"I mean I'm just a man with a little learning and some medicines in an old black bag. I can't stop cancer of the pancreas."
"Yes, you can. You have to."
Ben's father raised his head. He looked gaunt and deeply tired. "There's no point in arguing with Dr. Williams," he said. "You hush now, Ben."
Ben turned his face to the floor. "I thought you were a good doctor," he whispered.
Dr. Williams took Ben by the chin, tilted his head, and looked at him. The light reflected in his glasses. "I'm neither good nor bad," he said, so close that Ben felt the warmth of his breath. "I wish I could make you see that."
"Make her better."
"I can't, Ben."
"You have to make her better."
"I can't."
Dr. Williams went to the rocker. He pulled his black bag close to him and looked inside it, silent.
"The opium," Bens father said. "There must be some amount that's too much."
"That's for you to decide," said the doctor. "A question of how much pain she can bear, and of when enough is enough."
"I don't know how far that goes. I don't know what that means."
"I know just what you're saying," Dr. Williams said. "That's the hell of it."
Mrs. Emery came to help first, then Mrs. Fisk and Mrs. Elginhurst. At church women organized to help and spelled one another in the day hours. Evenings, after work in the orchard, Ben, Aidan, and their father took over. Ben's mother often lay on her side, looking out over the dark, cool trees stretching down toward the river. In the last light of evening the world looked haunted, as though on the verge of disappearing, solid, into the night.
"Are you scared?" Ben asked his mother once.
"I believe in God," she said. "But yes, I'm scared, to be honest."
He did not know what to say to this, so he said nothing; he waited. "It's the pain I'm scared of," she confessed.
He still had no idea how to respond. He had never heard her this way.
"This isn't any way to live," said his mother. "I miss the world, Ben."
"We could take your bed outside, though. Put it on the porch, maybe."
"It isn't that." She turned to look at him. "It's more that my work on earth isn't finished. Raising you, I'm not done with that. You and Aidan both."
He wished she wouldn't say these things. "Mom," he said. That was all.
"I wanted to see you as men. What you would be like as men. What you would do in the world."
"I don't know," said Ben.
"Do something fine," his mother said. "Do something grand and wonderful. Whatever your heart desires."
"I'll try," he said.
Later that week, her moaning turned into a faint wheeze, and she curled up like a fist, a leaf, curled up like a baby in the end, and died at 6:35 in the morning on the twenty-eighth of June, 1938. Ben, Aidan, and their father were sitting on kitchen chairs brought into the room, their father with his elbows on his knees, his forehead low, close to hers, and then her wheezing came to a stop, and he dropped his cheek to her heart. "Lenora," he said. "Lenora."
They buried her on a knoll above the river, her parents and the Fisks and Coles looking on, and the Robinsons and Knoxes and Elginhursts, and Dr. Williams and the Gilchrists and Cochranes, and the Emerys with their four small children, and twenty-three Givenses from up and down the river—from Kennewick, Wenatchee, Brewster, Kettle Falls—and that evening came a thunderstorm, and the rain beat across his mother's grave.
That summer, nothing was the same. They worked their apples with a hollow feeling, and the orchard fell into a decline.
Wright Givens wandered on foot, hunting birds in the willow canyons. He walked the hills for long hours, carrying his Winchester and following his Black Labs, returning at dusk with his coat pockets full of quail, chukars, and grouse. He'd dump them all in the kitchen sink and sit at the table, smoking. He'd scratch his unshaven jaw aimlessly or pull burrs from the dogs. Finally he'd throw his vest across a chair and stand at the sink with his sleeves rolled up, dressing birds as if in an assembly line. He pinched off their heads, twisted off their wings, severed the tendons in their knee joints, and threw their clawed feet in a metal pail. Rolling the meat in salted flour, he fried it in a cast-iron skillet, which he set on the dinner table. They ate the birds with fried potatoes, the shotgun set in the corner by the door, the dogs curled by his father's boots, asleep with their heads on their paws. All July his father hunted, returning at dusk with dead birds.
The migrant pickers came. They were mostly from Oklahoma and Arkansas, sometimes from Missouri or Texas. Single men and drifters, loners and vagabonds, also families with eight or nine children, they made the fruit run in pickup trucks, hopped freight trains, or walked the roads. In April they picked strawberries in California, then worked northward through plums and pears, arriving in June for sweet cherries and peaches, followed by yet more plums and pears, and finally the apple harvest. The men arrived at the Givenses' place sun-darkened and lean-jawed, bedrolls slung from Manila twine across their backs, unshaven under broad-rimmed hats and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. In the rows of apples, high in their ladders, nestling fruit into canvas bags slung from suspenders and belted at their waists, they regaled Ben and Aidan with fabulous tales: dust storms, stabbings, arrests, brawls, riding the rails in Arizona or crossing into Mexico at El Paso for the whores in Cuidad Juarez. Herding sheep in the Sierra Nevada, riding roundup in Idaho. The impossible wastes of the Cactus Range, the Amargosa Desert, Death Valley. Condensed milk poured into a radiator to plug a slow-running leak; a crankshaft brought into round again with a shim made out of a bacon rind.
There was a family that came when Ben was fifteen, and one night deep in the rows of trees—they had been with the Givenses exactly a week—he kissed their sixteen-year-old daughter. Her skin smelled of dust, her mouth of apples, and when he pressed against her urgently, the girl wrenched free and ran away. Her name was Nora Ellerby, from Milfay, Oklahoma, and her skin was sun-polished to the color of dark pine wood, and her hair lay long and flat against her cheeks with the tips of her ears poking out of it. Her eyes were shallow and her chin very strong, but her fingers were long, brown, and smooth. Ben watched her hands plucking apples, then spoke to her quietly when no one was listening, and that night she met him in the orchard. They kissed, pushing against each other. The next night they lay beneath the apple trees, where he ran his hands along her waist and touched her breasts through the fabric of her shirt, until Nora, coming to her senses, ran away from him again.
On the following night, the moon rose addled and yellow. They went hand-in-hand to the river secretly and sat in the night shadow of a fine-grained butte pillared along its summit but graced by warm sand at its base. They lay in the sand, holding each other. The girl's breath blew warm against his face, and she spoke with a soft winsome twang. She spoke of a boy in Shingletown, California, who had not kissed nearly as well as Ben and had promised to buy her a brand-new dress if she ran off with him to Canada. She said that she had some money saved and that one day she would live in Sacramento or Chico or Redding or someplace civilized. She would shop in town, live in a house, keep fresh milk in an icebox. She'd been to the county fair in Klamath Falls, to the circus when it came to Yakima, and at a swap meet in Yuba City, California, she saw a man with a tattooed belly swallow a blazing sword. She paid three cents to a fortuneteller there, who told Nora she would have seven children and warned her to be suspicious of men who promised to buy her things. The boy in Shingletown had promised her a dress, but no one else had promised her anything, so what was the point of that prophecy? She had hoped for more from the fortune-teller.
Ben and Nora kissed for a half hour. Then he put his fingers between her legs and touched her where she told him to, until, three times, she shivered breathlessly in small persistent shudders. As if in return, she unbuttoned his pants and clutched him so that he flooded thickly against her arm and fingers. The next day, Nora left to pick fruit in Okanoga
n County.
School started after picking season. There were fifteen children on the Rock Island Road, and their schoolhouse sat on a knoll above the river a half mile downstream from the Fisk orchards, close to the Palisades junction. It was a small single room built of river stones and heated by apple cordwood. The orchardists up and down the road kept its slope-roofed woodshed filled in winter, and the older children kept the stove going strong by stoking it high when the embers glowed and leaving the draft open. The county ran power to the schoolhouse for a string of lights nailed over the desks so the children could write their assignments and see their maps and primers. The place was tidy and smelled of wood smoke, ink, and wet woolen clothes.
The teacher, Ruth Dietrich, lived with the Cochranes, an elderly couple with children long grown and an extra room to let. She was a lively woman, large, with glasses on a chain, and she peered at her charges over wire frames and then down through swimming lenses to read aloud from Ivanhoe or Alice in Wonderland. Miss Dietrich wore her gray hair pinned tightly to her head, and a cream-colored lace shawl draped across her shoulders, fastened with a brooch at her breast. Her face was coarse, lined, and thick; two long hairs sprouted from a mole on the left side of her chin. Miss Dietrich collected Wanapum arrowheads, petrified wood, and opals. She knew her medieval history, could recite the chronology of British kings and queens, and could render from memory "Frost at Midnight," "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," and "The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd." She was prone to poetry at the slightest provocation, so that the rising of the river breeze was a just occasion for orating an impeccable "Ode to the West Wind," and the various hues of apples on her desk for a rendition of "Pied Beauty." Upon the announcement by a student one day that the Rock Island Dam had been completed, she recited "Ozymandias," then gave a short lecture on the sin of hubris. Miss Dietrich could discourse knowledgeably on the agriculture of Mesopotamia, the habits and mores of the Egyptian pharaohs, and the scientific notions of the Greeks. She knew all about the religion of the Incas, the travels of Charles Darwin to the Galapagos, the Boxer Rebellion, the Potala in Lhasa, and the invasions of the Mongol Khans.
Ben took pleasure in listening to her. He read with zeal the story of Macbeth, Canterbury Tales, David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers, and Heart of Darkness—all loaned to him by Miss Dietrich. He learned the periodic table, the primary theorems governing geometry, and the Latin names for plants and animals as classified by Linnaeus. He learned about the exploration of the poles, the formation of crystals and of sedimentary rock, and the propagation of light.
Miss Dietrich was at home in the orchard country and had an expansive knowledge of apples: the fruit, she told them, Pyrus malus, had taken its name from Aphrodites priest, who was turned into an apple tree after the impaling of Adonis. When her students, in the fall, bobbed for apples, she explained to them, while their faces were wet, that the druids had once done likewise—bobbing—as an act of divination. The apple tree, she told them one day, had been sacred to Apollo and Venus both, and was, of course, the fruit of discord that started the war at Troy. And it wasn't just pagans and pantheists who worshiped apples; in Bulgaria there were paintings of the Virgin Mary with Jesus cradled in one hand, an apple held in the other. When a student misbehaved, she quoted sternly from Chaucer—The rotten apple injures its neighbors—or she might borrow from Shakespeare—An apple cleft in two is no more twin than these two creatures—in reponse to an argument between the Gilchrist sisters. A student who complained of the burden of homework was reminded that Hercules, for his eleventh labor, traveled to the far western end of the earth in order to bring back golden apples, stolen from the Hesperides, and that he walked a thousand miles for them, and slew a dragon along the way, and if Hercules could do all this, why couldn't they read just ten pages from Huckleberry Finn? Once a girl asked Miss Dietrich if it was true that her husband had died at the Battle of Gettysburg, and Miss Dietrich laughed with such sustained force that tears gathered in her eyes, then uttered something about Asgard and apples of immortality. Another girl told her in class one day that a woman who washed her face and hands in water mixed with the sap of an apple was sure to bear a child, and Miss Dietrich smiled and nodded at this and said that a girl in search of a husband should squeeze apple seeds between her fingers: if any struck the ceiling, she was sure to be happy in her quest, for apples were the fruit of love.
One spring Miss Dietrich took ten students on a field trip to identify plants: Ben, Aidan, Billy Lawrence, Willy Griffin, Owen and Clare Goodall, Caitlin and Amelia Burns, and Hannah and Gillon Crichton. The students spread out with their pocketknives and cut snowberry, wild rose, and boxwood twigs, arranging them in a grid on a square of canvas laid across a slab of table rock. Miss Dietrich showed them the red osier dogwood, used by the Shuswaps for fishing weirs and pipe stems, though she preferred a pipe of elderberry, a wood also good for an elk call whistle, a peashooter, or a drinking straw. She peeled back the layers of a mallow ninebark and explained that where you found this plant, ocean spray could be found, too; the Indians made fishing spears from it.
At noon they moved higher to eat in a meadow, and Miss Dietrich, between bites of her tomato sandwich, extolled the virtues of the surrounding larches: how they were hardier than pines or firs, stubbornly surviving winter weather; how their needles in the early fall turned a brilliant, gilded yellow. She thought of them as inherently old, as dying one small piece at a time but nevertheless showing new leaf each spring, and this in the parched, unheralded places no other tree much wanted. Miss Dietrich was moved to poetry by them and recited Housmans "Loveliest of Trees" and "Far in a Western Brookland."
She held Ben after school one day and told him he was her brightest hope in twenty-seven years on the western plains and a candidate for a good university, should he decide on such a path—a path she urged him toward greatly. A path he should have no fear about; a path he should walk with confidence. Ben answered that his father needed him to work the apple orchard. Couldn't he do that later? Miss Dietrich asked. Wouldn't it be both an adventure and a test? Didn't he owe it to himself? Wasn't the larger world waiting?
He thanked her again and went out to his brother, who was waiting propped against the wall of the schoolhouse, chewing on a stem of wheatgrass. The January wind blew hard off the river, and Aidan had his back turned to it.
"What did she want?"
"She said I should go to college."
"You going to do it?"
"I don't know."
"Probably you're smart enough."
"Maybe, maybe not."
"You ought to go, Ben."
Aidan pulled his hat brim low and rose, still chewing on his grass stem. "Come on," he said. "Let's get on home. We've got horses to feed."
Fifteen months after Pearl Harbor, Aidan was drafted into the Army. He packed his bag three days before leaving and said he wanted one last ride up in the Colockum country.
At dawn Ben and Aidan saddled the horses and crossed the river at Coleman's Landing. They rode on empty stomachs until nine; then they sat at the lip of a spring and ate in the sun from their saddlebags. They turned the horses up Dry Springs Canyon and rode southeasterly through the afternoon, sometimes at a canter over meadow ruts, or at a side-by-side trot over ridges. At dusk Aidan shot a pair of blue grouse from where they had lit on low tree limbs after kicking up before the horses. They made camp just north of Spring Gulch, near a grove of hoary willows. They sat in their blankets with the pair of grouse spitted, the wind railing hard at their backs, the fires smoke streaming away. It was a chill evening. There were no stars in the sky. The night air was sweet and promised rain: Aidan said he could smell it coming as surely as if he had seen dark clouds borne toward him on the breeze, as surely as if he could see rain just upwind already.
They ate and banked the fire extravagantly, until the flames caused them to sweat. At midnight came a thunderstorm, and they lay with the lantern turned out in the tent to watch the lightning flicke
r. The rain fell with such fervor that the world disappeared.
They measured the rains tapering by the quality of its sound against the canvas, and finally there came silence. Out beyond the dripping, dark willows, they took in the stars and the sliver of moon, calm and pale, as if the rain had never happened. "I don't want to go," Aidan said. "You're the one person I can say it to. Truth is, I'm not cut out for the Army. I'd rather be right here."
"I wish you were staying," said Ben.
They were quiet standing wrapped in their blankets in the darkness of the hills. "I don't know nothing but apples," said Aidan, and kicked, hard, at a loose stone on the ground. "What do they want with me anyway? I'm nothing but an apple farmer."
"Anyway, you have to go."
"I don't have to like it," said Aidan.
In the morning they ate the last of the apricots. They rode out onto the ridge top together to take in the long view across the river toward the sage plateau. The high country was March cold, the morning bright, the brush wet. The horses nickered and threw their heads when the riders stood them high on the summit reach by a field of huckleberry. Steam chuffed from their mouths. To the southwest were the big mountains in mantles of snow, and to the southeast the river coiling. "We ought to have climbed those mountains," said Ben. "How come we never did?"
"They're too far off," said Aidan. "They're one hell of a long ride."
"But they look like you might reach out to them."
"They're too far off," repeated Aidan.
They rode back all day to the Columbia, traversed it on the Colockum Ferry, and at dusk came into their orchard tired, on empty stomachs, their hats tipped back, to walk the horses between the rows of trees in a silent kind of processional, and Aidan ran his hands over limbs as he passed them with his horse behind him, the limbs trembling in the wake of his passing, and on, then, to the barn.