So Brave, Young, and Handsome (31 page)

“A shade?”

“He said he’d come back and wake Joaquin in the night,” Glendon explained. “He said he’d wait for the darkest night, when Joaquin was already nervous, then drift up and breathe on his ears.”

So it was an unadorned service at the mission church in Lury. I suppose there were sixty people in that sanctuary of cool adobe and lit beeswax. By far, most were native Californians who knew Claudio as a citrus grower, but some of his relations had also arrived: a nephew and his wife from the horse country of Morelos, twin cousins famed once for their beauty and now for determined spinsterhood, a sister who kept to the side of the room in her black skirts and stood up the whole time, a hand on the wall.

Later the relatives gathered back at the orchard. Susannah and I stayed out of the way. Someone brought bread and someone else chocolate, also a jar of viscous mescal Ar
ā
ndano was unhappy to see. Pond showed up with his instrument and offered to play, but Joaquin put a finger on his chest and informed him music would displease Claudio’s shade.

Drifting back to the mill house, Susannah said, “Glendon’s different now, isn’t he.”

“He quit that whiskey,” I replied.

“Not just that. There’s grace in him. He’s reached some settlement.”

We didn’t feel like going in. A westerly breeze had picked up and was laying a pink wash over the valley. It smelled like rain or the sea.

“You are also different,” she said.

I didn’t try to explain that. You can’t explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn’t even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work. I suppose grace was pouring over Glendon, who had sought it so hard, and some spilled down on me.

Susannah said, “You seemed afraid before you left. Now you don’t—that’s what I think.”

Up in the yard we could hear Pond’s accordion wheeze and blow—he had won out, it seemed. It sounded like a distant carnival. I said, “Do you know who’s going to be afraid tonight? Joaquin.”

This is what Ar
ā
ndano wanted: to give the orchard one final opportunity to rebound from its hard winters. To see whether the young citrus trees that had voyaged so far would resist the cold and the blights and the various insects and bear a crop. Toward this end Glendon and Joaquin and I used up the end of summer, the smoky days and nights of cooling earth.

When it came time for school Redstart went each day to Lury while Susannah took work painting signs and I set about finishing the boat with Glendon. He had scratched out the envisioned keel and replaced it with leeboards, the better to navigate shallows. He had an idea it would be speedy under sail and pretty enough to build a business on. One night, thinking aloud, I said it could be prettier.

“Prettier, Becket? How?”

He’d developed a little pride about this new girl—he felt she would dance in any breeze at all.

I said, “What if we built in a bowsprit and made room for an extra headsail?”

“A staysail and a jib,” he mused.

“One for beauty and one for speed. Let’s make her a cutter.”

“A cutter,” he said. “My goodness.” He stepped back and looked at the hull, at its lines and hefty scantlings. “Yes, all right, Becket. A cutter it will be.” He grasped my hand and we grinned as partners do, but then a boat always takes longer than you think it will.

* * *

December arrived as a cloudy mist aspiring to rain—hardly difficult conditions for people accustomed to biting snows—yet the season brought down a hush that was not unwelcome. Evenings we lit a fire in the grate and read the tales of Chekhov and O. Henry and occasionally verse by Amado Nervo, which Ar
ā
ndano would translate as she read. When these turned melancholy we put them away and looked at pictures in the stereopticon. Claudio had collected several hundred of these images, their edges so crisp they were nearly in motion—sinking battleships, the Great Pyramids, famous racehorses with their puny saddles on. We mulled over the photographs, and we grieved for Claudio. Christmas came, and for all our stuffing and fowl it was a beleaguered holiday. Late that afternoon we went walking round the orchard—it looked pockmarked and infertile and even the islanders seemed trancelike and forgetful in their little frost pocket.

Mostly what we did that winter was work on the boat. Among Glendon’s board feet was a small cypress beam which we tapered into a sprit with a carved tip and iron bobstay. Claudio would have loved how that boat turned out; surely Ar
ā
ndano loved it, for she ventured down evenings along with Susannah and ran her hands over its curved ribs. Sometimes she’d ask Glendon about joinery or design and he would answer her straightforwardly, in short complete sentences. Sometimes she smiled; if she did, Susannah and I might drift back to the mill house.

“She’s being good to him,” I might say.

“What do you hope for?” she might reply.

“Well, I hope for his happiness. And hers.”

“Poltroon.” Susannah could not endure the safe answer.

“What do you hope then, if you’re so brave.”

“All right: I hope she forgives him entirely, and mourns Claudio for as long as is right, and then I hope she falls for Glendon in a way that is just barely dignified and marries him, and that they live here on the orchard in perpetuity,” she might declare, and I would laugh, saying, “Yes, that’s it!”

So we indulged ourselves in romance; we wrote scenarios in which Glendon and Ar
ā
ndano’s eyes met, and she forgave him at last his flight from the
federales
, his nonreturn, his years of thievery and shift. It was much to forgive, but we talked ourselves into believing
it would happen—indeed, into expecting it. Why shouldn’t it happen? Weren’t we living in a valley of orchards? In a house like a castle keep?

But Ar
ā
ndano was not to be rushed. In fact, the two of them didn’t talk much. Their conversations filtered down to formalized questions, to occasional citations of memories common to them both, or, more often, memories from their unconnected decades.

One night Glendon and I were at the nitpicky work of installing deckboards when he straightened and said, “I don’t know what else to do.”

“Do?”

“To make it up to Blue.”

I said, “Haven’t you done it already? You apologized. You worked here in the orchard as though it were your own. You stood by for Claudio while he was dying.”

“It ain’t enough, Becket.”

“Maybe it just takes more time.”

He walked to the door of the shed and looked around and came back in. “Monte, what is it you think I am trying for?”

The question made me nervous. I felt found out, I suppose.

“Go on,” he said.

“Why, I guess it’s the thing you didn’t dare hope for previously. The thing honor prevented while Claudio was alive.”

He smiled. “You mean I should win Blue back again. No. That is the very thing I must
not
do.”

I had nothing to say.

“Do you think because Charles Siringo is dead or dying someplace, I am no longer a wanted property?”

“But no one else is looking for you.”

He smiled. “Even if you’re right, does it remove my debt?”

“But wait, Glendon—you love Blue,” I said. “That is partial payment at least, I would think.”

“It’s as you say. But if she loves me back, it deepens what I owe. There ain’t no parity in that arrangement. That’s what I did not see coming.”

I still didn’t understand. He said, again, “I don’t know what to do next.”

So we worked on the deck of the boat, on its handsome coach-roof, but from then I understood that Ar
ā
ndano’s reticence was only partly her own. Partly it came from Glendon’s refusal to allow her to come near.

Croplanders learn early to distrust good omens: A perfect planting invites epic drought; a burgeoning wheat field is a summons for hail. Ar
ā
ndano had been examining the trees daily, awaiting nascent blossoms; when the first buds showed color in early January it put her in a precarious mood. A wet cloud descended and stayed most of a week and Ar
ā
ndano became nearly hostile—mention the trees to her and she would look away, sometimes walk away while you spoke. When the cloud burned off we saw the buds emerging by such heavy thousands the limbs appeared to bend presciently. I wondered whether the brightening petals might actually drive Ar
ā
ndano to violence, but instead she became precise and supervisory. Redstart and I set to cutting forked posts for later use supporting laden branches. Glendon and Joaquin took the wagon down-valley to rent honeybees and came back with a load of box hives, which they left covered until after dark and then stacked in the orchard. It was the bees that brought Ar
ā
ndano around—you can’t walk through a humming orchard with sun dripping off the glossy leaves and not admit that something fine might be about to happen.

It happened slowly, the fruits gaining until they lay clumped along the boughs like tiny limes. As we filled the days until harvest, I unrolled Glendon’s boat sketches and made some adjustments that seemed appealing; Susannah completed her first California commission, of a priest’s Great Dane that would obey at least twenty commands including
Sit still;
and Redstart got sent home from school when his own latest pet, a coyote, entered the building and bit an administrator through the meat of his hand.

Then in late spring a man drove up and didn’t come to the door but walked out into the trees and began to grip the oranges. He put his nose to them and pressed with his plump fingers. He had a square-shouldered jacket on, a city hat, boots that looked much used and out of place with the rest of him. When Ar
ā
ndano went out and confronted him he made a small accented bow, disarmed her fully, and asked after the character of the fruit. He was a wholesaler, not one she had met before. The oranges with their patina like verdigris beguiled him. “They might be a risk. There are prettier citrus,” he said. “They’re sweet, though, am I correct? Island trees, I believe. They’ll be sweet all right.”

Ar
ā
ndano told him to come back in a few weeks and taste them himself. He wanted her to sign a contract but she said, “No. Come back.” So he drove away, looking over his shoulder.

Later that day Susannah brought her easel outside. She meant to walk down and have a go at the oranges, but she was diverted. We had the boat finished right down to its paint: cream decks, blue topsides and the bowsprit aglitter with varnish. It sat on its launch boards one shove from freedom with the cold river running behind it. Also that day the gelding Wardlaw was tethered close by—he was a curious animal who liked the smell of wood shavings and oiled tools and would come snuffing right into the shop if we didn’t prevent him.

Struck by something, Susannah set her easel down and laughed aloud. She prepared a vivid palette and began to paint a whimsical picture of our proud cutter. In the picture Ar
ā
ndano is at the tiller wearing a green dress, and the speckled roan Wardlaw is on the boat too, his head peering out the companionway. Of course he would never have fit on the boat, but there was a curious appeal in the picture. It looked completely right and cheerful—Wardlaw’s great Roman neck arching up from below, the cutter with exaggerated almost storybook sheerlines reaching along under full sail below a cerulean sky; and above, as in myth or song, a sun that was no ball of flame but a perfect round orange with a coppery skin. When Ar
ā
ndano saw that picture she at once began to exclaim with pleasure and took Susannah to herself as though they were blood sisters; when Glendon saw it he could
only laugh; but when Redstart saw it he said, “That would be a good label for the new oranges.”

Susannah began at once to refine her painting, to produce in fact a number of versions from which Ar
ā
ndano might pick the best for a lithographer’s run. In this excitement and as the oranges swelled, we saw Ar
ā
ndano continue to soften toward Glendon, so that it became common to see them talking in evident comfort. An observer stepping in without background might have said, Here are two handsome people entering a courtship. But that observer wouldn’t have heard the sparring that went on, the tacit sparring of two people keeping themselves at a distance.

It seems to me now that if we did not witness the rebirth of a union, a clasping of souls after thirty years’ absence, we were at least privileged to behold a slow mutual rescue—slow in that Ar
ā
ndano’s forgiving of Glendon Hale took some months and might never have happened if Charles Siringo, ancient and infirm, had not come into our lives one final time.

On the day in question a Wells Fargo truck rolled up to the house and deposited a crate of prints from a lithographer in Los Angeles. They were reproductions of Susannah’s painting of Ar
ā
ndano at the helm of our delicate cutter, with Wardlaw’s noble head looking out curiously from the companionway. We had awaited these prints like a boy waits for snow. The size of book jackets, they were orange, green, azure. They were labels for the new brand of oranges, which Ar
ā
ndano had named Claudios. When she pried open the crate and cut the twine and lifted out the little bale we all whooped, and Redstart carried in ginger beer, and we sliced down some cheese and summer sausage and raised a toast to the tough little islanders, which at that moment were bearing a promising load of the oranges to be so labeled. It was a moment that had been unimaginable only months earlier, and it surprised us all; up to our chests in victory, I looked over at Susannah, whose face was rapt in lament. Ar
ā
ndano clung to her, and Glendon clinked his ginger beer to Redstart’s and said the name of the man we loved. So we ate and drank and mourned. I never enjoyed a party more, or so bitterly missed its absent host.

Then Redstart went to the window and announced that an old man was sitting in a car at the end of the yard.