Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

6 REBECCA August 2, 1990

Sam, who has never in his life left Massachusetts, tells me about a Chinese ritual of death, minutes before I leave his apple orchard. We are sitting in the dark cellar of the Big House, on rusted milk cans from the early 1900s. We have adjusted to the heavy air, the white mice and the wet smell of apples that has been built into the foundation of this place: mortar mixed with cider to form sweet cement. Sam’s back is pressed against my back to help me sit up; I am still not feeling one hundred percent. When he breathes in, I can feel his heartbeat. It is the closest to him I’ve been since we arrived in Stow. I am beginning to understand my mother.

There are thick beams in the cellar walls, and forgotten cane rockers and cracked canning jars. I can make out the jaws of the animal traps. Sam says, “In China, a person cannot be buried until an adequate number of people have paid their respects.” I do not doubt him, and I do not ask how he knows of this. With Sam, you take things for granted. He reads a lot. “Even tourists can go into the funeral parlor and bow to the widow of a dead man, and they count. It doesn’t matter if you knew the person who has died.”

A small square of light sits in the center of the dirt floor. It comes from the only window in the cellar, which has been padlocked shut the entire time we’ve been here.

“Meanwhile, outside the funeral parlor, relatives sit on the sidewalk and fold paper into the shapes of castles and cars and fine clothing. They fold it into jewelry and coins.”

“Origami,” I say.

“I guess. They make piles and piles of these, you know, things that the dead person didn’t have when he was alive, and then when they cremate the body they add all these paper possessions to the fire. The idea is that the person will have all these things when he gets to his next life.”

Someone starts a tractor outside. I am amazed that the orchard is still business as usual with all that has happened. “Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

“Because I can’t tell your mother.”

I wonder if he expects me to tell her, then. I wonder if I can remember the way he told it. The exact words would mean so much to her.

Sam stands abruptly and the imbalance knocks me off the milk can. He looks down at me on the floor but makes no effort to pick me up. He hands me the flannel shirt-Hadley’s-that I have let him hold for a few minutes. “I loved him too. He was my best friend,” Sam says. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

At the mention of this, I begin to cry.

Uncle Joley’s face appears in the square of the cellar window. He raps on the glass with such force I think the pane will shatter. I wipe my nose on Hadley’s beautiful blue shirt.

Uncle Joley has been outside with my parents. He must have been the one to talk my mother into going back to California. No one else here has that much power over her, except maybe Sam, and he wouldn’t tell her to go.

Sam picks me up in his arms. I am exhausted. I lean my head in the crook of his shoulder and try to clear my mind. Outside is too bright. I shade my eyes, partly because of this and partly because everyone who works at the orchard has come from the fields to see the spectacle, to see me.

My father is the only one who is smiling. He touches my hair and opens the door of the shiny Lincoln Town Car. He is careful not to get too close to Sam; after all, he is not a stupid man. I look at my father briefly. “Hey, kiddo,” he says under his breath. I feel nothing.

Sam stretches me on the back seat on top of old horsechair blankets-I recognize from the barn. These remind me of Hadley. He looked nothing like Sam-Hadley had choppy fair hair and pale brown eyes like the wet sands in Carolina. His lip dipped down a little too far in the middle. “These are yours now,” Sam says. He puts a hand to my forehead. “No fever,” he adds, real matter-of-fact. Then he puts his lips to my forehead like I know he’s seen my mother do. He pretends it is to check my temperature.

When he closes the car door he cuts off the sound from outside. All I hear is my own breathing, still rasping. I crane my neck so that I can watch out the window.

It is like a beautiful mime. Sam and my father stand at opposite sides of the stage. There is a backdrop of willow trees and a green John Deere tractor. My mother holds both of Uncle Joley’s hands. She is crying. Uncle Joley lifts her chin with his finger and then she puts her arms around his neck. My mother tries to smile, she really tries. Then Uncle Joley points somewhere I can’t see and claps my father on the back. He propels my father out of my range of vision. My father turns his head. He tries to catch a glimpse of my mother, whom he has left behind.

Sam and my mother stand inches apart. They do not touch each other. I get the feeling that if they did, a blue spark would appear. Sam says something, and my mother looks towards the car. Even from this distance, in her eyes I can see myself.

I turn away to give them privacy. Then Uncle Joley is at the window, rapping for me to roll it down. He reaches halfway into the back seat with his lanky arms and pulls me forward by the collar of my shirt. “You take care of her,” he says.

When he says that, I start to see how lost I am. “I don’t know what to do,” I tell him. And I don’t. I don’t know the first thing about holding together a family, especially one that resembles an heirloom vase, shattered but glued back together for its beauty, and no one mentions that you can see the cracks as plain as day.

“You know more than you think you do,” Uncle Joley says. “Why else would Hadley have fallen for a kid?” He smiles, and I know he is teasing. Still, he has admitted that Hadley did fall, that I did fall. Because of this simple thing I sink back against the seat. Now I am certain that I will finally sleep through a night.

When the front doors open it sounds like the metal seal breakingon a new can of tennis balls. My mother and father slide into their seats simultaneously. On my father’s side of the car, Uncle Joley is giving directions. “Just take one-seventeen all the way down,” he says. “You’ll hit a highway.”

Any highway, I think. They all take you to the same place, don’t they?

Sam stands across from my mother’s open window. His eyes have paled clear and blue, which gives the illusion that he has spaces in his head through which the sky shows. It is an eerie thing to see, but it holds my mother.

My father starts the car and adjusts his headrest. “We’re in for a long ride,” he says. He is as casual as I’ve ever heard him be. He is trying but it is too late. As he eases the car forward, dust foams at the wheels. My mother and Sam are still staring at each other. “I think we’re going to be just fine,” he says. He reaches behind his seat to pat my foot.

As my father pulls down the driveway my mother’s head turns to watch Sam’s eyes.

“You two have really been on some trip,” my father says. “You had me all over the place.” He keeps up his monologue but I lose track of the words. My mother, who has turned halfway around in her seat, closes her eyes.

I am reminded of a time that I watched Hadley bud grafting. He took a bud from a flowering apple tree and grafted it to the branch of an old tree that hadn’t been bearing fruit. With a sharp knife, he made a T-shaped cut in the bark of the old tree. He said it was very important to cut only the bark, not the wood of the tree. Then like a whittler, he pried away the folds of bark. He had the branch from the younger tree in a plastic baggie. He sliced off a middle-section bud, taking a little piece of the meat of the branch. To my surprise there was a leaf inside-I never really gave much thought to where the leaves were before they actually came out. Hadley cut off the leaf and gave it to me and then pushed the bud under the bark flaps of the old tree. He wrapped it tight with a greenish tape the way you might wrap a sprained ankle.

I asked him when this would start to grow, and he told me in about two weeks they’d know if the bud had taken. If it did, the stub of the leaf stem would be green. If it didn’t, both the bud and the leaf would have dried up. Even if the graft took, the bud wouldn’t branch until next spring. He told me that the great thing about grafting like this was that an old tree, a dead tree, could be made into something new. Whatever strain of apple was grafted would grow on that particular branch. So in theory you could have four or five different apple varieties coming off of one tree, all different from the original fruit the tree used to bear.

I pull away a blanket from the floor of the back seat. Underneath someone-Sam?-has put bushels of apples: Cortlands and Jonathans and Bellflowers and Macouns and Bottle Greenings. I am amazed that I can pick all these out by sight. Intuition tells me there are more in the trunk, and cider. All of these things to take with us to California.

I reach for a Cortland and take a large, loud bite. I interrupt my father, who is still talking. “Oh,” he says, “you took some with you, did you?” He has been saying something about the air quality in Massachusetts versus in L.A. He continues to talk, but neither my mother nor I listen. She is hungrily watching me with this apple.

I stretch out the other half to her. She smiles. She takes a bite even bigger than mine. Juice runs down the side of her mouth but she makes no effort to wipe it away. She finishes the apple down to its core. Then she unrolls the window and tosses it onto the road. She leans her head out the window. Her hair blows into her face, hiding parts of it and illuminating others.

A motorcycle swerves on the other side of the road. It comes close enough to alarm my father and to break my concentration. The Doppler effect, I think, listening to the engine scream lower and lower as it disappears. But it doesn’t really disappear. It just leaves my field of vision, temporarily.

My mother catches my eye: Be strong for me. Be strong for me. This silent chant fills the car. There is something to be said for the fact that my father cannot hear a thing. My mother’s thoughts come in waves, pulling me towards her like a tide: I love you. I love you.