Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

13 SAM

The apple, I tell them, came before Adam and Eve in the story of Creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that’s how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit, much less carnal knowledge.

That’s the first line of the talk I give every year at my old alma mater, the voc-tech high school in Lexington. I’m a big draw at the school. I’m the head of one of the only profitable apple orchards left in Massachusetts, I have a staff of fifty, one hundred thriving acres, a good rapport with the buyers for Sudbury Farms and Purity Foodstores, and U-Pick-Em fields that attract the public on weekends from as far away as New York. I kind of fell into the position when my father retired after his heart surgery, but I leave that part out of my speech.

The kids seem to get younger every year, although I suppose you could make a case that I am getting older. This time, there aren’t as many of them as there used to be because of the economy; they all want to go into steel production or microchip processing-farming doesn’t pay. I watch them filter into the auditorium and they are still ninety-nine percent male, which I understand. It’s not that I have anything against women’s lib, but working at an orchard requires grit and muscle that few ladies have. My mother, maybe, but she was an exception.

I don’t plan to talk about running an orchard, or profitability margins, or scabs or even textbook examples of management. I’ll tell them what they are least expecting to hear, and I try to draw them into my life. The stories my father told me when I was growing up, when we would sit on the porch and all around us the scent of cider would make us dizzy; these are the very things that bred pomology into my mind. I never made it past high school and I may not have the smarts of a high-style manager; I admit there are many things I do not understand, and I will not waste their time. Instead, I tell them what I know best.

In reality the apple mentioned in the Bible probably wasn’t an apple. Apples didn’t grow in Palestine, but the first translations of the Bible were done in some northern country, and the apple comes from England, so there you go. I have heard that there are shells fossilized in the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, left from a time when the water reached that high on the earth. Well, apples have been fossilized too. Archaeologists have found remains of apples, charred in the mud in prehistoric excavations sites near Switzerland. Imagine.

The apple spread west, and it spread fast. It grows from a seed. Toss an apple core into the ground and in a couple of years you’ll have a sapling. When I was a kid, apple trees sprung up on the farms of my parents’ friends, in just about every place where there wasn’t something growing. The trees would fight against the cows that grazed on their leaves, and after a few years they’d get above the cows’ necks and drop the fruit at their bases. Then the cows would cluster at the bottom and eat the sweet apples, inadvertently planting new seeds. In our own cow pasture we had a tree that grew apples as red as fire, that made pies almost as good as Macouns. Never did figure out that variety, or market it . . . if I had I probably would be a lot richer than I am today.

You can find apples in Norse mythology, Greek mythology and fairy tales. My father told me all the stories. There’s Snow White’s poisoned apple and Eve’s fall from grace. In Scandinavia, a character called Iduna kept a box of apples that, when tasted by the gods, gave them new youth. As late as the 1800s in England, fertility salutes were dedicated to apple trees to ensure a bountiful harvest. And here in New England, when little girls peeled apples, they tossed a long curl over their shoulders to see what letter it would make when it fell-the initial of their future lover.

At this point I ask Hadley-who graduated from Minuteman Tech with me and has been working at the orchard since-to pass out the apples I’ve brought. When these kids taste for themselves what the work and patience of human hands can do, well, they understand a lot more than I could ever tell them. I open the floor up for questions, and then I have no problem giving information. Lectures I have trouble with. But questions are a different story. I have always found myself to be a much better listener than talker.

“Are you hiring?” kids ask. “Do you break even?” One industrious boy asks something about the merits of scion grafting versus bud grafting, the official names of which I didn’t learn until about two years ago. But the question I will like best will come from the kid in the back, way in the last row, who hasn’t said a word. I jump off the podium and walk down the aisle and lean over towards him, and he turns red. “What do you want to ask?” I say softly so no one else can hear. “I know there’s something.”

There is, it’s in his eyes. “What is your favorite?” he asks, and I know what he means. Spitzenburgs, I say, but they’ve about died out now. So suppose I have to say Jonathans. It’s the question I never got to ask when my own father gave this speech, when I was still a student.

Afterwards, I send Hadley back with the truck. Me and Joellen, a math teacher at the school and my first girlfriend, go out on the town. There’s a Chinese place we like; I don’t get to eat too much of that in Stow. I order her a Mai Tai, which comes in a porcelain coconut with two pink umbrellas, and I get a Suffering Bastard myself. When Joellen gets a little drunk, she forgets that she hates me for some reason or another, and like last year we will probably wind up in the back seat of her Ford Escort, on top of textbooks and abacuses, clawing at each other and bringing back the past.

I do not love Joellen. I never have, I think, which may be the reason she thinks she hates me.

“So what you been up to, Sam?” she says, leaning across the Peking fried chicken wings. She is a year younger than me but she’s looked thirty for as long as I can remember.

“Pruning, pretty much. Getting ready for the troops in the fall.” In late September we open the orchard up to the public. Sometimes I can gross over a thousand dollars in one Sunday, between bushels of apples and fresh-pressed cider and retail-pricing wholesale Vermont cheddar cheese.

Joellen grew up in Concord, one of three or four fairly poor families living in a trailer park, and she came to Minuteman Tech to be a beauty stylist. She has a reputation for doing nails. “Find your own variety yet?”

For years I have been working in a greenhouse, grafting and splitting buds in hopes of coming up with something really incredible, some apple that will set the world on edge. My own form of genetic engineering, I’m trying to bring back a Spitzenburg, or something like it that is easier to grow and more adaptable to our climate, so that this time it won’t die out quite so fast. I can’t tell if Joellen is interested, or mocking me. I have always been a lousy judge of character.

Joellen dips her finger into the duck sauce and deliberately sucks it clean between her lips. She holds her hands out to me. “Notice anything?”

Her nails, which are what I have been trained to look at first, are covered-with tiny caricatures of Sesame Street characters. Big Bird, Ernie, Snuffelupagus, Oscar the Grouch. “That’s good. Where’d you learn that?”

“Kids’ Band-Aids,” she sighs, exasperated. “I can copy pretty good. But that’s not it. Look again.” She wiggles her fingers, so I start to look for new creases in her skin, cuticle damage, anything. “The ring,” she says finally. “For God’s sake.”

Christ, she’s engaged. “Well, that’s great, Joellen. I’m happy for you.” I don’t know if I really am, but I know it is what I am supposed to say. “Who is it?”

“You don’t know him. He’s a Marine. Doesn’t look a thing like you, either. We’re getting married in September, and of course you’ll be invited to the wedding.”

“Oh,” I say, making a mental note not to come. I resist the urge to check if she is pregnant. “What’s his name?”

While Joellen tells me the life history of Edwin Cubbles, hailing from Chevy Chase, Maryland, I finish the food on the table, my drink and Joellen’s drink. I order two more drinks and finish those too. While she is telling me the story of how they met at a costume party on the fourth of July (he was a walrus, and she was Scarlett O’Hara) I try to make the umbrellas stand upright in the thick and seeded duck sauce.

Last year when I came to speak at the high school we drove to the place where we both lost our virginity-a field in some conservation land that turns purple with fireweed at the end of the summer. We sat on the hood of her little car and drank Yoo-Hoo from a convenience store and then I lay down in the grass to watch the night come. Joellen sat between my legs, using my bent knees as a kind of armchair, and she leaned back against me so that I could feel the hooks of her bra through her shirt and mine. She told me again how sorry she was that she had broken up with me, and I reminded her that it was me who did it-one day I had just realized I didn’t feel the way I used to. Like barbecue coals, I said, you know the way they’re orange one minute and then you turn around they’ve just become grey dust? As I told her this I cupped my hands around her breasts; she didn’t stop me. Then she flipped herself over and began to kiss me, and rub her hands up and down the legs of my good khaki pants, and as I got hard she said to me, “Now Sam, I thought you didn’t feel the same way.”

Joellen is still going on about Edwin. I interrupt her. “You’re the only girlfriend I’ve ever had who’s gotten married.”

Joellen looks at me and she is truly surprised. “You’ve had other girlfriends?”

Although we haven’t had our main course yet I signal for the check. I’ll pick it up as an engagement present; we usually go dutch. She doesn’t seem to notice that the lo mein and the beef with pea pods haven’t come, but then again she hasn’t really eaten much of anything. “Don’t worry about driving me home,” I tell her, feeling my face turn red. “I can get Joley or Hadley to take a run out here.”

The waiter, I notice, is a hunchback, and because I feel bad I take a couple of dollars extra out of my wallet. He has brought pineapple spears and fortune cookies with the check. Joellen looks at me and I realize she is waiting for me to pick a cookie. “After you,” I say.

Like a kid, she dives into the puddle of pineapple juice and uses her nail as a chisel to crack it. “Great beauty and fortune dwell in your smile,” she reads, pleased with the outcome. “What’s yours?”

I break my cookie in half. “You will find success at every turn,” I read, lying through my teeth. Really, it says something dumb about visitors from afar.

As we walk out the restaurant Joellen takes my arm.

“Edwin is lucky,” I say.

“I call him Eddie.” And then, “You really think so?”

She insists on driving me back to Stow; she says it could be the last time she sees me as a single woman, and I can’t argue with her there. About halfway, in Maynard, she pulls into the parking lot of a church, an old New England white clapboard church with pillars and a steeple, you name it. Joellen reclines her seat all the way and rolls back the moonroof in the car.

I get the feeling I have to leave. Fidgeting, I open the glove compartment and riffle through the contents. A map of Maine, lipstick, two rulers, a tire gauge and three Trojans. “Why are you stopping?”

“Jeez, Sam. I’m doing all the driving. Can’t I take a little rest?”

“Why don’t I drive? You get out and sit over here and I’ll drive. You’ve got the whole way back to drive, anyhow.”

Joellen’s hand wanders across the console, like a crab, and comes to rest on my thigh. “Oh, I’m not in a hurry.” She stretches, deliberately, so that her ribs rise and her breasts get flat under her blouse.

“Look, I can’t do this.”

“Do what,” Joellen says. “I don’t know what we’re doing.” She reaches across to loosen my tie and unbutton my shirt. Pulling the tie through the buttoned collar, she wraps it like cord around her hands, and slips it over my head to rest on the back of my neck. Then, drawing me in, she kisses me.

God can she kiss. “You’re engaged,” I say, and when my lips move hers move with me, pressed on mine, like an echo.

“But I’m not married.” With amazing skill she swings her leg over the center console, pivoting, coming to sit spread-eagled on my lap.

I am losing control, I think, and I try not to touch her. I wrap my fingers-around the plastic fixtures of the seat belt until she takes my hands and holds them up to her chest. “What’s stopping you, Sam? It’s the same old me.”

What’s stopping you? Her words stay, frosted on the window. Morals, maybe. Idiocy? There is a buzzing in my ears, fueled by the way she is rubbing against me. She slides her hand down my shorts and I can feel her nails.

There is this buzzing and what is stopping you? My head keeps ringing and at some point I realize that I cannot be held accountable for what is happening, for my hands ripping at her and the taste of the skin on her nipples, and she closes on me, closes and holds from the inside. Remember when it was you and me, baby, in this field, at fifteen, with life laid out in front of us like a treasure chest; and love was something to breathe in your girl’s ear. Do you remember how easy it was to say forever?

When it is over her hair is free and our clothes are puddled around us on the front seat. She hands me her underwear to wipe myself clean and smiles with her eyes slitted shut as she climbs back into the driver’s seat. “It was nice seeing you again, Sam,” she says, although we are still seven miles from my place. Joellen puts on her blouse but leaves her bra in the back seat with her teaching tools, and insists on driving naked from the waist down. She says no one will see but me, and then she asks for my undershirt, on the floor, to sit on so she won’t drip onto the red velveteen seats.

I do not kiss her goodbye when she pulls into the driveway. In fact I don’t say a word, I just get out of her car. “I can keep the shirt?” she asks, and I don’t bother to answer. I’m not about to wish her a nice wedding, either, I’d expect lightning to come out of the sky and strike me. Chrissake, we were in the parking lot of a church.

When I walk into the Big House, Hadley and Joley are still at the kitchen table playing Hearts. Neither of them looks up when I come in and throw my tie on the floor. I strip off my shirt too and toss it so it slides across the linoleum. “So,” Hadley says, grinning. “You get any?”

“Shut the fuck up,” I tell him, and walk upstairs. In the shower I use up an entire bar of soap and all the hot water, but I imagine it will take some days before I feel truly clean.