Sweeter Life (60 page)

DURING THE NEXT TWO DAYS
Cyrus met with as many farmers as he could. Men like Ernie Bell, who had no apple experience, were eager enough to take on Orchard Knoll but were just too clueless. Those who knew about apples expressed no interest at all. Wade Dobbins over at D&B Orchard put it down to a sign of the times.

“Wouldn’t make much sense our taking on your acreage,” he said, pushing back the brim of his peaked cap. “We’re pulling out half our trees as it is. Not worth our while. Now if the damn bureaucrats up in Ottawa would do something about these cheap imports, we might stand a chance. But the way it is, it’s hopeless. We’re putting in cherries instead. You might want to go that route, too, Cy.”

As much sense as that might make from a business perspective, the thought of pulling out a single tree seemed a crime. He would, he realized, just as soon chop off his own hand as cut down one of them.

His other dilemma, Janice’s refusal to marry him, was much more troubling. They had continued to sleep together but, by tacit agreement, there was little contact. On the third night after his proposal, however, their unspoken pact broke down and they made love almost desperately, as though they both feared it might be their last chance.

The next morning he awoke alone, after his first solid sleep in weeks. The sun was up and he stumbled out to the kitchen. There was a half pot of coffee. A clean cup, saucer and small breakfast plate were on the table. Janice’s dirty dishes were in the sink. Her car was still in the driveway.
Peering out the low windows of the laundry room, he could just make out her silhouette in the shed. She was already hard at work.

While he dawdled through breakfast, his thoughts bounced back and forth through time: wondering about his future with or without Janice, remembering the smell of Ruby’s
kuchen
and the sound of Clarence’s tuneless humming, probing the aches and bruises from his life with Eura, occasionally pausing in the present to contemplate the luxury of a day off from Dominion Optical. His thoughts were interrupted by the telephone.

“Is this Cyrus?”

“Yes.”

“This is Billy Maddux. I was phoning about guitar lessons?”

Cyrus looked at the receiver with disbelief. Then he said, “No lessons here, kid. Bother somebody else. Where’d you get this number anyway?”

“Was on the ad. Maybe I dialled wrong. I’m sorry …”

“Ad? What are you talking about? What ad?”

“At McCready’s. On the bulletin board there.”

McCready’s was the new music store in town, the kind of place that Cyrus could only dream of when he was a kid. But he knew just the sort of ad the boy was referring to: a small typed notice with a phone number repeated on several detachable tags. It would be tacked on a corkboard with a thousand other notices announcing lessons, equipment for sale, musicians at liberty.

The boy continued. “Said to call Cyrus at 555–2134.”

“Well that’s the number, all right, and my name is Cyrus—”

“ ‘Lessons from a rock star’ is what it said …”

Suddenly it all made sense. It was Hank’s doing. He’d gone downtown and put an ad in McCready’s, the idiot. Cyrus clucked his tongue. “Sorry, kid. Somebody’s practical joke.”

A few minutes later he wandered out to the shed. When Janice saw him in the doorway, he said, “I can’t believe how good I feel.”

“Me too. It’s a beautiful morning.”

He jammed his hands in his pockets and half-turned so he could see the sunlight and blue sky and acres of trees. Without looking at her, he said, “I wish I could always feel this way.”

“You can try.”

He wandered idly around the shed, picking up tools and putting them down again. “Need any help?”

“Well, there is one thing you could do for me. You could get lost, Cyrus. I’m trying to work.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She hugged him with all her might and pushed him toward the door. “Call me for lunch. You keep telling me what a great cook you are, maybe you could show me a little more proof.”

He drifted back across the yard. Before he went inside, he inspected the apple tree near the corner of the house, the one on which he and Izzy and Clarence had grafted three new buds to symbolize the union of the two families. It was in no worse shape than the other trees he’d inspected, but this one was special, so he returned to the shed for Clarence’s bow saw and his heavy-duty shears.

Clarence didn’t follow a lot of the common wisdom about apple trees. He thought it was wrong to prune only in late winter. Nor did he think topping trees was a good idea. It made them bolt and waste a lot of energy. In most ways, he said, an apple tree was like a person. It needed space and light. It needed to be protected, and when it got sick, it needed someone to care for it. It needed grooming and could not be expected to carry the full weight of its burden without some kind of help. “You can always trust a nice-looking tree,” he liked to say.

Cyrus circled the tree a few times to confirm his first impression. Then, angling in to the trunk (both Frank and Clarence had advised him to prune from the inside out), he searched for a place to begin. It wasn’t easy. He had always found it difficult to make that first cut, to limit growth and creativity however undisciplined.

Start with the obvious, Clarence had told him. Broken branches, split branches, branches that are causing damage to others. And so he did, one cut leading to the next with surprising ease until the tree began to open up, creating corridors of light and air where fruit could flourish. It was pleasant work. His muscles were humming. His mind was clear and focused. When he finished, he returned the tools to the workbench, then gathered the pruned
branches together, three big bunches, and carried them over to the woodpile behind the shed, amazed at how much a tree could do without. As he walked back to the house, he stopped to admire his work one last time. To the untrained eye, the tree would now appear stunted and unnatural, but Cyrus knew it was a better tree than it was before, stronger and healthier and more likely to express its genius.

When Janice came in for lunch, he made grilled cheddar-and-tomato sandwiches (one of Sophie’s specialties), which they ate outside on the front porch. After that they made love once again, then went for a long walk along the Marsh Road. Around five o’clock, he drove downtown to Izzy’s office, where he found her alone doing paperwork. Without a word of greeting, she said, “How’s the search going for a hired hand?”

He slumped in the chair opposite. “Haven’t found anyone who knows even half as much as I do.”

“Well, the job’s yours if you want it.” She scribbled something on a document and then looked at him over the rims of her reading glasses.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

“Well, no, neither did I. I was joking. Or maybe not. Why don’t you think about it—at least until you know about your hand.”

“I know about my hand. Besides, I already have a job.”

But even as he said the words, he knew something was changing. During the past few days there’d been a feeling of suspension in the air, like those old spider chords Sonny used to play that stretched out in every direction and acted as a bridge to another key or groove. He got to his feet and said, “I’ll keep looking.” At the door he turned and added, “It’s great, you know, what you’ve done for Hank.”

She removed her glasses and rubbed her weary eyes. “Po Mosely, for Christ’s sake. That was all his doing.” Then leaning back in her chair, she shook her head and smiled. “Ever think your life would end up like this?”

He looked out at the main street of Wilbury, over to his middle-aged sister, streaks of grey beginning to colour her hair, then down to his mangled hand. “I guess I never thought about anything much at all, Iz. But I was always afraid I’d wind up back here sooner or later, burned out or washed up.”

“You’re not a failure, Cy.”

He took a step back inside the room and leaned heavily against the door jamb. “I don’t know what to think about any of that. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m about to find out.” He thought about Clarence and how clear and unified his life had been. He thought about Jim and his many transformations. Then he said, “Let’s you and me do something. Go to Hounslow maybe. I’ll buy you dinner and tell you my whole sad story.”

Instead they ate pickerel at the golf club and talked until midnight, filling in the blanks of the past twelve years. Afterwards, he dropped her at the office where she’d left her car. Then he drove on alone to Lake Isabel, believing that the two of them had established a connection at last, that after a lifetime of awkward negotiation, they had finally found a groove.

Hank was sitting alone at the pond with the National cradled in his lap. Cyrus walked up beside him and stood admiring the full moon. A jet soared high overhead. Nearby there were crickets, and out on the water the same two mallards. Hank plucked an open string—
pling, pling, pling
—then let his arm hang limp at his side as the final note rang out. Staring straight ahead at the pond, he said, “I did it, you know.”

Cyrus was confused by the bleak tone of voice. He said, “I know, Hank. You should be proud of yourself. You’ve got a great set-up here.”

“I mean a long time ago. That guy. At the gas station. I did it. I killed him. I told you I didn’t do it, but I did. I killed him. I’m guilty.”

Cyrus swallowed hard, tempted to tell his brother that no one had ever believed he was innocent. Instead, he took a deep breath and said, “That was all a long time ago, Hank. You’re not guilty anymore.”

His brother looked straight at him now. “I’ll always be guilty, kid. Always. And I’m not complaining. I deserve that. It’s the way it should be. I just wanted you to know.”

“Well, Hank …”

“I mean, I wanted you to know, I guess, that I’m sorry.”

Another jet passed over them. A car drove along the Marsh Road, stopped briefly and then moved on again. In a different voice, pitched a little higher, Hank said, “I love this place. It keeps me from thinking too much about all that. I got my plans, right? And when I come outside this way, I kind of get lost. Maybe it’s spending all that time in prison, but I
almost get stoned when I’m out here. There’s the birds and the flowers and the bugs. Had a praying mantis here the other day, weird as fuck. And this pond, I could sit here forever and watch it. It kills me how it came up the way it did. Water’s a tricky thing, right? I mean they built that dike over there to hold back the lake, and it works all right—we drive every day on top of it—but the lake, I guess, is just waiting. The minute you make a space for it, it flows right under the dike. That’s what we did here. That’s what this is, I guess, a bit of lake that managed to escape.”

Hank struck a few more notes on the guitar, not really playing so much as keeping time. Then he looked at Cyrus and said, “You ever think of giving lessons?”

Cyrus closed one eye as though he’d been poked. “Funny you should say that. Billy Maddux called me this afternoon asking the same thing.”

“No kidding. Word gets around, I guess.”

They fell into a companionable silence, a space so calm and carefree it seemed to predate them and any of the troubles that had twisted their lives out of shape, before Portland and Burwash, before anything dark and dismal and disfiguring, back when two brothers could sit and say nothing and do nothing and just be together.

As Cyrus looked out across the pond, some part of the night detached itself and began to flutter toward them. It hovered above the water as if trying to make a choice, dipping down to the surface of the pond and then fluttering up again, dipping down and then up, before it finally continued in their direction. A moment later, he could make out a large summer moth, a cecropia, it appeared to be, lavish and unlikely. The closer it came to them, the more directly it flew, until it was almost within arm’s reach. It seemed to hang there a moment, as though it had been mesmerized by the moon’s bright reflection in the polished metal of the guitar. And before either brother could say a word, the moth moved on again, tremulous and fragile. The night was opening like a flower.

In writing this book I relied on information from a number of sources, including:
Music, The Arts, and Ideas
, by Leonard B. Meyer;
The Singer of Tales
, by Alfred Lord; and in particular, Larry J. Solomon’s essay, “Sounds of Silence.” The Rilke epigraph is from a translation of
The Duino Elegies
by Stephen Garmey and Jay Wilson.

Many thanks to my editor, Anne Collins, for all her help; to copy editor Stacey Cameron; to my agent, Bruce Westwood who, among other things, prunes apple trees like a poet; to friends and family far and wide who allowed me to gibber about a work in progress; and most of all to Christine, Claire and Anna.