The Orchardist (24 page)

M
y stars, girl, said Caroline Middey, pulling a straight pin from between her lips. She knelt beside Angelene, who stood on a stool before the full-length mirror in Caroline Middey’s guest bedroom, wearing a gingham dress that Caroline Middey was letting down the hem for.

You’ve grown two inches, at least, said Caroline Middey.

Angelene said nothing, but when Caroline Middey bent down to work again, Angelene put her shoulders back. Lifted her chin. Gave herself a steely—and by this she meant to be womanly—look. And then saw (but could not be sure): the suggestion of breasts beneath the fabric across her chest.

A
nd then the peaches were done, and Maggie P. was going to pick berries farther south. Did Della want to join her? It was good money, and she would show her just how to do it, there was no better teacher, really—

But Della was going west, to the coast, to the canning factory, as she had planned. Maggie P. kept a straight face upon hearing this news, although she could hardly believe it. Why would any person choose to work in a canning factory if they could pick berries in northern California?

Well, which one are you working at? Which canning factory?

Della said she didn’t know, she would find a place when she got there. She didn’t ask why Maggie P. wanted to know, but Maggie P. said: I’m going to write to you.

But you don’t know where I’m staying, said Della.

I’m not stupid! Maggie P. burst out, and walked away quickly.

It was a common occurrence that whoever met Maggie P. and came up against her immense friendliness thought she was immune to hurt feelings. But she wasn’t. She wished people would understand that. It wasn’t very nice, really, how most people treated her.

T
he first railroad, the Great Northern, came to central Washington in 1893, seven years before Angelene was born. Thousands of men had worked to bore tunnels into the sides of mountains for the trains to pass through, connecting those people and products east of the mountains to those west of them. There was a party in Cashmere when the track was laid. The station was erected soon after, and the first train of passengers rode to Seattle free of charge.

Locomotive travel gave an air of authority and sophistication to the town, at least for a little while. People, even if they couldn’t afford a ticket to Seattle, could at least dream about it. If they had enough money, they could step up onto the train—
Watch your step, ma’am, let me help you there
—and travel wherever they liked. And most people did, at one time or another. And then, like all wonderful things—or most of them, anyway—the novelty wore off, and the train—hearing it, seeing it—became normal.

The train also was a boon to the fruit industry. Orchardists and farmers were able now to sell fruit to distributors, who sold the fruit abroad for a greater profit. This was the time the orchardists, some of them, began to think about large-scale fruit distribution, and to bolster these plans, irrigation. Water from the Peshastin Ditch, first begun in 1889, reached the orchard slopes above Cashmere in 1901. In 1902, a box factory opened in Brender Canyon. Three years later, the newly platted town of Cashmere—before, it had been called Old Mission, for the Catholic missionaries who had first settled there to preach to the natives—shipped 135 carloads of fruit down the river to Wenatchee.

The early part of the century was a time of busyness, and pride. “Wenatchee, Washington,” the box labels read. “Apple capital of the world.”

w
hen Della entered a lumber camp and applied for employment, the man said that they did not hire females. But she persisted—she hung around the camp and watched the men, the small tasks they busied themselves with in the off hours, the men unsuccessfully shaking her off—and the lumber boss said that if she wanted, if she absolutely insisted on staying and hanging around, she could have a job in the mess hall, helping with the cooking. She refused this offer, and continued to observe the men, stalking their work. She began to imitate them at chores with which she was unfamiliar—the sharpening of blades, the greasing of ropes and pulleys—and also, as a matter of course, and because she was able, she began to take care of the horses.

And then one day she traveled up the mountain farther than she ever had before, to the site of the felling. She had been rebuffed on earlier occasions—to hang around the base camp where they mended their tools and talked and ate their meals was one thing, but to enter the site where the actual work happened was strictly forbidden—but that day the men who saw her cast her rueful glances, or frowned, but did not order her back to base camp. All attention was given to an argument unfolding among a group of men. A man who was a topper had hurt his shoulder and, at the urging of his friends, refused to go up into the indicated tree. The topper had apparently reached this decision despite himself—he wanted to go up, but upon trying could not even get into his harness, never mind shoulder a saw—and there was the argument among the man’s friends and the others who thought the topper should go up regardless of his present condition. What had happened, the latter group argued, that had not happened to other toppers before him, who had ultimately mustered the strength to finish the job? The problem was not that of the body, they implied, but of the will. If he was hurt, he could at least finish the job for that night; tomorrow or the next day they could find another topper. Another topper this late in the season, this far inland? someone cried. It was finally decided that the man would not go up, which meant that one of the others must. But none of them had topped before, and no one wanted to go down to the camp and tell the boss that they weren’t going to finish the job because of a lack of a topper—and so they evaluated each other, at first covertly and then outright, impugning each other’s courage and character.

In a long pause in the argument, when Della said, in a clear, childlike voice they would not have thought possible to come out of her mouth, that she would do it, some glanced at her, astonished, not realizing she had been standing there. Some looked at her and then pointedly ignored her. But she persisted; and when the argument rekindled, she sidled up to the man’s friend, the topper’s friend, who held the harness—he was arguing with somebody—and took it and fit it over her body. Hey! said the man, and made a move to reclaim the harness, but she was in the last stages of securing it onto herself. There was a fierce, solemn expression on her face, and some of the men appraised her. I’ll do it, she said. I said I’ll do it! She’s crazy, someone murmured. Damn right she’s crazy, said somebody else. It quieted for a moment as they watched to see what she’d do next. Where’s the tree? she said. I know what to do, I’ve done it before. Shit, somebody said. Is that right? said somebody else. Let her do it, said a man at the back of the crowd, and heads turned to see who had spoken. It was a rotund man with black hair and watery eyes. She does it and falls off, we won’t have to deal with her anymore. We’ll be rid of her. There was gentle guffawing. Della fingered the silver buckle on the strap, which was not unlike a bridle. You send me up there, she said, and I’ll get the job done. I just want to do it, is all. You let me be the topper, she said, and I’ll work so fast it’ll make your head spin. Now the guffawing turned to laughter. Lady, said a man, and then cleared his throat, because calling her that was somehow ridiculous—Lady, you get up there and you just get the job done, is all. You don’t have to be good at it. I’ll be the best, she said, and now another man said: Send her up! There was no more discussion; and, as it was getting late in the day, a bottle was passed around, and many of the men who had first declined it took a drink on the second round; and they led her to the topper site, and hoisted her aloft, for she was too short to even make the starting point, and as soon as she was set—she had her legs wrapped around the tree—they stepped back, and she began to climb.

A quarter of the way up the tree she began to cry; her pants were not suited to the work, and the insides of her thighs were burned numb from chafing. The men down below passed the bottle around and watched her. When she was halfway up, the sun was setting, and they were shouting encouragement that she could barely hear. When she reached the top, she could no longer hear them. She feared she would be too weak to work the saw. She looked at it and knew at once that she could not do it.

Darkness came. A breeze smelling of duff came from below. She wept, clinging to the trunk. It seemed the air coming up from the ground was warm. There was the sound of innumerable doors opening and closing, and when she stopped crying, she realized it was the other trees creaking in the wind. The first stars came out. She did not know what was real. It was quiet now, the wind had gone. She was in a tree, but it was not the tallest tree in the world; or there were millions of trees in the world, and she had climbed this one because it was the one that she was going to cut; she would cut into the wood with her blade. She had set the saw across the radius but had yet to apply any pressure to it. She looked down at her hands against the saw, very white, childlike but also manlike hands; and before she knew it she had begun to work.

T
almadge was not interested in large-scale fruit distribution even when he saw the necessity of it in the changing, increasingly industrialized world. He had made a living since he was a boy tending his own acreage, and even though he accepted the help of the men when they traveled through, the work was never overwhelming to the point where it affected his health. This would soon not be the case—he was getting on in years, and the work the orchards demanded of him was making him tired. Was wearing him out. He did not speak of this, though he and the girl were both aware of it. Angelene becoming more capable with each year, working hard, while also being discreet, to compensate for his tiredness.

He had never had difficulty selling his fruit in town, in front of the feed and supply store or at the weekly market on Saturdays, but with the increased production from the irrigation canals, and the influx of settlers into the area also selling goods, he found he had too much fruit at the end of the day, and did not know what to do with it. The three of them—Talmadge, Caroline Middey, and Angelene—canned and dried what they could, and stored the surplus. Talmadge soon contacted a distributor who agreed to take some of the fruit off his hands. Some of the orchardists sold all their fruit to distributors, but Talmadge did not want to do this if he did not have to. He enjoyed sitting alongside the wagon at market, greeting people, selling fruit, letting the day go by.

He earned more than he anticipated when he began to sell part of the harvest to the distributor, which surprised him. He had never charged too much for his fruit, and now that somebody else had put a different price on it, he was dismayed. It felt, somehow, dishonest.

It’s the way of the world, Talmadge, said Caroline Middey. The way the world is heading. You shouldn’t feel bad about it, she said, when she saw he was still bothered; you deserve the money, your fruit is by far the best. Why, I bet you could get even more money, if you wanted to! Then: There’s nothing wrong with collecting what is rightfully yours, after all these years of hard work—