Orchard Read Free Page B

that with each gunshot he could name the particulars of the situation—that deep
boom,
a noise like a heavy wooden door slammed on an empty church, was a shotgun rifled for slugs and likely fired from that stand of tamarack bordering the east orchard; that sharper
krang,
a plank dropped from the scaffolding of a house under construction, issued from the stone wall separating Blander’s land from Otley’s; and that
blam-blam-blam
series, a screen door banging in the wind, probably came from an inexperienced hunter up on the ridge, someone shooting down at a deer running for the trees. That was the autumn of Henry’s fourteenth year, and though his father returned the rifle to Henry’s hands one year later, in time for deer season, Henry had always felt a vacancy in his life where that lost season should have gone.
    Henry supposed he should head home, but he had trouble making himself move in that direction. The sun was low in the west, and if he stayed on this road, he would soon find himself climbing the rocky bluffs that looked down on the bay. So he had choices. He could keep walking and enjoy the view. He could return to the Top Deck—after all, he had fifty dollars in his pocket. Or he could go back to his family, to a waiting meal, though the potatoes that Sonja had boiled were surely cold by now. In another minute he’d turn around. . . . He kept thinking—as he looked out at the ashy brown-black of the tree trunks, the bone white of the rocks, the yellow-green of the grasses and leaves—of the painter’s trousers. He must have been painting a scene similar to the one Henry was contemplating—how could an artist resist it?—yet there had been no streaks of blue on the man’s pants. Where was the water? Where was the sky?
    In the painting,
the rifle barely shows. A window at the front of the house is open, and the curtains billow outward, as if the wind has found a way to reach inside the house and pull out the tattered lace. Through that window a table is visible, and leaning against the table, the rifle, only the tip of its barrel revealed. But really, one would have to stare at the painting a long time before noticing the rifle at all. It is the deer that captures the eye, the dead deer hanging head down from a tree branch. The season is obviously autumn, but perhaps the year’s last warm day—hence, the open, unscreened window. Leaves, all shades of ocher, litter the yard, and the wind has swept—is sweeping, for a few leaves hover in the air—some of them into a little pile under the deer, so it appears that once the animal was split open, leaves tumbled out.

4
    Winter still—yes, that was both how and when Weaver first saw her.
    He had been in his gallery sorting through a series of landscapes— few of them his, and those only watercolors he had done years before— and when he came out, she was there, a brushstroke of scarlet amid all the surrounding shades of gray, dun, rust, and ash. She was sitting on a boulder, staring down at the ice-locked little bay that gave Fox Harbor its name.
    As Weaver approached her—she was hatless and her red duffel coat was unbuttoned, though the northwest wind was blade-sharp and each gust tore loose a few snowflakes—she did not look his way. Yet she had to see him coming. He walked right along the edge of her field of vision, but her gaze was as frozen as the harbor and she was as motionless as the rock she sat upon.
Winter still.
    “I remember a year not so long ago,” he said, “when they were ice fishing out there on Easter Sunday. In April.”
    When she turned to face him, Weaver almost walked away in disappointment. He wanted her for his subject, yet when he saw her full-on—the high forehead and prominent cheekbones, the square jaw, the wide-set, downturned eyes, the upper lip fuller than the lower—he thought, I’m too late; another artist has already created this work. A sculptor chiseled her from stone and set her upon stone, here on a