The Orchardist (27 page)

C
offee? said Angelene, and rose from the table.

They had eaten Christmas dinner: rabbit dressed in chestnut butter and sage; collard greens and Brussels sprouts; mashed squash with raisins; onion bread. Apples stewed in brandy. Plum cake.

I couldn’t eat another morsel, said Caroline Middey. But they would all have coffee, despite the hour. It didn’t affect them like other people.

Talmadge, in his chair in the corner, was asleep by the time Angelene had prepared the coffee. Caroline Middey glanced at him, smirked. She sat at the table and beckoned to the girl, who also sat. The coffee steaming before them. Caroline Middey was opening a package—a cross-stitching packet—that she had bought for the girl, but feared might be too advanced. They looked over the materials. Caroline Middey spread the instructions on the table, flattened them with her palms. Cleared her throat. Several minutes passed in silence.

Oh, this doesn’t look so bad, said Caroline Middey.

D
ella woke startled, lethargic, and hot, in a narrow high-backed bed, her feet near a deep fireplace roaring with flame. She sweated, and when she tried to sit up, her head ached. She eased back again onto a multitude of pillows.

Look who’s up, said a woman—a nun, Della saw, by her modest wimple—who pulled up a stool beside her and sat down and took Della’s hand, not to hold it, as Della thought, baffled and embarrassed, at first, but to feel her pulse. The nun, after smiling briefly, looked into the middle distance of the room, trying to determine the strength of blood in Della.

You’ll live, she said finally, and replaced Della’s arm back onto the covers. Patted her hand, and rose. The woman’s touch rang on Della’s flesh afterward, like the reverberation of a bell.

S
he lay in the high-backed bed while storms raged and winter spent itself. The cabin was an outpost that functioned also as a hospital—situated high on the pass, meant to cater to cases such as hers: people who had tried to cross the mountains but failed, mostly due to inclement weather.

There were two others who convalesced in the room with her—a hunter who had broken his leg, and a young woman who had tried to cross the pass to reach her husband, who was in Seattle, but got caught in a snowstorm. The woman, who had been pregnant, had spent two days in the snow before the nuns had found her. She had miscarried.

Twins, confided the nun.

They stayed together in a close room, and the nuns slept on either end of it. The walls were made out of a dark wood. The fire roared constantly. The nuns—there were three—fed it as if it was an animal without which they would all perish. And in a sense it was.

They fed the invalids dark broth.

Della knew it would be fruitless to try to leave the place: the windows were white with storm, and besides that, she was not strong enough yet to survive by herself. She drank the broth, she let the nuns prod her and bathe her, she listened to the hunter snoring and the young mother weeping silently in the darkness.

Della would have to wait out this time, she knew, like all the others. The thing was to not fight against it, but let it pass over her; patience was the hardest thing to learn. Eventually, she slept.

S
he heard the quiet noises of the nuns praying before dawn: voices different from the ones they used with her and the hunter and the mother. Who were they talking to? God, she remembered. And then slept again.

I
n February she left the hospital, joined a group of mountaineer-salesmen who had stopped at the hospital to deliver supplies. Their route took them north and then east, they told her, over the North Cascade Pass to the mining town of Mazama, west of the Okanogan. Della was welcome to join them if she wished.

She rode with them into the pass. The cold and bitter weather, the merciless days of snow and rain, almost made her regret leaving the hospital. But in the end she was satisfied; she had had to leave that place, that roaring fire, the praying voices of the nuns. She had to fling herself into the openness again, so she could think properly.

At times she and the mountaineers—there were three besides herself—had to pull the mules over the rocks, cajole them, force them up steep boulder-rich valleys. At first these episodes quickly exhausted her, and she feared becoming ill again; but then her strength eventually returned. There was one bad snowstorm during which they could not drive and remained in the covered wagon, drinking condensed milk out of tins, eating corned beef and crackers. But after that—days after that—they reached the high point of the pass, and began to descend into the lower elevations. The temperature rose, and their collective spirit with it. They were on the opposite side of the mountains now; the hardest of the traveling was behind them.

She left the mountaineers at Mazama and rode with others—miners—down to Winthrop. The rains terrible; mud perpetually to her ankles.

Is it always like this? she asked one man.

He laughed at her.

It was too wet to camp in the woods, and so in exchange for doing chores, she slept in the barn loft of a woman whose husband worked up-mountain.

And then the weather warmed, and she was off again.

I
t was early spring, but before the snow had melted—she was south of Twisp, but still in the Methow Valley—when, coming out of a store in a small, ramshackle, barely there town, she saw Michaelson walking down the street.

He did not see her. She moved down off the platform, into an alleyway between buildings, and looked out. He was handcuffed, and the men he walked with—two in front, one in back—looked like the law, or bounty hunters. One walked with smug superiority, while the other two were modest, slightly embarrassed, even.

She stared at Michaelson. He was familiar to her, and yet altered. She could tell after watching him for a minute that he was in a calm state. He appeared as if he had been in hiding: his skin was yellowish, and his face was grizzled with salt-and-pepper stubble. She remembered his passion for being clean-shaven. (Once, during an excitable phase, he had shaved all the hair from his body; some of the girls had helped him.) As he walked now he squinted and pressed his side with both hands, as if he had a cramp. And then he dropped his hands, grimaced, kept on.

She followed them at a distance. After a few blocks he and the men entered another building—most likely the police headquarters, or a law building. She stepped up onto the platform half a block away and pretended to look at a window display.

Good riddance to old rubbish, said an old man with frog eyes, who sat in a rocker at the end of the platform, and spat. He’s been polluting this county for too long, said the man. It’s about time the law sat up and paid attention—

What’s he done? said Della.

The man laughed shortly. What
hasn’t
he done, is more like it—

Della said, after a minute, feigning a lack of interest: What’s going to happen to him?

The man removed a tin of snuff from his breast pocket. Sending him to Chelan, last I heard. Hope it’s the prison from there—

O
ver the next three days she entered the town. Told herself she was there to run errands, but really she was listening for news. The frog-eyed man delivered the gossip: they were going to send Michaelson to Chelan on the Friday train.

Chelan on the Friday train.

She went fishing, though it was too early in the season to do so; too cold. But she had to do something: she was hungry, and also needed to distract herself.

Her wool gloves with the fingertips cut off were rotten, her fingertips bloated and hard. She baited the hook, stabbing the grub in the belly.
Chelan on the Friday train.
She had been contemplating going south, finding work again in the trees. Maybe heading to the coast after that. And then remembered the nauseating odor of the cannery.

Remembering the lumber camp, what had happened there, she became hollow with dread; stopped what she was doing and simply stood. Stared ahead of her, at the snow-patched opposite bank.

She cast the line, and at the cold
kerplunk
of the bait in the water, her vision narrowed, and all she could see was the dancing water. The light on the water.

Chelan on the Friday train.

She walked into the ice-rimed pond up to her calves—her boots would be ruined—the water numbing her feet, her flesh, her blood. She was panting. But soon she calmed.

She would need a horse to ride to Chelan on.

No! she thought, slogging out of the water. Why would she ever go see him?

Later, walking through the forest, she thought: Maybe.

T
he next morning she changed her mind: she would not go to Chelan. It was foolish: it did not make sense.

And yet she could not forget him. That strange expression of pain as he walked down the road. If she were to step out and intercept him, would he remember her? What would she say to him? He to her? And how would she respond to him?

She lay on a bedroll in the dark and should have been too cold to think, but in half consciousness she gathered to herself the myriad things she had ever felt for him. Fear—but that was to be expected. He was in charge: and like God, who they sometimes heard about, his reasons for doing what he did were often inscrutable. When Jane and Della first arrived at the camp, they heard stories from the other girls: that at times all Michaelson wanted to do was sleep; to eat special meals prepared for him and lie still in a chair on the front lawn, the sun on his limbs; or stand in the creek a half mile away, sometimes for hours, thinking his thoughts. Or he spent the days in bed alone. He had favorite girls, and sometimes during these calm states he would ask for them. They would be prepared and delivered to him. In his room the favorite girl slept with him, or sang songs, read out of books, if she was able to, or loved him. But most often, when he was like this, he did not want to love, he simply wanted the presence of another person in the room. There were rumors: he made one girl prick another in the center of her palm with a needle; he made a girl burn another on the inside of her elbow with a cigar. But mostly the girl—whichever one he chose—sat beside him on the bed and touched his head, and remained with him while he slept.

The times they—the girls—braced themselves for were the times he had a fire in his blood—when he did not sleep, and paced the house, rushed outdoors as if wild dogs were at his heels. This was a time of his projects and plans, great domestic festivals where the parties of men flooded in, and the girls dressed in their costumes, and there was music and alcohol and dancing. And when the property was not enough to contain him, Michaelson left with a few of his men and they were gone for two, three days, sometimes longer. Most often they were on a quest: to find a girl who had escaped. It did not matter when she had fled: sometimes Michaelson’s blood called for him to search for—to turn the countryside upside down for—a girl who had disappeared five years before. There was a girl left in charge when the men went off. Her name was Ellie; she was also the cook, and the keeper of the infirmary. She was not usually mean, but whipped a girl raw once for trying to escape while Michaelson was away. Ellie was fifteen, but to Della she seemed middle-aged.

Michaelson did not ever think Della was special—he never regarded her singularly or treated her any different from the other girls—but Jane was one of his favorites. What does he do? Della wanted to know, when he took Jane privately to his room. He wants me to talk to him, said Jane. That’s all. What do you tell him? Della asked. Jane shrugged. I tell him stuff, she said. I make stuff up. Della thought this was funny, and then worried. What if Michaelson found out she was lying? But overall it seemed all right: if Michaelson was keeping her for himself and just wanted her to talk, then that meant she was kept from the other men who would be unsatisfied by just talk. And so Della decided to be grateful for Michaelson’s attention.

But then she saw, as Jane undressed one day—she caught a glimpse of—a series of perfect raised circular welts on the inside of Jane’s thigh. They were angry, deep purple, puffy. What’s that? said Della, though her heart had already begun to pound with knowledge of what they were: she had seen similar marks on other girls. Cigar burns. And then Della could not believe it: Jane lied to her. Bug bites, said Jane, and her eyes obtained a kind of cast. They’re not bug bites, said Della. They’re burns. From his cigar. But Jane would not answer her, and Della’s heart pounded harder.