Orchard (5 page)

11

From the kitchen window she saw him coming out of the barn, and she smiled when he stopped to sneeze twice, because she always did the same thing when she stepped out into the sunlight.

She couldn’t watch him long, however, because her hands were in the soapy water with that sharp paring knife that had once sliced her thumb when she was not paying attention to the task at hand.

Why was he now walking backward, lurching away from the open barn door? Was he gazing back at the site of some mischief? She didn’t like either of the children playing in the barn, but she finally gave up trying to keep them out. Instead, she made these rules: They could bring their playthings into the barn, but they could not play with anything they found there. And they could not enter Buck’s stall.

Spring and early summer had been unusually hot, and the county was overdue for rain. Farmers and orchardists both feared for their crops, and the resort owners worried that tourists would cancel or cut short their vacations—why travel north and pay to stay in cottages that were hotter than city houses?

Sonja disliked the heat, and when she could escape it no other way, she tried to imagine herself in surroundings unlike those pressing in on her. On days as stifling as these, she thought back to the winters of her childhood when icy gales blew down from the Norwegian Sea and snow as fine-grained as salt could pelt you even from a blue sky. John sat down heavily in the path between the house and the barn, and Sonja recalled how when her father walked back and forth from the house to the boat shed his boots kicked up powdery clouds of snow like the dry puff of dust that rose just now from her son’s rump.

Was it this memory of her father? Was it Sonja’s wish to leave this moment when the morning was already so warm she felt as though she were wrapped in a membrane of her own sweat? Or was it nothing more than her concern for that paring knife hiding in the dishwater that made her miss the exact moment when her son flopped onto his back and began to convulse, thrashing against the ground so violently it seemed as if his intent was to raise a cloud of dust dense enough to conceal him during this embarrassing episode?

The dog arrived at John’s twitching body before Sonja did, but Sandy, usually as placid and even-tempered as a pet could be, was plainly agitated at the sight of the boy and began to bark excitedly. Sonja felt as if she had to quiet Sandy as well as care for her son, but then she stopped herself just as she was about to shush the dog—what if John thought she was telling him he should be quiet, and at that moment she wanted nothing more fiercely than for her son to speak to her. No, he didn’t even have to speak—he could cry out, wail, he could make any sound other than that faint gurgling at the back of his throat that made it seem as though he were drowning, drowning in the dust between the house and the barn.

His spasms stopped abruptly, and Sonja was about to pick him up, but John’s arms were thrust out from his body with a rigidity that seemed to warn away her touch.

She put her hands on his cheeks, and that was when she noticed the bits of chaff in his hair, mingled so well with the reddish-blond strands it looked as if straw were taking root in his scalp. When she brushed these out, John’s eyes blinked open and he spoke his last words, or at least Sonja believed the sounds were shaped into words, but his voice was so faint she couldn’t be sure. She thought he said, “It’s far.”

Sonja House never shared with anyone what John said, nor did she confess that in her son’s last living moment she had been afraid to lift him in her arms, thereby depriving him of what all human beings must wish for: to die in their mother’s embrace.

Although John had
a large bump on the back of his head, Dr. Van Voort would not—could not—say with absolute certainty that this injury was responsible for the boy’s death. He had a hematoma, that was sure, and yes, a bump or blow could cause have caused the brain to bleed and swell, but perhaps John House simply had a weak blood vessel that would have burst that day no matter what the circumstances.

The doctor would go no further in his explanation to the boy’s parents. His voice trailed off into silence, and he put up his hands. He did not wish to seem unfeeling, but he had been practicing medicine for many years—during Henry House’s childhood Dr. Van Voort had been the only year-round physician in the county north of Sturgeon Bay, and he had practically lived with the Houses when young Henry fell ill with pneumonia—and in his view it was best for parents to accept as quickly as possible the finality of their child’s demise. If Henry and Sonja believed that they could have done something to prevent their son’s death, they would flagellate themselves and each other until they were stripped down to nothing but bone, guilt, and grief. And what could they have done? Well, of course there were any number of things. They could have put the horse out in the pasture when the children were around. They might have kept the boy out of the barn. They could have sold the horse once they decided to have a family. The doctor didn’t know exactly what caused the boy’s death—only an autopsy could settle the matter, and he sure as hell wouldn’t put the parents through that—but he was fairly certain the horse was involved. Dr. Van Voort hadn’t found any mark on the child that a shod hoof might have made, but even a glancing kick or bump from a thousand-pound creature could be fatal to a four-year-old boy. But what would be gained by assigning blame to that gentle beast? The child might have teased him, startled him, come up on the wrong side of him. Why not let the horse be as guiltless as the parents? Dr. Van Voort couldn’t say to Henry and Sonja that their boy’s brain was destined to rupture on June 29, 1953, no matter what the circumstances, but that could have been the truth. And finally the doctor wished that that was the conclusion on which they would settle. They might go on then to believe that it was a cruel, godless world in which a child’s death was inevitable, but in the long run there would be less torment in that faith. Losing a child was pain enough to undo any parent; adding guilt and recrimination frequently doomed the marriage as well.

Sonja knew the
form in the doorway was Henry’s, but since she saw him only in silhouette, she could not figure out how he was posed. Where were his arms? Had he bundled himself in a blanket, the chill of grief finally overcoming the season’s heat? Was he embracing himself? Were his hands clasped behind his back, so he might approach as a supplicant?

She turned her head away, though less to avoid her husband and more to escape her own thoughts. Dr. Van Voort had given her pills intended to make her sleep. “If I could,” he said, “I’d have you sleep for a year. Then, when you woke, the pain wouldn’t be gone—God knows that’s not possible—but the hurt wouldn’t be quite so sharp. Just remember that— every hour, every minute you can get past will make it a little better. I know that doesn’t seem possible either, not now, but it’s so.” Yet she didn’t sleep, not exactly. She lay on her bed, and while her head, arms, and legs felt so heavy she hadn’t sufficient strength to lift them, her thoughts churned like the wildest sea, and she would have given anything to stop her own thinking.

The winter before, Henry, Sonja, June, and John had driven down to Green Bay on a Sunday afternoon to visit Henry’s mother in her apartment. They returned in a snowstorm, which Henry steered them through without incident until the truck began to climb the driveway toward home. Then a tire slipped into the ditch, and they were stuck. The wheels spun and whined but wouldn’t catch. Henry only laughed, and they walked through the drifts to the house, John riding high on Henry’s shoulders. And under the influence of Dr. Van Voort’s pills, that was what happened with Sonja’s thoughts. They slipped the track and spun uselessly.

“Are you awake?” asked Henry.

She turned her face once again in his direction, hoping he would see her open eyes and spare her the effort of using her voice to answer him.

He took a step into the room and let his hands fall to his sides. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

He wrapped himself once again in his own arms. “If you want to sleep . . .”

“No, no. What is it?”

He walked over to the bed and sat down beside her. She didn’t see the motion his hand made, but she sensed that he had reached out to her, then drew back.

“I know you probably don’t want to think about such things,” he said, “but we have to. So here goes.” His intake of breath was doubled, as if a sob was concealed inside it. “Do you want me to dig the grave myself? I know that might sound strange to you, but the Houses have done it before. Not regularly, I mean. But my dad did it. Twice. He and his brother did it for their father. And then when my uncle died, Dad dug his grave too. So if you want . . .”

What if John had not died? Would Sonja never have known that she was married to a man willing to pick up a shovel for such a purpose?

“You don’t have to decide just yet,” Henry said. “Give it some thought, and I’ll check back. Maybe after you’ve had a rest . . .”

But she couldn’t decide, not when her mind kept getting stuck, this time spinning on two words. Dig . . . grave. Grave . . . dig.
Grave
was the Norwegian word for dig.

Sonja could trace her confusion over the word to the day she left her home and climbed into a boat to begin her journey to America.

“Grave! Grave!” The man in the prow shouted at the men who immediately obeyed, pulling back even harder on the oars in an attempt to carry the boat and its passengers beyond the waves that wanted to push them all back to the shore.

Dig? thought Sonja. Surrounded by nothing but water and he commands them to dig? Then she noticed how the oar’s blade plunged again and again into the froth, and she knew: Digging was exactly right. Her older brother had taught her some English, and she could see the connection—the effort to displace water was not so different from the gravedigger’s as he worked to move dirt.

And what did young Sonja Skordahl believe would go into that watery grave? She was insufficiently versed in irony to think it possible her life could end exactly when so many people told her it was about to start anew. But then neither had she ever thought it possible that the day would come when her mother and father would place their twelve-year-old daughter in a small, unsteady boat that would row her to the ship on which she would sail to a country Sonja had never seen to live with an aunt and uncle she had never met. “To a better life, Sonja,” they told her again and again. “We are sending you to a better life.” But how could that life be better when it hurt like death to leave the present one?

Ah, so that must have been it! The oarsman gouged a grave in the ocean to bury the past. In went the village and the little house! Under the waves with the friends and all the familiar faces of childhood! Down, down went Father and Mother and brothers, as surely as if they were going into coffins, never to be seen again!

She never saw her parents again. Two years after she left Norway her father was dead. He slipped from the roof when he was making repairs on the chimney, and though he was not killed instantly, he never woke from the coma he lay in for eleven days. One week before Sonja’s sixteenth birthday she learned that her mother was dead of a cancer that bloomed in her brain with such rapidity there was scarcely any time between diagnosis and demise. Both her brothers, Anders and Viktor, she met again, but so many years after their first parting that when they entered the room without introduction she wondered who these strange men were.

And now, into her life again—dig, grave . . . grave dig. Could he mean it—Henry was willing to dig the hole into which their baby boy would go? Only a man could think such a thing! If she stood in that empty space in the earth, she would never climb out. It would be too easy to pull the dirt in on top of herself, to pull and scrape until the stony, sandy soil began to tumble over her of its own accord, the way ocean waves rush to fill in their own hollows and troughs.

She knew what her decision was, what it had to be. It came to her as she thought again of Henry’s silhouette in the doorway. On unsteady legs she rose to go and find her husband, to tell him he should not have to use his muscles to dig their son’s grave.

Sonja was not
interested in assigning blame, at least not beyond the sizable portion she heaped upon her own plate for not keeping John out of the barn altogether, but she could not quell her curiosity. Something had happened when John was in the barn, and she meant to know what.

She had reason to believe that the horse was involved, not only because of the straw in John’s hair—possibly indicating that he had been in Buck’s stall—but also because the boy died with his hands clenched into fists and twined tight between the fingers of one hand were filaments that Sonja thought could have been horsehair. That was all it took. A bit of chaff. A strand of hair. She imagined her little boy sneaking up behind Buck in order to run his fingers through the tangle of the horse’s tail. The horse, startled or annoyed or both, kicked out, and his hoof either hit John and caused that bump on the back of head or caused him to fall back and strike his head.

Sonja did not present this theory to her husband, not right away, but on the night of the funeral, she asked Henry to accompany her to the barn. Their home was still brimming with family and friends who had come over with cakes and casseroles and their own bewildered hearts to try to help Henry, Sonja, and June through their grief.

Henry did not at first understand his wife’s request; furthermore, he seemed uncomfortable being alone with her. “The barn? With all these people here? You want to go out to the barn?”

“Perhaps we can know what happened out there.”

Henry moaned and let his weight fall back against the wall. “Honey. No, no. Don’t. Let it go. You heard what the doctor said. Sometimes you can’t know.”

Perhaps if Henry had put a hand on Sonja—a touch on the wrist might have been enough—he could have kept her in the house.

“I’m going out there,” she said. “You stay if you like.”