The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  VI. The Apples

  The orchard is at the far end of the garbage pit. When we finally reached it, Jerry knelt to unhook the electric fence from the truck battery that powered it. He stretched the wire gate, unfastened it, and pulled it aside to let us in.

  In total, Jerry planted fifty-four apple trees on this land. He began soon after he settled here, and the process was slow. First, he planted the rootstock, which he covered with sawdust and dirt. He waited a year for them to sprout, then drove to experimental orchards on Flathead Lake and in the Bitterroot Valley to taste their apples. The next spring, he returned to cut wood from the varieties he liked and grafted that wood onto his young trees. Slowly the rootstock and the grafts matured into trees and after a decade or so, Jerry picked his first apples.

  They were wonderful, unusual apples, with names like Incarnation, Star Song, and Priscilla. He had Sansa apples from Japan, and an English variety called Ashmead’s Kernel that originated in the eighteenth century. An apple called New Jersey 46 has soft pink flesh that tastes like strawberry soda.

  Unsatisfied to stop here, Jerry then selected his favorite varieties and crossed them, hoping to combine one apple’s flavor with another apple’s texture, for example, or its storability. To do this, he tied a sack around the blossom of the parent apples while they were still buds. When the blossoms opened, he fertilized them by hand with pollen from his chosen apple parent. Once the petals had fallen, he removed the sack, labeled the location, and waited for the fruit. The seeds within the resulting apple would be genetic crosses of the two parents.

  When that apple was ripe, he picked it and planted its seeds in his greenhouse. Each seed had different traits, like children in a family. The following year, he planted these seedlings in his garden. Several years later, when the wood was pencil thick, he would graft a section of it onto one of his trees. Then he waited several more years for the new branch to mature, flower, and produce fruit of its own.

  After four decades, Jerry’s trees contained 175 different kinds of apples—eighty-two standard varieties and ninety-three of his own crosses. (Because the process is so glacially slow, only eight of his own crosses bore fruit before he died.) Without the ability to control which qualities each parent apple contributed, some of the crosses were terrible and Jerry sawed these branches off his trees. Those apples made Jerry think of the anecdote in which the dancer Isadora Duncan wrote to George Bernard Shaw, “Will you be the father of my next child? A combination of my beauty and your brains would startle the world.” Shaw declined, misogynistically, on the grounds that the child was just as likely to have his beauty and her brains.

  But some of the crosses were successful. One of them, between a Blushing Golden and a William’s Pride, Jerry called Morning Sky. The crowning achievement of his orchard, though, was his fourth attempt at crossing a Sweet 16 with a Gold Rush. He called it the Jocko—after the river that flowed past his house. This variety has a clean crunch, it stores well, and its flavor is delicately sweet, with a faint note of fennel. It was a worthy dividend to decades of tinkering.

  Late in Jerry’s life, I learned that he never actually ate his apples. He’d take a bite now and then to feel the texture and enjoy the flavor, but he spat out the pulp. He made sure every last one of them was picked, at peak ripeness, and distributed to friends, family, or the food bank. Jerry’s chief incentive as an orchardist was the creation of something unique. To me the utility of an orchard was its fruit, but to Jerry an orchard was a laboratory in which the apples were the incubators for the seeds. The fruit would ripen and rot in a season. But the seeds? They were eternal.

  * * *

  We all filed into the grassy orchard, where Jerry pointed out a limb of Jocko apples. They weren’t ready yet, but we hadn’t come to eat. Instead, we watched as Jerry swiveled his torso around the orchard, looking for something. Wind whistled through the tops of the pines as Jerry still clutched the morphine pump in his left hand.

  “What about this spot here?” he finally asked. “You like this end? I kind of like this end, too. You come in the gate, and you have this spot to go to. You have to walk.”

  He walked over to the spot and scanned the ground.

  “If it were camp, I’d kinda like my head to go here,” he said, pointing to the earth. Duncan, his forty-two-year-old stepson, set a large rock on the ground.

  “My sleeping bag would come down this way,” Jerry said. “Hey Dunc, move that rock two inches to the left.”

  Jerry was looking down now, making small measuring steps, as if he were about to dive into water. Then he got down on his hands and knees and flattened his back against the earth. His palms lay flat on the grass, his head rested on the rock like a pillow, and his pain pump whirred beside him.

  “How do you like it, everybody?” he asked. “Okay?”

  It wasn’t okay. Not to any of us, no matter how long we’d known it was coming. Death for Jerry was still inconceivable, oxymoronic even. But if he had to be assigned to a single patch of soil, there was no better spot than this. Duncan gently sank a shovel into the grass on either side of Jerry’s head, and again at his feet, upturning four divots of sod. Hilly and Janet took Jerry’s hands and helped him stand.

  “It’s a little easier going down,” he said.

  No one talked. We were all staring at our feet and this plot of grass, beneath an apple tree, next to a garden hose; this ordinary piece of dirt that death would sanctify.

  “What a strange bit of knowledge to have in my head,” Jerry said. “Wow. It’s a gulper. It’s a gulper.”

  We stood there, shifting our weight, awkward under the uncertain certainty of it all. Jerry read the mood and did the kindest thing he could. He walked over to a tree and shook a limb so that ripe Noreen plums rained down on us. It felt as if he’d shaken us, too. Soon we were all stooping down to pick them up. They were tart and sweet. The flesh was bright red and the juice dribbled down my chin. Janet walked over to her husband and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  “A graveyard and an orchard,” Jerry said. “They go well together.”

  VII. The Hole

  With his decision made and his energy waning, Jerry turned back toward the house and we followed. As we walked down the driveway, some of Jerry’s older grandchildren and one great-grandchild were already returning to the orchard with shovels. No one knew how much time we had, but it seemed sensible to dig the hole before the ground froze.

  Jerry stopped to offer them some advice.

  “You might want to pile it on a tarp,” he said. “It’ll be a huge amount of dirt. You’ll be shocked. A little planning won’t hurt.”

  His fourteen-year-old grandson, Colton, was carrying a pry bar.

  “There’s a bigger bar,” Jerry told him. “I’ve got the perfect bar for the job.”

  As we approached the house, we paused for a moment at the foot of a sugar maple by the woodshed. Jerry planted many trees on this land—oaks, lindens, willows, and walnuts. He planted a tree that’s a cross between a mountain ash and a pear. Most of the trees are tall and mature now, a diverse arboretum that complements the native grandeur of this forest. But in fall, no tree is more breathtaking than this sugar maple.

  It’s about as tall as the house, with a trunk forking off into twin branches that reach skyward like raised arms. We had been watching its leaves turn from green to yellow to orange to red. They were like an hourglass of the season.

  Before long, the leaves would fall. But at this moment, the tree glowed like an ember. I learned from his stepson Simon that Jerry used to tell the kids something at Deer Camp, when they circled around a warming fire under a glittering November sky. “The heat of that fire,” he’d say. “That’s sunlight burning.” Matter and energy are never created or destroyed, he’d explain. They just change state.

  In the same way, sugars in these maple leaves were igniting the last of the summer sun into a Technicolor display. The transformation incurs a metabolic cost to the tree, and botanists
still aren’t exactly sure why it happens. Whatever the reason, the tree pulled our eyes toward it like moths to a lightbulb.

  By the time we reached the porch, the digging had begun. The earth in the orchard is riddled with rocks and we listened to the shovels sing out against them. Jerry walked into the house and sat down to a bottle of beer and a game of cribbage with his old friend Jay. On alternating evenings before dinner, Jay and Jerry would drive to one another’s house, up or down the river, to share beers, curse at each other, and play cribbage. They did this almost every day for more than twenty-five years, passing a crumpled dollar bill back and forth to the night’s victor.

  When he finished this night’s game, Jerry tiredly ascended the stairs and crawled into bed. Hilly brought him a Lorazepam to help him sleep. “How are they doing on that hole?” he asked her. “Do they want me dead by morning?”

  * * *

  In the end more than a dozen family members dug the hole, including young grandchildren and Philippa, the wife of Janet’s first husband, Scot. The job took several days. The physicality of the labor and the simplicity of the objective were a refreshing escape from the anguish in the cabin. After one spell of digging, I returned to the house sweating and Jerry looked up at me from his pink recliner with soft eyes. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  Meanwhile, Simon and Duncan built a box. They scavenged scraps of wood from the Honey House—the old sides of Jerry’s honey truck, pieces of his bee hives, and the colorful remnants of a sign Janet once painted for the local café. The sign became the lid of the casket. Inside, the boards read: soup & salad, espresso, breakfast. The casket sat outside on the porch, a thing of beauty, with handles of purple-grained juniper and a soft, sanded lid. Theo and his three-year-old cousin, Selah, would bang on it gleefully, like a drum.

  In the midst of these preparations also came new beginnings. One afternoon, Jerry’s daughter Romy gave birth to a daughter, Opal. Duncan drove Jerry into Missoula to see her, arriving just minutes after she was born. Jerry looked gaunt and exhausted, but his face glowed several watts brighter when he sat down and cradled his newest granddaughter.

  “You look handsome holding that baby,” Janet told him.

  His dry lips smiled. “It’s just reflected light,” he said.

  VIII. The Descent

  Five days before Jerry’s death, my father and I were caring for him upstairs in his bedroom. He was lying in a whorl of blankets, pillows, and cream-colored sheets. His cheeks were unshaven, and his smile—when he could summon it—was apologetic. He lay diagonally on the bed, one knee cocked, like a weather vane swiveled into a storm.

  The bedroom was crafted of rough-hewn pine. Hoya vines hung from the ceiling. Books were stacked beside the bed: James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, and Giuseppe di Lampedusa. A dried-up sea horse was propped on a shelf. Soft light pooled in the north-facing window, and through it we could see the black-eyed Susans atop the root cellar, the blazing sumac, and the rusty trunks of ponderosas. Beyond them the Jocko River tumbled relentlessly westward.

  My father and I hovered over Jerry, holding his hand, lifting water to his lips, feeding him morsels of egg, tomato, and toast. Pain and morphine had muddied his mind and it was difficult to know what he was thinking.

  “Chavez,” he announced at one point, into the stale stillness of the room. “Chavez. He was such a major figure for so long. Now it’s a different deal.”

  He slowly looked around, caught my eye, and raised an eyebrow.

  “How many of us are in here?” he asked. “Three? So I can fart.”

  He was dressed in baggy black sweats and a white undershirt that Hilly and I bought for him at Target. The clothes were too sloppy to suit him, but comfort was our final prayer.

  I tried to make conversation.

  “The golden eagles are migrating over the Big Belts,” I said. “I read it in the paper. They’re heading south.”

  “Hmm, that’s funny,” he muttered. He looked skeptical, like I had the timing all wrong. He glanced at the window. A few days ago he asked his friend David to measure it and then measure his chair. He wanted to be sure of his exits.

  Suddenly his concentration tightened around some unspoken purpose. Spurred by the muscle memory of a lifetime of movement, he pulled himself to the edge of the bed and rose on his weakened legs. But then he forgot his intention. So he just stood there, an island unreachable even to himself.

  We took his arms and guided him to his chair at the foot of the bed, where he slumped down and exhaled. The family had agreed that it was time to move him downstairs. Left up here he might fall, and downstairs he’d be closer to the bathroom. The other night he climbed out of bed to pee into a red jug that Janet had bought for him. But he kept trying to unscrew the head of his penis instead of the lid of the jug.

  My father and I told him that we’d help him down the stairs.

  His chair was next to his shoe shelf. For almost fifty years, he sat here each morning to lace up whatever footwear the day required. His dog would crowd his feet, yawning and stretching in anticipation. Jerry was a dog’s ideal human: always outside, active, and punctual. He looked at the shelf now and took inventory. There were his hunting boots, his town shoes, his muddy gardening boots, and the old sneakers he used when he went fishing. His feet were in slippers now.

  “My stuff is looking at me with funny eyes,” he said. “Like, ‘Why don’t you do something?’ ”

  He put his hands on his knees.

  “That’s the plan, then?” he asked. “Going downstairs?”

  He seemed to know that he wouldn’t see this room again, that every death was its own kind of descent.

  IX. The End

  We moved him down to a hospital bed that hospice had erected in the living room. Janet oriented it to face the window and the flaming maple outside. The room was filled with curiosities Jerry and Janet had collected. There was a handmade violin from Mexico’s Copper Canyon, a whale vertebra they’d found on a beach, an obsidian hunting knife, an aluminum pot punctured by the teeth of a grizzly. The house hummed with stories.

  Hospice sent out waves of nurses, pharmacists, and social workers—even a massage therapist and a harpist. The nurses managed the dosage of the pain pump, which purred next to Jerry on the bed. Janet kept his belly plastered with Phentynol patches. And in the evenings, when the nurses had gone, she climbed into bed with him and they ate ice cream and watched Trevor Noah.

  I was in the room on one of these evenings, sitting on the sofa. I watched Jerry look over at Janet, his companion of thirty-five years, the patient, gregarious artist, the right brain to his left. Jerry called her “one of life’s customers.” Different as they were, they were similar in the ways that mattered. Jerry liked to say they were cut from the same rock. (Unbeknownst to us then, Janet had developed a new cancer in her bladder that would kill her less than two years later, in this very room.)

  “Let me hold your hand,” Jerry said to her. “Just to hold it, I guess. It’s you and me, okay? And that’s what happened. What’s happened has happened.”

  “No getting out of it,” Janet said. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “Get some rest now. Close your pretty blue eyes.”

  “It’s always going to be what it was.”

  “That was pretty fun, wasn’t it?” Janet said. “At the dinner table, with the kids, talking to them?”

  “Yeah. We did what we did.”

  “That’s all you can do in this life, and then you don’t do anymore. You get a break. You get a rest.”

  Jerry closed his eyes. “I love you,” he said. “Good night.”

  Janet kissed him on the forehead. “I love you. Good night.”

  In the corner of the room, the fish tank released bubbles of air.

  * * *

  While Jerry could still swallow, he ate half a piece of a cherry pie made by Jay Sumner’s wife, Janna. His eyes had a faraway look, and he ate small bites slowly and gratefully. It was
the last thing he ate.

  Eventually he began to cough. The cough turned into a rattle and then a gurgle, like the sound an irrigation pipe makes right as the water chases the last of the air out of it.

  Now and then his body convulsed, as it does when you’re drifting off to sleep and suddenly you dream that you’re falling. He started to sweat, and asked politely if we could turn the heat down, even though it wasn’t on. Janet put a cool washcloth on his brow. When his lips cracked, we smeared them with Bee Balm—the lotion he once made out of the beeswax from his hives.

  We held vigil over his bed, shuffling seats around him, ceding chairs to our superiors in the hierarchy of closeness. The grandchildren entertained themselves outside, throwing leaves at each other under the maple. Duncan’s wife, Jana, sang Norah Jones. For long stretches, Hilly sat at the old saloon piano and played: Satie’s “Gymnopédies,” “Ave Maria,” and a piece called “Ode to Life,” written by the jazz pianist Don Pullen after the death of his friend.

  Jerry’s eyes brightened with the music. “Wow,” he whispered. “Wow.” They were his final words.

  The gurgle in his chest took on the sound of a coffee percolator right before it’s finished brewing a pot, like the sound of gravel falling into a hole. His body was a tool he was not quite ready to set down. I took a seat at his writing desk, beside his bed, and found a scrap of paper with his handwriting. “Let the great world spin,” it read.

  * * *

  And then the spinning stopped. It was four o’clock in the morning, and Janet was sleeping next to him. The silence woke her, she said, when the drone of his labored breathing shut off like a switch. Hilly, Theo, and I were sleeping nearby in the kids’ cabin. When we reached him he looked like he was still sleeping, with his mouth slightly open. Crying, Hilly nudged it closed.