Tom Lake(64)
Cody, for once, took my side. “I think a pint makes sense.”
Duke put up a little argument then let it go. A fifth was hard to control, even if he wouldn’t admit it. I wasn’t drinking my share and he was left to pick up the slack. Like it or not, the bottle had to be empty by the end of the show. “Drinking is a muscle,” Duke liked to say. “And you have to keep that muscle in shape.” He had no end of theories as to how to avoid the repercussions, though mostly it came down to gallons of water and three prophylactic aspirin, which he insisted on chewing for best results. After his incandescent rehearsals, he took a long swim and pulled himself together for the evening’s performance of Our Town. I always went with him to the lake to make sure he didn’t drown, having no idea what I would do if he did. My swimsuit was never completely dry in those days. Whenever I pulled it on it was still clammy from the swim before.
I had no idea how Duke managed to drink so much and be so good. I was desperate to be good, but all that did was make me look desperate.
After we finish cleaning up, Joe says he’s going to check on the goats and just take care of a few more things out at the barn. He says he’ll only be a minute and I say, okay. I say, tell the goats good night for me. After a respectable amount of time has passed, I take a flashlight from the basket by the door and head in the direction of the Otts.
The leaves on the cherry trees are silvered with moonlight, with flashlight, the branches bent beneath the cherry weight. They make me think of cows aching to be milked. I take the quickest way, not on the road but through the orchard, feeling like I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing. But what shouldn’t I be doing? Going to see a movie? Joe wouldn’t care.
Joe would have come with me had I asked him, and the girls would gladly make room for me on their blanket. But I want to have a thought, an action, a memory that I haven’t run past anyone. I want to see a little bit of the movie by myself.
At the bottom of the hill I go past the pear trees, those difficult, unlovable pears. The Otts have five children, and when they were young each of my girls had an Ott of similar age to play with—-sleepovers back and forth, campfires and homework dates, all of them ultimately disrupted by the gnarled pear trees. One by one our girls became evasive about the Otts. They loved them in the summer, but as the days got shorter and colder, they started to cancel their plans at the last minute, and in the winter they would have nothing to do with the Otts outside of school. I might have suspected something amiss at our neighbors’ house were it not for the fact that the seasonal disenchantment worked in both directions: Young Nelsons would not visit young Otts, and young Otts wouldn’t come to see young Nelsons once the weather turned cold. One day I picked up two of the Ott girls from school and brought them home with us. I don’t remember why but it wasn’t an uncommon situation: We all picked up other people’s children and they picked up ours. Maybe Patsy Ott was taking her older boy to have his braces tightened or maybe two of our children had partnered on a science project, but when it came time to go home they cried. They could not stop crying.
“What?” I asked them. “I’ll walk with you.”
They would not be walked and would not be consoled. Finally, Maisie, who might have been nine, gave me a high sign to follow her to the bathroom. She shut the door quietly behind us and sat down on the toilet lid, pulling up her knees to make herself small. “Drive them,” she whispered.
“Drive them next door?”
She looked at me, her green eyes huge. Maisie was about to cry herself.
“Why? What’s out there?”
Some kind of oath was involved in all of this. I never got that part straight. The dangerous thing was infinitely more dangerous if you spoke its name. But Maisie was hard up against it now, and she wanted to save her friends. “Pear trees,” she said.
“What about them?”
She closed her eyes, shaking her head in despair. “We can’t walk past them and there’s no other way to get there.”
It was true, they weren’t allowed to walk on the road.
In the summer the pear trees were fine. In the summer, all that is hideous about a pear tree is hidden by leaves and pears. But once those disguises were removed they were nothing but acres of murderous psychopaths emboldened by darkness. To cross the naked pear orchard at night was to run the gauntlet of death. The branches jutted with dark knives: child snatchers, child killers. Turns out it wasn’t just the Nelson children and the Otts who believed this about pear trees. Nearly everyone who grew up on an orchard in Grand Traverse County had had issues with them at one point or another, and then they forgot, or, worse, remembered and thought it was funny. I gathered up all the children, theirs and ours, and told them we were going to the Dairy Bar for soft serve. A week from now the Dairy Bar would close for the season, and so we needed to get in all the frozen custard we could, even if it meant spoiling our appetite for dinner. When all of us were sticky and full, I drove the Ott children home, their dignity intact.
“It’s the pear trees,” I whispered to their mother at the handoff. I could see the memory cross Patsy Ott’s face, pear trees.
Maisie announced her plans to sleep between us that night, certain the trees would march up the hill and smash their horrible branches through her bedroom window to carry her away. But as soon as the lights were off she bolted up. “They’ll take Nell!” she cried.