Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  This time when his uncle shook his head he looked positively mournful. Maris said, ‘He bought that one in a junk shop in Healdsburg.’ And when the two adults laughed, the boy joined them. And he looked at the end of the room at the gun cabinet, through its glass front at the guns lying horizontally in racks.

  ‘You’re going to have to go to school,’ his uncle said, looking at the boy carefully. ‘What grade were you down there?’

  ‘Fourth grade.’

  ‘You’ve just scraped by.’ He laughed and pointed at Maris. ‘Lucky for you, she only teaches third grade.’ Maris frowned, but again Jack could tell she was only pretending. His mom had used to kid him; it was nice to hear it again.

  His uncle said, ‘The school doesn’t even know you’re here yet, so we thought maybe you wouldn’t start this week. That way you can get used to this place, see how things work around here. Maybe you can help me out with the apples, too. Most of the work’s done, and the pickers have moved on. But there’s the near end of the Back Valley to do, and I could use the help. And the company. What do you say?’

  The boy was full of questions – what was the ‘back valley’? who were the ‘pickers’? – but understood the gist, which was that he needn’t go right away to school. He nodded.

  ‘Good,’ said his uncle and Maris smiled at Jack, who felt sufficiently emboldened to ask his uncle, ‘Don’t you have to go to work?’

  Maris giggled and Will looked momentarily nonplussed. ‘That is my work.’ He scratched his chin while he tried to word an explanation. ‘That’s what I do here. Grow apples. I’m a farmer. Didn’t your grandmother tell you?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘She just said you lived in the country.’ And he sensed for the first time that if his uncle seemed a distant figure to him, he probably seemed that way to his grandmother as well. And though there seemed no hostility in it, the boy also felt comforted by the thought that somebody else wasn’t that close to his own mother either.

  After supper Maris came upstairs with him and showed him the empty drawers in his dresser. ‘You can put your clothes in there,’ she said shortly. Pointing to a painted bookshelf on the far side of the bed, she added, ‘I don’t know if you’re much of a reader but I got some books out of the library. The television’s downstairs if you want to watch it.’

  She left him alone and he put the few clothes he’d brought all into one drawer. He felt shy about going downstairs right away, so he sat on the bed and looked at the titles of the books. None of them was familiar but he discovered that Gram had put My Story by Henry Aaron in the bottom of his suitcase and he started to read it. He lay down for a minute, just to stretch out while he read.

  The next thing he knew the light had gone from the windows and his room – well, it was not a room, since it had no dividing wall or door – was dark. For a brief second he felt panic as he wondered where he was, trying to find the familiarity of first the room on Cole Street, then the spare room at Gram’s. Nothing fit and then he heard a noise from downstairs and he remembered where he was. He got up to use the bathroom down the hall, and stopped when he heard voices downstairs. ‘Leave some ice cream for your nephew,’ Maris scolded.

  ‘Don’t worry about him. I checked a minute ago and he was out for the count.’

  ‘He must be exhausted.’

  ‘He sure doesn’t show much, does he?’

  ‘It’ll come out. Just give it time. He seems a little sweetheart to me.’

  ‘Well I hope you’re right,’ his uncle said. ‘He’s had a rough time of it. I think my sister must have been a nightmare and he never knew his father. There are plenty of better ways to start life. But you were the one worried about having him here.’

  ‘I just don’t want you getting sucked into something you can’t get out of. If things don’t work out here he’s always got your mom, remember?’ Maris’s voice was uncompromising, but softened to a tease as she said, ‘You may think she’s an old hag, but she didn’t do that bad a job with you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t wish her on anyone, much less my nephew.’

  ‘You may not have to. If it works out here.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said his uncle, and Jack tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom, where the light had been left on. He was as uncertain as his uncle seemed to be as to how long he would be staying. Part of him was still nervous, part of him still scared. Maris in particular didn’t seem that happy to have him there, but he comforted himself with what she called him – sweetheart – which was something his mother hadn’t called him for a long time.

  When he woke up the next day and came downstairs, his uncle was in the office. ‘Maris left early,’ he explained. ‘She’s got her own place in town, and most week nights she stays there. But don’t worry,’ he added, mistaking his nephew’s look of curiosity for concern. ‘I can cook breakfast okay. Just not anything else.’

  And he could – instead of his usual cereal, Jack found himself eating pancakes and bacon and fresh orange juice and even two inches of coffee heavily diluted by milk and liberally dosed with dark brown sugar.

  When he’d finished, his uncle said, ‘That should hold you,’ then looked at Jack’s sneakers. ‘You bring any boots?’

  Jack shook his head.

  Will nodded. ‘You’re going to need some for winter. We don’t get much snow here, but it’s wetter than hell from November until March. I’ll take you into town later and get you some gear. Maris said you didn’t bring that many clothes.’

  They went outside through the back door in the kitchen and stood on the low deck looking at a line of high trees that faced the back of the house in a sweeping semicircle. The stand was a mix of eucalyptus and firs, well spaced to give an airy feel of forest rather than of dense wood.

  To their left was a well-worn path across a short section of lawn that continued into the trees. ‘Come on, I’ll show you around,’ said his uncle, and they walked this way, with Ellie the collie suddenly appearing to pad along behind them, coming through the trees into a clearing with a long oval-shaped pond, about the length of a tennis court. The surface was studded by water lilies at the far end, which was framed by a bank of rhododendrons, in bloom with pink and purple flowers. Behind them sat a long greenhouse, its side a series of diamond-shaped panes of glass. At their end of the pond, a rough diving board had been fashioned out of a long plank balanced precariously on a line of three fat tree stumps.

  ‘Is it deep?’ the boy asked cautiously, staring at the dark reflective water.

  ‘Deep enough to dive. Can you swim?’

  Jack shook his head.

  ‘Well then, this is a pretty good place to learn.’ Will pointed to the far side of the pond. ‘It’s shallow there. And after a day in the orchard there’s nothing can beat a swim. It’s the best.’ He said this with an enthusiasm the boy was unused to.

  They walked around the pond and came to the greenhouse. It was backed against a sharp rise in the land, so that it was sheltered from wind, nestled against the hill. As he followed his uncle through its door he felt as if he’d stepped into a sauna, like the one the parents of his school friend Mickey, back in San Francisco, had in their basement on the other side of the Panhandle. The air was thick and moist; after only a moment Jack could sense sweat gathering on his neck.

  In the greenhouse there were two long trestle tables on which sat small terracotta pots, each containing a plant. His uncle gestured at the pots. ‘Strawberries. And a few tomatoes. Maris is crazy about tomatoes,’ he added appreciatively.

  Further down on several tables were small bundles of what looked like sticks, wrapped together with electrical tape.

  ‘These are the scions for the grafts,’ said his uncle. ‘The root-stock’s in the orchard already – I bring these out later on in spring and put the two together. Bet you’ve never seen a graft before.’

  The boy shook his head. He hadn’t understood a word Will had said. The greenhouse seemed surprisingly shallow, but it was wide, almost fifty feet long he
’d have guessed. There weren’t that many plants, but it seemed crowded nonetheless, with the imminent, burgeoning growth and the moist air somehow dense with expectation.

  ‘Nothing much else to see in here,’ his uncle declared, and led him outside. They walked back past the pond in the general direction of the house. For the first time Jack saw that near the house, across from the turnaround, there was a wooden barn, once clearly painted red but now, except for a few off-scarlet flakes, the silvery grainy grey of the ageing boards. Inside Jack could see a tractor with a flatbed behind it, stacked with empty lugs. Against the far inner wall of the barn there were more lugs stacked neatly in high piles, and a vast assembly of tools hanging from pegs pounded into the cross beams.

  Will took a long, funny-looking saw off the wall, then clambered onto the tractor. He looked down at the boy. ‘Hop on,’ he said, ‘unless you want to walk.’ He had Jack stand behind him, and the boy gripped the back of the seat with both hands as Will slowly reversed the tractor out of the barn. Then he shifted gears and the tractor jerked forward; they moved unsteadily away from the house, on a worn path of ash-coloured dirt, with Ellie trotting behind.

  The path went through a mix of flowering bushes and brush which swept against the side of the tractor’s front tank, and, his forward view blocked by his uncle’s wide shoulders, Jack could only see the greenery on each side. Gradually, it grew lighter, and he sensed that they had emerged from the jungle of growth and were moving ever so slightly downhill. His uncle braked and the engine coughed, then stopped. As his uncle stood up and stretched, the boy loosened his hold on the back of the seat, and using the tyre as a step awkwardly hopped down to the ground. ‘This is the Valley Orchard,’ his uncle announced. Blinking from the light of the high sun overhead, the boy felt dizzy for a second, and only lifted his gaze when his slight vertigo dissolved. Then he looked ahead.

  They were at the top end of a soft and grassy slope which gradually declined for several hundred yards, then bottomed out briefly before ascending in the distance, until it levelled off at about the same height as the ground where he and his uncle stood. The two slopes thus formed a gradual valley, which had an air of having an unsupervised life of its own – like a secret garden spreading over dozens of acres. There was a picturesque vista of much higher hills in the distance, but they were so far away that they seemed not to intrude at all on this valley, but only served to provide a kind of remote frame to the picture in front of him.

  Throughout the valley were rows and rows of trees – apple trees, the boy concluded, of a high and standard sort, reaching into the air with full extended arms of greenery. The trees were well spaced and well rounded, and every single one seemed to be absolutely loaded with fruit, which hung on the branches of the trees like the ballooned bulbs of his grandmother’s Christmas ornaments. There were here a million dots of vermilion, pink and gold, the orchard a contrasting neat sea of tree greenery and colourful fruit. The apples shimmered in the warm sun, as if the humid temperature somehow moistened the light itself.

  He had never seen anything remotely like it in his life.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked his uncle.

  This time Jack spoke at once, too wonderstruck for shyness. ‘Nothing’s the matter,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing,’ he said, of the magic in front of him.

  His uncle laughed. ‘They’re called Gravensteins,’ he said. ‘Late ones, too.’

  ‘Oh?’ said the boy with disappointment. ‘I thought they were apples.’

  He was forever grateful to his uncle for not laughing at him.

  The magic did not wear off, even as the week progressed and the boy helped his uncle pick the latest and Gravenstein part of the harvest. He had never actually worked before – the chores he had done around the apartment, especially when his mother was drinking, weren’t really work, and had the advantage of being short-lived. It was not easy, but the exhausting aspects of picking apple after apple did not diminish the sense of wonder that this transplanted city boy felt. The inevitable realities – the apples bruised by wind or branches, the ones half eaten by worms – were not debasing ones. Even when his uncle pointed out a rattlesnake, curled up and sleeping against some bricks outside the barn warmed up by the sun, this could not bring him entirely down to earth.

  At first he picked the juice apples, including the windfalls on the ground if they weren’t too bruised. He wore one of the old-fashioned aprons Will tied up double so it wouldn’t sag, yet when empty its large front pocket still swept in a billowing fold down to his knees. Every half a dozen trees there was a large wooden box on the ground, and he would unclasp the three hooks on the apron’s pocket from its clasp just below his throat and let the fruit tumble like lucky dice into the bins.

  His uncle picked the table fruit, slowly moving through a tree from the lowest branch up, shifting onto a ladder for the older part of the orchard, at the near end of the valley, where the trees had grown as high as twenty feet. He showed Jack how to pick for the table. ‘Never pull,’ he commanded from ten feet up on a ladder rung, while Jack peered upwards from below. Will turned and moved his hand towards a large apple on an inside leader. ‘They say lift and twist. But actually, the best way to do it is to kind of push the apple. Away from you, towards the trunk of the tree. There,’ he said, turning with the apple held delicately in his hand.

  And by the end of the week Jack was picking top fruit for the table too, and, with Will on board, steering the tractor when they drove the flatbed stacked with full crates back to the barn. There Will used an ageing fork-lift to unload and stack the crates. Jack would have to wait until he was a lot older, Will explained, to use the fork-lift. At lunch-time they ate sandwiches and drank frozen Kool-Aid slush from lunch boxes Maris packed the night before; at the weekend she made fancy lunch, as Will called it, and they ate inside. And in the late afternoon when they knocked off work, they stopped on their way back to the house at the pond and stripped off. Jack was shy, since he couldn’t really swim, and waded in slowly from the shallow end on the greenhouse side. Will did a large cannonball from the diving board, then swam across to Jack, who had yet to get wet above the waist. ‘Take your time,’ he said gently, and the next day he brought a lifebelt he’d gone and bought in town. ‘Once you get used to the water, I’ll teach you how to swim. Correction: I’ll try to teach you how to swim.’

  Despite his uncle’s friendliness, it took several days before Jack felt comfortable enough to volunteer conversation, or questions. But once comfortable, he found himself asking questions almost non-stop. If this tried his uncle’s patience he didn’t show it.

  ‘Uncle Will, why did you come and live here?’

  ‘It was when I was over there.’ He pointed vaguely over his shoulder, and it took the boy a moment to realise his uncle meant Vietnam. ‘We’d sleep at the base, then every morning get helicoptered out to the countryside. It wasn’t for sightseeing purposes, and between you and me, when they say “Join the army and see the world”, they mean see the asshole end of the world. But in spite of that, every morning I would look around at the countryside we landed in and I’d think to myself “This is beautiful”. And you know, if you took away the guns and the VC and people like me, it would have been beautiful too. It may sound weird, but the countryside there wasn’t a million miles different from the one we got here.’ He pointed out over the Valley Orchard, and Jack was struck that his uncle, who had actually been in Vietnam, also saw a resemblance.

  ‘Were there apple trees over there?’

  His uncle smiled. ‘Nope. Too hot. But that’s okay. I wouldn’t want too close a resemblance.’

  And as his uncle also became comfortable with the presence of another person, he began volunteering information. ‘I don’t actually own this place,’ he said one afternoon. ‘I rent it from a cousin of Maris’s. That’s how we met – she wanted to see what kind of fool would pay good money for this kind of land.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the land?’ asked Jack, a
lready feeling proprietary about the acreage.

  ‘You can’t farm it really. Top fruit’s about all you can grow – it’s too hilly, too many trees, and the topsoil’s thin up here. Apples are okay – but not many people grow them in this part of Sonoma. To be honest with you, people think the best apples are over towards Sebastopol.’

  ‘What’s wrong with these?’ demanded Jack.

  Will smiled at the boy’s fierceness. ‘Nothing’s wrong with these. Nothing at all. Finest apples between Cloverdale and Healdsburg.’ He laughed. ‘Pretty much the only apples too.’

  The boy was nervous about going to school – it had been the only sour note of the week, hanging like a black cloud when he thought about it – and on the first day his uncle drove him in, though thereafter he would usually take the school bus. But school didn’t prove difficult at all. It was easier for one thing – the math he had done the year before, and his spelling and composition were ‘excellent’ they told him when he was tested first day, in a small room all by himself. There were three other new kids in his very year, and though they had been attending class for the four weeks since school began, they were not such old hands by now not to feel some charity towards the newcomer. He soon made friends with Ernie Weiskranz, who rode the school bus every day and lived down the mountain from him in a house on the edge of the nearest town (a ‘townlet’ really, according to Will), called Haley’s Ford, which had a gas station, a few houses and a lot of dust.

  There was one kid who was unfriendly: Jerry Simonson, who right away seemed to know where Jack lived and was snotty about it, given to sarcastic remarks, acting as if Jack were living in a trailer parked out in the wilderness. Yet the teachers seemed extra nice, as nice as Mrs Dielecki, as if somehow they knew his situation, though he was careful not to explain himself in full to anyone: he was staying with his uncle, went his account, while his parents travelled round the world, ‘on business’ – that was the phrase he fetched from some recess in his memory. It seemed to work with his classmates, and the teacher Mrs Kite nodded sagely when he explained the present touring condition of his mom and dad.