Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Will, entering what Jack always thought of as his ‘mature’ mode. It was usually unconvincing. ‘It’s a little more than that. But where did you hear the word?’

  ‘At school. Jerry Simonson was talking.’ There was no point saying ‘some kid at school’, since it might not mean much to Will but Maris knew the name of every one of them.

  ‘Did he have some?’ Will asked, his eyes swinging back and forth between the two of them, but Maris was fingering her spoon and wouldn’t meet his look.

  ‘No,’ Jack said. ‘He was just talking.’ He didn’t want Will to think they had been doing anything so he explained further. ‘He said his father claimed you can’t make a living out of apple growing—’

  ‘Who can’t?’ Will was starting to look concerned.

  ‘You, Will. He was talking about you.’

  ‘Jerry Simonson’s father was talking about me?’ He looked at Maris with an expression that was both appalled and disbelieving, but she still kept her eyes on her spoon. ‘He sells real estate,’ Will protested. ‘What’s he got to do with me?’

  ‘Beats me, Will. I’m just telling you what Jerry said. His dad said nobody in their right mind would grow apples in this part of Sonoma. He says you’d only grow them for cover. Then Jerry pretended to be smoking – you know,’ Jack said, putting up his hand and pinching his thumb and forefinger together, then mock-inhaling. ‘And that’s when he said “sinsemilla”.’

  Maris was shaking her head now and Will looked flushed and unhappy. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him to shut up,’ Jack said, which wasn’t true since he had been puzzled more than angered by what Jerry Simonson said. And he was a little scared of him, though now he added with boyish bravado, ‘I told him if he said it again I’d punch his lights out.’

  But Will didn’t look impressed by this at all. ‘Jesus Christ, don’t hit him, whatever you do. That’s the last thing we need – a visit here from the school. Or his father.’

  ‘Or the police,’ said Maris flatly. She stood up and began collecting the plates. ‘Jack, you can help me do the dishes. Your uncle can sit out here by himself and sweat.’

  He was not always stuck inside, and leaped at the chance to help when Will began the annual pruning cycle of the orchards late in January. While his uncle stood on the rungs of a metal ladder propped against the old standard Gravensteins in the Valley Orchard, Jack raked up the thin sticks of new growth and collected them in a large pile beside each tree. He could stay well ahead of Will’s pruning, so he would make neat bundles out of the dropped twigs, and hold them together with thin rubber bands for storage in the barn – a year later they would make the most perfect kindling. And he still had time to cut the water spouts, or ‘suckers’ as he thought of them, which popped out like unwanted children from the base of the tree trunks.

  There was limited time to help after the school bus deposited him at Truebridge’s in the afternoon, though already by February he could gauge the light lengthening in almost visible daily increments. And helping Will never got him out of his tutoring with Maris, though at least she gave him a pre-supper snack before sitting him down in the late afternoon. Weekends there was no one-on-one with her, though he almost wished there were since he had so many more hours free to help Will with the long slog. Usually Will worked in silence, though sometimes he brought a transistor radio along; occasionally he’d tell Jack about what he was doing, describing the methods for pruning: with some old neglected trees in the Back Orchard, he cut extravagantly, reducing the leader and removing the tangles of interior branches that sucked up the light and air. With healthier trees he mainly headed back, shortening branches, thinning out the new growth. With the youngest, still to fruit, he trained rather than cut their branches, sometimes even tying the thin branches to the leader.

  All this he’d demonstrate to Jack as he worked, until it became ingrained in the boy like a tree’s rings of growth. But much as he loved the orchards, Jack would try and change the subject sometimes, eager to hear his uncle talk about himself. He rarely succeeded, until one day, trying a different tack, he asked, ‘Uncle Will, who taught you so much about apple trees? Was it your daddy?’

  ‘God no. I don’t think he’d have known an apple tree from a rhododendron. I had to teach myself. I don’t think your granddad even liked the country.’

  ‘Didn’t he ever take you out of San Francisco?’

  ‘Not very often. He worked pretty long hours and when he wasn’t working he liked to relax at home. Drink a few beers and watch baseball on TV.’ Will finished tying back an elusive leader and looked down at Jack. ‘Nothing wrong with that of course.’

  Jack thought for a minute. ‘Did you know my daddy?’

  Will came down the ladder and picked a grass blade. Sometimes he would split them with his fingernail and whistle through them. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘A little bit.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Oh that’s kind of hard to say. I only saw him a few times.’

  ‘Did you like him?’

  ‘I’m sure he was fine,’ Will said, and tried to whistle through the grass blade. It didn’t work.

  ‘Yes but did you like him?’

  Will pursed his lips and looked up the slope of the Valley Orchard in the direction of the house. ‘Not a lot,’ he said finally. ‘Understand, I’m not trying to hurt your feelings. But I figure if you’re troubling to ask me then you probably want the truth.’

  Jack was silent for a moment. It was strange, but he had no particular view of his father, not even a fantasised image. His father was a big hole in his mind. Sometimes it seemed to Jack that as far as his mother was concerned his father had been an accident. Which Jack supposed made him one too. The man had played piano and run off to Alaska – that was the extent of what Jack knew.

  ‘What was wrong with him, Will?’ he asked. For if Will didn’t like the man something must have been the matter with him, since Will liked everybody, except his old commanding officers.

  ‘There was nothing really wrong with him – he was a good piano player; I heard him once in a club near Union Square – except he drank too much. And like a lot of people, when he was drinking he got nasty. He was just a little guy – I mean, your mom was bigger than he was – but he sure got mean when he drank. That was the problem.’

  ‘But Mom drinks too,’ Jack said, not revealing what had entered his mind – and she didn’t run off to Alaska. But now she might as well have, for all the good it did Jack.

  ‘Yes, she does. Yes sirree,’ said Will, almost in wonder at the thought of his sister and her drinking. ‘And that didn’t help very much, I’m telling you. I’m sure you must have realised they didn’t get along too great.’ Jack nodded shyly. ‘Anyway,’ said Will, his voice lightening a little, ‘what’s with the questions? Have you been thinking about your dad lately?’

  Jack shook his head.

  ‘Well I think your dad’s probably still alive, if that’s what you’re wondering. Why? Would you like to know where he is?’

  Jack looked at his uncle with surprise; he had always known his father was in Alaska. Miles away. A different world. Nothing to do with me, Jack thought, not for the first time.

  ‘Do you want to see him?’ Will asked, surprising Jack even more.

  ‘Hell no!’ he said instantaneously, almost angrily.

  ‘Just asking,’ said Will, putting his hands up in mock surrender. ‘We’ll leave him be then.’ He picked up another blade of grass, and this time managed a thin, weak whistle.

  They didn’t always stay on the farm, and sometimes they took day trips, once to the coast. It was ostensibly for Jack’s benefit, though in fact Jack would have been happy to stay at the farm all the time. He had moved around so much with his mother (the last apartment had been ‘home’ only for four months) that he wanted to put roots down as much as possible, and roots meant not moving from a place.

  He still thought quite often about his mothe
r, but the pain of his separation from her was being dulled by time and the settled domestic routine of his new household. And Maris for all her moodiness and distance did lots of things his mother had stopped doing – like towelling his hair dry each night after he’d showered so he wouldn’t go to bed with it still damp, then reading him a story when he was in bed, something which old as he was he still enjoyed; like nursing him when he was sick, bringing him hot drinks and sports magazines and comics she bought for him in town. And though she had her house in town, more and more it seemed she spent the night with Will, even referring to ‘our bedroom’ once when she asked Jack to fetch her handbag. As a family unit they were bound neither by blood nor marriage, but they cohered – getting along, doing things together, and this was something Jack had never had.

  They went one Saturday almost directly west to the ocean, to the state park at Salt Point. It was a grey, gusty day, and they all wore rain gear as they walked along the wild grassed cliffs above the waves crashing against the shore. Jack could barely believe that it was the same ocean as the one which thudded onto the monotonous flat beach just five blocks from his grandmother, only a hundred miles south from where they now stood.

  The park seemed virtually deserted to Jack, but Maris complained about the number of visitors. ‘It used to be in winter you could spend all day here and barely see a soul,’ she said as they got in the car to leave. ‘It’s all getting too built up. This county’s going to be a suburb soon of the whole Bay Area. Mark my words.’

  ‘Not near us,’ said Jack.

  ‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘They just won’t be able to leave it alone. All these millionaires in Palo Alto I keep reading about are going to start looking for property.’

  ‘That’s awful far away,’ said Will. ‘They’ll buy land down there.’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Maris again, and Jack wondered why she sounded so gloomy.

  But what Jack really wanted to hear was something his uncle only rarely talked about, for, despite the boy’s intense curiosity, Will never described his time in Vietnam, except for that first account of the beauty of its countryside. Once when Jack expressed his fear of rattlesnakes, his uncle said, ‘Be thankful that’s all we’ve got. Now, coral snakes,’ he said, ‘they’re something to watch for. But we haven’t got any here.’ And he told how at Officers’ Candidate School in Georgia men were forced to crawl under a line of live ammunition fire. One aspiring second lieutenant came across a coral snake and in his panic stood up, only to be killed instantly by a live round.

  ‘I didn’t know you were an officer, Will.’

  ‘I wasn’t. Though it was a close call,’ Will said, and when Jack looked at him questioningly he added derisively, ‘Goddamn dumbest thing I ever almost did.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘After Basic I just kept my head down, but I must have tested pretty high, because after about six months my sergeant came along and he said, “Son, I know and you know you’re a sorry-assed excuse for an infantryman, but the powers that be think otherwise. For reasons I won’t explain – and to be honest cannot explain either – it has been decided that you are potential officer material.”’

  Will laughed at the memory. ‘“Golly,” I thought to myself, “think of that, little old me, with bars on his shoulders and men under his command. Won’t Mom be proud?” And I came within all of twenty minutes of signing the form and heading off for Fort Benning Georgia, which has to be the asshole end of an asshole state.’

  ‘Is that where you become an officer?’

  ‘Yes sirree,’ said Will, ‘but fortunately that same sergeant, a southerner by the name of Lamar T. Firestone, believe it or not, he had the goodness in his heart to call me over for a little talk. He said, “Shaughnessy, I can see you are flattered by the exciting prospect of becoming an officer, something superior in rank even to yours truly, who has chewed your ass and made your life a misery. But can I point out one thing?” “Sure,” I said, but I was thinking he’s just jealous. And then he said, “There is a thing called the Vietnam War in progress, and despite the belief that airpower conquers all, there is plenty to do for old-fashioned grunts like you and me. Only we have to be led, don’t we, as we walk along in the jungles of Vietnam looking for our country’s enemies? So before you get too excited, ask yourself where second lieutenants – which is what you would become, if you’re stupid enough to get on the airplane east – are likely to go with their brand-new shiny commissions. Leading patrols in the jungles of southeast Asia, that’s where.”’

  ‘And fortunately I listened to the counsel of Lamar T. Firestone. Thanks be to God, I swallowed my pride and told them to go stick their OCS right up where the sun don’t shine.’

  ‘But you went to Vietnam anyway.’

  ‘I did indeed, and it sure weren’t no picnic. But when I was there, my own platoon lost three second lieutenants, two of them before my very eyes. While, as you can see, I’m still standing and breathing God’s free air. Corporal was high as I got, and happy with it too. The moral of the story is always remember when you get offered things to ask yourself one question – “What’s in it for them?” Don’t think: “Gosh, they must think I’m the bee’s knees to offer me this”; don’t think “How can I turn them down and what will my relatives say?”; don’t ever think, “Who am I to say no?” Just ask yourself whether you’re really going to benefit from it, or whether the people praising you to the skies are the ones who make out the most.’

  ‘But what was Vietnam like?’

  ‘I told you before, just like here but without the apples.’

  ‘Why won’t you ever talk about it?’ he complained.

  His uncle looked at him with a mix of seriousness and tolerance. ‘Jack, do you know what “minimise” means?’

  Jack shook his head.

  ‘It means to make small. Small as possible. That’s what I learned to do, thanks to Lamar T. Firestone. Keep your ass away from the fire at all times. And when something bad happens, which it’s bound to sooner or later, then in my experience the best way to handle it is to figure out first if you’re okay, then try and make sure it doesn’t happen again, and then make it as goddamned small as you can. Minimise. Know what I mean?”’

  He wasn’t sure if he did, though he understood the bit about making it small – you ducked your head, and if you got hit anyway then you tried to take the bad memory of the experience and tuck it away, so far away inside you that you didn’t even know it was there. He thought: Minimise. That’s what I’m trying to do with Mom.

  At last, towards the end of February, the pruning was done and it was then that the prospect of his mysteriously delayed Christmas present materialised. Maris was in the kitchen when Jack ran in, unable to contain his excitement. ‘Will says he’s going to build me a tree house.’

  ‘He did, did he?’

  He sensed she was not impressed. ‘It’s real nice of him, Maris,’ he said, wanting her to know that he was grateful. ‘Has he got the time to do it, do you think?’

  Maris snorted. ‘Don’t worry about that. He’ll make time. Your uncle always does.’ Later as he did his homework at the table in the big room, he heard her in the kitchen, talking on the wall phone with her friend Loraine. ‘Honestly, sometimes I think he’s just a big kid. And now that there’s a real child here, he’s got an excuse to act like one, too.’ She didn’t sound angry, but she didn’t sound enthusiastic, either.

  At first, Will wanted to build the tree house visible from the house, but there were no suitable trees – the eucalyptus weren’t that close together. Jack felt in any case that building there would defeat half the purpose of a tree house, if it was right under the eyes of his . . . what would he call Will and Maris? Guardians? He certainly knew what that meant. But no, they were more than that – Will because he was his uncle, and Maris because Jack wanted her to be.

  So he and Will went looking for a site in the acre or so of woods between the pond and the beginning of the Valley Orc
hard, a mix of firs and pines and oaks behind the bordering ring of eucalyptus on the pond side. About halfway into this stand they found three Monterey pines close together which would be perfect. They had thick branches, and the wide crutches of the trees were about eight feet off the ground, providing a perfect platform for a tree house floor. There was spare lumber in the barn, but Will wanted to do it properly, so they measured it out carefully; his uncle boosted Jack up onto a big limb and had him measure the rough floor area formed by the convergence of the trees. Will even insisted on sides to the house and a roof. They drove into Cloverdale on Saturday afternoon to the lumber yard, and started first thing Sunday morning. All day they worked, though Jack knew he was mainly just watching Will and fetching him drinks, and by four o’clock the plank floor was down, the packing cases were the sides, and even the two slanted sides of the roof were up and nailed together.

  And it would have been hard to get Jack out of there ever again, such was his happiness with this private place, had there not been so much else to do. Both Maris and Will were tactful about his time in the tree house, never coming out there except when Jack invited them. The most his uncle did was come to the edge of this patch of wood and call out: Jack, supper’s ready; or, when the boy was feeling low but had spent long enough time to recover his spirits, Best come in now, Jack, it’ll be dark soon; or, Maris wants you and, if that failed, Maris has been baking.

  Spring came stop-start, stop-start, with warm days in the high sixties, followed by windy cold rain which was twenty degrees lower, and then back to warm again. School remained a largely painless, slightly dull way of passing time until the school bus opened its cranky door and he jumped out and walked down the track to the farm where, as the days lengthened, life was increasingly conducted out of doors. There was simply so much to do.

  He helped Maris plant lettuce and carrots and beets and sprouting broccoli, but though he appreciated the function of these – Maris claimed there was nothing more satisfying than eating what you yourself had planted – what he enjoyed most were the flowers they planted, using seeds Maris had collected, partly by her own harvesting efforts, some from a friend in town, some by mail order catalogues she looked through during the dark winter nights. Some Maris had him sow in the bed between the ground-floor deck outside the kitchen and her vegetable garden – iris and rose bushes she bought in Healdsburg and tulips, all protected now by a wide rectangle of rabbit-proof fencing which he and Will were made to lay one Sunday afternoon. But her special love was for wildflowers, and they would go for walks together, sometimes to go see Will when he was out in the orchards, sometimes just to have a walk. They were careful in the woods because of poison oak, and Maris would lead the way and stop to point out blue dicks (he would have laughed had they not been so beautiful) and mountain iris and wood strawberries which he ate, green and hard as they were. Near the Back Orchard there was California lilac trying to bud, and a little patch of sticky monkey flower, ridiculously named but structured like a complicated pagoda, and all over there was huckleberry.