The Orchardist (21 page)

That whore’s girl
. Angelene did not know what that meant, exactly, but she knew enough to break out into a cold sweat the moment she heard it, and later hesitate, on the ride back home, to ask Talmadge what it meant.

He did not notice anything was amiss. He looked straight ahead in the wagon, on his face an expression of subdued pleasure from her winning the prize.

She let the moment pass, intuiting, even then, what would hurt him.

W
hat’s a whore? she asked Caroline Middey two days later, as they peeled potatoes in Caroline Middey’s kitchen. They were preparing supper for them all: Talmadge had gone to town but would be back by evening.

Caroline Middey raised her eyebrows but did not take her eyes from the task at hand. She hesitated.

A whore is a woman who lies with men for money, she said.

Angelene, after a minute, said: Oh.

Then, the inevitable: What do you mean, Lies with?

Caroline Middey sighed. She and Talmadge should have talked about this: When was it the right time to talk to the girl about—things? But, she thought, if it was up to Talmadge then the girl would never be told.

Angelene, working slower now, watched Caroline Middey, as if to glean any information—any knowledge—from the other woman’s expression.

There is an activity, said Caroline Middey, that grown men and women—married people, but they do not have to be married, do they, no. She hesitated, considering. There is an activity that they do, when they love each other, and they decide they want to be together, where they take off their clothes, and rub—certain parts of their bodies together. This is called intercourse.

The girl drew back her head, puzzled.

No, she said, breaking into laughter. Go on!

Caroline Middey smiled too, despite herself. How strange it all was—the girl was right—and how strange it must be to hear it for the first time.

There is a lot more to it, warned Caroline Middey. And I will explain it all to you one day. But a young girl like yourself does not need to know too much. It doesn’t do to know—or be thinking about such things—right away.

There was a silence.

And so a whore does it for money, prompted Angelene. How much money?

Caroline Middey pursed her lips.

Goodness, child!

Angelene pulled back, impressed and surprised that with that question she could have rattled the woman who was so often hard to move.

I don’t know, said Caroline Middey. But I will tell you this: it’s not something that women, most women, like to speak of, if they’re doing it, or they know someone who is. It’s not—accepted, mostly. She paused briefly. There are some people who see no shame in it. They treat it like a—business transaction. But then she looked at the girl, carefully.

If Talmadge knew we were talking about this—

But why? said Angelene, her eyes keen with interest. She had stopped working, her hands clutching the rim of the bowl. Would he be mad? But why?

Caroline Middey was helpless.

There are certain subjects that make some people—Talmadge especially—very uncomfortable.

But not you, said Angelene.

Not me, no, conceded Caroline Middey. After a brief silence, both of them working again, she said, I want you to ask
me
questions about this kind of thing—don’t go around asking anybody else.

Angelene, apparently satisfied, absorbed in her work again, said without hesitation: All right.

B
ut it did not occur to Caroline Middey until later, after the girl had gone to sleep—in the room with the hanging herbs; Talmadge slept on a cot in the kitchen—that the girl, in order to have asked the question, must have heard the word somewhere. Caroline Middey was going to make inquiries, but upon seeing the girl in the morning, face freshly washed, coming to her with a hairbrush, asking Caroline Middey to braid her hair, she could not bring herself to ask. If the girl was troubled, thought Caroline Middey, then she already knew enough to come to her.

But still Caroline Middey was bothered. What had the girl heard? What was she thinking?

O
n the way back to the orchard, riding in the back of the wagon, Angelene’s mind was washed clean of worry. The girl at the fair had called her a whore’s girl—but very clearly she was mistaken, or she was talking about somebody else. For Angelene did not know any whores.

H
ow long had Della been in the wilderness, this time? Had she gone into the forest because she was ill, or had she become ill because she was in the forest? Each succeeding day ate away at her memory, and after a length of time had passed—a week? a month? two months?—she was unsure of the events of her life leading to that moment. One morning she woke and could not remember her name. Dolly? Annie? Annie was the name they gave to girls who would not reveal their true names, at Michaelson’s camp . . .

Days transpired. Somehow she was able to sleep outdoors in the cold. She had stolen a buffalo rug. Laughed, not remembering where it came from. Lay whole days under it, feverish. The fever let out some of the old grief. She called Jane’s name, or thought she did. Remembered her children, who had not been fully formed, who had died. And how was she still alive? How was that possible?

She dreamed of Talmadge, that he was cooking her food. He told her to pick which closed fist, and she picked one, and he turned his hand and opened his palm: there was an apricot stone. She reached for it, and it disappeared.

In the morning, angry, airy with hunger, she crawled from beneath the blanket and staggered to a road she must have known about, for she went directly to it. Made her way to town.

The fever was over. She would eat, find a horse—her own horse she entered the forest with had disappeared—and then find work.

I
n the schoolhouse north of Cashmere, along the river, Angelene sat near the window that looked out onto a large cottonwood. She drew courage from that tree, which seemed to have been planted there for the sole purpose of being her friend.

She was very scared in the beginning—the air smelled of chalk and cold, and the voices of the other children were sharp as needles, and intrusive—but that passed.

History was baffling to her. There seemed to be too much of it. She preferred geography, was struck by the idea that there could be different landscapes from the one in which she lived. After a lesson on photosynthesis, she drew diagrams in the small notebook Talmadge had given her, and regarded these drawings often, improving upon them, thinking: And this is how it works: sun, soil, sugar, water . . . She could not wait to tell Talmadge about it.

The other chief love—and how similar it was to science, and how different—was reading. As soon as she realized the figures on the page meant something—could be strung together as words, and then sentences, and then paragraphs—she was covetous of the whole system. It seemed a new universe to her. And it was. Everything opened up. Some stories were meant to inform, and others were meant to entertain. And then other stories were separate from those—this the young teacher did not tell her, it was something Angelene figured out on her own, the first year, when a man visited and read them a
poem
out of a tome of poems—that seemed crafted to relay some secret, and even more than that, some secret about herself. Angelene was mesmerized. What was available for her to know? What secrets did the world hold? Which secrets would be revealed through the soil, and which through words?

I
n the spring of 1911 Della traveled with an outfit of men from Pendleton, Oregon, into the Sawtooths. These were not Clee’s men—she had found jobs traveling with other men, in other outfits that would accept her. The outfits, like this one, would usually have to be short a few men to agree to take her on; but even so, despite the general wariness to include her, she had been around some all-right types in the last few years. That is to say, she had been with men who more or less left her alone.

This group in the Sawtooths she had been traveling with for a week. They were hunting horses in the high ranges. Some of the men had wanted that morning to return down the mountain, saying they had got enough horses to satisfy the boss, but it had been discussed among them all and finally decided that they would keep at it, go up into some other peaks, another two days, at least, to search for more horses. Otherwise, the hunt, the whole enterprise, would have more or less failed. They had promised the boss more horses than they had captured thus far. But it was hard going; it was May, and yet it had snowed the day before last, in the early morning. These men were among the roughest she had traveled with—loud at night, careless with their words and hands. One or two had touched her, but nobody had outright abused her, and so she stayed. Wanted to stick it out, for the payment, of course, but there were also the horses to think about, the great hunting in the days to come.

After a week of traveling they came into a camp in the late afternoon, just before dusk. Some men began to prepare their evening meals while others went to the river to wash. It was a valley high in the range, and as the sun went down, the snow-covered peaks in the distance glowed. In the valley there was a deep hush, and the noises the men and horses made were tinny in comparison. The entire valley wrapped around them and blanketed them in distance.

Della did not go with the men to wash, and neither did she light a fire right away. She sat on her bedroll and looked out over the valley darkening. And where would she go, what would she do? Ate a loaf-end of bread, incredibly tough, she had found in her saddlebag. Her hands dark with filth. The sweat, as it dried on her body, chilled her. When darkness came the men sat in their camp below—she sat uphill from them, a few yards off—eating and guffawing. Some of the men were still sore about going up into the mountains; any moment that might turn into something else. She was constantly attuned to the noise of the men, the different pitches that would mean that they were talking about women, they were talking about her. The men were tired and lonely, they were angry.

She lit a fire, and heated some beans. As she waited, a form separated from the camp below, and moved uphill. He took only a few steps before he paused and then returned to the camp. That’s right, she thought. That’s right. Her arm was steady as she transferred the can of beans, which she handled with a mitt, between her knees. Tentatively began to eat them. Watched the camp. She burned her mouth, and cursed. When she’d finished eating, she scoured the empty can with a rag from her kit and then put the can in her saddlebag. Stomped out the fire. Lay down on her bedroll.

Her eyes closed, she listened to the men. They had begun to drink. She listened to them even as she slept. Even though her hand rested on the hilt of the unsheathed hunting knife under her pillow, she was not afraid. She knew what to listen for, and the atmosphere wasn’t right for them to come for her. It was close, but still not right. It was not close enough that she would not be able to sleep. Tomorrow she would have to reevaluate the situation. But tonight she could rest.

W
hat did you learn? Talmadge asked Angelene, when she was back in the orchard. She stayed with Caroline Middey three days out of the week now, because it was too far to travel from the orchard to the schoolhouse and back every day. They sat at the table, eating, and Angelene told him all that she could remember. The dates of battles of the Revolutionary War, some times tables, why there was so much ash in the soil. After supper she studied at the table while Talmadge sat in the chair in the corner, looking at his almanacs. Sometimes he looked at them only a short time before getting up and going outside, to do what, perhaps walk in the orchard. He sometimes did that if it was getting close to a heavy work time, or if he was upset by something, or if his food wasn’t digesting properly. Often when he passed by her he would touch her head, as if to say, Keep going, I’ll be right outside, you keep studying. There was a sort of tender pride there that made her feel as if she was doing something important, something that pleased him deeply.