Living in Massachusetts

THE ORCHARD

When I come home these days sometimes I hear myself calling out “Mom?” before I remember.

The year my mother died in that September President Ford survived two assassination attempts by women. Why he was so lucky unlike Kennedy, Lincoln, McKinley and Garfield nobody knew. Maybe women don’t make good assassins.

I knew that things were bad with mother and that I’d have to do something. It was pointless checking her into a drying out place since she didn’t want to stop drinking. She’d have no memory of things getting out of hand when she’d wake up the next morning after her usual bottle of vodka. Maybe I was relieved when I came home that day and found her unconscious at the foot of the steps leading down to the lake. How long she’d been lying there I couldn’t say. The ambulance took her to hospital in Springdale and she died a couple of days later. Though she woke up she thought I was her deceased brother.

The funeral was a small affair- our neighbours the deVerres and me. All the friends she and Dad made had long vanished as her fondness for the bottle grew. A few days after it Alan came over to see me and asked me what I was going to do now: did I want to sell the cottage? I had no great attachment to the place so I said “maybe”. I said that I’d look around for somewhere nearer town and if I found something I’d let him know. They owned most of the point and rented out the other cottages to vacationers.

I was surprised that mother had left a will. She must have made it while she was not drinking. I was surprised even further when I was told by the lawyer that as well as the cottage she had left quite a lot of money- mainly stocks and shares. She and Dad had been both thrifty and sensible in the early years of their marriage. I knew they had saved up some for my education, which was interrupted by the war in Vietnam, but I never knew how much they’d salted away. Once Dad had died unexpectedly mother just let everything lie and it kept gathering interest. The lawyer asked me what I wanted to do with it all. I didn’t know so I simply said to leave it until some time had passed and “maybe” I’d get back to him. All I had to do was to sign various legal papers taking over the cottage and the investments. I was in his office less than an hour, which I guessed was what he charged by.

I said “Maybe” a lot those days.

*

It was a bad year for the country and the Commonwealth. President Ford as well as pardoning Nixon also pardoned Robert E. Lee, who was long dead and couldn’t say thanks. Ford found he couldn’t say the word ‘recession’, but unemployment rose anyhow as ‘production’ fell. His golf swing didn’t improve either during his short presidency. When Dukakis took over as Governor that January he told us that the State was broke. Maybe we were; but there were sure a lot of rich folk around as well as the poor Puerto Ricans in downtown Springdale. They’d come looking for the American Dream and had found some kind of nightmare. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses thought Armageddon was going to happen that year. Maybe this was why Jimmy Hoffa disappeared; but it couldn’t explain Ali beating Frazier in Manila.

I wasn’t unhappy when the paper mill gave me my cards. I’d moved from being the janitor to a box-stitcher. Wielding the mop and bucket had been simpler but there was more money in the packaging line of the factory. We had heard late in the previous year that sixteen men had been laid off at the Woronoco mill. Then in the new year Ricky mentioned to Tom that he’d heard from Ray, the foreman, that some of our night shift were going to be laid off. Neil asked Ray about this and Ray said he’d heard nothing. He also said that Ricky was a cheap little rumour-mongerer and shit-stirrer. Maybe, I thought, Ricky gets a kick out of making people uneasy; but maybe he was right.

I was called into the superintendent’s office along with two others one Friday as I started the shift. There was Neil, who was a stacker and Marty, the long-haired guy who feeds the trimmer. As soon as Ray told me to report I knew the rumours were true. I walked to the office whistling ‘Good-bye, Good-byee, wipe the little tear from your ey-ee!’

Worden stood in his doorway, pot-bellied and beer-reddened face, trying to look sincere.

‘Nobody likes doing this,’ he began and rambled on until we were each handed our termination papers marked ‘Laid off-lack of work’.

He wanted to know if we’d work our shift. Neil and Marty said they would work. I said no, took my pay packet and left. When I got home mother was already fast asleep in front of the television on which ‘Kojak’ was trying to catch some hoodlum. I told her in the morning and she’d forgotten it by lunchtime.

I’d drive out each morning after that looking for work at ‘Digital-Electrical’, ‘Old Colony’, ‘Third National’, ‘Food Mart’ and ‘Valley Savings’; anywhere, but nobody was hiring. Then out of the blue I got a call from Roy Norovich who owned a fruit farm just over the State line. He said he’d heard from Alan our neighbour that I was available for work and he was looking for some reliable help on the farm: was I interested? I said I sure was and he told me to come over the next morning at eight and we’d take it from there.

Well that’s landed head up I told myself. Mother said that she knew Carrie, Roy’s wife, from way back, when she and Dad used to drive around at weekends. They’d stop at the Norovich farm just outside Grantby and buy fruit and jams and honey. It was the best in the county, mother would say. I was to remember her to Carrie. I said maybe we could drive out there one day once I’d settled in and she liked that idea. We never did because it was back to the bottle and the television and she forgot the conversation. Then she fell down the steps and died.

*

I am thirty and unmarried and live by the lake alone now.

The house is quiet except for those occasional creakings that suggest the place is alive and gently flexing its muscles. At night when it rains I can hear water in the gutters and pounding on the concrete draining blocks at the corners of the house.

As I lie in bed and listen to the rain I sneeze. Draughts, pollen, dust, even an unexpected erection make me sneeze these days.

I have these disconcerting dreams all the time. The nightmares begin as soon as I’m alone. While mother was around at least her company and the need to look after her kept me safe. But now that I’m thrown back on myself I feel that I’m in danger of falling apart.

You ought to be able to turn the brainbox off, I tell myself.

*

I think of Willie Pawlak with whom I’d been to High school. His parents were Polish, friends of my parents. Willie was immature, insensitive and loud-mouthed. Others in the school found him quite unlikeable; but because of my parents’ friendship with the Pawlaks- who wouldn’t acknowledge that there was anything wrong with Willie- I tolerated him. His sister Katy had a crush on me ever since I took her to one of the school’s formal dances. Her parents and Willie had us ‘engaged’ and Katy tried pretty much everything to make that the case. When I started dating another girl- Katy by then had accepted I was just a friend- Willie did everything he could to break us up. In the end Joanna had to turn a garden hose on him to get him to lay off his attempts to date her. Willie had an inflated sense of his abilities, which were minimal. When I graduated top of the school he wouldn’t believe it, having himself come near the bottom. He phoned the school guidance counsellor and principal and tried to get my success ‘investigated’. Then we were both drafted and the Pawlak’s urged me to look after him. When he was killed they blamed me and stopped visiting mother. I couldn’t tell them that it was his own incessant talking which had enabled the Cong to drop the mortar on him.

*

The farm was just this side of Grantby, which had been settled in the early eighteenth century. It had a population of fifteen hundred mainly white Americans. Grantby was comprised of a town green with its stocks and pillory, the Old Meeting House, the village store, a library and a few Federal style buildings by the architect Ithiel Town. Most of the inhabitants lived in farms in the surrounding countryside.

Norovich’s orchards were in Connecticut but the farm building was the Massachusetts’s side of the State line. I could drive there in twenty minutes on the old town road which linked Grantby to Westville and other small farming towns in the county. Only local traffic came through here; the Turnpike to the North syphoned off all the heavy stuff. Maple trees lined the rolling blacktop which followed the line of the Hubert River. There were fields of ripening maize and meadowland all around. Here and there as I drove I could see several small waterfalls. Despite the settlements this was black bear country, though I’ve never seen one. They mostly snuffled around the campsites in the State forest, which used to be the hunting and fishing grounds for the Tunxis tribe before they were killed off.

Roy and their twelve year old coughing collie greeted me as I pulled up outside the skeleton of the new barn he was building. The collie did a lot of hand-licking and fawning. Roy was a wiry, weather-beaten man with both grit and warmth in his eyes. He was friendly and hard-working as they come. He said that when he was seventeen he couldn’t tell his ass from a hole in the ground but he was willing to learn. He had been ‘fiery’ and still had a bush of untidy red hair though he was the most placid and unpanickable man I’d ever met.

His parents had originated in Russia. His father had been booked to sail on the ‘Titanic’ but (as Roy told it) had spent ‘too long in a pub’ and missed the sailing. Roy remembered his father and mother speaking Russian at home and leaving Roy to speak the English he learnt at school whenever that became necessary. His parents could speak English but not too well and were self-conscious about that. The only Russian Roy could remember was ‘Xotite potancevat?’– ‘Would you like to dance with me?’

Roy had married a local girl- Carrie- when he was nineteen. When they were first married Carrie was handed a stool and a pail by her new mother-in-law and told to milk the cows. Her sister-in-law would watch everything she did to make sure she did it right. Several times during those first few months Carrie told me she went back to her mother. Each time Roy would go to bring her back home. They had two children, ‘Chip’ (also named Roy) and Sally. Sally had recently married but still helped out selling fruit. When I first arrived to work on the farm ‘Chip’ was away cycling around Nova Scotia, painting and drawing. He wanted to become an artist though Roy hoped he would blow that out of his system and help him to run the farm.

When later I saw some of the younger Roy’s work- which he offered for sale behind the roadside tables from which apples and other fruit were sold- I thought it more likely that ‘Chip’ would end up working the farm. But at least he had a dream, I also thought.

*

As I listen to the rain I think that I’ve never found any use for most of what I was taught, except that is to help me solve crosswords. All those graphs I drew and all those dates I knew; all those causes of revolutions and logarithm tables; all those atomic numbers and fine points of grammar- all gone!

*

The way life is on a farm is non-stop. No job was too little though some had to be done before others. You have to do everything yourself or take on casual and seasonal labour to help out. Each day when I arrived at eight Roy had been working for an hour or more. When I head for home at five he’s still working. You only stop for meals and that was only because you needed to take on fuel to carry on working. Farm’s never sleep, Roy would say, but we have to.

That first morning I guess Roy was checking me out as much as I was checking him and the farm set-up out. The pay was two dollars thirty-three cents an hour. I was working six days a week- unless it was raining, in which case Roy would ring me to tell me not to come in- and eight hours a day. I said that was fine by me and what did he want me to do?

He set me to mowing the grass around the house and barns. That took four hours pushing an old gas-driven mower. Because of the heat I wore my old Dodgers baseball cap and had a handkerchief down the back to cover my neck. Meanwhile Roy was taking delivery of timber for the barn.

Carrie called us both in for lunch and asked after mother, who she’d not seen for a while. No use beating about the bush, I tell myself. They knew about Dad’s death- Carrie had come to the funeral, which I remembered mother had been thankful for. I told them about mother’s drinking and they were silent for a moment.

-That’s hard, Carrie said.

-Yes it is, I said, but more for Mom than for me. She just thinks each day’s the same day, which I suppose it is. As long as I’m there she’s okay. As long as she’s okay I’m okay.

I told them that she remembered them and sent her best wishes and that one day I hoped to bring her over on a Sunday. Carrie said they’d like that but I guess she knew as well as I did that it was unlikely, given mother’s drinking.

In the afternoon Roy took me with two other casual workers- Wayne and Kenny- to an orchard just off the Grantby Road. There was a stone strewn stream running into a pond at the foot of the hillside on which the orchard stood. Buried in the undergrowth on one side of the orchard were the bodies of an old car and van. Just up a path- shaded by sumac and wild grape vines- which lead towards an upper gate was an old stump that looked like a cowled grey monk. Wasps nested in the hollowed limbs. Swallows were swooping through the trees as though slaloming. Vigilant hawks glided overhead like B52s.

Kenny was just out of the Air Force after four years’ service. In the evenings he pumped gas at the nearby ‘Texaco’ station. Wayne was from Pittsburgh and had this habit of reminding us what a poor season the Patriots had had in the AFC while the Steelers had beaten the Vikings and were the Superbowl champs. I made sure I worked a few rows over from him as the afternoon wore on and I saw Kenny had done the same. Some things seem even worse than when you’re up a tree with angry wasps buzzing around the bruised peaches above your head.

When I got home late that afternoon I had blisters on my hands, my shoulders were sore, my knees were bruised from climbing the ladder and my clothes were covered with grass, dirt and sawdust. I was itchy all over because of peach fuzz. On the WWLP Channel 22 news from Springdale I learned that it had been ninety degrees and it was going to get hotter as the week went on. I took a shower and threw my clothes in the washing machine before I carried mother to her bed.

The next morning neither Wayne nor Kenny showed up. Roy said that was how it was a lot of the time. We started by nailing plywood on the roof over the joists of the barn. Then we raised and fitted in place a sidewall frame of the upper part of the barn. When I started singing Johnny Cash’s ‘Jesus was a carpenter’ Roy came right in with Tim Hardin’s ‘If I was a carpenter’ and we were both spitting nails with laughter.

-You’re a very pleasant fellow, Jimmy,’ Roy said once he’d got control of his mouth.

- Company’s the same, I smiled back.

*

Here I am up in a tree again, I’d think as I worked in the orchard. There was something safe about being up a tree, I thought.

There used to be an old spruce tree deep in the woods that I remember climbing as a child. It branches seemed to rise in a spiral almost to the very top and the lower ones were so thick that I could stand on them to climb as high as I wanted to. I never went too high up- from the top you could probably have seen the distant reservoir.

Then as now I used to run in the woods, following the line of pylons, over carpets of pine needles and the dirt track rutted by trail bikes. But then I ran for pleasure; now I run to tire myself so that I can sleep. I would jump over the gnarled roots exposed by the rain wash. They formed a natural stairway down to the stream. The stream would be choked with bracken and Lady Ferns. I’d hear the plop as large, basking and sluggish frogs plunged into the water at the pounding sound of my heels. I’d dance over running ground pine moss and stare at the gaudy peacockry of the dying leaves in autumn.

As a kid I’d marvel at the seasonal crops of fungi and mushrooms, which I’d look up in a book in the library. I wonder (as I’m up a tree) whether I’ve still got those old notebooks in which I’d copy out the now forgotten names of things- the poisonous red-capped Russula emetic; the white and shiny Amanita phalloides and the red and yellow Boletus roxanae.

Mother probably had stuff like that stashed away somewhere. After her death I started to nose around and found all kinds of junk- even my first baseball mitt. It hardly fitted my hand but I spent one evening looking at myself wearing it and popping a ball in and out of it while sipping a beer on the boathouse roof and listening to a Red Sox game. The Sox were doing well that year, heading for the playoffs.

When I was up the trees in Pecks’ orchard where Roy would leave me on my own to pick fruit I used to remember those days when I’d dash into the woods near Westville and clamber into the branches of that old tree. It was the place I ran to when Dad died. I remember staring up through the higher branches and thinking that maybe I’d see Dad as he went up to heaven.

Each day there was something to do and I liked not only the variety of it all but the apparent randomness of it. In the paper mill it had been the same floor to mop or another box to stitch and throw on the pile for someone to move and fill. It was different in the orchard. For a start everything was natural, peaceful, alive and following its own path of growth. There was no hissing of steam and whirring and thumping of machinery or howls of pain as clumsy fingers were cut off by the guillotine.

One morning I’d be working in the store building, nailing down a plywood floor. The air was filled with the sweet, sickly smell of boxwood saturated by the juices of all the fruit. Then I’d be removing tar paper tiles from the lower part of the roof adjoining the sales room, where the new barn was being built. Next we’d be stacking two by six inch lengths of planking on the roof ready to be nailed in place. Then we’d be putting up sheets of ‘Texture 1-11’ to side the new storage barn. And then I’d be fixing old fruit boxes; or nailing one inch lengths of wood on to broken skids; or shovelling sand and soil to fill a several feet deep hole containing a newly planted large black oil tank; or marking four quart and eight quart bags; or picking fruit and loading the boxes in the orchard on the trailer behind Roy’s old 1964 Allis-Chalmers Model D19 tractor. Anything that was broken could be fixed; if it couldn’t be fixed it could be used some other way. That’s how I felt sometimes too.

It was hot: that summer the heat just went higher and higher, like the thermostat was broken. It peaked at a hundred and stayed there for a while, like a blow-torch burning paint. Each day I shed two or three pounds just through sweating. The last time I’d spent so much time outside was in the jungles of Vietnam. They had been alien despite their lush greenness. In my dreams I would shudder when I saw those trees, trees which devoured or exploded or pierced you with their sharpened branches. Sure there was death in the orchard but it wasn’t so horrendous even when it was as gruesome as a coon ripping itself to pieces trying to free its leg caught in a metal-jawed trap. That’s the sight that greeted me one morning after Roy and I had spent the afternoon wrapping aluminium around the peach trees and setting traps to keep the coons off. I thought of Willie and threw up.

Roy and Carrie never asked about my service and I was grateful for that. The day I threw up over that torn coon he simply brought me some water to wash my mouth out and by the time I looked again he’d shovelled the carcase up out of sight and cleared the trap.

We’d work the orchard together some days, picking early McIntosh and Cortland apples. There’d be the smell of skunks around and wasps’ nests like old turbans hung from branches. With the heat as it was you had to take your time, work in quarter of an hour bursts, then shelter in the shade of the 1954 Chevy 3100 pick-up’s cabin as you sipped water. There’d be not a breath of air, no cooling breeze, and sweat would be dripping from your nose, ear lobes, eyebrows, chin, everywhere. Even the ladders were too hot to be touched more than briefly, as was the metal hoop around the top of the basket in which you’d place the picked fruit.

- I’m about beat, Roy said one afternoon.

- Roy, it’s so hot it’s illegal, I replied.

- Too hot to laugh, Roy chuckled and wiped his face. I’ve got sweat in my eyes.

- Sounds like an old Ink Spots’ number, I said.

Later when I climbed up on the back of the truck and helped Roy shifting the boxes of peaches and apricots so that more could be fitted in, he said that was one of the things he liked about me, the way I’d just pitch in without being asked to give a hand. Most ‘hired help’- and he said that as though I wasn’t “most hired help” but more like family- would have stood around waiting to be asked. I sat in the back and held on to the two ladders as we drove to the farm. Most evenings when I was about to go Carrie would give me some fruit to take home,

*

People came and went that summer and autumn. Some worked just a day, others maybe a week, some a bit longer. Some were hoping; some were just passing; and some couldn’t stay on the ladder. There was Dick: he had six children who lived with him and his wife in a trailer outside Springdale. His eldest daughter worked as a tobacco sorter and they all received ‘Welfare’ of one kind or another. He didn’t show up the day after Roy gave him a ten dollar advance on his pay cheque. There was Tom, twice divorced- the most recent marriage only lasted three weeks- and living in a motel. He was hoping to start a Laundromat business but couldn’t find a bank to give him a loan. There was Jay who arranged for me to pick him up at the lights at the Route 57 intersection and wasn’t there in the morning. I waited, reckoning he might just be late; but after twenty minutes I had to head for the farm and was ten minutes late myself. I apologised to Roy and explained what had happened. He was easy about it and advised me not to offer ‘casuals’ lifts since that kind of thing happened a lot. Roy was used to the unpredictability of casual workers which was why he was pleased with my dependability.

And there was Glenda who was Alan’s eldest daughter. She started to work in the sale’s room as the selling season picked up. Some days I’d help out on the stall when it got busy and she and I would chat. I’d give her a lift back to the lake and she’d tell me about her sister’s shenanigans out West in California. Kimberley had gone out there after she’d met some guy who had a chain of cocktail lounges in Hawaii and California. Kimberley went back with him to become ‘an exotic dancer’ and had graduated into the porn business. There was more money in that, she’d tell Glenda when they spoke on the phone; why didn’t Glenda come out and join her?

-Why didn’t you join your sister? I asked Glenda when she told me about Kimberley.

The thing was they were quite different. Glenda was more thoughtful, less impulsive and nobody’s fool. Kimberley was always on the look-out for a ‘good time’ and had been sexually promiscuous from the day she discovered what sex was all about. For her it was a commodity which, if used right, would get her out of small town Massachusetts and somewhere exciting. Glenda had never liked the way the boys who shagged Kimberley would try to get into her pants as well. She’d give them the brush off; and those few who didn’t take the hint and became pushier found that Glenda could deliver a mean punch and kick to the groin.

It was only natural, I suppose, that I should regularly give Glenda a lift back from work- her starting hours differed so usually her mother ran her out to the farm. Then she started to drift over now and then to join me on the boathouse roof for a beer or two in the evening. We’d chat about all sorts of stuff- music, movies and books, whatever. She’d been to see Bob Marley and the Wailers at Paul’s Mall in Boston. I said I didn’t really know his music and she said she’d lend me some. She’d seen Eric Clapton at the Civic Centre in Springdale when he’d played Layla, Bell Bottom Blues, Key to the Highway and Massachusetts Jam. I said I preferred him when he was in The Yardbirds. We forked out ten dollars each in July and went to see Elvis at Springdale- he’d not been this way before and wasn’t likely to again, so ‘Why not?’ we said. He was on stage for just over an hour, opening with ‘C.C. Rider’ and ‘I’ve got a woman’ and finishing with ‘Mystery Train’ and ‘Fools Rush In’. We agreed it was a pity he’d put on weight but his voice sure was mighty fine. Afterwards we stopped in the bar beside the ‘Mad Apple’ record shop and had a cold beer or two. When someone played Glen Campbell singing ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ on the jukebox a fifth time we decided to call it a night. I guess we found each other pleasant company. We went to see ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ together. Then we kind of drifted into the bedroom one evening having decided to check each other out a bit more closely. That seemed to be mutually acceptable and pleasurable so that now and then became regularly and often.

She was the first woman I’d been with since I had been drafted. Unlike most of my pals in the squad when I was on leave I didn’t head straight for the cat houses of Saigon. Once I was demobbed and back home with mother I couldn’t get near to anyone. I didn’t want to. I just wanted to feel normal, human, to forget all about killing people I didn’t know and didn’t necessarily dislike even though they were ‘the enemy’. It felt like ‘the enemy’ was in me after all that killing.

Though we would make out she would always go back to her family’s cottage on the other side of the point afterwards. We didn’t really talk about that and it just seemed this was what would happen. Maybe she was being respectful of the fact that my mother had died only a month or so before we started to get together. Had she wanted to stay overnight I probably wouldn’t have minded; but then I don’t know how I would have felt waking up sweating and maybe crying out if there was someone in bed beside me.

*

During the picking season a reporter from Channel 22 came to interview Roy in the orchard. Since I was up a tree the cameraman asked me to ‘pick an apple’ so he could film it being done. I pointed out that I was up a nectarine tree and did he want me to come down and go up an apple tree? Roy cracked up. All I had known about apples and nectarines before I worked on the farm was that you ate them. Now I could tell the difference between the red and green skinned McIntosh with its crisp, white flesh (originating from South-eastern Ontario) and a Westfield-Seek-No-Further (with its firm, creamy yellow flesh). I could also tell the difference between a Ruby Grand nectarine, with its firm yellow flesh, and the white fleshed Arctic Glo. But it was the peaches I liked best.

I found out that you judge peaches with the eye and a caress, like you do a woman. You position your ladder in the branches so that the weight is towards the tree and you climb up to pick the fruit within your reach. You cup your hand around the peach so as not to bruise it and you gently place it in the wicker basket slung by a strap over your shoulder. You become as agile as a monkey and work from side to side, up and down the ladder, emptying the contents by undoing the straps holding the canvas bottom of the basket closed. So that the peaches don’t fall but gently roll on to the others you put the basket in the large crate placed nearby. Anything bruised is removed and goes for cider or jam.

They say you shouldn’t plant peach trees again in such an orchard. The life span of a peach tree is around fifteen years and they take five of those years to reach a size that bears reasonable fruit. The dead roots make the soil unhealthy for new growth.

That’s handy to know, I thought; and I wondered if people were like that. Maybe I’d think on that awhile and sip a Bud on the boathouse roof with Glenda, I told myself.

© R.L.Paige 2011