The Orchardist (6 page)

Talmadge stepped inside.

The screen door thwapped shut.

The man absently splayed his hand to indicate the wealth of seating—several sofas covered in crushed velvet, musty smelling, and three chairs in the same velvet in different colors—emerald, ruby, mustard. Have a seat, said the man, and scratched the back of his head—again the uninterested tone—and sat down on the edge of the emerald chair. Talmadge sat opposite him, lifting the rifle over his head and laying it across his lap. Michaelson leaned forward and opened a cigar box on the low table and lifted his eyes in Talmadge’s general direction—an offering—but Talmadge raised his hand to decline. The man took a cigar for himself and lit it and took one puff and remained sitting still in his chair. He stared at the floor—worn, scratched pine boards—and seemed to fade into a stupor; he pressed his lips together as if recalling a former agitation.

And then he seemed to come out from whatever spell he was under.

No one offered to relieve you of your weaponry, I see, he said.

Talmadge didn’t answer. Was the man sick? he thought. Had Talmadge just woken him from a nap? And another thing that was bothering Talmadge: he could not locate the man’s age. He had sensed, when the man first appeared behind the screen, that he was in his forties—a muscular, hard, but graceful body, and a wide but also lean, weary face. As he smoked, he seemed to age: was he near Talmadge’s age? Beyond it? Talmadge was dismayed that he could not tell. The man seemed a chameleon.

Doing some hunting? Michaelson said, without inflection.

Talmadge hesitated. Yes. He cleared his throat. I’ve been south of here but—thought I’d see what’s north. Good hunting here, I’ve heard—

While Talmadge was speaking, Michaelson’s eyes had traveled, bored, to the corner of the room. When Talmadge fell silent, Michaelson turned his head to him but did not meet his eyes. Lifted his eyebrows. The girls are sleeping, he said. You’ll have to wait. Unless, he said, you want me to wake someone up. His gaze traveled to the opposite corner of the room. You understand, he said.

Talmadge understood he was referring to money. By this time he understood much. He listened to the sounds of the house, aware now that it was filled with girls. He thought of the two girls in the orchard and looked up to see Michaelson watching him now hard, frowning. Talmadge couldn’t decide if it was Talmadge—his person or visage—of which Michaelson disapproved, or if he was thinking of something else and had just let his gaze rest there, on Talmadge’s chest. There was a faint wheezing as Michaelson puffed on his cigar.

Where are you from?

He, Talmadge, must be very careful now, he thought. He looked to the window.

Oregon.

Michaelson smoked and continued to look at his chest. His frown increased by a degree.

Long way from home. You a mining inspector? He smoked. Or a bounty hunter? They send you to hunt me? You going to shoot me?

There was a silence as Talmadge, baffled, decided how to answer.

He stood. I have to be going.

Michaelson did not look up at him.

I was looking for another Michaelson, said Talmadge. Looks like I got the wrong place, here.

Michaelson brought the cigar up to his lips. I’m the only Michaelson around here, and everybody knows it.

The floorboards whined softly. Talmadge turned to see a child in the doorway between parlor and kitchen. She was small, maybe nine years old, with limp black hair and black eyes. A child’s pouting mouth, stained red. She rubbed her eyes. She was wearing a man’s cotton undershirt and nothing else. Pa, she said. A gentle croak.

He lifted his chin in assent, and the girl trod lightly to him, climbed onto his knee. He put one arm around her waist—casually—and with the other brought the cigar again to his lips. Scowled at the floor. And then he leaned forward and crushed the cigar on a saucer on the nearest table and cleared his throat. Again he addressed the corner of the room: Two dollars, he said. For twenty minutes. He paused. This is Mary Elizabeth.

Talmadge looked away. I have to be going, he said.

I’ll clean her up, put her dress on. It won’t take long. If she’s up the others will be up, he said again, more to himself than to Talmadge. With the heel of one hand he rubbed his eye and stretched his legs. The girl slid off him, scampered away through the doorway from which she had come. You can have your pick, said Michaelson. What do you like?

But Talmadge had stepped outside onto the porch and down into the stunning light. He walked quickly across the clearing, his eyes on the mule standing in the stippled shade beside the barn. It took him a long time to reach his destination. His foolishness overwhelmed him. The boy scrambled up from where he had been sitting with his back against the barn wall and hurried to unfasten the reins from the post. That was fast, he said to Talmadge, grinning.

I
n Okanogan he stopped again at the general store. The old man working behind the counter, recognizing him, stuck out his jaw.

That man Michaelson, said Talmadge. What’s he about?

The man looked askance at him. He had picked up a rag, had begun wiping the counter.

You went up there, didn’t you? he said after a minute. You know what he’s about.

Something wrong with him? said Talmadge. He sick?

The man snorted. Glanced at Talmadge, to see if he was serious. When he saw Talmadge’s question was in earnest, he said: He’s hibernating now, I suppose.

Hibernating?

The man snorted again. The man is a fiend. Goes through rages more than any person I’ve encountered in my life. Ups and downs. Some mental sickness, I suppose. And then he’s into that stuff—that opium. When he’s in the stuff you don’t hear from him for a while. But then he comes to town and wreaks all kind of trouble. Don’t know why they don’t permanently jail him. His newest thing, the man said, as if suddenly remembering it, is chasing girls—I think it’s two—who ran off from the place earlier this year. He’s frothing at the mouth to find them. I hope they’re long gone by now, said the man, looking out the window to the street. Hate to know what he’d do if he found them. Man’s not in his right mind.

Didn’t seem to be frothing when I saw him, said Talmadge, after a silence.

That’s because he’s hibernating, said the man. Any time he has that stuff—that opium—he stays up there and eats it. Or whatever he does. Smokes it, I don’t know. Waits for one of his men to bring him more. Woe the man who comes empty-handed. He’ll eat it until he runs out of money. Harmless as a puppy until then, I suppose. Though I don’t know. The man is a menace. The man glanced at Talmadge again. Why’d you go up there? he said. If you pardon my asking. You don’t seem the type.

Talmadge considered carefully how to answer.

I thought it was a different kind of place, he said.

W
hen he arrived back at the orchard, a day and a half later, the two plates were stacked neatly on the porch. He made eggs. He left the steaming plates on the porch steps and walked past the girls, who had crossed the grass toward him, down to the creek and washed his face. Had the girls come by steamboat? he wondered. Or, as he increasingly believed, had they come by foot, through hard country and forest?

The girls had finished eating by the time he passed the cabin again and the plates were stacked as before. They sat at the mouth of the apricot orchard, waiting.

He spent the morning deciding what to do. The image of Michaelson at times rising to harass him. Early afternoon he loaded down the mule with supplies and led him out of the barn and across the grass. Crossed the creek. A moment later he heard the splashing of their crossing behind him. He walked slowly so they would not fall too far behind. He led the mule into the outer apple orchard, into the canyon. Up the short incline where the path veered away into a band of aspen. The ground was hardened ash and clay and covered with a dull confetti of mulch. He slowed, gauging their stride, and kept on.

For their beds he filled burlap bags with leaves. He had three quilts besides his own, which he packed. He brought a lantern, and thought as he led the mule up the hill: What if they were unfamiliar with lanterns and burned down the cabin in the middle of the night? He thought he should try to explain the mechanics of the lantern but could not imagine such a conversation. Sun winked through the trees. He anticipated the small rent in the forest to the right and soon found it and waited to make sure they saw him, then stepped off the road and guided the mule up the embankment. He heard them struggle behind him, and hesitated. The mule looked over his shoulder.

He came to the small clearing, the narrow, clattering creek. Beyond the creek the cabin stood backed by two massive overhanging evergreens. The cabin and trees sat on a small rise overlooking the valley on the opposite side. He crossed the creek and walked around the side of the cabin to view the orchards below. There was his own cabin, the elbow of creek.

The girls sat on the opposite creek bank and watched him. The mule entered the water and moved over to them and they arranged their postures to accommodate his grazing.

The cabin was one room, dank and cold but solidly built. (Too wet up here, their mother had said, when they first discovered it. They chose to settle below, in the valley, even though early on it meant huddling in the miner’s shack, which, for its closeness, was as dry as a bone.) The cabin’s single window—large, paneless—overlooked the valley. He swept away most of the leaves with his boot and then constructed their beds and draped the quilts atop them.

Outside the cabin he hailed the mule and unstrapped his fishing rod, and hiked along the creek for a half mile to the pool. The girls followed him and sat on the rock outcropping jutting two dozen feet out into the water. He scouted the ground and found pale larvae on the underside of a log and then baited the hook and cast into the water. In an hour he caught three fish.

At the upper cabin he started a fire. The girls crossed the creek and resumed their previous positions. They watched as he gutted the fish and threw the entrails into the water. By the time he cooked the fish, it was late afternoon. He set the plates of fish on the porch, and from the saddlebags he removed apples and apricots and biscuits wrapped several times in a cloth and set these on the porch as well. He went around the side of the cabin where the mule had gone to warm his rump in the sun and gathered the reins and led the mule across the creek. As he passed the girls they gathered their legs close to them and looked in opposite directions. He continued down the slope and listened for their footsteps but did not hear them.

When he made his own supper, it was dusk. He ate cornbread, an apple. He did not light a lantern. The flesh of the apple shone moonwhite, and he ate it and chucked the core into the orchard. He sat on the darkened porch and rolled a cigarette, a ceremony he saved for Clee but for this one time, and he did not bother to question the impulse. He sat smoking. After a while he saw, like twin phantoms, the girls creep down the avenue between apple orchard and canyon. They momentarily disappeared and then came out of the canyon mouth. Crossed the field, disappeared again, and then alighted at the edge of the apricot orchard, settled into the grass. Awaited, with their peculiar and indifferent curiosity, what he would do next.

D
ella was happy.

She and Jane were submerged to their necks in the pool beyond the upper cabin where the man had made them a place to stay but where they did not stay. A mile or so down the hillside the man worked in the orchard, or he was done for the day, he was washing himself in the creek, the same creek that fed the pool in which the girls now swam, and that flowed out and down the hillside through the forest, to where it clattered below the apricot orchard. When hunger struck one of the girls, they immediately swam to the rock abutment from which they had lowered themselves into the water a half hour before; but, finding they could not pull themselves up again because of their weight, they swam to the shallows and slogged, fully clothed, up onto the rocks. Panting. Dizzy. Clutching each other for support, both giddy with hunger, they made their way through the heaven-reaching evergreens, found the path that led down to the orchard.