The Orchardist (19 page)

A
nd Angelene, too young at the time to articulate her feelings for Della, regarded her as part of the orchard as the men and the horses were a part of it, interesting and unusual and even phenomenal, but they had nothing to do with, were separate from, what constituted the real orchard life, which was Angelene and Talmadge by themselves. The last few times Angelene saw Della, as a child of four or five, neither made a move to embrace the other. Della was difficult to place for Angelene during that time. She was Angelene’s aunt, but Angelene did not understand what that meant exactly. In the grain of Angelene’s life Della was the one thing going the opposite direction; she didn’t fit. She was always there, the odd detail agitating an otherwise serene existence.

Talmadge did not speak to Angelene about who Della was or where she came from, and why she was so different from other women. Angelene was too young then anyway to understand. If she voiced any confusion to him, neither of them remembered it. What she did remember was riding Talmadge’s back in the orchard—for pleasure, now, since she had outgrown the papoose—with grass and honeysuckle stuck in the corner of her mouth, asking endless questions about the animals, the clouds, the trees, the fruit. And he answered, beginning: Oh . . . Thoughtful answers.

They had moved into the time in the orchard when Della came no more. Angelene always thought she could place the moment exactly, the beginning of this time. Her birthday was held every year after apricot harvest, with the horses down below in the field, and the men up in the yard, dressed in their town clothes and sitting in chairs and on the ground, eating food Caroline Middey had prepared. Whether it was a fact or simply the way she remembered it, this birthday party—her sixth—was the first that Della did not attend. Talmadge kept drawing to the edge of the yard to look out at the treeline across the field, expecting Della to ride out of it.

This was the image Angelene had of him at that time, always moving to the edges of some celebration, assuming a position, looking out for Della. He was to speak of her less often in the years to come, but he never lost that air of distraction, of looking out. It made Angelene sad for him, and resent the one who stayed away.

III

D
ella entered the picture booth—she had not known what it was beforehand—to satisfy a mild curiosity.

It was a kind of closet, very quiet compared with the outside carnival she had just come from. These carnivals cropped up around the auctions, and she was sometimes let to wander off by herself.
Be back at camp before dusk—

She sat on a blue velvet-cushioned stool. A man she could not see—he was in the ink-black darkness before her—told her to hold very still. He was taking her picture. Did she know what that meant? Don’t move your mouth, he said. Sit still. Try not to blink.

Ultimately, the picture was the size of her thumbprint. She kept taking it out of her pocket, afterward, as she walked the carnival alone among the blinking, lurid lights, and looked at it. This was what she looked like. The girl in the picture was pale (but that was the effect of the film; in life she was rather dark-skinned) and had a startled expression, dark eyes. A mouth almost lost in sternness. The man had made her take off her hat and her hair was raggedy and held together in two braids, one of which lay coiled on her shoulder. A smattering of freckles across her nose. Her shoulders were very narrow. One of her front pockets was torn.

She did not know that you were supposed to give the picture to your sweetheart—how would she know this?—and so she thought she would give the photograph to Angelene, or Talmadge, before she remembered she did not see them anymore. She fit the photograph inside her breast pocket. After a few minutes, when nothing else in the carnival succeeded in catching her eye—and she was hungry, but found no food stalls—she turned campward.

S
he wondered that evening, watching Clee move around the fire preparing supper, what his image would look like, captured in a photograph. His frame was tall, heavy; his square head would take up the entire frame, she thought, not understanding how a camera worked, not understanding that the lens could be adjusted. His hair was brushed up in a pompadour and braids, in the style of many Nez Perce men at the time. His eyes were heavy lidded; his cheekbones high and set wide apart. He wore a dark wool shirt and a vest with fringe on the front, and a beaded necklace with a medallion that he wore inside his shirt. And also a scapular—that was what it was called, though she did not know it at the time.

She thought about this photograph of him that was not taken. That night, taking out the photograph as she lay on her bedroll and looking at it in the firelight—her own small, pale, startled image—she imagined this invisible counterpart alongside it, giving it substance and weight.

A
ngelene sat on Talmadge’s shoulders:
I am queen of the orchard!
Singing in the trees while they worked, silly songs he knew, and also hymns. Their voices in the trees. His absentminded whistling. The lilting sound, every once in a while, of Angelene asking a question.

R
iding in the herd, the sound like one constant, endless sigh; some horses frantic and others calm, some remembering some wrong done to them while others wanted only to sleep, and each struggling with hunger and thirst; some horses pregnant, others desperate to copulate; and all moved forward as one body amid the heat and the dust. The men and Della spaced out and caught among them like ornaments in a blanket; like disparate thoughts fretting to cohere. The feeling that this would never end, being caught in the herd, heading east or north, west or south, moving for some purpose, though that purpose was for the moment lost; the horses—the herd—carried the men at times more than the men guided them. The men were bound by time—they must reach the auction that evening, or the next day—and yet the riding among the horses through the landscape was endless and timeless, distanceless. It made some men—not the ones who were riding, but others, who lived elsewhere, employed in different occupations—desperate; it made Della sink down under the pressing weight of all that time, all that distance—for it was not deficit but surplus experienced between two destinations—and though she felt at times she could not move, because of the pressing weight, she also felt placed. Ensconced. Safe.

A
ngelene crouched in Talmadge’s closet, among the hanging flannel shirts. In the corner, atop two boxes of crystal glassware—Talmadge had found them at a fair and was certain they had value—was an open-topped box. She reached inside it.

She did not think she was forbidden to be there—she roamed in and out of his room as if it were her own, and often cleaned there, on Saturdays—but besides this, she did not even think she would be reprimanded for going into his closet. There were the few times when he called her for supper and found her there, hidden among his shirts, a game. But she did not know what he would say about her exploring the contents of the boxes, disassembling them, without his permission. But she did it anyway, sensing that he would never be truly angry at her. And where was he now, as her fingers clutched an object, smooth—glass?—beneath a gingham wrapping? He was out in the orchard, working, or sleeping on the porch. Later he would leave her alone in the orchard while he went to town. But now she was too young—eight years old, barely that—to be left by herself.

She was used to Talmadge’s boxes. There were the boxes of glassware, but also boxes of old almanacs and newspapers, magazines, other dishes and knickknacks, in the shed. Things he had picked up over a lifetime of fair-going and browsing the secondhand shops. People sometimes went to estate sales in other counties, and brought treasures back for him.
Thought this might interest you, Talmadge
. He had a collection of postcards, tiny porcelain bells, and spoons with emblems of the forty-five states on the handles. He did not order these from the catalog but kept track of their production and then looked for them in the secondhand shops. The storekeeper in town knew his predilections.

Objects too at times, after all, like the landscape, held the potential for meaning—she took out the first object now—and were able to comfort.

These items Angelene had never seen before. Two ambrotypes: one showing a dark-haired woman standing on a hillock with two young children, a boy and a girl, standing in front of her; the woman had her hands resting protectively on the children’s chests. The other ambrotype showed the children alone, holding hands in front of a trellis, squinting in the sunlight. There was also a pair of extremely old children’s leather boots with a ruffle along the toe; a white christening gown, yellowed with age; and a pair of baby’s booties.

Talmadge had not told Angelene about his family, or about his history in the orchard. What, then, must she have made of those images? Did she know that was Talmadge’s mother, and the little girl standing beside him was his sister? Did she know that Talmadge was the boy? Did she understand that Talmadge had ever been a boy? It was difficult to know exactly what she made of the images, though she must have been impressed by them, because she returned to them again and again.

One day she was particularly confident and brought in a cup of tea with her to the bedroom. She had already pulled out the box minutes before in anticipation of viewing, and left the room for the tea—and as she returned, coming into the room, she tripped over a slightly raised floorboard, and fell. The cup, like some bad joke, landed in the box, and with horror, as she lifted out the cup and felt the box for moisture, she saw that the boots were relatively unharmed, but the gown was stained and the ambrotypes were ruined. She cleaned the objects to the best of her ability, so shocked and afraid that she was unable even to cry. Her hands shook. She wrapped one of the ambrotypes that had broken in a handkerchief and then put the box back. Maybe, she thought, he wouldn’t know that she had done it. Oh no, she would say, when he pulled out the box and asked her if she knew anything about it. What happened?