Chapter 2 The Orchard
The Orchard
The upstairs had gone unused for decades. Hunks of drywall and plaster littered the floors, having broken off from the ceiling. If the Salters had not immediately renovated the bathroom, the toilet could have dropped into the kitchen. A wasps’ nest—bulbous, painted over—was embedded in one wall.
(“Why did you buy this place?” Laurel asked when the nest came up at dinner.
Laurel’s mother looked at her father. “It was romantic,” she said.
“I think the word you’re looking for,” said Laurel, fifteen, “is difficult.”)
But she loved it. As an adult, she thought of its twin elements—romance, difficulty—and wondered if the former required the latter, or if the latter acquired the former in hindsight.
In winter, they had to thaw the pipes with hair dryers, but Laurel knew no cozier feeling than wearing a pair of Clare’s hand-knit socks while the evergreen trees donned their white capes.
Even summer’s tornado warnings took on a sense of adventure.
The Salters kept a mattress in the basement so that they could sleep more comfortably on stormy nights.
Afterward, they reentered the world through a basement bulkhead that opened directly outside, as if to Oz.
Laurel’s father had been raised on a traditional Wisconsin farm: one hundred cows, pesticides sprayed by the acre.
In winter, they logged the property and sold the wood as timber.
Indoor plumbing was not installed until his teens.
Until then, an outhouse served as the only bathroom; in spring, a mock orange shrub deodorized the vicinity.
Pete’s family thought him snooty for going to college, and peculiar when he chose to study something he didn’t have to leave the farm to see: trees.
He was drawn, too, to the serious sophomore in his forest biology lecture.
When he turned to look at the clock, he stole glimpses of her, bent over a notebook with her brow furrowed.
Clare’s hair was long and strawberry blond.
She wore it not in the feathery bangs or middle part that were popular that year but in a single braid.
Pete kept his own shoulder-length hair in a ponytail. A rascally grin turned his eyes to crescent moons. He was five foot six, which he’d been making up for since he was old enough to realize it was short: he was genial, with a quick wit—the sort of person others wouldn’t mind having around.
Pete missed the lecture before Thanksgiving to help his parents with the harvest, and he asked Clare if he could borrow her notes.
He returned them with his dorm phone number scribbled at the bottom.
Months later, he learned the source of Clare’s gravity: her mother had died, and she didn’t speak to her father.
(Laurel at six, sitting atop the laundry machine, where she felt queen of the house: “Why doesn’t Grandpa Arthur ever visit us?”
Clare was folding underwear. Her thoughts were so opaque that Laurel thought she wouldn’t answer.
“You’re lucky, Laurel, to have such a good father,” she said. “Grandpa Arthur wasn’t like that.”
This was how she spoke: sideways, through omission. Even her praise was restrained. A good father, she’d said—not superb. Not faultless, as Laurel thought of him.)
On weekends, Clare walked to Memorial Union, a student center on the shore of Lake Mendota.
The second floor contained an old ballroom that never seemed to be in use, or locked.
Inside was a Steinway grand piano. Her mother, a music teacher, had taught her how to play.
Clare performed Bach’s “Zion hort die W?chter singen” from Sleepers Awake—her mother’s favorite cantata—for Pete alone. By graduation, they were married.
Pete and Clare were not only drawn to the romance of Edner’s ramshackle farmhouse.
They also had plans for the orchard. Edner had rented the west side of the farm to an aging apple-grower who ran a traditional orchard, Macs and Red Delicious to which he applied synthetic nitrogen and 2,4-D on a calendar schedule.
But Clare and Pete had seen what radiation did in Hiroshima and Agent Orange did in Vietnam.
They were teenagers in 1968, when Black sanitation workers went on strike in Memphis, and one year later, as three million gallons of crude oil flooded into the ocean from a drilling rig off Santa Barbara.
During the spring of their first year of college, twenty million people joined Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson in the first Earth Day teach-in.
Pete signed up for a fruit-growers course at Michigan State.
He learned to use pheromone traps to assess insect maturity and to scout an orchard, monitoring it for issues before planning an intervention.
The previous farmer had only grown commercial trees, which were strategic for a wholesale model—they produced high yields, which ripened all at once and barely bruised—but what they gained in homogeneity, they sacrificed in taste.
Pete and Clare planted heirloom varieties: great old giants that could live for a century, particular as any elder whose character had steeped over decades.
Northwestern Greenings had tough chartreuse skin that ceded to a tart and cheeky sweetness.
Wolf River grew so large that you needed just two for a pie.
Ashmead’s Kernel was shy bearing—it matured late, in October, and the yield was always unpredictable—but its richness was unmatched.
Those apples ripened to a hammered-looking bronze.
One night, when Laurel was in kindergarten, her parents let her stay up late with only “You’ll see” for a reason.
At ten o’clock, a caravan of trucks, fronted by two blinding eyes of light, made their way toward Upper Orchard.
Laurel smelled the cargo before she saw it.
Out they flooded: twelve sheep, half of them stolid brown Romneys, the other half white, jaunty Finns.
Pete’s family claimed that real farmers didn’t name their animals, but Pete countered that “real farmers” still used ear tags.
The only difference between a name and a number, he said, was dignity.
There was noble Nora, who charged a coyote when the guard dog froze; Lemon, who assumed a one-eyed glare before she butted something; and Hank, who was frostbitten one winter and spoiled thereafter, his debrided ear small as the petal of an artichoke.
It was Laurel’s job to make sure they had water and hay.
Grain went to the lambs and pregnant sheep.
When the female Finns were in heat, they gathered around Oberon, the Romney ram, like fans to a rock star.
One year, an ancient ewe named Ileana knocked over a gate to reach him.
The Finn ram was sweetest: he nuzzled a ewe, walked and ate with her, until he knew she was ready to stand for him.
Spring was lambing season, and Pete was there for every birth.
In late pregnancy, the ewes made a point of coming over to him, as if to remind him they might need his help.
Most delivered on their own, but when they couldn’t, a shepherd had to move quickly.
Once, two days before Christmas, Laurel entered the barn and heard pawing.
This was a sign of labor: a ewe made a nest and lay down, over and over, to find the right position for her trial.
The sound led to Agnes, who fed and warmed any lamb who needed it, often at her own expense.
Pete and Clare were visiting a friend; they’d never had such an early birth.
Laurel, thirteen, dropped her grain and ran for gloves.
Agnes’s birth canal was small. Laurel inserted a hand and eased a large lamb caught in the channel.
She was afraid that it would suffocate, but the baby emerged in a brine of fluid unscathed, and mellow for all the trouble he’d given his mother.
A second lamb followed without assistance.
By the time Pete and Clare came home, Laurel was drying the twins with towels while the other ewes helped themselves to the grain she had spilled at the door.
A shearing took place every spring, conducted by an expert who traveled across the state.
The shearer sat on a bucket. His stage was a piece of wood beneath a single light bulb.
He knew that this was a performance: Laurel and her parents, along with the farmhands, stood in the barn, watching.
It was often a cold morning, the spectators in hats and gloves; space heaters were brought in for the sheep, who would have to adjust to losing pounds of wool.
Only the shearer wore a light shirt. Arm hooked through the horns, he danced with the rams, daring and efficient.
The females waited in a huddle. Alert were their soft faces, the marble eyes on each side of the head.
He chiseled, like a sculptor, until a shape emerged: a lean little sheep or a full one, her teats already straining—not until the shearing, weeks before lambing season, could they be sure which ewes were pregnant.
Brave Agnes always went first. The shearer pulled her toward him and propped her across his lap, where she lay like Jesus in the Pietà.
Her fleece, grown over the course of one year, fell in velvet pools.
Afterward, she stood on wobbling legs, eyes glazed over in the light of the bulb like some beleaguered muse.
Between subjects, Laurel darted forward for the coats.
There was a stark contrast between the haggard outer wool—pierced by hay, matted by mud or droppings—and that which had been next to the skin, which was clean, with an airy, spongelike structure.
She humped them in the pickup truck, where they looked like whole sheep sleeping.
Her rough hands drank up the oily lanolin.