After Alice (10 page)

Fresh off the boat: she remembers her mother using that phrase. She can remember what her mother said almost perfectly, she thinks. She had been horrified, appalled. It had seared into her. Her mother complaining in an unfamiliar, petulant voice:
but they always had
a little more money than us, and Betty acted like Hugh and Graham
were headed for Oxford
.
It was her idea to send them to that private
school in Vancouver, you know
.
And they sent Graham off to the one
in England when he was fifteen
.
But he got sick and had to come back,
and then Betty said that the air here was healthier
.
But it was because
Graham was not right, even then
.
She had it in her head that the boys
would both marry upper-class girls
.
She thought Alice wasn't as good as
them, though Alice was the prettiest girl around, and your father would
have been titled, back in Europe
.

Mother, rambling, displaying unattractive grudges and jealousies, letting loose some old secrets, in her last weeks. She had been in pain, and the morphine had disinhibited her, of course. But a shock to find all of that festering, when she had grown up knowing Betty Inglis as her mother's closest friend. A shock to have secrets revealed.

Revealed and not revealed. She had thought, then, that Mother had meant that Alice should have married Graham or Hugh. But Graham had become ill in his early twenties, and Hugh, who was Alice's age, had never seemed like a possible partner for her. He had been a boy still, when Alice was already grown. And they'd all grown up as siblings. There had been no possibility of romance between them. Had there?

And she herself had been too much younger, had left the valley before she was grown up, so the question had not arisen. There had been no possibility of romance between herself and Graham, or herself and Hugh.

Had there?

POMONA

She could have found her way on her own,
but Walt Rilke is waiting for her in the long, rutted driveway, in his green gabardine work clothes, his leather work boots planted squarely on the centre ridge, among the colonizing dandelions and plantain and a dwarfish, determined race of mustard, as though nothing has changed in two decades.

Though as she gets out of her car and walks toward him, she thinks, for an instant:
No, not Walt
. White hair tufts out from under his cap, at the sides; the skin of his neck and face has leathered to a permanent tobacco-brown, is shirred around his prominent blue eyes, stretched taut and shiny at his knobby cheekbones. Moles of various species cultivate his cheeks and forearms. His grin as usual — full curving lips pulled back over serviceable teeth, eyes disappearing into their puckered lids. Who is this old man?

She would not have recognized him, except that he resembles his father. Then the images of him, past and present, serigraph in her mind and he is just Walt, whom she has known nearly all of her life. Trusty sidekick Walt, trudging after her in his short pants and gumboots, his red cheeks, his white-blond hair like milkweed silk, transparent against the sun.

He stretches out both hands. “Sidonie. Long time no see. How the heck are you?”

“Walter,” she says. “Good to see you.”

And here Walt's son Jack — looking like the image she'd had of Walt, a middle-aged man now, his tow hair darkened, but tufting out in the same way under his cap.

“Dr. von Täler.”

Firm grip; callouses. She remembers Jack as a small boy, remembers Walt at the same age, and at the age Jack is now, remembers Walt's father, old Mr. Rilke, at the age of Jack and the age of Walt. Layers of memory: the images all ranged one behind the other, like one of those stylized watercolours of mountain ranges. Only instead of retreating into mistiness, her memory-images become sharper the further they are in the past.

But how like his father Jack is — the stocky build of him, the sturdy neck, the face all knobs and creases. She sees all of her images merging into just this one, this genotypical Rilke.

The Rilkes breed true, her father had said.

“It's been what, a dozen years?” Walt says.

“Twenty-one this June,” she says.

They stand about in the driveway, grinning at each other. The Rilkes are not talkers. She is not a talker. They commune by standing still, shuffling their boots. It's faintly ridiculous. She could have found her way by herself. And really, it wasn't necessary for her to drive out at all. She does not need to see the orchards — Walt's usual annual report, delivered over the telephone, would have been sufficient.

But it's a ritual, she recognizes. An important one, for two grown men to take half a day from whatever else they might be doing. The message is that they have been working hard. She must fulfill her seigniorial role, and acknowledge, adjudicate their hard work.

Jack clears his throat. She wonders about Jack, who must be in his late thirties now, perhaps forty. Still living at home, working for his dad. Hadn't he taken a heavy mechanics course just out of high school and gone north to work at one of the big mines? But he's been back some time. Not married any longer, or so she'd been informed in one of Christina's Christmas cards. The type of man who might find it difficult to meet a girl. Shy, a hard worker, but something of a plodder. The Rilkes are a race of garden gnomes, Alice had said.

“It's a beautiful day,” Jack says.

It
is
beautiful, this April day: bright and clear and warm, the sky cloudless, the lake cobalt. The hills, which will be sere and yellow by July, are green. The trees are all in blossom or fresh leaf. A day of spring. Beautiful and bucolic, here in the countryside. On either side of the driveway, the rows of mature Delicious, each tree grown to its full extent, the circumference of a room. Wrinkled purple-grey limbs; bronze-green branches in full leaf now. Soft clear-green of spring leaves; their silvery-grey undersides; the blossoms just peaking, their rounded cups unfolding, Schiaparelli-pink sepals and white, white petals.

On this day of her appointment with Walt, she has awakened with an unusual sense of purpose, put on her jeans and Gore-Tex boots and layers: T-shirt, pullover sweater. Hiking gear, because she doesn't own orcharding clothes these days. She knows they will start their walk in a cool morning wind, damp air rising off the lake, and then, as they march up and down through the trees and the sun rises in the sky, they will get warmer and warmer, and finish off in Walt's kitchen, which will be hot from his wife Christina's baking. She must layer on and be prepared to layer off.

Her foot has healed, as the emergency-room doctor had said it would, in the six weeks since the accident. She is able to walk again, a little more each day. She does not attempt the lake path, but she can drive herself, walk about the stores. She has retrieved her car, which is unscathed: only the radio station settings have all been changed. She has had to reset the buttons to CBC One and Two.

She has driven north along Highway 97, past the new supermarkets and gas stations, the Esso and the Petro-Canada, the A&W, the McDonald's. Past the old plaza, built in the early 60s, with the
CIBC
, the
IGA
, the bakery and liquor store, the little one-storey buildings re-fronted, patched up, painted, this decade, beige and burgundy, bearing new signs, but still recognizable. Plain, even ugly buildings, she sees now, the old and the new. Not planned; built of necessity. Strung along the highway, the most basic way stations. On the side roads, more modernization: the high school tarted up with a glassed-in entry; some frou-frou apartment blocks. But there is more sameness than change.

On the side roads below the highway, the old fruit packing houses, with their red asphalt shingles standing in for brick, the creek with its scrim of cottonwoods, the rich-soiled bottom lands of pasture and vegetable gardens. And above the highway, the slopes with their orchards, their scarves of saskatoon-berry bushes and red-osier dogwoods, their little stands of ponderosa pines.

Turning left off the highway by her old school, she followed the narrow road with its rutted shoulders up the hill and over the crest and down again. All along the roads, the saskatoon, the waxberry, in their sharp, tender green leaves, vulnerable, dangerous. The Oregon grape, evergreen, glossy; its blooms deep-yellow plumes. In the orchards, the trees in their rows, pale green and white, like lace tossed on a lawn.

So beautiful, so beautiful.

She has not been back for over twenty years, but the landscape is familiar to her as her own body: the valley itself, with the big lake mediating the climate, daubing something almost Mediterranean on this Canadian landscape. The lake, like a great creature rolling out its own bed, undulating from the foot of the cool, damp Monashees in the north a hundred kilometres south to the desert, with its Blue Racers and scorpions, its petroglyphs, its prickly pear.

And within the central part of the valley, a ridge of steep hills, wrinkled by dry gullies, pinched into a few peaks: Knox, Dilworth, Spion Kopje. The ridge divides the valley into two. In the west fork of the valley, the main lake, the thick, open-mouthed blue serpent of it. In the east fork, a string of sister lakes, draining, diminishing from north to south: turquoise, green, brown. The sides of the ridge draped with the orchards, the fruit trees so well adapted to the surfeit of sun, to the lengthened summer, the ameliorated winter of the valley.

This particular orchard, even after four decades mostly of absence, familiar as the terrain of her own hands. This plot of land, this section of west-facing hillside, where she was born and raised, and where she has now returned. She feels bathed in light. She feels oriented, grounded.

They set off up the driveway, its ruts and potholes (she must ask Walt if he will grade it again this year), between the stands of trees. Mature trees with strong limbs and scaly, purple-grey bark: Delicious, Golden Delicious, Spartans. She can see here the years of neglect, some years the trees were not pruned. The symmetry off; some narrowness of the basal limbs. But they seem healthy, after all. The leaves held out to the sun, small hands. The blossoms, thick, clotted, and (listening for a moment) active with bees. Row on row, the trees: variations of themselves. Like machines, they produce the fruit: hundreds of pounds for each tree. But they are organisms: livestock, rather than crop. They must be tended: pruned, thinned out, sprayed for pests, protected from frosts, visited by bees. Their limbs, in late summer, in early fall, growing so heavy with the fruit that wooden posts must be propped under them to prevent their cracking off at the joints.

The texture of tree trunks asserts itself, remotely, in her fingertips. Slubbed satin of the younger cherry; sketchpad-sheets of the curled apple bark. A body memory. Her fingers recognize the texture as if it is their cradle tongue, not heard for half a century.

Along the driveway, deeper into the orchard. Now, a clearing, an acre or two of outbuildings and yard. They pass the old house, her old house. She does not look at it closely, only sideways, out of the corner of her eye, registers the boxy mass of it, its honey-hued stucco, tile roof, boarded-up windows. The house she grew up in, the house built to her father's specifications, the house containing all of her childhood, and Alice's. It's an odd house: built not to take advantage of the view of the lake, but to repel the southern sun, to create a refuge, a well of cool shadow. The windows are high, small; the walls thick. It's larger than most houses of its vintage in this village — larger and more European-looking. It tells, she thinks now, the story of her father's youth: part Bavarian castle, part Alpine chalet, part Italian villa.

And now a wreck, a smashed box, though the outside, of course, betrays little of the havoc. She does not think about what's inside; her mind skulks around the edge of it.

“Do you want to go inside, have a look around?” Walt asks. “I brought the keys down in case.”

No. No, she does not. She does not want to go into the house. She had been in on her last visit, twenty years ago. She does not want to see it now.

Though she will have to deal with it, some day.

She strides on.

Past the old wash house, past the chicken shed, past the Quonset where the tractors and other equipment live. The sweet-sharp smell of pesticide. The landscape of her very early childhood, when she had not ventured beyond her mother's garden. All in good repair. The dry climate preserves. That and, she supposes, Walt's assiduous stewardship. What decay, what wreckage has infiltrated, must have arisen in the years when Walt was absent, when the house and orchard stood unattended.

Then past the yard, and a turning of the double track of the driveway, this rough road used by the tractors and pick-up trucks. Now they're in a sheltered rise, a section always planted with the tender fruit, the peaches and the less hardy cultivars of the cherries. The cherry trees with their delicate, narrow, translucent leaves, their pink blossoms like Japanese watercolours. The peach trees with their deep forks, their narrower limbs: some are damaged, torn nearly in two, and bearing great scars, and there are spaces where trees have been removed. The peaches have not fared well during their decades of neglect. An unpruned peach tree, or one too heavily laden, is a vulnerable being.