After Alice (12 page)

Father has a big book called
Pomona
that has paintings of all of the different kinds of fruit and their names. The names are European names, though, and underneath some of them, in Father's tiny scrolling writing, are the Canadian names. Bon Chrétien, for example, has
Bartlett
written under it.

“Pomona,” Father says, “was a Roman goddess, the goddess of fruit and orchards.” Father shows Sidonie a picture of her in one of his books. She has curly auburn hair and plump, white arms and legs, and a dimpled smile. She has on a yellow wrapper and one of her bosoms is sticking out, but she doesn't seem to notice. In her left hand, she's holding a Gala apple, and under her right hand is a Golden Delicious.

“She looks like Mrs. Inglis,” Sidonie says. Father laughs. But Alice says, scornfully, that she doesn't at all.

It is something else that Sidonie means: a feeling she has about Mrs. Inglis, that she will later put the words
abundance, generosity
to.

Father tells them the story of Pomona. “She had lots of admirers,” Father says, “but she married one who tricked her with a disguise. He disguised himself as an old woman, and gave her advice.” Sidonie doesn't like that story: she likes the stories about the sailor Ulysses. The proper name for those stories is
myths
, Father says.

She learns to identify each cultivar, to see the fine differences among trees. I will be an orchardist like you, Father, she says.

He laughs. And Alice says: no, because you're a girl. It would have to be your husband. And it's going to be
my
husband, because I'm older.

It had not turned out that way, of course. Why not?
Hubris
, her father's stories would have said.

A memory-flood. She must be careful. She does not want to be caught up in this flood. There is no going back: she knows this.

Walt is asking her about being tired. She has not been paying attention. No, she is not tired. She is fit; she walks a good five kilometres a day, now that her break has mended. As well, the orchard seems smaller than she remembers. Of course it is: sixty acres have been lopped off, sold, since she was a child. But what is left has been compressed. The distance from the house to the edge of the wood, an arduous journey in her memory of childhood, now diminished to a brisk ten-minute walk.

“No, I said
retired
,” Walt says, grinning, his bright blue eyes disappearing into a tangle of branching wrinkles. “Did they give you a good send-off, your company, out there? A good dinner, speeches, a gold watch?”

Yes. She hears what Walt is up to, now. It is the local form of teasing; a sort of farmer's humour, specific for those who have gone away and returned. It purports to admire how grand, how impressive your life must be! But the subtext is, of course, don't get too big for your boots.

Yes, a grand dinner, she says, entering into the spirit of it. Over the top. Lobster flown in from Nova Scotia. Little birds stuffed with organic wild rice and rare mushrooms. Three hours of speeches. She falls into the appropriate tone: irony, self-deprecation, tempered with a little wide-eyed amazement.

“
Heyyyy
,” Walt says. “You must have brought them a lot of dough.”

Had she? She supposes. Dr. Haephestes saying, yes, you must have a party. It's for the rest of us who are staying. It's a ceremony to mark a change in regime.

A beheading, she had said to Dr. Haephestes, and he had laughed, but had not denied it.

She had not planned to retire early. But it had seemed the right time — a change in atmosphere, a shifting of priorities at the Institute. She feels, now, the unease of the past couple of years: the growing sense that the world of her research was shifting, becoming something that she did not feel comfortable with. She does not say any of this. She has never, she thinks, had a conversation with Walt about what it is she works at.

“You'll be glad to be back,” Walt says.

This is likely true.

She is not quite sure why she has come back. For the boy, perhaps, though she doesn't let herself think of it too much: foolish to pin one's expectations on another human being. But for the boy, if she is honest.

They have reached the northern boundary of the land — here is the camp road, which, she sees, has been recently paved — or repaved, to be precise — looping around to meet the edge of the estate again. Had it not been first paved in the early 1960s? She must fit the memory into a time frame, fit it between her rare visits back. Vineyards are interspersed with orchards along this road. Gnarled vines haul themselves up on strung cords or cables; it's altogether an unfamiliar look. She can see, though, how the vines have been pruned back, their strength retrenched into a thickened trunk, limbs or whatever they are called. Truncated. All to force new growth. A couple of figures — a middle-aged man and woman — lean against support poles, talking. Walt and Jack lift their hands, and the people in the vineyard salute back.

It appears to be a quieter time of year, in the vineyard as in the orchard. Winter pruning and dormant-spraying completed, and a space of rest before the spraying of the set fruit. Who does this work, now — thins the fruit, picks the grapes when the harvest arrives headlong? She had not thought of this before — that although Walt and Jack run the orchard, teams of labourers must come in seasonally, and do the bulk of the concentrated work.

Vietnamese, she guesses. Cambodians.

“No,” Jack says. “That was in the 80s and 90s. It's Mexicans now. Come up from Washington. And Sri Lankans.”

There is some guilt in Jack's tone. That's his age. His is a generation schooled to notice, to address, inequities. In her childhood, the orchard workers had been minorities too, a changing force of small brown people from various countries, willing or at least available to take on low-paying physical labour. Refugees from turmoil in other nations often, so that the waves of settlement in the valley might map, as a geological cut would, the international political upheaval, the wars, of the last century. Of course it must have been hard work: she herself had picked up prunings as a child; had thinned the small fruit till her arms ached; had picked cherries and peaches under a relentless sun. It was a hard life. But some would stay, integrate into the community. Their children would go to university. And how could the fruit be grown and harvested without a cheap, seasonal labour force? Even in the 50s and 60s, families weren't big enough to do all of their own orchard work.

Cheap seasonal labour. She has not thought much about it. Walt, of course, would do the hiring, the overseeing.

Along the road, now, treading the gravel shoulder. Above and below, the orchards and vineyards, in their new sharp green leaves, and then the lake — here, a couple of miles wide — and the steep blue rise on the opposite side. The west side of the lake, though, riddled with the chalky geometry of buildings. That's new, too.

In the past, this section of hillside had also been part of Beauvoir — both sides of the road. But now it is not. And around the bend in the road, where the ponderosa woods butt up against Beauvoir at its most south-westerly corner, where they normally would have been able to cut through — a sudden outgrowth of new houses. They are large, with stone facings and wide, Craftsman-style trim, many windows to the view of the lake. Expensive landscaping too, and driveways full of new cars and boats. And high board fences blocking the route.

“Where is all this money coming from?”

“Alberta oil money,” Jack says. “Not a housing lot to be had on any lake in B.C. these days.”

Walt only grunts. A sore point? The Rilkes have worked their orchard for over fifty years, but have not become wealthy enough to own a lakeside cottage.

Here is the old access road, now named: Tiefendale Point Road. Was that always its name? The old Tiefendale dairy farm lay just to the south of here, until the 1950s. She had walked there, sometimes, to collect an extra pint of cream, if Mother were baking. She remembers the surprise of an escaped cow appearing suddenly in a stand of ponderosa.

They start up the road, which is paved until the last of the new houses, then an earthen track again. Now they must climb back up the hill, through the pine woods. She remembers the climb from childhood, how they would leave the lake in late afternoon, dripping wet, and dry off completely as they climbed the hill under the westering sun. Dry off and arrive baked, as if they'd ascended through a kiln. The resin scent of the pines in the hot dry air.

The pines are all dying in this little fold of woods, their bunched long needles bleached or rusty. And small firs, opportunists, already pushing up among the waxberry, the saskatoon and Oregon grape.

Walt makes a
tsk
sound with his teeth at the sight of a pile of sprinkler pipes that have rolled into a gulley, spilled about, fifteen-foot long aluminum tubes. Should have got those picked up, Walt says. And without a further word, they are carrying the pipes up out of the fold in the hill, closer to the tractor road, so that Jack can retrieve them later. She carries up a couple — she can only manage two at a time, though, and gets in Jack's and Walt's way. There isn't room for all three of them to pass on the slope. She stands instead and waits.

Walt in his green gabardine, Jack in jeans and a chunky sweater. Both men in their tractor caps, though Jack's is reversed, the bill over his neck. Good orchard men: solid, stolid. Not imaginative; slow of conversation. But stalwart, utterly dependable.

Walt, showing off, runs up the slope with a bundle of pipes cradled across his arms.

A shift, a slippage in time.

She remembers now Mr. Rilke running toward the house, out of the orchard, a limp and heavy burden carried in front of him.
Bitte, bitte
. . . his voice like something flayed. What was in his arms was Karl, Walt's older brother, who was what, thirteen, fourteen. Tall, strong Karl, laid out across his father's arms, bucking and writhing for breath. Father had run down the steps: “Put him on the ground.
Am Erde!
” Mother, following, turning back in a whirl of housedress and apron, running in to phone. The Rilkes had no telephone. Father with his mouth on Karl's, as if blowing up an air mattress that writhed and grabbed the dirt and drummed its heels on the ground and then was still.

“I can't,” Father said. “I can't put the air in.”

Karl's chest crushed — from the step, she could see it, the stoved-in shape, lopsided under his blue jersey. Blood on his mouth and Father's. Karl's blue eyes frozen open.

The keening that was Mr. Rilke. And then Mrs. Rilke, running through the trees, having been fetched by Walt.

It was the tractor, of course, rolling on Karl. He'd tried to turn too tightly on a slope. The tractor had reared like a stallion, and Karl had slipped from the high seat, and the wheel guard had caught him, the heavy green steel slice of it, with the tractor's weight behind it. Walt had seen it all.

She has not thought of that death in years. Does Walt think of it? Did he think of it when his boys, Jack and what's the younger one, Rob, were teenagers, when they drove the tractor, as they must have done?

She remembers Walt at both her parents' funerals. And at Alice's.

In Walt's kitchen,
with plates of sticky buns and a strudel full of tart-and-sweet apples and a carafe of deep black coffee, Walt crosses his arms and looks at Jack, and clears his throat and doesn't speak. Christina, who has been bustling around, serving them, says, “Oh, for crying out loud! Just spit it out!”

Walt finally opens his mouth and says, “You see, Sidonie, we've had an offer on our orchard from Rhenisch next door, and considering how little we made the last year out of the two orchards, and how much the work has been, well, we think, that is, Jack and I think, we'll sell. And I will keep this house and half-a-dozen trees, but the rest will go. And so — well, we will have to give up Beauvoir.”

Yes, she can see that. Not profitable for them to manage Beauvoir; not enough to keep them both.

“The trees are old, there's going to be a lot of waiting before a new crop,” Walt says.

Jack has been chopping rounds of apple trees into firewood outside. Now the sound of the blows, of axe on hard wood, stops. Christina goes to the window, calls out to him: “Come in for a snack.”

“Not till he's done the work,” Walt says.

The child who remains at home, who works for his father, may not be allowed to grow up.

Walt looks up at Sidonie from under his big sandy-white eyebrows, and she sees that he is nervous. Does he think she is going to scream and throw herself on the ground, as the young Sidonie would have done? But she has grown inward, reserved, since her early childhood; has grown skin like bark.

“Well,” she says, for she needs to say something. “After all that work you have done on Beauvoir this past winter.”

It is too bad; she will have to look for a caretaker or lessee again, and will be hard-pressed to find anyone, let alone someone as practiced, as knowledgeable as Walter. Someone with the lime earth of Beauvoir in his veins. During the time she had leased out the orchard to other people, it had not been maintained. One tenant had not looked after the trees at all, but had pastured horses there, letting them eat the fallen apples. Some horses had taken colic and died.

But can't Walter manage Beauvoir on his own?

“What are you going to do?” she asks Walter, and he laughs.

“Retire! I will be sixty-two this year, the same as you, Sidonie.”

“Retire and do a little traveling, like we've never been able to,” says Christina, stoutly, in her voice the common frustration of orchard women.

What about Jack, then?

“Jack is going to be taken on as foreman in the grapes,” says Walt. “He's going to learn the grape business.”

So — to work for someone else, and not with orchards. Something in her recoils. Yet that is a sensible move. He'll have a steady income, and not the burden of losses in bad years.