Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

“Like what?”

  “A kind of gambler, I guess. It’s a real risk to move around well-rooted trees, and he knew that-he’s smarter than me when it comes to agriculture. But the way it was here, well, it just wasn’t the way he saw it in his mind. And he had to make all the pieces fit together.”

  Hadley sits down on a cluster of rocks on the edge of the lake and points to the tree overhead. “You hear that cardinal?”

  There is a noise like a squeaky toy-high and low and high and low and high and low. Then out of the branches flies a bright red bird. The things this guy knows, I think.

  “It’s really nice of Sam to let us stay here,” I say, making conversation.

  “No insult to you and your mom, but he’s doing it for Joley. Sam isn’t really big on visitors, especially women from California. He’s been griping about it all week, actually.” He stops and looks at me. “I guess I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “Well, that’s all right. He seems to have it out for my mother. She fell into a pile of manure before and he didn’t do anything to help her.”

  Hadley laughs. “Not much you can do if someone falls in a pile of shit,” he says. “Didn’t your mom grow up around here?”

  “Newton. Is it close by?”

  Hadley whistles through his teeth. “Close in miles but a world away. Sam’s got this chip on his shoulder about the suburbs in Boston. They’re the ones with all the power who always vote down local aid to farms, but they haven’t got any idea what kind of work we do here. Newton girls, when we were in school, were the ones who used to giggle when we walked by, you know, come on to us but not let us near them. Like we were always dirty, because we worked with our hands instead of pushing a pencil. Some of them were really hot, too. Drove Sam nuts.”

  Hadley turns to face me. He is smiling and about to say something but when he looks at me his smile falls away and he is just left staring. “You have really pretty eyes.”

  “Oh, they’re a mutation,” I say. “In biology we had to go around class and tell our genetic combinations-you know, big B, little b, et cetera. So all the blue-eyed kids said little b, little b, and all the browneyed kids said big B, little b, or big B, big B, and when the teacher came to me I said ‘I have green eyes,’ and the teacher said that green eyes are a mutation of blue. Like a radioactive monster.”

  “Well, they’re a really nice mutation, then.” Hadley grins at me and I think I have never seen anyone with such an open smile. It’s like he’s saying, Come with me, come along, we have all the time in the world.

  We walk for a little while along the edge of the lake (Hadley says it’s stocked with freshwater bass, thanks to him and Sam when they were kids), and then we cut up the north side of the orchard. Finally, far away from the house, I begin to see apple trees that really have apples hanging on them. Hadley tells me these are the Puritans and Quintes-a little tart for eating but great for cooking. As we come closer, I see Sam and Uncle Joley and my mother.

  “Where have you guys been?” Uncle Joley says. “We were getting-ready to have lunch.”

  Hadley pushes me gently between the shoulder blades so that I take a step forward. “We’ve been down by the lake. Rebecca was telling me all the stupid things you did at family Christmas parties,” Hadley says, and everyone laughs.

  “Sam,” my mother says, “Joley says you have one hundred acres?”

  Sam nods, but you can tell from the look on his face he doesn’t want to talk about it. I wonder if it is the subject, or my mother. “You know anything about apples?” he says, and my mother shakes her head. “Then it wouldn’t really interest you.”

  “Sure it would. What varieties do you grow here?”

  Sam ignores her, so Joley and Hadley take turns reeling off the names of the different apples growing at the orchard.

  “And what are these?” My mother reaches out to the tree we are passing and picks one of these early apples-a Puritan, Hadley had said. It all happens very fast, the way she holds it to the sun to observe and then lowers it to her teeth, ready to bite into it. Suddenly Sam, who is walking behind her, throws his arm over her shoulder and knocks the apple out of her hand. It rolls on the clipped grass and settles under a different tree.

  “What in God’s name is your problem ?” my mother hisses.

  Sam’s eyes darken until they are the color of a thunderstorm. “They were sprayed today,” he says finally. “You eat it, you die.” He pushed past her and walks ahead of us toward the Big House. As he passes the fallen apple he steps on it with his work boot. My mother holds her throat. For several seconds we stare at the pulp of this apple, ruined.

  27 OLIVER

  I have never been to Salt Lake City, which worries me. What if this impromptu trip was motivated by my own subconscious desires, rather than tapping into the quality of Jane? What if Jane and Rebecca are well into, or through, Colorado by now? If I miss them in Colorado, I will catch up with them in Kentucky. Or Indiana, wherever. As long as I reach them before they get to Massachusetts; as long as I have a chance to offer my side of the story before Joley begins brainwashing Jane again.

  Joley Lipton, the bane of my existence. We have never really understood each other. Even after I had won over Jane’s parents- a twenty-year-old dating their teenaged baby-I never got her brother’s approval. Not then, not years later. He almost refused to attend the wedding, until he saw his stubbornness was literally wasting Jane away. So he did come, but sat in a corner throughout the ceremony and the reception. He belched loudly (I assume it was he) when we were pronounced man and wife. He did not offer me congratulations; he never has. He spread a rumor that the salmon mousse was rancid. And he left early.

  In my opinion he is terribly in love with his sister, beyond the usual parameters of a brother-sister relationship. He has always been a drifter, and Jane has always been fiercely loyal to him. I don’t find him deserving of such support; I have heard about their childhood and it seems he was the one to get off the proverbial hook. Yet, there is something about him. Perhaps he annoys me because of this: I cannot pin down my emotions about him. He instigates. He fills Jane’s head with ridiculous notions about the institution of marriage-he, whom I have never seen with a woman. He calls at the wrong times and shows up unexpected. If Jane gets to Joley before I reach her, she may never come back. She will have been conditioned otherwise. She will most certainly not listen to me.

  This blinding whiteness hits me quickly, a desert of salt. Suddenly I am in its midst, driving, a blot against this expanse. I know better; it is not colorless. White is all the colors in the rainbow, reflected at once.

  I pull the car into the shoulder of the road, where several other tourists have stopped to take photographs. The terrain is flat and sweeping. If not for the record heat, I could easily be convinced I am seeing snow. A woman taps me on the shoulder. “Sir, would you mind?” She waves a camera in my face and motions where I have to push the button. Then she runs to the guardrail where her traveling companion-an elderly man in green overalls-is already sitting. “One, two, three, ” I say, and the flash cube goes off. The man has no teeth, I see this when he smiles.

  I have always wanted to see the Great Salt Lake because of its incongruity. The idea of it: saltwater in a landlocked state, an ocean away from the ocean. I have heard that it is so large it may as well be an ocean (a small one, anyway). I look at my watch- 5:20. There is not much I will do today, anyway. I can go to the lake, take a look around and check into a motel for the night. If I must travel across America, I might as well enjoy myself.

  I try to avoid the route through the city, since there might be a rush hour; if Mormons have rush hours. Instead I skirt the perimeter, bordered on both sides of the road by white earth. From time to time a breeze or a passing truck blows salt onto the asphalt, which swirls in front of the car like a wailing ghost. There are no signs for the lake and I do not want to waste the time to ask at a service station, so I follow the other cars on the road in front of me. Surely one of them, maybe more than one, will be going to the Great Salt Lake. I pass cars earnestly, searching the windows for ch