Read Online Orchard by Larry Watson - Free Book Online Page B

husband and more to escape her own thoughts. Dr. Van Voort had given her pills intended to make her sleep. “If I could,” he said, “I’d have you sleep for a year. Then, when you woke, the pain wouldn’t be gone—God knows that’s not possible—but the hurt wouldn’t be quite so sharp. Just remember that— every hour, every minute you can get past will make it a little better. I know that doesn’t seem possible either, not now, but it’s so.” Yet she didn’t sleep, not exactly. She lay on her bed, and while her head, arms, and legs felt so heavy she hadn’t sufficient strength to lift them, her thoughts churned like the wildest sea, and she would have given anything to stop her own thinking.
    The winter before, Henry, Sonja, June, and John had driven down to Green Bay on a Sunday afternoon to visit Henry’s mother in her apartment. They returned in a snowstorm, which Henry steered them through without incident until the truck began to climb the driveway toward home. Then a tire slipped into the ditch, and they were stuck. The wheels spun and whined but wouldn’t catch. Henry only laughed, and they walked through the drifts to the house, John riding high on Henry’s shoulders. And under the influence of Dr. Van Voort’s pills, that was what happened with Sonja’s thoughts. They slipped the track and spun uselessly.
    “Are you awake?” asked Henry.
    She turned her face once again in his direction, hoping he would see her open eyes and spare her the effort of using her voice to answer him.
    He took a step into the room and let his hands fall to his sides. “Can I ask you a question?”
    “Yes.”
    He wrapped himself once again in his own arms. “If you want to sleep . . .”
    “No, no. What is it?”
    He walked over to the bed and sat down beside her. She didn’t see the motion his hand made, but she sensed that he had reached out to her, then drew back.
    “I know you probably don’t want to think about such things,” he said, “but we have to. So here goes.” His intake of breath was doubled, as if a sob was concealed inside it. “Do you want me to dig the grave myself? I know that might sound strange to you, but the Houses have done it before. Not regularly, I mean. But my dad did it. Twice. He and his brother did it for their father. And then when my uncle died, Dad dug his grave too. So if you want . . .”
    What if John had not died? Would Sonja never have known that she was married to a man willing to pick up a shovel for such a purpose?
    “You don’t have to decide just yet,” Henry said. “Give it some thought, and I’ll check back. Maybe after you’ve had a rest . . .”
    But she couldn’t decide, not when her mind kept getting stuck, this time spinning on two words. Dig . . . grave. Grave . . . dig.
Grave
was the Norwegian word for dig.
    Sonja could trace her confusion over the word to the day she left her home and climbed into a boat to begin her journey to America.
    “Grave! Grave!” The man in the prow shouted at the men who immediately obeyed, pulling back even harder on the oars in an attempt to carry the boat and its passengers beyond the waves that wanted to push them all back to the shore.
    Dig? thought Sonja. Surrounded by nothing but water and he commands them to dig? Then she noticed how the oar’s blade plunged again and again into the froth, and she knew: Digging was exactly right. Her older brother had taught her some English, and she could see the connection—the effort to displace water was not so different from the gravedigger’s as he worked to move dirt.
    And what did young Sonja Skordahl believe would go into that watery grave? She was insufficiently versed in irony to think it possible her life could end exactly when so many people told her it was about to start anew. But then neither had she ever thought it possible that the day would come when her mother and father would place their twelve-year-old daughter in a small, unsteady boat that would row