The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [30]
Later that day, as I am taking notes on the contents of the Tatro kitchen, I remember the orchard. It occurs to me that I must develop a more serious plan to thwart Kurt in his next helpful policy. I’m not sure our conversation at Sweet’s Mansion persuaded him to leave those trees alone, and I plan to call him that night. I practice several ways to let him know, again, why his attentions aren’t wanted in the orchard. I plan to tell him my reasons for leaving the place unkempt, blowzy, unproductive. I want to make sure he lets those apples rot. Fewer blossoms every year, the apples crabbed with thrips and worm-riddled. Branches down, dying, silvered in the heavy sun. I want the long grass to shield the starving mice who gnaw rings around the bases of the apple trees, girdling them, choking them off, bringing them down. But even as I’m thinking this, I am too late. My imaginary conversations and persuasions are a waste of time. For he is revving up his chain saw, macho New England accouterment. He is striding into the orchard and lopping off deadwood with furious ease. Even as I am leaving the Tatro estate, he is piling brush. As I drive home he is putting a cone of fire to the driest twigs. I see the white spiral of smoke as I turn onto Revival Road, and breathe the scent of burning apple wood.
There are weeks of dry warmth, which is bad for our wells and ponds but wonderful to see in the woods. The willows blaze in tender bud. Drifts of wild plum blossoms float among the cavern pines. The rapturous trilling of spring peepers begins, that electronic sexual whine. I keep the windows slightly open as I drive the back roads to the Tatro house, and breathe the watery air. The road’s final quarter mile is now almost impassable, the bedrock sunk against gaping holes, swamp grass and overgrown ponds to either side where the peepers warble and moan at a throbbing pitch. As I bounce along I quiet the frogs, momentarily, so that I seem to be continually piercing a wall of sound.
In the orchard, the tiny cold buds are deep pink at the base, white at the tip. The apple trees with their low, thick crotches are shooting out leaves from every node of trunk and every branch behind the cuts. I sit an afternoon away in the snow-drifted grass, the sun-blasted grass, the grass thrown back in long shines of wind, the new grass rising underneath in shy waves of power. I want to remember the orchard as cold, sleeping, wrecked, and still mine, before it happens.
One hot ninety-degree May afternoon throws the switch.
Full moon, a spring midnight. Over everything like clear glass the light falls evenly, a tarnished silver. I am awakened by something stealing up on me, creeping through the window screens, over the drum. A breath of orchard sweetness sails, curls into my room, and I remember the days when the orchard bloomed this way every spring.
My little sister was alive then. Over the years I’ve warped my life around her memory, I think, even though sometimes now I can’t picture her at all except from photographs. I cling to what I do remember of her—little incidents. The time she ripped my fairy book or squeezed the paint from my paint set, or left my clay out to dry. The times she crawled into bed with me after bad dreams—her telling me about them, her breath hot along the side of my face. She tickled spiders out of their webs and wore pink Keds with laces she colored blue with a ballpoint pen. She was a very good sister who loved me so much that she sacrificed herself for me without hesitation and for no use, no use at all. It happened out there in the orchard.
With their deadwood sawed away, the trees have come alive. Each is loaded with as many open blossoms as the live twigs can hold. I rise and walk to the window and sit there with my hand on the drum. I can see her, running in her checkered shorts, with her flag of brown hair flying. She is climbing, quick and nimble. I can just make out the dim shapes of the trees, their twisted arms that hold her. There is no wind and the odor