Had they heard of the Rock Island wheat chute? At first the wheat smoldered and burned in the pipe because of its speed and friction. Before the railroad came through Rock Island, there'd been a tram between Waterville and Orondo for carrying gunnysacks of wheat to the steamboat and for hauling coal back up. The Indians back then grew squashes and pumpkins in the bottom of Moses Coulee. They moved east when the sheep came in and farther east when the tractors came, the tractors fueled by sagebrush, bolts of pine, anything that burned, even greasewood. Ben's father had seen Hutterites up on the plateau who lived in hovels in the ground and boiled their soup on dung fires. He'd been to Soap Lake, where a sanatorium had been built by the muddy shore for sufferers from rheumatism, eczema, and gout. He'd been to the Yakima powwow at White Swan and to the Yakima horse races in the huckleberry country up in Indian Heaven. He'd floated logs through the Yakima Canyon on the spring floodwaters past Ellensburg and down to the mill near Selah. He said that where his grandfather had lived, just outside of Walla Walla, freight was carried toward Hell Gate on the backs of African camels. There were channeled scablands down that way, where rich, kilted Scotsmen ran ten thousand sheep herded by indomitable miniature dogs and by men who spoke the Basque tongue. Ben's father had traveled by steamboat once all the way to the mouth of the Columbia and had seen the Pacific Ocean. He'd also been on the railroad to Minneapolis and had prospected the Black Hills in South Dakota. He'd passed a summer at a placer mine north of Ketchikan, Alaska. He'd been to Chinatown in San Francisco, where he ate raw sliced octopus and squid and baby eels.
Wright Givens told of how his grandfather led west a train of covered wagons in 1879. J°hn Hale Givens was a fruit grower and nurseryman in the vicinity of Marion, Indiana, who built two wagons as soil beds in which he planted newly grafted fruit trees and bushes to bring across the plains. Apple starts, pears, cherries, plums, currants, gooseberries, peaches: they were canvased over for protection from weather, but on balmy days the canvases were removed and the traveling gardens bounced sun-drenched across the plains, hauled by teams of oxen. The Indians, Wright's grandfather claimed, had vouchsafed the westering party's passage in the belief that the traveling gardens were protected by the hand of the Great Spirit.
Wright Givens said that the boys' maternal grandfather had patented the Rainier Delicious apple. James Chandler purchased two dozen seedling trees from an itinerant peddler passing through Wenatchee—they turned out to be Golden Reinettes from Virginia—and when the offspring of one of these, sprung from a windfall, eventually produced an extraordinary fruit, huge apples growing mild yellow on each branch, he bought up the propagating rights. He built an iron cage around his tree to prevent the theft of bud sticks and took to promotion vigorously. In 1921, the American Pomological Society presented James Chandler with its Wilder Medal; in 1926, a carload of his apples was shipped to the men of the St. Louis Cardinals to honor their World Series triumph. The boys' grandfather had once been wealthy, but had invested with too much confidence in the stock market before it crashed in 1929.
The embers of the fire went quietly red while Ben sat listening. His father nodded across the coals, where Aidan was curled asleep on a log, his mouth hanging open. "Not interested," his father said, and shrugged.
"I am," said Ben. "Keep going."
"It's time for sleep," said his father.
In the morning they broke camp in the dark and rode up Stray Horse Canyon. Ben watched his breath boil off into the dawn, until his father motioned him alongside and pointed out the deep track of a buck, heart-shaped and split down the middle. The buck had passed the dark hours at the creek because there was no other running water, and now at first light was working west toward higher elevations. The track made an easy meander in the snow with the dewclaws readily visible, and finally they came across droppings in a pile, as if the buck had stopped unalerted. "This is good," said Ben's father. A quarter mile farther was an opening in the trees, but they held up below it in case the buck was watching his back track from a vantage point. They turned their horses directly up slope to keep the track below them.
They made the ridge top in gathering light and rode north, studying the hills on either side for signs that the buck had crossed ahead of them. They came to a saddle where no tracks showed, the world as still as if it had been painted, the snow loading up the boughs of pines in cumbersome white thick mantles. Wright Givens instructed his sons to tether the horses fifty yards downslope, then return to the ridge saddle. He took his Weatherby from its scabbard, turned up his coat collar, and pushed his hat down firmly. "This is good," he said again.
They sat with their backs to one another so that all points of the compass were covered. After forty minutes of waiting, Ben heard his fathers rifle click as the hammer was brought back into full cock. Turning, he saw a buck of modest size, in high alert with its gaze full on them, seventy yards down the hill, its sleek left flank exposed. There was no time for Ben to ponder things or to wish they might be different. His fathers Weatherby roared, and the buck buckled forward on tenuous forelegs, flailed weakly for a few seconds, and did not move anymore.
Bens heart beat wildly. He leaned against his father, who put a hand on his shoulder. "Looks like we got one," his father said.
They approached the deer cautiously. Wright Givens touched a stick against its eye. Then he knelt, looked closely, and showed them the place where the bullet had passed through the buck's hide. He explained how his bullet had splintered the left shoulder joint, next the spine just below the neck, and finally the right shoulder. There was blood on the snow underneath the buck, and he said it was good for the blood to drain and for the meat to cool quickly. Pointing with the tip of his dressing knife, he showed them the sticking place on the buck's soft chest, and then with no warning he thrust in the knife, lifting its hilt until the artery was severed. The buck's eye remained open. More blood colored the snow.
Ben's father stepped back to look at his sons, pulled off his hat, and rubbed his chin. He was lean in the face, unshaven, wind-worn, with a head of neat black hair. He propped his Weatherby against a tree, knelt with one hand on the buck's warm flank, and motioned the boys to kneel. "I promised your mother," he sighed.
They took their hats off, as he had. They all three laid a hand on the buck, and their father began to pray. "Dear Lord," he said, "our thanks to you for this meat you have granted. Our thanks for your goodness and your bounty, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen."
He stood and worked his hat on. He cut the scent glands from the deer's hind legs, severed the testicles, and tied a knot in the penis so no urine would taint the meat. He explained what he was doing and why he was doing it, and Ben and Aidan watched. Then they brought the horses around, lashed the deer quarters over the saddles, and left the hide, the head, and the guts on the stained, snowy ground.
Five minutes later, riding down the ridge, their father halted his horse. There was blood across the front of his coat and on his jaw, nose, and hands.
"That's how it's done," he said to his sons. "That's the way you'll want to do it when I'm not around anymore."
At the Grade and Pack Conference in 1932, Ben's mother spoke against lowering standards. Dressed in black, her hair black, she was tall, confident, plain-speaking, her eyes a deep, strong blue. It was her contention that even C-grade apples should not be permitted to go out worm-stung, discolored, or pocked by hail. She said that culls sold at $3 a ton should go directly to vinegar plants because the brokers in Spokane and Portland were flooding the C market with high-grade culls, driving prices down. Worse, the price for Winter Bananas had fallen to $1.25 a box, too little to cover picking and packing, not to mention freight and auction. Half the shippers in the industry, she guessed, had gone broke after the stock market crash, and this threatened all orchardists because shipping contracts were the necessary collateral for a bank to cover growing costs. Did everyone grasp this? she asked. Did all support the shippers? She favored a lobbying effort made through the shipper
s to bring the Great Northern into line at $1.25 Per hundred pounds, and she insisted that apples could be shipped at sea from rail points on Puget Sound as a counterbalance to the railroads. Otherwise, she warned, there would be a lot of orchards out of business within two seasons. There would be a tightening of belts no matter what they did, but the belt would hold and they could endure it and eventually things would improve. In the meantime, she said, picking wages would have to be set at somewhere near 15 cents. The fixed wage for the construction of boxes should be no more than 75 cents per 100; to pay more was worse than folly. She encouraged everybody gathered there to consider the Crop Production Loan Office plan for the purchase of spray and fertilizer. She explained how the Agricultural Credit Corporation could do what the banks had once done. She spoke from the floor, not from the podium, after sitting for two hours beside her sons and husband listening to men joust bitterly, and she announced herself as the wife of Wright Givens, whose grandfather had brought the first fruit stock across the plains, and as the daughter of the founder of the Rainier Delicious apple, and the gathering held silent while she spoke and remained silent afterward. When she was done, she sat with her eyes fixed ahead, fanning herself with a Yakima newspaper, and her husband reached calmly across her lap and took her right hand in his.
Once every month she took Ben and Aidan on her market trip to Wenatchee. The avenues were paved with large fir blocks that froze and buckled in winter, giving horses trouble. The boys accompanied their mother to the bank, the courthouse, and the post office, and to pay the bill at the utility office. They went to the market for bacon, salt, flour, rice, beans, pepper, corn syrup, and sugar. They stopped at the apothecary and the fabric shop on Miller Street, and they visited the nickel-and-dime store. At a fountain shop on Kittitas Avenue, they stopped for a hamburger and ice cream at the counter; the boys sat on either side of their mother, who ate neatly and slowly. When their errands were done, they sat in the city library, combing through magazines and newspapers from Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco. The Wenatchee people spoke to their mother about the progress of the new irrigation pipeline going in on the east side of the river, or asked for her estimate of where prices might fix for Rome Beauties or Stayman Winesaps. She answered everyone in the same way, with confidence but no trace of arrogance. She had attended a boarding school near Boston, had learned decorum there. She had come west enthusiastically, with her parents and her two sisters, in the spirit of an adventure. On coming of age, her sisters went east again, but Lenora Chandler stayed. Now she kept the books for the orchards and told her husband when to plow new land and when to plant new trees. After dinner nearly every evening she sat for an hour at her rolltop desk with a ledger book in front of her. With one hand she held her hair behind an ear; with the other she scrawled neat figures. She worked, generally, with the Victrola playing the music of string quartets. Violins, she told her sons, were in perfect accord with the orchard landscape. She liked to have a half hour in the evening to sit in an armchair with her needlework and with the Victrola playing quietly. The orchard air came softly through the screens, and she would stop, shut her eyes, breathe in the world, and sometimes fall asleep with her feet up and the violin music playing.
In the summer she worked with Ben and Aidan in the packing shed, making apple boxes. They bought box shook from the mill at Malaga and ferried it across the river. They bought a hundred-pound wooden keg full of five-and-a-half-penny nails. The sun filtered in and lit up the pine dust slowly rising on the air. Bens mother drove nails with a box hatchet, humming while she worked. She wore her kitchen dress with the sleeves rolled up, wiped sweat from her face with the hem of her apron, and hammered with either hand. His father could make sixty boxes in an hour, but his mother could make sixty-five. She held ten nails in her hand at once, as if they were sewing needles. In picking season she wrapped apples in oiled tissue before packing them tightly, nailing down the lids, and loading up the wagon. On each box she glued the label she'd designed: their orchard by the river, hung heavily with fruit, bordered by pink apple blossoms.
Once, at the end of the workday, Ben sat with her in the orchard shade, watching the dusk flight of doves to the river and drinking from a canteen. His mother kneaded the small of her back, sighed and brushed the dust from her hair, then settled back against a tree. "I'd better see to dinner," she said, but didn't get up to leave.
"I'll help," Ben offered.
"I'd rather you read a book," his mother said. "You've got time before dinner."
"There's ditches to clear," said Ben.
His mother watched the doves for a while. "Someday," she said, "you'll grow up and leave. So you'd better get in the reading habit before that day arrives."
"I'll never leave," Ben told her.
"You'll leave. You'll be ready to leave. You'll have your own work, somewhere."
"I don't know what I'd do except apples."
"You'll do whatever is in the spirit of who you are," his mother said matter-of-factly. "Some kind of gift you'll have to give. Whatever God plans for you."
Ben was silent now. His mother was a dyed-in-the-wool Presbyterian who could lecture at length on the life of Calvin, on the sacrament of baptism, or on predestination; she took her sons to church each Sunday, where they heard the minister Joseph Miles declare—when all the congregation was weary of picking apples—that God had ordained their sweat from the outset, on thrusting Adam and Eve from the garden. Cursed is the earth in thy work, proclaimed God, with labor and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee and thou shalt eat the herbs of the earth. By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread. His mother, riding home, had revised the sermon, in keeping with her own interpretation of the Westminster Shorter Catechism: that work was an expression of love for God, that work was the path toward knowledge of Him, that we are here to do God's work. Our life, she said, was full of worthy tasks to accomplish in accordance with our particular design, in such a way that we are lifted up, to ascend by the work God means for us to do toward a higher love of Him. We know ourselves through the work we do—Bens mother insisted on this.
Ben was twelve—it was just after Christmas—when he noticed a yellow cast to her eyes. His mother acknowledged noting it too, and said that Bens father had commented on it, asking her to visit Dr. Williams. She went and was told that her jaundiced condition was difficult to understand and might derive from many sources. For a few days she held to the hope that the problem would simply vanish; then after New Year's she went again to the doctor, and this time he drew blood, collected urine, and concurred with her that the yellowing had grown deeper, pervading the skin around her eyes. By the middle of January her skin was green, and when she cut herself with a paring knife one day—a shallow slice through her index finger—it was difficult to stanch the bleeding. Her blood ran thin, darkly colored. By February she had seen two specialists in Spokane, but despite their efforts she grew more green, gaunt, and hollow-cheeked. She took to bed one afternoon and could not rise to attend to dinner, but lay curled beneath the comforter. The next day she went again to Spokane. She was hospitalized for nearly a week, then sent home with tincture of opium.
After that she lay in a torpor or sat in an armchair wearing her bathrobe, and twice a week Dr. Williams came to dole out more tincture of opium. She had no appetite. The mere smell of food sickened her. She sometimes vomited in the early mornings, battling fever and chills. Her skin was now tinted orange.
On the tenth of April, she turned thirty-seven. That evening blood trickled from her mouth; Dr. Williams came at midnight. He rolled up his sleeves, loosened his tie, and gave Bens mother a sponge bath. He explained to Ben's father how to move her carefully and change the sheets one side at a time. She was very thin now, and moaned with every breath. Dr. Williams increased her dose of opium. She quieted, and they left her room to sit in the parlor at midnight.
Dr. Williams warmed his back at the fire, a snifter of bran
dy in his hand, his sleeves rolled up, his face tired. He was a tall man with thick glasses, his jaw long and prominent. He had brought Ben and Aidan into the world, had treated their father for a rattlesnake bite, had stitched up Aidan's hand when he cut it making an apple box. Now he sipped from his brandy and sighed. He set the snifter on the mantel.
Dr. Williams walked to the window and looked out into the darkness of the hills. He paused there with his hands in his pockets. He pressed his glasses against his temples, but then suddenly pried them off, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and began to polish their lenses. "Sit down, boys," he said.
Ben and Aidan perched on the sofa. Their father wouldn't look at them.
Dr. Williams lowered himself to the edge of the rocker and set his elbows against his knees. He held his glasses to the light briefly, then slid them onto his face. "Your father has asked me to talk to you," he said, "because it's hard for him to do it himself."
"That's okay," said Aidan.
"Your mother can't be cured," said the doctor. "That's what we found out over in Spokane. She has a tumor, a cancer of the pancreas. There's nothing we can do to cure her."
"But you're a doctor," Ben said.
Dr. Williams fingered his chin. "A doctor isn't a magician, you know. I wish I was, believe me, Ben. If I was, I'd cure your mother."
"What do you mean you can't cure her?"
East of the Mountains Page 7
