Free Orchard by Larry Watson

her to the ship on which she would sail to a country Sonja had never seen to live with an aunt and uncle she had never met. “To a better life, Sonja,” they told her again and again. “We are sending you to a better life.” But how could that life be better when it hurt like death to leave the present one?
    Ah, so that must have been it! The oarsman gouged a grave in the ocean to bury the past. In went the village and the little house! Under the waves with the friends and all the familiar faces of childhood! Down, down went Father and Mother and brothers, as surely as if they were going into coffins, never to be seen again!
    She never saw her parents again. Two years after she left Norway her father was dead. He slipped from the roof when he was making repairs on the chimney, and though he was not killed instantly, he never woke from the coma he lay in for eleven days. One week before Sonja’s sixteenth birthday she learned that her mother was dead of a cancer that bloomed in her brain with such rapidity there was scarcely any time between diagnosis and demise. Both her brothers, Anders and Viktor, she met again, but so many years after their first parting that when they entered the room without introduction she wondered who these strange men were.
    And now, into her life again—dig, grave . . . grave dig. Could he mean it—Henry was willing to dig the hole into which their baby boy would go? Only a man could think such a thing! If she stood in that empty space in the earth, she would never climb out. It would be too easy to pull the dirt in on top of herself, to pull and scrape until the stony, sandy soil began to tumble over her of its own accord, the way ocean waves rush to fill in their own hollows and troughs.
    She knew what her decision was, what it had to be. It came to her as she thought again of Henry’s silhouette in the doorway. On unsteady legs she rose to go and find her husband, to tell him he should not have to use his muscles to dig their son’s grave.
    Sonja was not
interested in assigning blame, at least not beyond the sizable portion she heaped upon her own plate for not keeping John out of the barn altogether, but she could not quell her curiosity. Something had happened when John was in the barn, and she meant to know what.
    She had reason to believe that the horse was involved, not only because of the straw in John’s hair—possibly indicating that he had been in Buck’s stall—but also because the boy died with his hands clenched into fists and twined tight between the fingers of one hand were filaments that Sonja thought could have been horsehair. That was all it took. A bit of chaff. A strand of hair. She imagined her little boy sneaking up behind Buck in order to run his fingers through the tangle of the horse’s tail. The horse, startled or annoyed or both, kicked out, and his hoof either hit John and caused that bump on the back of head or caused him to fall back and strike his head.
    Sonja did not present this theory to her husband, not right away, but on the night of the funeral, she asked Henry to accompany her to the barn. Their home was still brimming with family and friends who had come over with cakes and casseroles and their own bewildered hearts to try to help Henry, Sonja, and June through their grief.
    Henry did not at first understand his wife’s request; furthermore, he seemed uncomfortable being alone with her. “The barn? With all these people here? You want to go out to the barn?”
    “Perhaps we can know what happened out there.”
    Henry moaned and let his weight fall back against the wall. “Honey. No, no. Don’t. Let it go. You heard what the doctor said. Sometimes you can’t know.”
    Perhaps if Henry had put a hand on Sonja—a touch on the wrist might have been enough—he could have kept her in the house.
    “I’m going out there,” she said. “You stay if you like.”
    Henry walked with her to a point midway between the house and the barn, but there