After Alice (11 page)

“A battle zone, eh?” Walt says. “This section should be replanted in two, three years.”

They walk the rows of Golden and Red Delicious, the Spartans (how she misses Spartans, which are really only grown in this province!), Macs (cheap, not good keepers, but popular, Walt half-sneers: the orchardman's bias), the gnarled, finicky Red Havens, the tall Bings, purple in the spring light.

They cut north and eastward, through the trees, as the tractor path swings wide here to avoid a rock outcropping, a steep-sloped gully of pine. Here a section of very old trees, gnarled and blackened.

“Still producing,” Walt says. “But they'll have to go in a year or two.”

They talk prices: Granny Smiths,
Grannys
, Walt says can be relied on to bring in about eight-and- a- half grand an acre; Spartans, only around seven. Cherries are holding at ninety-five cents a pound, but with a shelf life of about two days, they're volatile. Peaches, freestones, will gross four grand an acre — hardly worth the trouble, and they ripen in series, so they're labour-intensive. And if they end up going to processing, the orchardist takes a loss. Everyone grows some peaches — they fill the space between cherries and apples — but only a block. Soft fruit's a gamble.

Then the new saplings, chest-high, their trunks the thickness of two thumbs, still bearing the graft scars. But they've all taken — purple buds swell the twigs.

Scions, they're called, the new grafts. All apple cultivars in this part of the world are grafted onto root stock of the Transparent, a tough Russian breed. Somehow, the tree bears the fruit of the graft. The root stock provides hardiness. It's a kind of miracle.

“The new grafts look healthy,” she says. She reads the plastic tags: Pink Lady, Honeycrisp, Ambrosia. Fancy names.

“Experimenting,” Jack says. “See what grows best on this slope.”

Gingergold, Jazz.

“Jazz, now,” Jack says, “That's a cross of Gala and Braeburn.”

Healthy young trees, all.

“It's the middle generation that's missing,” Walt says. “You'll have a gap in your production.”

It is true. The orchard looks well cared for: pruning completed, last-year's props and sprinkler pipes stacked in the shed, sulfur powder from the dormant oil visible in the cracks and crotches of the trees. The obedient rows of trees, pleasing variations on the theme of trunk, branch, twig. (Could this be represented by a formula?) But there is an absence of young trees, those that should have been planted out and grafted in over a decade or two ago. Perhaps they should plant some earlier-producing varieties to catch up, fill the gap. More peaches, which reach puberty at two or three years. The tradeoff will be a shorter lifespan, of course. But it might work out. They will have to do some calculations.

She points this out; it's not Walt's fault, of course, as he wasn't responsible for the orchard during that time, but it will affect his and Jack's yield in the next decade or two.

Jack says nothing, only tosses his father a look.

What was that? But she has missed it.

Such satisfaction, that Walt and Jack are leasing Beauvoir, that they are caring for this place. They are orchard men, the Rilkes: it is in their bones. And they know Beauvoir. The Rilkes have been neighbours of Beauvoir, they have worked at Beauvoir for half a century, off and on. The stir, now, of the cultivator's instinct, the same she has felt in starting a new research project. A combination of gambler's euphoria, that locking-in of attention and optimism, and a sort of curiosity, and a third element: energy. A surge of endorphins. How it all floods back — the knowledge of the profession, the body-memory of seasonal tasks, the sensory triggers of the timing and shape of tasks. Pruning and spraying, thinning, picking — all these she would know when and how to do by the angle of the sun, the warmth on her forearms, the size and colour of the buds and fruit, the form of the tree on the screen of her mind.

She must be careful. She must not become too involved in this: it is not her occupation. Not her business. She is only maintaining Beauvoir, husbanding it for the future. She has never wanted to run an orchard, to be tied brain and limb to the work. It is only for the future.

Only body memory, trip-alarmed by walking among the trees.

The look between Jack and Walt, back there. But if something is amiss, it will come out later at the kitchen table, where they will negotiate new terms, and discuss what Jack will plant this year, what will be grafted in. For now, they will perform this inspection of the trees, the sloped land, on foot. It is not necessary; it is a ceremony of some kind. Nevertheless, it must be done.

Up the hill (her newly-healed foot paining her a little), to the highest part, the most exposed shoulder of the slope. From here she can see for miles the sweep of the east shores, the pine-topped hills, the fans and rectangles of fruit trees.

But it is all altered. Where the little village along the highway had seemed only slightly changed, this slope above the lake has changed alarmingly. Dozens, hundreds of new houses have sprung, toadstool-like, from the ground, eating away at the meadows, the pine brush, and even, here and there, at the orchards themselves. And what she has taken to be orchard, she sees, is actually something else: not the dotted rows of trees, but the wavy lines of vine plantings. Fully two-thirds of the orchards along this ten-kilometre slope, she judges, have been turned into vineyards.

“So much new development,” she says to Walt and Jack. This — crowding — is unsettling, threatening. Who are all of these newcomers, pushing up their clusters of new houses where her memory plants woods, meadows? But what has she expected? Everywhere the cities are spreading to the countryside, the old villages taken over by new houses.

“Must be a real change,” Walt says.

Yes.

“The orchards are hanging on, most of them,” Walt says. “ALR keeps that going. A lot switching to grapes, of course.”

Again, the half-look, the almost imperceptible signal between Walt and Jack. Some conflict between them, maybe? Walt's thirty acres, with its heave southward, would be good for a vineyard. Maybe Jack is pushing to switch. Well, she'll find out soon enough.

All changed. The proliferations of new houses, the breaking up of the orchards. Why is this upsetting to her? She has not lived here, has chosen to live elsewhere, for nearly fifty years. She is not, in principle, opposed to change, to development. People have to live somewhere.

It is the evidence the changes give of newcomers, of strangers moving in, appropriating what she had thought was hers.

But what had she thought was hers?

“Beauvoir is still producing,” Walt says. She notices, with pleasure, that Walt uses the old name, pronouncing it the old way:
Beaver
.

She remembers the great orchard estates of her childhood: Eagles' Rest to the north and west, Robinson's Dingle to the south, San Souci north and a little east, shoulder to shoulder with Beauvoir.

In Marshall's Landing in the 1940s, when she was a small child, there had been perhaps seventy families, half a dozen orchard estates. The estates had anchored the landscape, economically and socially. Eagles' Rest, where the Protherows lived, the biggest, and fittingly: Major Protherow (who she had been surprised to discover, at nine or ten, was also Father Christmas at the community children's party), the unofficial leader of the community. Mrs. Protherow, who smelled of violets and wore long, dusty-looking silk dresses and opened the Ladies Auxiliary Tea. Their spinster daughter Margaret, who gave piano lessons and painted. The name Eagles' Rest, Father had said, came from the ospreys that nested in the tops of the tallest ponderosas and plummeted into the lake, where the shore was steep and the water transparent, dark green, to pluck out the rainbow trout. Though by the time Sidonie's father had told her this, the ospreys had already vanished, prey to the DDT used in the orchards back then, or else the mad son Lorne Protherow's gun.

Next door to Beauvoir was Sans Souci, where the Inglises lived: Mr. and Mrs. Inglis and Graham and Hugh, who were older than Sidonie, as old as her sister Alice. The Inglises, their tweed suits and tea rituals, Mrs. Inglis's herbaceous borders, the high hollyhocks and delphiniums, the peonies and Michaelmas daisies and dahlias as big as a child's head.

She thinks of mentioning to Walt that she is back in touch with Hugh Inglis, but does not. Hugh, whom she had followed about from the time she could walk, and who had books she might look at but not take away, and Meccano that she might not touch. What is she doing, now, with Hugh?

Eagles' Rest and Sans Souci, Beauvoir and Rainbow and Robinson's Dingle. Ridgetop, Rainbow, Pixie Beach. North Star, Gordon's Brae, Davidson's, Campbell's, Reynolds', Farquarson's. This had been the community in the 1940s and 1950s — a group of families, well-enough off to enjoy books and concerts, music lessons, teas. The men had organized irrigation systems and marketing cooperatives and school boards. The women had raised money for a library, a community hall. The children had finished high school and worked in the orchards in the summers, taking the hottest part of the day off to swim, to socialize. They had gone on to university. Several Olympic rowers and swimmers had come out of the area.

An ideal time. A time of achievement, of prosperity. Of general happiness. Had it not been? She could stride about this part of the valley as a young woman, and know that it was her place.

Of course, the tradition of the estate has long died out. Even by the late 1950s, the names had become tarnished with a patina of embarrassment, an aura of silliness, anachronism. When Major Protherow had died and the Eagles' Rest had been broken up and sold, suddenly it wasn't the fashion to have an estate, a name.

Eagles' Rest had been partitioned, parts sold off for smaller orchards, the beach and house section bought by the United Church for summer camp — when was that? 57 or 58. The name had not been kept. Sans Souci had been sold in the mid-80s, and Beauvoir had not been inhabited by von Tälers since 1974. And only forty acres left of the original one hundred.

And the smaller plots, the ten-acre plots. How are those sustainable, these days? Not enough income from them to support one family, and too much work for them to be purely hobby farms. How are they managed?

But here she is, with Walt Rilke, who is — perhaps miraculously — keeping Beauvoir alive. She still has Beauvoir. It is still a working orchard. She still has a good chunk of land, and she has Walt Rilke, who was raised on this land, who was trained by her father to look after it.

A stand of pears here, where her father always grew the pears. Bartletts, D'Anjou, Bosc. Old trees: these must be the same trees he planted. A pear tree, you plant for your grandchildren, her father had always said.

She thinks of her father, not much older than Walt, than she herself, when he died. He had walked the orchards every day, unless he was ill. His lists, his mind carrying a map of the trees: not only a snapshot of this year's configuration of the orchard's acres, but also maps from years before and after. What had grown, what could be planted. His mind a map of each slope and hollow, of the idiosyncrasies of each cultivar.

Wearing his hat, always, and his good leather boots, resoled and resoled, and polished each Saturday by Alice, and then herself, on the back step with a tin of gasoline-smelling wax, a stiff brush, a clean scrap of flannel. Her father strolling — he did not stride — between the rows of trees, and always the lists in his head. And a trail of foremen and dogs and children behind him. Father who, as she has come to appreciate, was one of the last of his kind, a gentleman farmer, polymath, as familiar with Schubert on the gramophone as digging out beds for new trees or wielding a pruning hook for twelve hours at a stretch.

How it comes back to her, as she walks the rows of trees.

In spring and summer,
Father wears a flat, broad-brimmed hat of tightly-woven straw: it's called a Panama hat, he says. It is worn by gentlemen in hot countries to shield them from the sun. A very practical design, Father says. It's probably been in use since the time of the Spanish Conquistadors. Maybe they got it from the Greeks. In fall, Father wears, not a flat tweed cap like the other men, but a felt fedora, and in winter, a tall fur hat with ear flaps, made of wolf skin, from Russia. Father says that they know how, in Russia, to keep the cold from your ears. This hat is not actually from Russia, though: it was made by an Indian lady in Medicine Hat to replace his original Russian hat, which he bought in Hamburg before embarking for Canada. The replica hat, Father says, is just as good as the original (which was chewed by mice one year, when Father forgot to store it in its tin box). The Indians, Father says, know how to work with animal skins: it is in their blood. The original Russian hat and the original Italian hat he had brought with him for the purpose of protecting his scalp from the harsh Canadian climate. He can still order the Italian hats; they come in big cardboard boxes stamped “
Borsalino Alessandria Italia
.” But no hats may be ordered from Russia, which is now in the Soviet Union, behind the Iron Curtain.

Father needs hats because of his premature baldness. Father says: I had such a thick, curly pelt when I was a young man! I never would have believed I'd go bald!

What had made him go bald?

The gas, he says. The gas, in the war. Not the last war. The one before that. Also, it did a number on my lungs, Father says.

The names of the fruit a currency for conversation. He would cup an apple in his hand, point to a tree not yet in leaf. If you could name it, praise; if not, a patient explanation. See here, the five swellings at the blossom end. By four or five, her legs long enough to keep up, she had begun to learn.

These are the fruit that are grown: apples, pears, plums, peaches, apricots, and cherries. Then the varieties: Red Delicious and Yellow; MacIntosh, Transparent, Gala, Jonathan, Spy, Spartan, Granny Smith, Winesap, Jubilee. Each kind of apple looks a little different than the others, and tastes different, and ripens and ships differently.