Light Action in the Caribbean: Stories

Remembering Orchards In the years I lived with my stepfather I didn't understand his life at all. He and my mother married when I was twelve, and by the time I was seventeen I had gone away to college. I had little contact with him after that until, oddly, just before he died, when I was twenty-six. Now, years later, my heart grows silent, thinking of what I gave up by maintaining my differences with him. He was a farmer and an orchardist, and in these skills a man of the first rank. By the time we met, my head was full of a desire to travel, to find work like my friends in a place far from the farming country where I was raised. My father and mother had divorced violently; this second marriage, I now realize, was not just calm but serene. Rich. Another part of my shame is that I forfeited this knowledge too. Conceivably, it was something I could have spoken to him about in my early twenties, during my first marriage. It is filbert orchards that have brought him back to me. I am a printer. I live in a valley in western Oregon, along a river where there are filbert orchards. Just on the other side of the mountains, not so far away, are apple and pear orchards of great renown. I have taken from these trees, from their arrangement over the ground and from my curiosity about them in the different seasons, a peace I cannot readily understand. It has, I know, to do with him, with the way his hands went fearlessly to the bark of the trees as he pruned late in the fall. Even I, who held him vaguely in contempt, could not miss the kindness, the sensuousness of these gestures. Our home was in Granada Hills in California, a little more than forty acres of trees and gardens which my stepfather tended with the help of a man from Ensenada I regarded as more sophisticated at the time. Alejandro Castillo was in his twenties, always with a new girlfriend clinging passionately to him, and able to make anything grow voluptuously in the garden, working with an aplomb that bordered on disdain. The orchards--perhaps this is too strong an image, but it is nevertheless exactly how I felt--represented in my mind primitive creatures in servitude. The orchards were like penal colonies to me. I saw nothing but the rigid order of the plat, the harvesting, the pruning, the mechanics of it ultimately. I missed my stepfather's affection, understood it only as pride or gratification, missed entirely his humility. Where I live now I have been observing orchards along the river, and over these months, or perhaps years, of watching, it has occurred to me that my stepfather responded most deeply not to the orchard's neat and systematic regimentation, to the tasks of maintenance associated with that, but to a chaos beneath. What I saw as productive order he saw as a vivid surface of exquisite tension. The trees were like sparrows frozen in flight, their single identities overshadowed by the insistent precision of the whole. Internal heresy--errant limbs, minor inconsistencies in spacing or height--was masked by stillness. I have, within my boyhood memories, many images of these orchards, and of neighboring groves and orchards on other farms at the foot of the Santa Susanas. But I had a point of view that was common, uninspired. I could imagine the trees as prisoners, but I could not imagine them as transcendent, living in a time and on a plane inaccessible to me. When I left the farm I missed the trees no more than my chores. The insipid dimension of my thoughts became apparent years later, on two successive days after two very mundane observations. The first day, a still winter afternoon--I remember I had just finished setting type for an installment of Olson'sMaximus Poems, an arduous task, and was driving to town--I looked beneath the hanging shower of light green catkins, just a glance under the roof-crown of a thousand filbert trees, to see one branch fallen from a jet-black trunk onto fresh snow. It was just a moment, as the road swoopLopez, Barry is the author of 'Light Action in the Caribbean: Stories' with ISBN 9780679434559 and ISBN 0679434550.