifted her eyes from her work—you will want to judge her, and you are allowed that, I suppose, but it is also your responsibility as . . . part of her—family—to know the whole story about her. Well, she stabbed a man. Yes. And that’s terrible. Just terrible. But—we do not know the whole story, not even me, not even Talmadge. He and the Judge are sorting it out. She stabbed a man—we don’t know why, not really, or who he was—and then she turned herself in. That’s what’s happening. But I doubt we know the half of it.
Angelene listened carefully. She did not know if she was unimpressed by such news—if she had been expecting it to be something like that, violent—or if she was numb from the shock of it. She hardly felt anything at all. What impressed her most was that Talmadge was visiting somebody who had stabbed someone.
Did he die? said Angelene. The man?
We don’t even know that, said Caroline Middey.
Two guards and the warden came into Della’s cell before breakfast, and the warden told her to step into the corner and remain there: they were going to search her cell for weapons.
There aren’t any, she said.
Kindly step back, Della.
She did as she was told. What shocked her was that he had called her Della. He had always called her Miss Michaelson before. She did not know why it bothered her so much.
She stood with her back to them so she wouldn’t have to watch what they were doing. They found another stick in the middle stages of being sharpened, and her collection of stones. A bottle.
This is very bad, said the warden quietly, as he passed her. The guards shuffled behind him. The door was closed, locked behind them; and she was left alone.
Talmadge immediately forgot about, but was revisited, days later, by the warden’s phrase: how Della had been “a fount of information when she wanted to get in there,” meaning the jail. Talmadge had been surprised, at the time, that the warden had put it that way. Why on earth would anybody want to be incarcerated? Or—he forced himself to ask the question—why would Della?
Maybe the answer was simple. It was the end of winter—or was it early spring?—when she had turned herself in. Maybe she was cold, and hungry. Warmer weather was coming; but maybe she could not wait any longer. He assumed, at the time of her confession, she was itinerant. Maybe—because of her physical state—she was not in her right mind. He was able to imagine that much: in such a situation, he would concede the possibility of certain mental weakness.
And maybe, after turning herself in, she realized what she had done—confessed to something terrible, and untrue—and was ashamed to retract her story.
As for her attacking this other man at the jail—Talmadge did not believe the man totally innocent. He had most likely called to Della, teased her. Provoked her. Talmadge did not believe the warden’s claim that Della and the men had no contact—of course they did. He did not see how the warden could be so naive. Della and the men lived in the same environs. Physical contact was only part of the potential harm.
Della had her reasons, he believed, for everything. He just needed to talk to her, to understand what had happened—the truth, if you will—so that he would know how best to help her. He had been overwhelmed upon seeing her the first time; but the next time he would gather all the information and not accept silence or any evasion; he would have to be prepared, he would have to be stern. Even intimidating, he thought; though he did not know exactly what that meant, or how it would manifest—
Now the warden made the guards sweep the yard for objects that could be made into weapons.
But the yard was large.
On her tour around the perimeter, in a depression at one end of the yard, near the fence, was a sort of quarry—the smaller stones had been collected by the guards, and only the larger, half-submerged stones remained. There, shining for a moment in the sagebrush—but was it a mirage?—was a flat green bottle, most of the surface coated in dust. A long-legged spider crawled out of the mouth as she took it up.
Her back was to the courthouse, where the guard might or might not have been watching. She fit the bottle into her waistband and pulled her shirt over it. Smoothed her shirt and glanced over her shoulder. But nobody was watching, nobody was paying attention. She continued onward, toward the other end of the yard.
Angelene preferred usually to dress in dull, unassuming frocks, complete with her signature straw hat when she went out into the sun or on wagon rides to town, but for her birthday she wore dresses the shades of pale flowers. Also she washed her hair and braided it over her shoulder, as she had when she was very young. It was he who had braided her hair then, securing the ends with bits of twine tied very tight. He had never questioned her about this birthday ritual where she dressed remarkably different from her usual self; thought, somehow, his drawing attention to it would embarrass her.
The day she turned fourteen, a week after he came back from his second trip to Chelan, he came out of his bedroom in the early morning to see her preparing breakfast. The last year or so she had been waking before him—at dawn, or just after—and spent the mornings alone, outdoors, walking, looking at the fruit. Thinking her thoughts, some of which she told him a
nd others not. This morning she glanced at him, brought him coffee as he sat at the table. She wore the pale purple dress Caroline Middey had sent with him two weeks before, as an early present. It was, he thought, made of the same material as Della’s new shirt, the one Caroline Middey had sent with him as a gift. The morning was cold; the door stood open, and the girl had wrapped a shawl around her shoulders. The way she gathered the shawl across her front, he thought, was distinctly womanly. She glanced at him again, and said: What?
You look nice today.
Well— She turned back to the stove and stirred the eggs. Blushing.
Caroline Middey arrived late morning. She looked out at the men and horses below as if she had seen them every day of her life, and told Angelene to help her unload the sacks of groceries from the wagon.
There was a ritual to this day: the men would have arrived two or three days beforehand and begun their work in the trees, and then on the day itself, Caroline Middey would arrive, with the groceries necessary to feed twenty people. Bread and corn stew and pickled vegetables this year, with strawberry cake. It was her contribution, said Caroline Middey, when Talmadge tried to give her money for it. He tried to give her money every year, and every year she refused him. Besides this, she would have another gift for the girl; the dress that she had sent with Talmadge before did not count. Spreading out the gift-giving like this was her way of reassuring herself that she was not spoiling the child. But she had another gift for the girl, stowed up with her in the wagon; she would present it after they had eaten, when Talmadge would give her his gift as well, and Clee.
The men this year had arrived two days before. In the morning the wrangler reminded them of the girl’s birthday, the day they would all take off work early and participate in a feast up on the lawn before the cabin. They worked until noon and then hiked to the upper pool to wash. Afterward they dressed in their fine town clothes if they had them, or at least made an effort to look polished. There was a lot of goofiness with flowers and grass; flowers in their buttonholes, crowns made of grass and cattails. (Some of these were given as gifts to Angelene, who took them and donned them all, or as many as she could, some unspringing from their knots; she crouched down to fetch them up again, tried to reassemble them, on her face her usual look of intense concentration.) Waiting for the call, some men milled about talking and watching the horses, others napped, and others, because they could not help themselves, drew again to the trees, began to do light work there. But all were waiting to be called at the particular time when they would be invited up to eat before the apricot orchard. Finally the time came; the girl went to the ledge above the creek and beckoned them with uncharacteristic boldness, and they traveled to the upper lawn, some settling in chairs or on the grass, some standing. Wordlessly, they took the food offered by Caroline Middey or the girl. They ate second and even third helpings if they were offered, but did not ever ask. Talmadge sat in one of the birchwood chairs on the grass, near the porch. Clee sat beside him, in the other chair; the wrangler beside him, perched on one of the walnut chairs that had been brought out; and Caroline Middey and the girl on the porch steps. They sat with plates of food in their laps.
The Orchardist Page 25
