The Orchard (5 page)

“No, it wasn’t weird, for god’s sake. It was almost dark. And it ain’t the middle of July, in case you hadn’t noticed. What did you want, ninety degrees or something?”

“Oh, absolutely,” he said, too loud and too fast. “I am a Sunbelt baby, remember? Born and practically bred in the wilds of Miami, and I don’t intend to spend the rest of my stupid life in this stupid icebox.” He yelled at his sister again and apologized, saying he was stuck at home, babysitting, because his father wasn’t feeling well and his mom was out at some meeting at their church.

“No sweat,” I told him and we agreed to meet at the student union after the English exam; tomorrow being Sunday, he had to stay home, help his mom around the house and do the yard work. I knew he wanted to bitch some about it, but I didn’t give him the chance. I told him Mike had called, and I promised to get back to him if there was any gossip he should know.

“Good deal,” he said. “Maybe he knows who that joker was who crashed the picnic.”

“Joker? What joker? Stick, who are you—”

Then his little sister screamed bloody murder right in my ear and the line went dead, and I knew if I called back, I’d get his father again.

Mike wasn’t home. His mother said he had gone over to Amy’s just a little while ago and—she laughed—he wasn’t in the best of moods. She called it a lovers’ spat; I watched my language and told her she was probably right.

Then I took a deep breath, said a few prayers to anyone who was listening, and dialed Mary’s number.

She answered on the third ring, and she sounded like hell.

“The funeral’s Monday afternoon,” she said.

I leaned back and stared at the ceiling, feeling like a shit for not feeling a thing. “You want company?”

“I don’t know if I can go.” Then she started crying, the dry kind that makes you want to scratch your throat because suddenly it feels like it’s been filled with sand. “I don’t know, Herb, I don’t know. What should I do?”

“He was our friend,” I told her as gently and truthfully as I could. “He was a buddy. We should.”

“He wanted me to marry him!”

Oh, hell, I thought.

“He said we could wait until after graduation and then get married.” The crying stopped; she had the hiccoughs now. “He said we could have our own careers, you know? He said we didn’t have to have children until later.”

I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to know it. But I couldn’t stop her because she didn’t know me. So I sat there for nearly an hour while she told me all the plans she and Rich had made, and how her life was ruined because some asshole in some asshole car was too damned drunk to see where he was going.

“Mary,” I said at last, “calm down, huh? Take it easy.”

“It just isn’t fair that he’s dead! Damnit, Herb, it just isn’t fair!”

I didn’t say anything. I let her go on until, finally, she dropped into a silence that had me thinking, after a minute, that she’d hung up.

Then, softly: “I’m sorry, Herb. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s all right, okay? It’s all right.”

“Are you angry?”

“With you? C’mon, Mary, don’t be a jerk. Unless you want me to be.”

“What?”

“I mean, if you really want me to be mad at you, I will.”

“Herb, please …”

“No, I mean it sincerely. Of course, you realize I’ll have to come over there and hang you from the ceiling by your thumbs and give you forty lashes with a wet cat.”

She giggled.

“You want me to come over? I can pick up a cat on the way.”

“No,” she said, reluctantly. “I can’t see anyone, I don’t think. I look like hell and i can’t stop crying and Jesus Christ, why the fuck did it have to happen to him?”

I had no answers, but I think I did a fair job of telling her so in the right way because the hiccoughs soon stopped and she was sort of laughing again.

“Jesus, Herb, what would I do without you?”

“Stagger on somehow,” I told her in my best, lousy British accent. “Chins up, eyes forward, pulling yourself together with a paper clip and a hammer.”

Another laugh, a quiet thanks, and we rang off.

I sat there forever, staring at the receiver, squinting at the far wall, finally pushing myself to my feet and heading for the back door. I needed to think. I needed to tell myself that it just wasn’t done, what I was thinking, which was to make myself so available to handle her grief that Mary would never think of being without me again.

In the old days, they called jerks like that cads.

I paused in the kitchen, sniffing the air vainly for the cooking smells I had noticed before, and shrugged. It must have been a reaction to the fact I hadn’t eaten all day, and my diet-killing mind was bringing up fond memories of Aunt May’s best meals. But since I still wasn’t all that hungry, I continued on outside, into a backyard walled in by house-high pines, the grass perfectly mowed, the flowers under the windows all the same height. My uncle’s doing. And the only break in the symmetry he had forced on it was a small shed in the back. Green, and the one place I could go and not be disturbed.

St used to be Uncle Gil’s toolshed until he got tired of doing all the work himself and hired a gardener; now it was my studio, heated for winter, a couple of small windows to keep me from frying in summer. After a glance back at the house, I unlocked the door behind me, and switched on the light.

And I hadn’t taken two steps toward the workbench and my project beside it when someone started pounding on the walls.

“It’s Amy, that goddamned little bitch!” Mike yelled as he bulled in when I reopened the door.

At first I thought she must be dead or in a coma, but the way he ranted around the room, the way he looked for something to throw and didn’t even dare pick up a pencil, told me she had zapped his ego again.

“You know what she said?” His face was flushed the color of roses, and he couldn’t stop waving his arms. “Do you have any idea what she just said to me?”

I didn’t, and I dragged him quickly outside before he destroyed everything I had. Immediately, he flopped onto the grass and began pulling it out by the roots.

“What,” I said, not getting down beside him. “What’s going on now?”

“She said … god, I still can’t believe it. She said that she’s decided she can’t ever let herself love anyone because sooner or later they’re going to die and she doesn’t think she can handle that kind of pressure.” He looked up at me in disgust. “Can you believe it, Herb? I mean … Jesus H., can you believe it?”

“You are out of your frigging mind, you know,” I told him less than tolerantly. “You’ve been chasing that woman like an idiot since you were both in diapers and she just doesn’t want to be bothered, right?”

His expression was glum.

“So I don’t get it. Why are you killing yourself?”

He went from glum to suicidal.

“Mike?”

He only sighed.

I wanted to hit him then, put some black around his lights. This was exactly what I did not need tonight, not after Rich yesterday and Mary’s confessions on the phone. And it wasn’t long before he realized from my silence that he wasn’t going to get any of my sympathy, only a strong dose of the truth heavily laced with my own brand of self-pity.

But Jesus, you’d think even a pal like him would understand what was happening to me. He knew. He
knew
what it was like, and he
knew
this was the absolute worst time he could have picked to come crying on my shoulder.

“Well, shit on you,” he said at last, pushing himself to his feet. “I’m going for a ride.”

“Good. It’ll cool you off.”

“Like hell. Maybe I’ll drive into a telephone pole or a truck or something.”

“Not on my block,” I said. “I’ve got work to do.”

He gave me a halfhearted finger and stalked off, and a few seconds later I heard a car start and tires squeal as he sped away. Then I felt rotten. He was looking for help and all I did was shove his stupidity down his throat. Jesus, I’d make a hell of a priest; I definitely wasn’t being much of a friend.

Then I remembered Mary and went back inside. Locked the door. Pulled aside a stained dropcloth and sat on a stool to look at my project.

It was a tomb.

On that television special I had watched, I’d been fascinated by the way the rich used to be buried in the real old days—in huge stone tombs with their likenesses carved on the lids. Like Queen Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots, and a bunch of other people I had never even heard of. Some of the tombs were so elaborate they were hysterical; others so simple they were stunning. Some effigies had been painted, others retained the stone’s natural color; biblical verses, poems, life histories, political lies, were sometimes engraved along the sides; and more than once, a husband and wife were buried together, and together they were carved, as if they were napping.

Nobody did that anymore, and it really was Art if you looked at it kind of sideways, and Danvers sure as hell couldn’t deny it was unusual.

So I began with small blocks of wood, a couple of feet long at the most, and tried to create facsimiles of what I had seen, and of the pictures I found in the library at college and in town. I decided after the first few attempts went sour not to have them in fancy clothes, like the Elizabethans, but the way someone might be buried today—in a suit and tie, or a Sunday or birthday dress. Then I thought it would be even better to have them represented the way they were in life—some in jeans, some in tuxedos, some in evening gowns, things like that. I tried a baseball uniform, a cop’s outfit and, one night when I was pissed at Uncle Gil, a judge’s robes with astrological signs along the hem.

Jesus, they were terrible.

The results looked like what they were—whittling without any force behind them, without any caring. I stopped and did some sketches, but they didn’t help either—they looked great, but they were only … sketches.

I had started in February.

By the end of the month I was ready to take the bus into Hartford and throw myself into the Connecticut River.

Then I discovered my first solution—I was working too small. The power of the originals lay partly in their size. Life-size. And after a lot of wheedling, of whimpering, of swearing up and down it was a secret and I’d tell as soon as I could, I got Uncle Gil to have a carpenter friend make me a thick block of wood six feet long and five feet high. It took three men to carry it into the shed. It hasn’t moved from the spot where they dropped it.

I was scared to death to start because I couldn’t afford a single mistake, but one look at my sketches and I knew I couldn’t use any of them. Not even now.

And that’s when I discovered my second solution, the most obvious one—I needed a real subject to work with, not just some imaginary person.

That’s why I couldn’t talk to Mary.

I had chosen her to be the model for my corpse.

And there she was now, lying peacefully with those green eyes closed, those soft hands folded on her stomach. Only the effigy was done. The base was still incomplete, because I had no idea what to put there yet. But it was all right, anyway. I mean, you could tell it was her if you knew her—but it wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t good enough by half, and I had less than two weeks to get it all done.

A car backfired on Raglin and I jumped, grinned at myself and pulled the stool closer, reached out and ran my hands along the lines of her body. She was smooth, cool, and I let my fingers trace the folds and curves of the dress she was wearing, in my mind, the white dress I had seen her in last March, at a concert on campus. Suddenly, I began giggling and couldn’t stop. I found myself pressing down on her forehead and whispering, “Heal! Heal!” to her closed eyes, to the mouth slightly parted, standing and pretending I was a tent preacher bringing the wooden dead back to life.

“Heal!” I said loudly, and fell back on the stool, laughing harder and shaking my head.

I was crazy.

I had finally flipped the old lid and had gone totally nuts. If my uncle saw me, he’d probably have the papers signed before he got me back to the house; if my aunt saw me, she’d tsk and fret a lot and tell me I ought to go to a movie or something to clear my head so I could work better.

Maybe they were both right.

I looked at Mary for nearly half an hour, envisioning what I wanted to have there, growing more frustrated by the minute because I didn’t know the secret of how to do it. Twice, I picked up a blade and took a sliver off here, a splinter there, and twice put the blade back down before I ruined what little I already had. I did some sanding to smooth imagined rough edges. I dusted her off three or four times. Then another bout of staring, as if by magic I could shift the wood’s molecules without moving a muscle. What it did was give me a headache.

“Leave, fool,” I ordered myself at last. “Leave, and seek inspiration in a chocolate shake, you jerk.”

I stood, replaced the dropcloth and the blade, and switched off the light. Then I went outside, locked the door behind me, and saw someone standing at the corner of the house.

No light from any of the neighbors came through the pines and high shrubs; there was only a dim square of grey-white on the lawn under the kitchen window. Whoever it was stood just beyond its reach, and for a moment I thought it might be that guy Stick was talking about, the guy from the picnic. Then I realized it had to be Mike, back to apologize after his tantrum had run its course.

“Hey,” I said, grinning and walking toward him. “Listen, you gotta hear what—”

I stopped.

A sudden, strong gust of wind punched me in the back, making me duck my head and fold my arms tightly over my chest, filling my ears with a high-pitched roaring. And it was cold. Nightcold. It started my teeth chattering, my eyes watering, and, for a frightening second, sucked the strength from my legs. I stumbled, was ready to fall, and the gust passed as quickly as it had come. Blowing like a whale, I rubbed my arms to bring back some warmth and hunched my shoulders sharply to chase away the tightness that had settled across my spine.

“Jesus, Mike, did you feel that? Holy shit, I—”

He was gone.