A letter arrived for Ben in May from a man named Willard Anderson, president of the Leavenworth Ski Club. Mr. Anderson remembered Ben from the time he'd passed on the jump at Ski Hill and urged him now to sign on with the mountain troops being raised by the Army. The 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment, he wrote, had been activated at Fort Lewis on the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. There had been much training on the slopes of Mt. Rainier, and various advances had been made. The 87th had been followed by the 10th Mountain Division, and it was this division that was now recruiting, in part with the help of the National Ski Patrol, of which Mr. Anderson was the local chairman, so he was writing to boys of fighting age with an enthusiasm for the high country, in the hope they would find it an honor and a privilege to join the Army's mountain troops at this time of dire need.
Ben's alternative, Mr. Anderson wrote, was to go where the draft took him. Wasn't it preferable, his letter argued, to take matters into his own hands and "meet the war on your own terms, and wearing skis as well?"
Ben's father said that if he had to go, he may as well go as a mountain trooper. "I wish you wouldn't go at all," he said. "I wish you could stay. I need you."
"You'll get along."
"No, I won't."
"You can hire somebody."
"That's not what I mean."
"Well, anyway, I have to go."
"I wish you didn't," said his father.
That June the cherries ripened early, and Wright Givens set the eleventh of the month as the day to begin their harvest. At first light the pickers met by the siding: Ben, his father, and nine migrant workers, the Emerys and their four young children, and finally Mrs. Emery's niece, Rachel Lake from Waterville, Maine, who—as Mrs. Emery explained—had come to stay for the harvest. She'd come, it appeared, not fully prepared, and so wore Mrs. Emerys work clothes, denim pants and a flannel shirt, both many sizes too large.
Ben's father lined them out down the rows, assigning each a set of trees and a picking bucket and ladder. Before long came the sound of cherries striking the bottoms of buckets like hailstones and the voices of pickers beyond the branches. Ben left the woody spurs behind, clearing his bucket of leaves as he went, stripping the limbs of their every fruit, careful to take them with their stems intact, gathering them in clusters. The harvest season lay in front of him now, miles and miles of fruit ahead, ten thousand trees to be gleaned of their yield, days, weeks, and months of fruit, until one dreamed at night of cherries, of apples and pears plucked loose from trees, of moving hands and moving leaves.
When the sun was up and the dew had dried, Ben sprawled in the grass to eat breakfast—three eggs he'd boiled that morning—and looked down the row at the heaped cherry crates waiting under the trees. He could see, not far off, Mrs. Emery's niece, high in her ladder, picking. Most of Rachel Lake disappeared in the leaves, but he noticed that she'd cinched Mrs. Emery's denim pants around her waist with Manila twine. The belt loops in back were tied together. He saw her stand on the toes of her boots to reach into the branches. She stepped up onto a higher rung, and her makeshift belt disappeared.
In the afternoon the heat came up so that the cherries went soft and left their stems behind. Ben's father called off picking for the day, and they loaded the fruit on the flatbed truck, hauled their ladders and buckets to the siding, and lined out the boxes for pickup by the Consolidated Cherry Packing Company. Ben was busy picking leaves from the boxes when Rachel came out of the orchard shade with her flannel shirttail loose. She paused to wipe her face with it. The barest shadow of her belly showed, a dark bar of flesh revealed for a half second. She tucked in her shirt and ran her hands through her hair—neck-length, tin-adorned, the color of walnut shells. Tilting her head up, shutting her eyes, she drank steadily from a water jug, wiped her lips with the back of her hand, then drank again, pulling hard, the cords in her throat working. He couldn't help noting the shape of her head, her nose, lips, chin. Her face was made of fine bones. She glistened with the sweat of her work. It was hard not to look at her, inside her oversized clothes.
One time they rode in the flatbed together with a half dozen other pickers. The orange sunset glowed in her pores, and her hair was flailed by the breeze. Another time he picked in the tree beside hers. She was fast not because her hands were agile but because she was undistracted. Her forearms emerged from the leaves unscathed, unscratched by twigs and branches. Her wrists were flat, her elbows pointed, her arms brown and long in the sun, her hair flecked with bits of leaf. He had glimpses of her at odd moments—leveling cherries in their crates, perched in a ladder near the top of a tree, bent to drink from a barn spigot with her hair checked by one hand. One evening he saw her at the bend in the river, wearing nothing but her winter union suit, her hair pasted against her head, performing cannonballs from a ledge. Another time he saw her beneath pear trees, weaving dandelion chains with a cousin to hang from the freighted limbs. He saw her one noon at lunch in the orchard, in a contest to spit a cherry pit farthest; she was animated in victory, raising her fists toward the sun. He saw her currying a horse in the barnyard, walking it in the river road, at dusk riding with solitary leisure across the sage-studded ridge tops. She galloped hatless beneath the early moon, easy and still in the saddle.
Later that month came rain showers. They had to wait a full day to let the cherries dry out. Ben took the Black Labs up in a willow canyon to hunt for quail in the wild rose and sumac. It had rained all morning, but now, at noon, the air was fresh and the sun so strong that the dogs worked with their tongues hanging out, stopping at springs to lap at the muddy ground. A game trail threaded in and out of the draw, and the dogs followed it steadily, crashing into thickets now and then without Bens urging them.
An hour out, they flushed a small covey laying up in bramble and thorn. After that they worked the singles uphill, the birds funneling out across the sage but coiling back into the canyons cover, seeking the shade of willows. Ben brought four birds to earth in the course of a half hour. In the high heat, he rested at a spring, the orchard country spread out below, the river silver and holding sunlight, the mountains still snowbound on their north faces. Ben lay back to take it all in, as he had many times before. Aidan and he had rested here often. There were the charred remains of the fire ring where they'd sometimes spit-cooked birds.
He rested long in the shade of the spring with his hands behind his head. The ache of the climb was in his limbs, as well as the ache of picking, and it was good to rest in the cool of the willows, the damp smell of the earth beneath him, slightly bitter, alive. He shut his eyes and listened to the wind. He dozed for a while and then turned on his side to look down the ridge.
He saw Rachel there, in the distance, on horseback, riding toward the plateau. A girl at liberty beneath the sun, making her way through the sage. She sat easily in the rhythm of the horse. She climbed to the ridge, turned, paused, and took in the view of the mountains. The horse circled under her, and she worked it around again. Then she disappeared into the east.
They were well into the heat of cherry season when at last he spoke to her. He was unloading cherries onto the siding, and she suddenly stepped in next to him to clean leaves from the crates. Her hands moved through the fruit lightly. The river wind blew against their faces. Shed turned sun-burnished in ten days of picking and had gone to Wenatchee for work clothes that fit—denim pants and a boys white T-shirt—but they were already stained with cherry juice, as were her teeth and lips.
Rachel said, "What's gotten into the bees today? They're all over the place."
"I don't know. It's strange."
He didn't look at her, just at her hands, swift among the fruit.
"This one's perfect," she said, and popped a cherry in her mouth.
"You're not tired of cherries?"
"I love them."
"Me, too."
"These are the best."
She ate a second and a third. He watched her spit out the pits.
"I've seen you riding," Ben told her.
"Up there, toward the plateau."
"That's one place," Rachel said. "But along the river is good too, and up in those little canyons with the willows."
"There's rattlesnakes in the canyons," said Ben.
"I'm not scared of snakes," she answered.
"They're bad this time of year," said Ben.
"I'm still not scared," Rachel told him.
She moved along the row of crates, their conversation finished. He felt certain he'd made a bad impression. A boy living in orchard country, a font of information on rattlesnakes.
The apricots ripened before the cherries were done, and there were two crops to pick. Thirteen pickers lived on the place and at dawn moved out to their ladder sets with their buckets and water jugs over their shoulders, the Emery children and Rachel with them, starting before the heat came up, finishing when the fruit went soft. Ben rose from bed before anyone else, dressed, and went out into the darkness. He laid out crates for the pickers. He put in apple branch props, mowed the quack grass in the orchard rows, and pruned summer suckers out of treetops. Then there was the problem of the codling moth. A man named Kevin Lawrence in Wenatchee, who worked for the Bureau of Entomology, had convinced Ben's father that time and money could be saved with the construction of an elaborate stationary spray system, as opposed to the leaky, wagon-mounted pump sprayer—hauled about by a pair of mules—they'd long gotten by on. Now, at picking time, they were still laboring with laying the base line of one-inch pipe and the lateral lines of three-quarter-inch pipe, driving in the many standpipes, mounting the proper fittings for the spraying hoses, pouring the concrete for the holding tank, and getting in the pump. And then the horses and mules must eat, the windbreak poplars needed water in the heat, more fruit boxes needed working up, and the wire bindings on the wood water pipes were coming loose in the south orchard and had to be replaced. And there was a place where moles were diverting water and no time to see about changing this, and in the evening was the accounting to see to and all the record keeping.
On the last day of June, he spoke with Rachel again. He was standing knee-deep in a feeder ditch, cleaning the weeds from a lateral screen, when she came along with her picking bucket, and he stopped what he was doing and looked at her, weeds dripping in his hand. "Hey," she said.
"Hey yourself," Ben said.
"Is that algae?"
"We just call it ditch weed."
"That isn't any official name."
"I don't know the official name. The Latin name or anything."
"Maybe you know these berries," she said. "Up there growing in the willow canyon. The little red berries you see in the wet places. Not really red but closer to orange. Clusters of them. Little."
"Those are currants," Ben told her.
"Currants," she said. "I've been eating them."
"We used to make them into jelly sometimes."
"I've had currant jelly. It tastes like gooseberry."
"We don't have gooseberry out here," said Ben. "But up in the canyon there's something called serviceberry. They look, sort of, like little purple apples. You've probably seen those, too."
"If I did, I didn't notice." She smoothed her hair, which had turned a lighter shade at the ears since they'd last talked. "I'll let you get back to your ditch weed. Or whatever it's called—ditch weed."
"It could be algae," said Ben.
There was a respite on the Fourth of July, and the pickers lolled through the heat of the day, keeping well in the shade. At dusk they brought out a guitar and accordion, and hollered long across the hills to hear their voices echo. They traded empty curses too, and screamed senseless insults. Ben and his father sat on the porch with the doors and windows open behind them and the Victrola playing the music of violins, which mingled with the noise from the pickers' camp. It was one of Lenora Givens's records, a slow, piercing concerto that her husband played from time to time, though it seemed to Ben an odd choice for Independence Day. They sat and listened anyway. The light fell and blurred the contours of shadows. The stifling air of the river basin cooled, and an evening balminess settled in, the sort that people in orchard country coveted all day.
"You oughtn't to just set here with me," Wright Givens said after awhile. "Whyn't you wander up to the Emerys and see that niece of theirs?"
"Why should I?" said Ben.
Ben's father nodded and grinned. "You waste too much time, she'll be gone," he warned. "Girl like that gets tired of picking fruit, she's going to leave this place."
"Let her," said Ben. "I don't care."
They could see across the way to the Emery Orchard. Most of the lights were on in the house. A pool of light in the glower of dusk overtaking the sage hills.
"She's just right there." Ben's father pointed. "Not any more than a ten-minute walk. And probably thinking on you, too, girl like that, your age."
"Lay off," said Ben.
"It's the Fourth of July. A night natural for festivities. It's reasonable to wander over there."
"She doesn't mean anything to me, okay? I don't care about her one way or the other."
"All right. Sit around here with your old man all night if that's what you want to do, Ben. You damn-fool-greenhorn-wet-behind-the-ears-little-stubborn-lamebrained-mule."
Ben went down toward the pickers' camp. In the dusty clearing in front of the cabins a pair of kerosene lanterns burned, and in their incandescent glare the accordion player and the guitarists crooned, stomping their feet and hopping like puppets, throwing their shadows across the ground, and all about them worn, weathered men shuffled and spun on bandy legs, men who limped and moved gingerly. Men were cursing and jostling, playing cards, rolling dice on the dusty ground, howling like coyotes at the moon. Ben made his way around them to the butte where once he'd lain with Nora Ellerby and run his hand up between her legs. The sand still held the last of the day's heat. The light of the moon illuminated rock faces. Ben sat listening to the hilarity of the pickers honoring the birth of their nation, and beyond it his mother's violin music.
When he returned, his father had a bottle of bourbon on the porch boards beside his chair. His boots were propped on the porch railing, his hat tipped down over his eyes, his hands clasped behind his head. "No luck, sailor?" he said.
"I didn't go over there."
Ben sat down, too, and put his feet up. His father groped on the floor beside him, then took a pull from the bourbon. "Do you know how old I am?" he asked.
"Forty-nine," said Ben.
"Forty-nine's right."
"So?"
"So nothing."
"You ought not to drink that hooch," said Ben. "It just garbles up your mind."
His father took another pull from the bottle. "It's a holiday," he countered.
There were more cries from the fruit pickers. Ululations, mock wolf howls, war whoops, and drunken bluster. "Those men are having a time," said Ben's father. "I just hope they don't go on all night or burn the cabins down."
Ben didn't answer. He looked at the moon. A gibbous moon in the western sky, as bright as though on fire.
"Those men had families, it'd be altogether different," Ben's father said. "They wouldn't be carrying on such. They'd have a different take."
"Probably so," answered Ben.
He heard them long after midnight from his bed, the pickers stuporous but still celebratory, still railing away at the firmament, a passel of travelers who'd stopped in this place long enough to glean it of fruit. Then there was nothing but a scratching from the Victrola. He got up to turn it off. Moonlight over everything. He saw his father out on the porch, hard asleep in his rocking chair, his head tipped back, his mouth open, the bottle between his thighs. He was thoroughly gray now—his whiskers and hair. His face was cross-hatched with wrinkles.
Mid-July, the apricots were done, but the pears not quite ready. They were still hard and green in every tree, and not heavy enough to need propping. Mr. Emery put the pickers to work at making apple and pear boxes, pruning summer suckers
from his apples, and scything away at the orchard grass. Ben and his father made progress on the spray system. The evenings were warm and windless. The field crickets resounded at night, and the bats worked over the orchards. In the morning, after the dew had dried, viceroy butterfly larvae fed on the poplar leaves. A red-tailed hawk rode afternoon breezes, languidly circling in a featureless sky. Starlings and robins pecked at the fruit. The coyotes came down at dusk, too. Their calls echoed across the hills, under the wide palette of the stars.
Ben spoke for a third time with Mrs. Emery's niece. He'd gone up into the willow canyon with the dogs and the Winchester 21 and found her with her horse tied, kneeling to drink at the lip of a spring—down on both knees as if to pray with her ankles turned up under her, her hands formed into a dipper. It was early in the morning. The water seeped between her fingers. Her hair spilled past her downturned face; she wore a pair of snake chaps. Ben emerged from between two willows and saw first the curve of her back, her chaps clipped to her belt loops. His dogs paused to consider the horse, then trotted up to drink beside Rachel. "Its you," she said, turning. "Don't shoot me."
"It isn't loaded."
"Supposing it was. Are you saying you'd shoot me?"
"No, of course not."
"That's a relief."
Ben called his dogs away from her, but they insisted on drinking at the spring, lapping at the water vigorously, showing their thick pink tongues. "We had a Golden Lab at home," Rachel said. "She died when I was fourteen."
Ben nodded. "They're always thirsty."
"Well, this is good water. From deep in the earth."
"I like this spring," said Ben.
Rachel drank from her cupped hands. She rose, wiped her lips, and seemed to appraise him and the shotgun broke open across his forearm. He propped it in the brush and looked at her horse, as if that were his primary interest. It was a sorrel mare worn down with the years, swaybacked and scraped and scarred by time, but her cannon bones still straight and clean and her mane and tail well groomed. "Your uncle's horse," Ben observed.
East of the Mountains Page 9
