The Orchard

Prologue

THE FILE IS IN a small maple chest which has served as a lampstand for years, in the corner of my library. The chest is my mother’s. Hayley. I remember that there are other keepsakes in the dove-jointed box: a deed to the cabin in Vermont; a hair ribbon and silk corsage from somebody’s wedding, not hers; a tin of surf wax; a fountain pen; a simple green jade bracelet. A short scroll with the ink brush figure of a heron in bamboo and Chinese calligraphy in the corner.

That I could have forgotten the file, or ignored it, or delayed reading it for two decades. That I did not open the chest in all that time, that I was not willing.

Open the chest.

I lift off the lamp and carry the box to my desk and untape the key from the bottom and fit it into the wrought-iron keyhole. Why now? Because four days ago I found out that I was ten weeks pregnant—father known but at this point immaterial.

A daughter, I’m sure.

And somehow I feel that she would want to know who her grandmother was. And I feel, too, that in seeing what there is to see I might find my footing in a lineage that would ground me, that might whisper, These are your people. Hard-boned and just, except to themselves. Who could never accept the wonder of their own magic.

But I also know that what I see could sear beyond hope of recovery.

***

The January blizzard shakes the panes in the French doors and drifts snow on the patio and against the low stone wall. Only midafternoon, but already going to a stormy dusk. I take a breath and turn the key and lift the top.

Not Pandora’s box exactly, but an opening on a world I had preferred to keep closed. And there, beneath everything, under all the mementos like a false bottom, lies the manila file. I work it up one side of the box and let the other things slide gently back into place. I set it on the green blotter.

There is no title, no scrawl in Hayley’s erratic hand, cursive so heedless and jumpy it’s hard to believe that even she could read it. No writing, only the blank beige of the file folder in which I see the flat sands of a desert.

Do I wish that? That the file will contain nothing but the grains of lost time? Maybe. That I could handle. But beauty, as transmuted through the heart of my mother, may be too much to bear. And I know, I know, that inside this folder, from the first sheet to the last, there will be a devastating dose of the stuff. Because Hayley was, I found out years after it was too late to acknowledge in her company, one of the greatest English translators of the Tang dynasty, of the Chinese mountain poets and particularly of the princess Li Xue, who lived in western Sichuan in the beginning of the eighth century and was a contemporary of Li Po.

How can paper age so, inside a wooden box? The manila feels fragile in my fingers as I lift the edge and fold it back and see on top, on notebook paper with faded lines, the very first poem.

The Orchard

Tonight the scent of apple blossoms

and the murmur of the brook

slip through the open window

the way we once heard ten strings.

Our daughter sleeps despite the racket in my heart.

When you rode off, we were practically children.

I counted the months by the moon,

filled out like her, like a loom fan.

Every evening I stood at the gate.

The wind came from the west, but never brought news of you.

Now our daughter is five and we are far from the capital.

I pray that the war has left you unscathed,

that you simply decided you no longer love me.

Death is permanent.

This way, one day you might have a change of heart,

and someone could tell you where to find us

in the blue hills above the river at Xinxiang.

Oh, God. Only the first. I slide the papers forward and breathe. I can see it, how she might order the work: Li Xue had left over five hundred poems and Hayley had selected thirty—will her translations be chosen for moments in time, to mirror in some way our own lives?

One

My mother was a back-to-the-lander. She had had this idea: to move with me, her six-year-old, to a cabin in a defunct orchard a few miles from a large river in Vermont. Defunct meaning that the trees had gone untended for years, had grown twisted and rangy, had yielded to waist-high orchard grass, young spruce and poplar, birch, maple. Or they had died and toppled, been lightning-struck and broken by the errant twisters that touched down, strangely, in these hills every few years.

The pond at the bottom of the orchard, brook-fed, had halfway silted in, but still held enough water to support the visits of giant beavers who seemed to me as big as bears and much meaner. In the stack of children’s books Hayley brought with us there were Winnie the Pooh and Corduroy, and the bears were always nice.

The cabin was thirty-one and a half feet long and seventeen feet seven inches deep. I know because I now live in it half the time and I just took a tape to the outside walls. This seems to me to be an eccentric pairing of dimensions, but I suppose that the size of the logs dictated the length of the walls. In any event it was small, even for the two of us and Bear, our Bernese mountain mutt. This was Hayley’s delusion of pedigree. To me he looked more like a combination of a beagle and a not-so-great Dane, with a lot of fur thrown in, errantly, for good measure. He was a happy mess, appearance-wise.

Hayley had been, at a very young age, an associate professor and a towering translator. Why did she give it all up to move here? Well, she gave part of it up: She never stopped working on her translations. I think in some way she was emulating the life of her subjects—the exile to the mountains, sometimes self-imposed, of the Tang dynasty poets. There was something they had all been seeking, and I think she was looking for it too.

Childhood memories are subject to constant revision, and so I have mostly vague and gauzy recollections of our move, punctuated by images and events that are far more crisp, even cinematic. I remember, for instance, the night the woodstove caught the roof on fire, and there is a certain pungency of resin-rich boards and scorched steel sheeting that still seems to linger in the recesses of my sinuses. At bonfires, when planks of construction scrap are thrown on, I find myself beginning to hyperventilate. Not exactly Proust’s madeleine. Another vivid memory is the time I caught my first fish in the pond. This fish, which had to be a brook trout and could not have been more than six or seven inches long, looms in my mind like a plesiosaur. The fight to bring him in, which I conducted masterfully under the screaming instruction of my excited mother, lives in my memory with the grandeur of The Old Man and the Sea. Such is the wonder of youth, that the world is essentially malleable, that small events can be made big and large events made to disappear.

Hayley—Mom—was a woman of letters, an organic gardener, an artist, an ethical consumer, and thus prone to bouts, seasons, even eras, of delusion. This seems a harsh judgment, much harsher than is necessary, and probably wrong. What I mean is that she brought us, Bear and me, to this bucolic, decaying, ramshackle setting to make a new life close to nature; that nature was one leg of the stool, and self-sufficiency and beauty the others. This was a place where her little daughter and her dog would grow under the domain of the constellations, the fresh winds of the new seasons, and ripening apples and falling leaves and swelling brooks and thawing ice and phalanxes of migrating geese barking out of the high dark and and and …

Well, it was beautiful. It is. I can stand on my front porch and concur and thank her.

***

She thought she would revive the orchard. There were plenty of apples. They had been ripening and falling on their own for decades. The wildness had somehow concentrated their sweetness. I suppose it was because so many of the branches had died—prey to insects and disease—that the ones that were left and still bore fruit were in some way more distilled. Each ripe apple from these gnarled elders was a gift of deliciousness. I remember that. And I can still find a half-feral survivor, an impossibly twisted hybrid at the edge of what field remains, and bite through the ruddy skin with the same surprise and pleasure I did when I was seven.

The problem is that to make an orchard economically viable, one needs to produce a certain number of apples per tree, so that picking becomes efficient, and one needs pickers and pruners. But the pickers will shun you when they take one look at your sparse and ancient relics, as they know that they can harvest bumper crops just down the road.

And so, if you are a young, earnest back-to-the-lander with a tiny, as yet nonjudgmental daughter and a dog, you are relegated by your own impulsiveness to harvesting these trees on your own. And the bushels of spotted fruit which cost you so much scratched skin and backache and sunburn, and exhaust you entirely, and bring you nearly—sometimes not so nearly—to tears as you load them into the back of your balking mule of a pickup—these baskets fetch you, from the indulgent if tight-lipped buyer at the co-op, just enough money to pay for your gas and for new sneakers for your growing daughter. This buyer, by the way, was named Bill—Bill the Buyer, we called him—and he turned out to be a very sweet castaway whose family had all been killed in Croatia, and who informed us that our discolored, sometimes scabbed apples were noncompliant but happily sweet.

So after that first fall, Hayley had to devise another plan. She was very good with a chainsaw and had cut enough dead apple trees to keep us in fragrant firewood for the next two winters. And as the blizzards raged and the icicles extended their glass fingers from the eaves and the forest behind the cabin creaked, the three of us gathered around the plank table in the middle of our one superheated room and put our heads together to figure out how we were going to make a living.

I must have turned seven, as my birthday is in January. I remember more than anything the grown-up feeling of putting fist under chin or against forehead while we pondered our future, while we brainstormed and strategized. I also remember the morning Hayley dressed me in my Monday Best, as she called it, and took me down to some big brick building in Brattleboro where a man with one eye that looked at the ceiling asked me a bunch of questions and gave Hayley a stack of notebooks, some heavy textbooks, and a calendar. He was the homeschooling superintendent, and he kept patting the corner of his mouth and one nostril with a handkerchief, and I later wrote a story called Leaky Man starring him. He shook Hayley’s hand, patted me on the head, gave me a grape Tootsie Pop, and walked us to the door of his office, where he seemed very glad to get rid of us. Funny what you recall.

Two

This story begins in earnest the morning Rose Lattimore walked up the orchard track. It was mud season, mid-March, also sugaring time, when the nights freeze and the trees creak like old hinges, but then the days thaw, the brooks rush, the snow melts, and the sap runs in the maple trees. Like our neighbors, we tapped our maples. We endeavored to collect the faintly sweet-tasting water in hanging buckets, the old way. All our neighbors used plastic tubing which ran from tree to tree in awful webs.

Hayley kept the door and all the windows open and the woodstove roaring and boiled down the sap in a giant canning pot. Not quite the way our neighbors did it, with their dedicated sugarhouses and vast boiling pans, but it seemed to work. After what seemed to me years of strenuous gathering, we wrung about twenty gallons of ambrosia-like syrup out of the maples around the orchard. I wonder now if the reward for all of this wasn’t supposed to be the work itself, but I am also cognizant of the fact that I had one pair of overalls and only two pairs of shoes: black-and-yellow fireman’s boots with big looping hand-pulls and patches of glue that looked like spilled egg whites, and one pair of Keds that I despised because they were pink. And so one afternoon when Hayley was hammering together a crude chicken coop, I used a black magic marker to turn them into what I imagined were the paws of a tiger. I thought one could do anything on striped feet.

This one morning in late March, the woodstove was popping, the door was open, the nuthatches were wheezing. I was sitting below the porch steps on Bear, who often consented to be chair, backrest, pillow, ottoman, and, today, throne. I was Aud, Queen of the Vikings. I was seated before my ancestral lands and pulling on Bear’s ear and asking him, as my chief warrior, Ragnar, where we should invade next, when I saw a flash of red down by the pond, at the bottom of the four-wheel-drive track that served as our long driveway.

I was only seven, but I could read like a wizard, and Hayley and I had been tearing through The Curse of Andvari’s Ring together. Certain words like eviscerate I always needed help with, but I appreciated, after the halting effort, how the word tumbled out like so many guts. I usually didn’t like being a girl so much—unlike me and Hayley, they seemed in stories to spend too much time inside castles, brushing their hair—but when we read about Gunnhild and Aud, I saw the possibilities in being a forthright and cruel queen.

Through the leafless trees, that first flash of red. A fleeting tatter of color lost again in the branches like the flight of a cardinal. Then it reappeared as a scarf—rose, not red—appended to a long purplish cardigan atop which bobbed a head of wild blond curls that spilled to broad shoulders and framed, I saw as she came closer, a red-cheeked face and hexagonal rimless glasses.

Bear and I fell silent. She saw us and waved and I waved back, twisting my hand like a queen. We didn’t have a TV, but now I spent a day a week down at the elementary school in the village so that—as Hayley said, tying the waist bow on my only dress and patting me down—I didn’t grow up like Tarzan. This was a poor rhetorical feint, as I couldn’t think of anything better than growing up like Tarzan. Anyway, I had seen the marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles on the classroom TV and I knew how queens waved.

The lady responded with more enthusiasm. In fact, she stopped dead and waved with both arms, like a castaway to a passing ship. Bear and I glanced at each other. I could feel him stirring beneath me and hear his tail whisking the grass and I thumped his big head and commanded, Stay!

She came on. When she got abreast of our old truck she stopped and said, Does he bite?

Definitely, I said.

He doesn’t look mean.

He’s not mean, he just bites.

I see.

The lady was of indeterminate age. She seemed both much older and much younger than Hayley. Her eyes were a mischievous glancing blue.

Well, she said. Requesting permission to speak to the queen.

My hand reached up and felt the gold cardboard crown we had made yesterday in first grade. It was a stupid crown, nothing like a Viking queen’s, but still. Bear couldn’t restrain himself any longer and stood up and upended me. I scrambled to my feet.

Are you from Brattleboro? I said. Brattleboro was the seat of all officialdom.

Westminster West, she said.

Oh.

Bear was prancing in place and whining with excitement and trying not to jump on the lady. I thumped him on the head and said, "Bear, sit!" He sat. She stuck out her hand, which was too much for him. He squirmed and covered her fingers with slobber.

Rosie, she said.

Oh, I said. Bear, quit!

What’s your name?

Frith.

Frith! Her voice rang like the brass