The Orchard

There are four hundred apple trees on the north side of the property in seventeen rows that run downhill toward the lake, and at the corner of the last row, where the fence turns, there is a black cherry tree that the lightning took in 1996—split from about six feet up into two halves that lean apart, with a gap between them you can put your hand into up to the wrist. It bears every August anyway. Small black fruit with a bitter skin, and nobody picks it.

I had walked that orchard most mornings since April, because Mila would run the rows and I would count them, and counting is a thing I do.

On the twenty-eighth of December it was nine degrees and the snow in the rows was over the knee, and he came out of the barn with his collar up and stood at the top and waited for me to come up to him.

“Walk with me,” he said.

We went down the middle row. He walks fast and I kept up. He said three things about the truck and one thing about the ice on the lake, and then he stopped at the black cherry tree and turned around.

“I am going to say this badly,” he said. “It is not that kind of proposal. I do not have that in me and you would not believe it if I tried it, so I am going to do it the way I do a job.”

Then he gave me the terms.

He wanted a wife. He wanted Mila to have a woman in the house who was not paid by the hour and a name that did not come out of a court file. He wanted the school to keep going. He was offering me the house, and a share of everything he owned, put down on paper, with his lawyer and mine.

“And I am telling you now,” he said, “that there is one thing in my life that I carry. If you marry me, you carry it too, and you do not ask me to put it down.”

“Name it,” I said.

“Not today.”

“Then this is a promissory note with the amount left blank.”

“Yes,” he said. “That is what it is.”

I asked when he wanted an answer. He said by the end of the week, because he had to be in Buffalo on the fourth and he wanted it done before he went. I asked whether Mila knew. He said no. I asked what Colette had wanted for her.

“A house,” he said. “A door that locks from the inside.”

That was the only sentence he said that whole morning that I did not have to translate.

I said yes. I am not going to dress it up. I said yes on the twenty-eighth of December at twenty past nine in the morning, standing in the snow at the corner of a wrecked tree, and what I felt was not what people write songs about. What I felt was that a door I had been standing outside of my whole life had opened, and that if I did not walk through it I would be standing outside it for the rest of my life, and I had done that already, for nine years, in a house on Ridge Lane.

There was one more reason and I did not say it out loud. I had written it twice in a notebook in August. I wanted him. That is not a reason, and I used it as one.

He put his hand out, which is how he does things, and I took it. His hand was cold and dry and he held mine about four seconds longer than the transaction required. I counted them. I have always counted them.

I did the arithmetic that night, because that is what I do with news. My pay was four hundred dollars a month plus room and board. I had come to that house in April with one thousand four hundred dollars in a savings account and a bus schedule in my coat. In nine months I had spent money on stamps, two pairs of shoes, and a winter coat. The rest was still mine. I did not put it into any of the papers he gave me, and I want that written down, because there is a version of this story in which I married a house, and that version is not true.

I told Mila that night, because I was not going to have her find out from a caterer. She was nine and she was sitting on the floor with Otto and she thought about it for a while and then asked whether she would have to call me something different. I said no. She asked whether he would still be gone as much. I said probably. She said, “Good,” and went back to the dog, and that was the whole conversation, and it was the only honest conversation anybody had about it.

We went to the clerk’s office in Canandaigua on the second of January, at a window with a flag behind it, and a woman who had been stamping forms in that building since 1979 took our names and our dates of birth and our parents’ names.

“Have either of you been married before,” she said, without looking up.

“No,” he said.

She wrote it down. Forty dollars, and the license with the seal on it, and a pen on a chain, and we signed, and I watched him sign the way you watch a man initial a shipping manifest.

The church was the small white one on the hill above the village, twelve rows and a wood stove at the back, and the minister was a man in his sixties who had known the Voss family for forty years. We set it for the tenth of January at ten in the morning.

Bea found the dress on the third floor in a cedar chest under a quilt. Gray silk, from 1974. She said it had been his mother’s, and she took it in at the waist with pins and did not ask me a single question about it, which is one of the two reasons I have never been able to say a word against Bea Truitt. The veil was in the same chest, in tissue paper, with a comb of yellowed celluloid, and when she lifted it out she said, “This wants mending at the crown,” and I said I would do it, and I put it in its box and took it up to my room.

Bernice Grady said one thing to me about the wedding, in the back hall on the fifth, standing with her coat half on. “A wedding wants the house quiet,” she said. “I would not have anybody up from the north end that day.” Then she went out to her car, and I stood in the hall with the sentence in my hands like something hot.

I wrote to Jack Amory that week. I wrote three drafts and burned two, and the one I sent said that I was well, that I had been teaching, that I had found his letter in a drawer in Lackawanna, and that I was marrying a man named Adrian Voss in January, and that I did not need anything. I put the address from the envelope on the front and mailed it from the village and got nothing back. Not that week. Nothing at all.

On the fourth he put the papers on the kitchen table, eleven pages, and I read all of them twice and asked four questions and the answers were short and true as far as I could check, and I signed.

That evening I went out to the orchard after supper. The snow had a crust on it and it held me up for two or three steps at a time. I stood at the black cherry tree in the dark with a quarter in my pocket, and I pushed it down into the gap between the two halves, past the bark, and pressed it with my thumb until it was not coming out.

I do not know why I did that and I am not going to pretend that I do. My mother’s people were the kind who believe you pay for what you take, and I had taken a house and a name and a child. There was a habit in that family of leaving a coin in a tree or on a stone or in the latch of a barn, and I had never done it in my life before that night.

I went back up the hill and did the dishes and went to bed.